Dude, who even knows.
Anonymous asked:
No comment on sady Doyle transitioning? Aren’t they in your fantasy gallery of people you consider peers for some reason (being alive at roughly the same time, i assume)?
Sady is one of the people I consider an equal but how much do Colin Spacetwinks or Eliza Gauger matter? (How much do I matter?) [Taylor Swift matters]
Moving upstate and having a kid and writing for women’s magazines made sense, the old fragrance reviews were insightful!
Link reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 41 notes
Sady Doyle is well and truly nonguynary now
I mean, I can’t imagine a more on-the-nose sign that the leading edge of the culture war dialectic is emerging from thesis and antithesis to new synthesis than Sady Doyle writing an essay about how Dudes Rock
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Anonymous asked:
what's doyle's deal even? the only time she passed into my sphere was her (insane) spat with bruenig like 5-6 years ago. since you came to tumblr for her you must consider her significant. why?
she showed up after the first wave of 2000s feminist blogs (say, Feministe, Feministing, Shakesville, Jezebel). Right in the “OMG, remember Sassy” era, right at the dawn of tumblr, when it looked to be the mainstream important discourse forum twitter became. She also had a group blog (remember group blogs!), “Tiger Beatdown”
I noticed her circa like 2009 scrapping with Freddie de Boer
She showed up too late to cash in. She was in the Brooklyn scene, but not at the dawn.
She would get really vicious but amazingly good at it, and would be really intense, CAPITALIZING PHRASES LIKE THIS, and then like two weeks later she would apologize. Later she announced she was bipolar and that led me to realize I was too and how to handle it.
She ran with an intersectional posse before it was cool, gay man Garland Gray and trans s.e.smith(?) and a bunch of black women before that took off - karnythia, so_treu, blackamazon
Her biggest thing on here was #MooreAndMe, she was hypomanic when Michael Moore was trying to rally the left around Julian Assange (then representing the hope of the Internet defeating legacy states, accused for the purpose of extradition of rape) and she spoiled it, which I do not think was for the best
Since then she kinda cruises on her reputation as a twitter scourge but she hasn’t really built it any other way, she gets occasional book contracts but once wrote an essay about how that was the dwindling of Shulamith Firestone, too
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friendly reminder part of Sady Doyle’s backstory is once for years she put up with this passive-aggressive high school bitch and finally snapped and slammed her head into the lunchroom floor
part of why I can’t give up on her
and now after the feminist blog wave matured all the mutual backslappers and ass-kissers have lanyard tenure and she, who actually judged people on their ideas, is left on the outside
even if she was Erma Bombeck for the Sassy generation no one notices; she writes rote pieces for outlets and then writes pieces for private like “you know as a talented writer I evoke emotion for effect, it’s all just craft”
She has another act left
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Sady Doyle having her edges rounded down by motherhood is funny to watch, given everything, but at least she’s putting spine into not going to shit, and Erma Bombeck was one of the best essayists of her generation
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The good thing about this kind of Taste, if you really believe in it, is that it is surprisingly democratic. If you read the right things, and talk to the right people, they can tell you exactly what Taste is. Then you just go out and buy some. The bad thing about it is that it is intentionally calculated to elude most people, no matter how hard they work: The right people only talk to each other, the right reading only shows up in college or grad school and sometimes not even then, all of it seems cut to flatter white men’s egos and no-one else’s, and everything you’re supposed to love is always exactly difficult enough or expensive enough or rare enough or well-hidden enough that you’ll never get your greasy paws on it, you fucking peasant, you.
Meanwhile, populist critics have adopted the idea of taste as natural and inherent. Basically, they argue for nature over nurture: They write about their love of (most often) pop music as if it’s a physical thing, a repressed desire that has always existed somewhere, waiting to be set free. This also frames pop culture itself as something forbidden and shameful that needs to be de-stigmatized. People don’t get into pop; they admit to it. I have almost never read anyone who is learning about pop, or trying to understand pop. (Carl Wilson’s Journey to the End of Taste might be the big exception, but even that comes down to a sort of epiphanic moment, a memory of listening to love songs with his ex-girlfriend and realizing that things could be simple and true and good.) What I read them doing is re-connecting. Or re-discovering. Or they reclaim, or own, or embrace. They validate their own “guilty pleasures,” they re-experience the innocent joy of dancing around in their bedrooms as children, they repudiate the shaming of an anti-pop social circle to proclaim their truths.
In the old model, Taste is transcendent, like God, existing outside the material universe. In the new one, it is immanent, a wellspring that is only found within. Taste is always already there. It’s only the listener who changes.
Sady Doyle took the time to open the Twitter cage and let her complaints about “poptimism” out to breathe in essay form, and the result is impressive (hint, hint).
I would love to see Sady and Freddie de Boer together on a poptimism feature some time. They’re the two most vocal, best critics of the tendency I’ve ever come across, but the specific things they find fault with in it - and the way this focus varies between them - map so perfectly to the broader differences in style and worldview that have had them at each others’ throats before that I think the tension could be fascinating.