power structures and dynamics

And here’s the hard part. You can’t just decide fuck individualism, I’m blowing it up . You have to replace it with a better, more equitable story of who we are as a country and how we organize our society. Which, for a lot of people, would mean giving up a modicum of power. Liberal white people can loathe the effects of individualism and still... See more

My claim is that luxury goods are gradually becoming a noisier signal of one's position in society. This isn't to say that they don't still confer status — they clearly do. People still buy material items to signal their status. But because they've become a noisier signal over time, people are starting to signal their status with their beliefs and... See more

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

— H. L. Mencken

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.

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

Chomsky and Robinson also acknowledge that other great powers acted in much the same way that the United States has, and these states also invented elaborate moral justifications—the “white man’s burden,” la mission civilisatrice, the need to protect socialism—to whitewash their atrocious conduct. Given that this behavior preceded the emergence of... See more

What if I begin to understand that clean culture — like diet culture, like purity culture, like bourgeois parenting culture — persists in part because it conveniently keeps women so busy, fatigued, and distracted that they can’t more effectively combat patriarchy? What if I really internalized how much it’s used to make other people who can’t or... See more

Millions of people — and white people in particular — would rather endure physical isolation, generalized loneliness, caregiving exhaustion, and financial precarity than relinquish some of their societal power. That’s a far less optimistic foundational myth than individualism. But it’s a far more honest one.