Ive Accepted That I Will Never Have a 23 Year Old Body Again and Dgaf Meme
Meghan Daum Has A 'Trouble With Everything': Feminism, Cancel Culture And The Internet 46:40 Re-create the code below to embed the WBUR sound player on your site
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Columnist and author Meghan Daum takes on political correctness in the new book, "The Problem with Everything." She joins us.
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Meghan Daum, author and essayist. Her new book is "The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars." (@meghan_daum)
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Extract from "The Problem with Everything" by Meghan Daum
Introduction
This began as a book virtually feminism and merely feminism.
I started in the fall of 2016, on the cusp of what would obviously exist Hillary Clinton'due south election to the presidency. The volume was a critique of the current state of the women's movement. It wasn't going to make every feminist happy, but nosotros were about to accept a female president, so I figured they could handle it.
My criticisms were centered on what are sometimes referred to as the "excesses" of contemporary feminism. I was tired of what I saw as the movement's lack of shading and dimension. I was tired of the one-notation outrage, the snarky memes, the exhibitionism, the ironic misandry in the vein of #KillAllMen, the commodification of the concept of "giving aught fucks" (the number of T-shirts for sale on Etsy displaying some iteration of DGAF, or "don't give a fuck," amounts to a genuine fuckton). I supported the fundamentals of the message, of course; women deserve equal status to men and should have autonomy over their bodies (at least these were the fundamentals every bit I saw them). But I was wary that the blustering tone of the media, social media peculiarly, had ready an overcorrection that was veering into self-parody.
Feminism had achieved many of its goals, the passage of laws around equal pay and reproductive rights, the ability of wives to initiate divorce, and admission to didactics for women, to name a few. There was more piece of work to exist washed, of course. Which is why I was then worried that feminism was in danger, specially on the social media front, of becoming a noisepool—and from in that location an echo sleeping accommodation—of manufactured or at least highly exaggerated issues. And these weren't problems as nosotros usually recollect of them merely, rather, everyday phenomena now reclassified as "problematic." Some of this problematica (my word) grew out of the sudden problematization (their word, alas) of masculinity. Men, with their unchecked ability and privilege, were purveyors of intolerable scourges similar mansplaining and manspreading. In fact, so unassailable was their power that women who bashed them could do no damage because these women were effectively "punching upward" to unassailable male ability. Articles similar Bustle'south "6 Reasons Men Tin Literally Never Be Victims of Sexism," Jezebel 's "Men (Wrongly) Think They're Smarter Than They Are" (that one dates dorsum to 2008), and Everyday Feminism's "160+ Examples of Male Privilege in All Areas of Life" were emblematic of that mentality—and owned in the feminist blogosphere.
On its face up, nigh of this stuff was besides light-headed to get all that exercised about. Nosotros know by now that a lot of what's on the cyberspace is much ado about nix. But what bothered me nearly about this new feminism was something more full general—something ambience, really. What bothered me was the way the prototypical young feminist had adopted the sort of swaggering, wise-ass persona you run into well-nigh ofttimes in people who deep down might not exist all that swaggering or wise. This young feminist often referred to herself as a badass.
Originally, this volume was going to be chosen Y'all Are Non a Badass. And so Hillary Clinton lost the ballot to Donald Trump. Along the way, much of the country lost its ambition for the sort of critique I was offering. There is no incertitude that had Clinton won, a special kind of pernicious and ugly sexism would take underscored her presidency. The badass feminists would however have had their hands full calling out all the sexist barbs—subtle and otherwise—aimed in Clinton'south direction. But the fashion things turned out, there was no subtlety to be found. There was no room for left-on-left critique of any variety.
The give-and-take "tribal" was suddenly everywhere. Information technology at present referred not to indigenous ties dating back thousands of years but to more recently established affiliations of class and culture. According to the pundits, it was tribalism that had formed those information silos that kept us from seeing this coming. It was tribalism that had caused and so many people to pull the lever for someone they found morally reprehensible still somehow less threatening than the culling. And though feminism occupied a large infinite in this expanding conversation almost identity and American values, in that location was clearly now much more to talk about than silly memes and shallow expressions of badassedness (or, to use my preferred structure, badassery).
The country was falling apart. I now realize I was falling apart, too—at to the lowest degree a chip.
As with the country, my meltdown was already in progress by the fall of 2016, simply up until then I'd been but partially aware of the extent of information technology. I knew I was experiencing some stress from (to borrow a term from insurance companies) a "qualifying life event," namely divorce. I knew I'd probably added to that stress past moving across the country by myself with no steady work and a Saint Bernard (the movement was an endeavour to make a clean pause from my union, since the marriage had never been quite bad enough to break cleanly on its own). What I did not fully comprehend were the ways in which my unrest ran deeper than divorce and relocation.
