power structures and dynamics

The world can feel very out of control, especially for younger people. And controlling your own body is a coping mechanism. Part of the solution, if there is one, is to educate about this. There's so much out there right now about diet culture, and no one is really talking about beauty culture in the same way.

At the same time, a lot of this would b... See more

It’s easy, I think, to understand how patriarchy feeds on apathy, and jealousy, and white women protecting their small spheres of power. It’s harder, or at the very least sadder, to think about just how much of it runs on women’s deep, abiding sorrow.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

— H. L. Mencken

I have also come to understand that trying to fit into society’s understanding of a “good girl” is a trap, the same way that the “model minority” and the “good gay” and the “good fatty” are all traps. Even when you succeed at it you lose, because these roles are all ultimately means of containment: of circumscribing power by putting exacting, contr... See more

Now, the GoFundMe and DonorsChoose thing is closely related, but it gets its own throughline. These platforms emerge to seemingly supplement gaps in the public safety net for things like education and health care. But instead, they’re in a kind of enabling feedback loop: instead of your taxes ensuring that kids have desks and cancer patients can ge... See more

These women have thoroughly internalized the male gaze, their to-be-looked-at-ness, and arrived at a place of incredible power — as objects. Their struggle, as evidenced by the ample time we spend with those who’ve “retired,” is figuring a sense of self outside of that objecthood.

In the end, this quest for a moral billionaire forced me to confront my own beliefs about wealth, power, and the nature of goodness in a complex world. I finished the exercise with hope—not because I found a simple answer to the question of what it means to be both wealthy and virtuous, but because I have discovered that even among the most powerfu... See more

“beauty is supposed to serve power’s interests.”

The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power . The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power . Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture the... See more