I am working on finding a name for this Saturday culture roundup (suggestions welcome!), ala Sunday’s “Haterade” rant and sports links. This newsletter is not as polished as I would like it to be so please forgive any typos. Thank you, as always, for being here. Paid subscriptions allow me to dedicate more time to this newsletter. It’s not just the time I spend writing, but the time I spend planning, researching, and reporting that is supported by upgrading.
If you want to pay for a subscription but don’t want to give money to Substack, feel free to use my Venmo or PayPal. Just reply to this email and let me know you’ve sent it so I can add your email to my paid list!
We had a BLAST in the live thread last night for the women’s Final Four and we’ll be there again tomorrow for the Championship between University of South Carolina and Iowa at 3 PM ET. I’ll open the thread a couple hours before game time. It’s open to all subscribers but after this, live threads will become a paid subscriber perk.
In defense (sort of) of Jojo Siwa
I didn’t want to have to write this. I have spent months telling my partner, Will, that I cannot have a public opinion about a 20-year-old because she is not for me. I am nearly 40. Her queer culture is not my queer culture, no matter how much the algorithm forces her into my feeds because I am gay.
There are a lot of things to criticize Siwa for and let’s get those out of the way now. Some of the things her exes have said about their time with her? Bad! The allegations about the way she and her mom treated the children in her girl group? Very very bad! Her tendency to borrow a not-insignificant amount of her personal style from Black culture? Not great! Most of her content? Cringe af!
Her transition to “adult” music is laughable, as it seems like she took every stereotype of what she thought grown-up music contained and threw it at the wall: singing about relationships, wearing skimpy clothes, cursing.
For someone who has as much money as she does and who has been in the entertainment industry as long as she has, I am baffled by the poor quality of her promotional graphics (did she hire Shohei Ohtani’s graphic designer?). It feels like a bad SNL skit and the response from much of the queer community has been to make fun of her which, fine. She seems to know that’s what people are going to do and she’s embraced that and, in interviews, has shown a level of self-awareness that I didn’t realize she had. She’s in on the joke and laughing all the way to the bank.
Before posting her much-mocked “Karma” TikTok dance (which is an exaggerated form of the choreography from the music video), she was fully aware of what the response would be and that was part of the reason she did post it. “I was like, ‘I know I’m going down in flames for this one because I look crazy,’” she said earlier this week on “The Viall Show” podcast. It took off. “And so then that kind of became a thing,” she continued. “I kind of had to keep doing it like that.”
But there’s been another reaction to her, too, and one I find quite annoying: the idea that queers, lesbians, sapphics are trying to distance her from the community, refusing to “claim” her because of how embarrassing she is. BUT LIKE, COME ON. Lesbians are the epitome of cringe—especially after their first sapphic heartbreak. Liiiike.
But let’s put her antics into context, shall we? Siwa grew up on camera and is arguably the biggest child star of her generation. She is estimated to be worth about $20 million. The world watched as she was essentially abused by her dance coach on national television. She lived in a very insulated bubble of fame and money and likely wasn’t socialized with her peers the way many other people her age would have been. She was robbed of her childhood. Her perception—of her own importance, of how relationships work—is skewed. Add to that the fact that she is still only 20 years old and you have a recipe for the messiest, cringiest person alive.
I don’t even want to think about what I would be posting if I was a 20-year-old with infinite amounts of money and fame and a TikTok account. Hell, I was a 20-year-old with an anonymous sex blog so I can only imagine what my social media presence would have looked like had I been in her position.
The other thing to remember is that there is no blueprint for what she’s trying to do. Yes, plenty of child stars have attempted to transition into an adult career and some of them have been more successful than others (Miley eventually found her footing after a messy period, Olivia Rodrigo seems to have mostly avoided many of her peers’ pitfalls). Siwa has said that she’s trying to have a Miley Cyrus Bangerz moment (and while Cyrus has matured into a vocal powerhouse and Grammy-winning artist, let’s not rewrite history about how her Bangerz era was received—the backlash and mockery were LOUD).
I also don’t think the two stars are comparable from a talent level—and neither does Siwa. I can’t find the video right now, but I recently watched an interview clip where she says that the criticism of her talents don’t bother her because they’re essentially what she believes about herself, namely that she’s not a great singer or a great dancer.
But no one has ever tried to transition from a bubble gum child career into a music career as an openly-gay artist. While Cyrus is queer, it has never been the central theme of her music or visuals or public image and her most significant public relationships have been with men. And Siwa is doing just that—her music video is full of women fighting over each other. She’s (sort of) kissing them and grinding on them and humping them, in moves that Vulture called “sexless” and “physicality without sexuality or sensuality.” It doesn’t matter, though. I cannot stress how significant this still is.