I was suddenly obsessed with aging—my ain as well every bit that of others. I had upward until then lived a life of precociousness, having mostly older friends and oftentimes existence the youngest person in any given room. Now, though, my joints were literally and figuratively beginning to creak. I was hearing voices inside my head yelling the equivalent of "get off my lawn." I supported social justice causes as much as the next self-respecting liberal, however I was irritated by the smug vibe of many young activists within the new left. This vibe was especially appreciable in the ones who had embraced the concept of existence "woke," a term borrowed from the black civil rights motility that signaled 1'southward allegiance to a more general ethos of progressive righteousness. (In the spirit of all of this, I coined my own term to describe the class of NPR-listening, New Yorker–reading, Slate-podcast-downloading elites once called the cognoscenti. They were now the wokescenti.)
Meanwhile, the stride at which the digital revolution was moving had me feeling old earlier my fourth dimension, even physically dizzy on a almost-daily footing. At my computer, the tweets and memes and hot takes scrolled down my screen so fast I could scarcely comprehend a fraction of them. Whereas my life had once felt like a road trip on which I was usually running ahead of schedule, I now felt like I was running on a treadmill, the mat churning beneath me at high speed while I held on to the handlebars for beloved life. I wanted to slow the machine down so I could grab my breath. Sometimes I even idea it might be nice to go to slumber for five or ten years, until this madness somehow ran its course. The phrase "woke me when it's over" became a lilliputian in-joke with myself.
I hesitate to characterize this equally a midlife crisis. That seems also generic in the same way it would be too generic to telephone call the Trump ballot a political crisis (not that information technology wasn't; information technology was just so much more than that). As I think about it, I doubtable the crisis I suffered was a personal one that happened to get intensified by the fallout of a political catastrophe.
That is non to say my personal problems were political or vice versa. I never much believed that the personal is political. As a slogan, "The personal is political" has a patina of earnestness, even gravitas, but, let's face it, more often than not the personal is but personal. In my instance, the personal wasn't unique or even necessarily all that interesting.
Over time, I began to run across the means in which my wariness toward what I saw equally hollow indignation and performed outrage—my resistance to certain aspects of the resistance, if y'all will—was in many ways fundamentally generational.
This book even so has a lot to exercise with the conflicted and tortured state of liberalism generally and feminism in particular. Merely information technology'south now likewise a personal story of feeling existentially unmoored against the backdrop of a land falling apart. Information technology'southward a story well-nigh crumbling and feeling obsolete equally the world spins madly—and maddeningly—on. It's also, by dint of my age, near the particular experience of Generation Xers, the last cohort to have experienced both the analog and the digital world as adults. Because of this—and for reasons I'll explain more afterwards—we're also the beginning generation that younger generations don't peculiarly want or need to await up to. Whatsoever wisdom nosotros might have to share is already obsolete.
If 2018 was the year that the concept of "cancel culture" went mainstream (foolish tweets acquired Roseanne Barr to lose her show and Kevin Hart to lose his Oscars-hosting gig, the holiday song "Babe, It's Cold Outside" was shunned equally an instance of rape culture, the previously canceled Louis C.K. was secretly taped at a comedy gig and informed that he'd violated the terms of his banishment), then 2019 may be the year that abolish culture cancels itself. Late concluding wintertime, inside only a few weeks of 1 another, ii young-adult fiction authors withdrew their soon-to-be-published books when social media mobs attacked them for racial insensitivity. This was, for the nigh role, non based on anyone actually reading the books in question. Instead, it was the noxious furnishings of the approval vortex of "YA Twitter," a pocket-size simply loud minority of readers who accept perfected the art of ruining careers nether the guise of social justice. One of these cocky-canceled authors was already known every bit a punishing patrolman of cultural appropriation and was even employed every bit a "sensitivity reader" for large publishing houses (this is a real chore in which books are vetted for ways in which they may be offensive to marginalized groups). Needless to say, that particular made the whole affair an peculiarly succulent case of the ways social justice activism was eating itself.
Around this same fourth dimension, a devastating documentary about Michael Jackson's sexual corruption of children had people calling for his music to never, ever be listened to again. A few weeks before that, Jussie Smollett, a gay black television thespian, had elicited torrents of sympathy and outraged solidarity when he reported being the victim of a crime where the perpetrators tied a noose around his neck and shouted "MAGA country!" After an investigation, police said they believed the actor staged the whole matter in an effort to gain publicity and, reportedly, heave his bacon. Smollett denied these reports and maintained his innocence, and county prosecutors somewhen made the controversial decision to drib all charges. The reasons behind this decision remain murky, but amid the official hand-wringing, this much seemed articulate: 2 years into the Trump era, the weaponization of "social justice culture" was headed toward some kind of height.
As for never over again listening to Michael Jackson'southward music, all I can say is, seriously?
