Tickles of Outrage Fatigue

Flavorwire had a nice run for a while. They focused on listicles, but listicles that came from a level of sophistication not found on your Buzzfeeds or Upworthys. The staff seemed to be a collection of n-nerds--the music lists by music nerds, the book lists by book nerds, etc--which meant that they explored the Expanded Modern Canon. They were as likely to discuss Iggy Pop as Arcade Fire, Virginia Woolf as much as David Foster Wallace. Though their choices weren't usually surprising, it was nice to read pieces by people who were aware of media made before they were born.

But we're in the second generation of professional web content. The original writers have moved on to other jobs--probably editorial--and their replacements are excellent examples of where our current culture has taken us:  myopic and unthinkingly leftist, with a desire to be considered intelligent and insightful.

They are myopic in that their media interests are broader but lack the depth of knowledge that their predecessors had. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of what's being produced right now without much thought to how that fits into the history of the medium. A typically youthful perspective, forgivable but which makes their content a lot less interesting than it used to be.

More irritating is the pretensions to intelligence that stems from swallowing the left's blue pill. You can find this all over mainstream critical websites, the idea that deconstructing works from the perspective of identity politics is the height of criticism. I've mentioned before the essay attacking the New York Times for not using a trans subject's preferred (made up) pronouns. That Flavorwire offers bandwidth to this idea shows how little thinking is required to appear to be a cultural critic; no thought is given to how many different pronouns are being created and how this will affect basic readability. Only onwards and upwards towards today's version of the progressive utopia.

But articles like this give me a little bit of hope. Flavorwire's not going to turn around, of course, and the social justice warriors aren't on the verge of beating their keyboards into plowshares, but any public mention of outrage fatigue should be encouraged.

The issue at hand is typically petty. ELLE Magazine, which isn't exactly the most influential periodical on the block, has published its latest issue with four variant covers. All of these covers feature a grrl-power zeitgeist role model:  Amy Poehler, Zoey Deschaanel and some gal from Girls. They are featured in full-torso shots, full color. The fourth is Mindy Kaling, whose portrait is in black and white and from the bust up. Kaling is of Indian heritage and has an average-to-dumpy figure--picture Lena Dunham if she got on the elliptical four times a week without cutting any calories.

The outrage has centered around the hottest SJW issue of the day, sizism, rather than that the only non-white's portrait is aesthetically different from all the others.

Sizism over racism makes sense. The SJW movement is primarily driven by feminism. Feminism likes to pretend that it's a warm, nurturing movement that values everyone's struggles and perspectives but its loudest outcries are always the irritations of the white, middle-class women at the center. Sailer's Law of Female Journalism applies, as does Amos & Gromar's second:  as the current generation of feminist blog writers hit the Wall, they imagine that their own personal issues are now News Everyone Should Consider.

Hitting the Wall, for most women, means more than crow's feet and short hair; it means gaining weight. Thus, the front line of the War on Women is society's rejection of heavier women. By cropping Kaling's body from the photo, ELLE is telling the world that small-breasted, wide-hipped women who carry a few extra pounds aren't as beautiful as conventionally attractive women. Which most men will tell you without consulting fashion magazine covers.

In considering this, Flavorwire writer Michelle Dean is suddenly very tired:  "I confess I am growing weary of magazine-cover controversies like these," she says, first because she's empathizes with Kaling having to address an argument that says, "They're discriminating against you because you're fat." With friends like these, you know.

Dean also applies a little real-world knowledge of the editorial process, pointing out that the ELLE editors probably considered some photos that matched the aesthetics of the others and found them less "flattering." This is probably true; the mass-market fashion industry is always teetering between walking on eggshells around their consumers and mean-girl dominance. They'd like to avoid accusations of being anti-woman but they are also authorities--sometimes you have to say, "Deal with it, bitches. This is gorgeous."

Dean ultimately runs up against the ultimate enemy of the left:  reality.

 Mostly, I think, I feel weary because it is my perception that fashion magazines are just never going to catch up on this issue. They don’t care to catch up on this issue. Our attempt to hold them “accountable” for the choices they make, magazine cover-wise, has been ongoing for several years now. It has made almost no difference. Celebrities are still routinely photoshopped into unrecognizability, the models are still what they are, and so ELLE, confronted with this new round of complaining, simply responds, “Mindy looks sexy, beautiful and chic. We think it is a striking and sophisticated cover and are thrilled to celebrate her in our Women in TV Issue.”

As much as they may like to support progressive ideals, ELLE Magazine has to make money, which makes their choices quantifiable. A progressive choice loses money, so they rationalize the profitable choice into the best justification at hand, that they're empowering Kaling herself, if not the whole XL set.

Outrage enthusiasts should note the three adjectives ELLE uses, sexy, beautiful and chic. These are aspirational qualities, not affirmative. What the SJW brigade never acknowledges is that nearly all pop culture is this way. Gritty realism doesn't sell because, if people wanted to see overweight women, they could just go to McDonalds.

Leftism is virulent, though. Faced with immutable human nature, the next option is to blame people, all of them:

What I find frankly worse is that there isn’t, in my perception, any real desire for change among the people who consume fashion magazines. I’m talking of the general populace here, rather than fashion bloggers. They like the pretty pictures; they don’t worry too much about how inaccessible — not just body-shape-wise, or in the lily-whiteness of the fashion world overall, but financially too — all of this stuff is. They are producing expensive catalogs, fantasy documents, and people aren’t really that interested in revising their fantasies.

Put two and two together, and Dean is saying that the general populace (which needs more, more, more democracy, BTW) needs to make their fantasies more realistic. They should also make their white more black and their cats more doggish.

I've written about it before (perhaps less than clearly):  the left is manipulates the public through semantic associations that fit humanity's need for stories. 

How much racist rhetoric have you actually heard from the Tea Party? None from any official voice and almost none from any identified member. Yet your average center-leftists understand the group as undeniably racist--the two terms are almost interchangeable in most mainstream commentary. 

If the Tea Party is a crypto-racist movement, then the Tea Party is no different from the perennial bogeymen of the left, only with a new name. The Fight Against Racism is a narrative already accepted far and wide. We fight racists. The Tea Party fights us. Ergo, the Tea Party is racist. Since we fight racism, we must defeat the Tea Party.

This is propaganda work. What we see in the ELLE controverslette is the pitfall of living in a propagandistic world:  believing that the representations are the reality. ELLE traffics in aspiration; its images are what women want to be. So the true believer fights over the images, not the aspirations. If the magazine would only put a fat woman on the cover, then women will want to be fat and women who are already fat will be considered sexy, beautiful and chic. Their self-esteem will skyrocket and suddenly they'll be good at math and science and business and politics and take over the world!

Dean is catching a glimpse behind the illusion. The People want thin, beautiful women on their fashion magazine covers. ELLE is giving them what they want. Like a good Soviet, though, she reckons that we should leave ELLE alone and change The People. 

However, speaking semantically, when I hear reeducation, I think Pol Pot.