Relief. Isn’t it lovely to be able to breathe and ease off some of that tension? What greater pleasure than anxiety giving way to comfort? What had been a threat, a disquieting confrontation, melts into a retreat into the familiar. Your parents aren’t going to give your toys away, they’re right where you left them in the corner of your untouched childhood bedroom. The people you were cruel to aren’t people at all. The blinds will remain closed, and the gate will remain shut. You’re safe, no one gets in.
It's nice, isn’t it? The quiet.
We live in reactionary times, both in the sense of those marble statue RETVRN weirdos on twitter and the stranglehold reaction content has on platforms like Tiktok and Twitch, not to mention the synthesis of the two that creates people who piss themselves with rage when a video game character isn’t fuckable enough for them. And, for many, being confronted with something new or the possibility that things may change from the norm, from the mere presence of a woman or a Black person on screen to a gender non-conforming person daring to exist in public, is an unpleasant and frightening experience that prompts not curiosity, but a turning away and a baring of teeth.
For some, there is a great sense of relief in being able to openly push away/down the people/things that that threaten their understanding of how things are or how things should be.1 This is the sigh: a return to casual meanness that’s embraced as a positive outcome of regression which is mirrored by structural cruelty. English Teacher makes a joke about kids saying the R-word again, which is true by the way what the fuck,2 as what little resources did exist for those with learning disabilities are gutted and chronically underfunded. The rise of ‘bigback’ as the epithet du jour for fat people is twinned with return of ‘thin is in’ rhetoric in fashion and on social media, paired with Wes Streeting hiding under your bed with an Ozempic prescription to reverse foie gras you.3
At times it seems as though a lot of people are waiting for an excuse to be cruel or violent, a shaking animal in the corner waiting for someone to brush near enough to bite. And this impulse is only exacerbated by the sigh, where the opportunity to make strangers public figures via social media is far too tempting. People, whipped into ideological frenzy through years of political and journalistic demonisation of minorities, with their brains left like ice cream in the microwave after being exposed to grifts and scams from every angle, wait for their chance to lash out. Sting operations executed by Youtubers, who posture about carrying out vigilante action against those who would prey on the vulnerable, brutalise and humiliate their targets for the sake of profitable spectacle, not out of care for victims.4
The ableist slurs and casual fatphobia that I thought had been done away with a decade ago have made significant comebacks on social media. The rise of weight-loss treatments, along with the naturalisation of beauty treatments like lash extensions or procedures that can be performed in the space of a lunch hour, have done little else but normalise a new beauty standard. We may laugh at the block-brows, greige lips, and metallic highlighter or 2016 but that was a time where makeup trends were about the putting on, not the perfect swallowing the real. The clean girl aesthetic that was doomsaid by Glossier and still dominates mainstream conversations around beauty is built upon the illusion that our beautified self is who we are; a world in which we are always the After picture, never the Before. Where a feminist movement may seek to render physical beauty as unimportant, postfeminism ‘reclaims girlhood’ (eugh) through endless consumption and surveillance in a lace-trimmed celebration of hegemonic femininity. Is your girlhood even reclaimed if you’re not spending money on pink tat that will rot for eternity in a landfill and posting tiktoks of you swaying to slowed and reverbed remixes of your favourite songs? Is that all you can envision girlhood to be? Moreover, a few years of attempting to be inclusive, brands are no longer caring to be interest in average-sized or fat people’s money, evidenced by the work of people like Samyra Miller. Some have quietly abandoned or rowed back on the promises they made in the response of BLM demonstrations in 2020, while others unpick their DEI initiatives or slink away from Pride-related advertising. Corporate enterprises were never allies or friends, but that they at least valued the money and labour of those communities to pander to them meant something.
You’ll have to forgive me if I seem all over the place here. Different versions of this entry have ripened on the vine in my worm-addled brain before withering and rotting over the past 8 weeks. It’s not so much that I can’t think of what to say, but more that there’s a difficulty in talking about something without talking about everything else. I’ve already deleted multiple paragraphs about abjection and Kristevan psychoanalysis – pray I don’t reinstate them.
I can’t pretend to offer solutions beyond not allowing yourself to succumb to the sigh, however it may appear to you. Seek authenticity, solidarity, community. Have a nice sandwich, see a challenging movie, touch grass, kiss someone. Push your comfort zone outwards bit by bit and resist the urge to lash out at what you don’t understand, but instead look with curiosity or mind your damn business. I trust you to be smart enough to know when to choose which action. And don’t tok a stranger, lest ye be tiked.
There is also great profit to be made in reactionary grift, let’s not forget
English Teacher is really good btw, watch it
I for one feel no sense of dread nor my soul melting into my boots at the idea of the UK Government conducting something like this!!!!!!
And victims rarely see any kind of justice as is, which is why there’s a desire for this kind of content. Believe me, I’m not defending the actions of any predators here.