This is where we stand at the moment. Believe me, the shakiness of this ground terrifies me. I continue to exist horrified and disgusted by the extreme anti-abortion measures proposed in states such every bit Alabama and Georgia in May. After being 1 of those skeptics who refused to believe Roe v. Wade would always exist overturned, I now retrieve this fate is entirely possible (though I also fearfulness the conclusion was based on a wobbly legal premise that, in some sense, was set to eventually fail). So I become that these are bad times. Very, very, very bad times. But by framing Trumpism as a moral emergency that required an all-easily-on-deck, no-difference-from-the-narrative approach to cultural and political thought, I fright the left has cleared the style for a kind of purity policing—enforced and amplified by social media—that is sure to backfire somehow or other. Fifty-fifty if we manage to get rid of Trump, either past voting him out of office in 2020 or somehow kicking him out earlier then, the political left still needs a grade correction. Nosotros need to finish devouring our own and canceling ourselves. Nosotros need fewer sensitivity readers and more empathy as a matter of grade. We need to recognize that to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.
Excerpted from the book THE PROBLEM WITH EVERYTHING by Meghan Daum. Copyright © 2019 by Meghan Daum. Reprinted with permission of Gallery Books.
New York Times: "100 Notable Books of 2019"
New Yorker: "Meghan Daum to Millennials: Become Off My Backyard" — "The writer Meghan Daum has told her life story in her books. She documented her salad days of debt and dating in New York in 'My Misspent Youth.' She novelized the story of an idealistic movement to Nebraska in 'The Quality of Life Report.' In 'Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House,' she described moving to Los Angeles and buying her first dwelling. In 'The Unspeakable,' she wrote about the death of her mother, an illness that nearly killed her, and her conclusion not to take children.
"In 2015, Daum separated from her husband and moved from Los Angeles to New York, a metropolis she had left some fifteen years before. Confronting divorce and passing into her late forties, she began a descent along 'a down slope of my youth that was far steeper than I had whatever grasp of at the time.' She was spending a lot of time on the Internet—by her own reckoning, 'three-quarters of my waking hours'—when Donald Trump took office. 'By the time #MeToo reached total strength,' she continues, 'my brain no longer felt continued to my body.'
"It was in this land that she started feeling bellyaching. It began with the tone of feminists online. The women's motion, she thought, had lost the chapters to process nuance; it was instead becoming a 'noisepool' of complaints. 'I was tired of the one-note outrage, the snarky memes, the exhibitionism, the ironic misandry in the vein of #KillAllMen, the commodification of the concept of "giving cipher fucks," ' she writes. Daum wondered when women became and so pleased nearly thinking of themselves every bit victims. Were they, in fact, so oppressed? She decided to write 'a volume about feminism and merely feminism.' The volume was going to be chosen 'You Are Non a Badass.' "
BuzzFeed News: "How Did This Liberal Feminist Writer Fall In With The Dark Web?" — "Last August, when the writer Meghan Daum published her essay 'Dash: A Love Story' on the Medium publication GEN (where she's a biweekly columnist), information technology touched a nerve. The love story, equally detailed in this 28-infinitesimal read, was about how Daum — a lifelong self-described liberal — fell into a YouTube hole populated past the 'intellectual night web,' the sticky neologism that applies to a loosely continued group of professors and podcasters, including Hashemite kingdom of jordan Peterson, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Joe Rogan.
"The group's members, first introduced to the mainstream past a 2018 New York Times piece by Bari Weiss, nowadays themselves as self-styled public intellectuals who fence that their values of 'reason,' which can easily be interpreted as hate speech, are 'under assault' from today's politically right attitudes. Daum refers to her 'new friends' (which she'due south careful to annotation include a 'scattering of this core' of the intellectual nighttime web) equally 'Free Speech YouTube.' In the slice, she outlines how she went from watching Bloggingheads.TV to curling up with a 2-hour interview with Evergreen College professor Bret Weinstein, the locus of a campus controversy on racism and intolerance, on The Rubin Report, a YouTube show hosted by Dave Rubin. 'I was invigorated,' she writes, 'even electrified, by their willingness to ask (if non ever totally answer) questions that had lately been accounted too messy somehow to deal with in mainstream public soapbox.' "
Los Angeles Times: "Op-ed: In the age of #MeToo, Philip Roth offers an unlikely blueprint for feminists" — "Philip Roth taught me everything I know about men, or at least well-nigh of what I've needed to know. I was probably xix when I read 'Portnoy's Complaint,' the novel the New Yorker called 'the dirtiest book ever published' and whose countless masturbation scenes including one in which the young narrator, Alexander Portnoy, achieves sexual fulfillment with a slab of liver that his female parent later on serves for dinner.
"At that time in my life, I was trying to figure out how men's minds worked and, more urgently, how practiced writing worked. Roth, who died on Tuesday, was helpful on both fronts. He went on to become probably my favorite 20th century novelist; over the years I ripped off his fashion and attempted to copy his narrative moves more times than I can count.
"Almost as significantly, Roth functioned as a portal into the developed male person psyche in all its brutality and stupidity. I attended a historically all-female college where nigh men hid their more cardinal impulses behind a scrim of good manners and artsy, frequently androgynous urbanity. Roth's men, on the other manus, were every bit animalistic every bit they were urbane. They independent news I could use, peculiarly virtually the way they viewed women. It wasn't ever happy news, but I appreciated the honesty."
Source: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/12/02/meghan-daum-problem-with-everything
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