Siwa’s attempts at maturing into an adult pop star who sings about heartbreak and sex and cheating and relationships—GAY heartbreak and GAY sex and GAY cheating and GAY relationships is ballsy as hell. It’s unprecedented. And it’s decidedly not for me or really for any queers of older generations. It’s almost not even for the queers that are her age—it’s for the queer kids who grew up loving her and now get to see her unabashedly become the kind of queer pop star that no other generations of kids have really had.
I have queer tweens who loved Siwa’s music. They are OBSESSED with “Karma.” It normalizes the kinds of relationships they currently want to have and it finally provides them with the kind of celebrity that their friends recognize. So much queer representation has been siloed and people outside of the queer community don’t really know who those artists are. But all their peers know who Siwa is and they can walk into any major store and buy her merch and she is GAY, like my kids are GAY and they think that is just the coolest thing.
I hope she grows and matures and learns to have more functional relationships. I hope she distances herself from her mother, who seems toxic for her. I can’t imagine it’s easy to try to grow up in front of the world, where all your embarrassing phases and mistakes are on display and up for public consumption, comment, and mockery.
So let Siwa sing her bad music in her budget-Kiss aesthetic. Queers deserve cringe mainstream representation, too. Equality, baybee.
Culture-related reading
As a native Floridian, the amount of schadenfreude I felt reading this article about people moving to Florida without even apparently googling the place and then complaining that it has… hot weather, hurricanes, traffic, and a divisive political atmosphere? Ugh, what incredible content (to be clear: I love my home state but it is not for the weak). Please enjoy the story’s lede:
Sex and the City is now available to watch on Netflix! Here’s a rundown of all of the queerness on the show (for better or worse)
Meanwhile,
reflects on the legacy of Samantha Jones as a postfeminist icon and a relic of a particular time period in which women thought the solution to inequality was behaving just like men: “Samantha is a caricatured reflection of the dovetailing neoliberal and postfeminist sexual sensibilities of that time, which placed an emphasis on individual choice, agency, power, and control.”- paired Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter with books and it’s a delight.
Marcelle G Afram is a trans Palestinian chef who uses food in the fight for liberation
- had some TIME to talk about the craft of writing trans characters and what the public expects from queer writers penning queer books: “There’s this crushing pressure on queer artists to be marketable by appealing to the public good, like my existence is a duck pond at a public park that needs funding approval. My writing is not a municipal duck pond. It is not a theater for an allyship win. It is not a template for correct representation. It is a place where people are human and do hot freaky sex to each other, and it is not obligated to serve any higher purpose than that. (Though, is there any higher purpose than that?)”
Only
could manage to weave consumerism, diet culture, Stanleys, mermaid water, and misogyny together so smartlyChappell Roan covered Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” and also kissed Olivia Rodrigo and lectured at Harvard
Kirsten Dunst’s current press tour is giving us SOUNDBITES and they are all incredible? Here are some highlights. To GQ Hype: “It’s not hard to get roles I just don’t want to work on things because most things aren’t very good. Let’s just call a spade a spade here.” Also to GQ, on method acting: “What, am I gonna be like that with my kids when I come home? Speaking in an accent? Like, honestly, I can’t do that. It seems like something only men can afford to do.” And one more to GQ, on aging and plastic surgery: “I’m not gonna screw up my face and look like a freak. You know what I mean? I’d rather get old and do good roles.” To Variety, re Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech: “My interpretation was he was saying that genocide is bad.” To Marie Claire, on whether she would do another superhero movie: “Yes, because you get paid a lot of money, and I have two children.”
Speaking of Kirsten Dunst, I screamed at what an X user by the name of mari called the “spider-man to tennis pipeline”
Obsessed with these vintage covers of Female Mimics International, which billed itself as “The Original Magazine For Men Who Enjoy Dressing Like Women!” It is full of glamorous photo spreads (and dated language, of course!) from the ‘80s and ‘90s, and Drew Gregory Burnett highlights some great ones at Autostraddle
I will leave you with this incredible aside from Isaac Chotiner’s interview with Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official, about the Biden administration’s Israel policy (and again, I always wonder why anyone ever agrees to talk to Chotiner lol):
This: For someone who has as much money as she does and who has been in the entertainment industry as long as she has, I am baffled by the poor quality of her promotional graphics. Is fucking hysterical🤣