In the always-wonderful
, Katherine Dee recently discussed a problem very familiar to me: the inevitable dilution of scenes ostensibly dedicated to people with defects, vices, problems; that is, the tendency of such scenes to become milquetoast in their avoidance of the truly gnarly aspects of whatever they concern, or, worse, to actively reify what the scene originally existed to resist.She first asks: âWhy is there so little media for (and about) ugly women?â
âŠit feels like spaces for the ugly, the abject, and the unattractiveâsave for maybe fandom, where youâre permanently outside of yourself, or /r/ForeverAloneWomenâhave been colonized by⊠attractive women⊠The 89 lbs. hypersexual hot mess isnât the only archetype of female pain.
When did sultry, seductive Lana del Rey become inextricably linked with the femcel, the FEMale CELibate? When I search âfemcelâ on Tumblr, why do I only see image macros of knock-kneed anorexics and pastel edits of Dominique Swain as Dolores Haze? I mean, I know why. But we need more spaces for female abjection that are abject, as opposed to shrines to what catalyzed the insecurity in the first place. Whereâs the catharsis in these aesthetics if you get called âlard assâ on a daily basis and have cystic acne? Â
My first encounter with this phenomenon was probably in high school. I was quite ugly, ugly in a way that I couldnât blame on society or âunrealistic standards.â Even with very realistic standards, I was gross; I had a gross face and a gross body, and it was no oneâs fault that girls did not find me attractive; I wasnât attractive; it was a raw fact of life, for me and everyone else. It hurt my feelings, of course, but that doesnât mean anything; weather can hurt my feelings.
I was also weird, and not in wholly appealing ways. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, âbeing weirdâ was in one of its cyclical ascents as âa good thingâ in American culture, at least on paper; it was the Tim Burton era, and strange boys and girls could imagine that they were Johnny Depp or Winona Ryder, their idiosyncratic virtues surely soon-to-be discovered and acknowledged by the world in a triumphant cinematic moment (or if not acknowledged, beautifully eulogized in what amounted to the same thing: the conferring of high status on those with low status). But the differences between me and Edward Scissorhands were immense.
Edward didnât look like the popular boys, itâs true; but he was beautiful, thin, and stylish; I was not.
Edwardâs âweirdnessâ was mostly innocent; there might be misunderstandings, but what Edward wanted and felt and did was nearly entirely virtuous and relatable; not so for me.
Edward had an undeniable talent âtopiary gardeningâ that earned him esteem even in âconventionalâ society; he was also, in his way, dangerous, capable of standing up to bullies, for example. I had no real talents and was physically weak, although I often had long fingernails due to personal hygiene problems Iâve never shaken.
In sum: at a time in which culture relentlessly celebrated the weirdo, I was aware that this valorization stopped well-short of including actual freaks like me. Into the grunge era, the cultural narrative was purported to be alternative, but the values were all still mainstream-aristocratic; yes, everyone loved Nirvana, but it was still better to be beautiful than ugly, smart than stupid, strong than weak, popular than hated, invited than excluded, charming rather than boring or annoying, etc., even within scenes that wouldâve claimed otherwise. Kurt Cobainâs hair was greasy; my hair was greasy; but I wasnât Kurt Cobain, anymore than I was Edward Scissorhands. I was a nasty-looking jerk, emotionally tilted, insane, sometimes cruel, often resentful and annoying: no oneâs idea of a good person. Imagining what sort of mutal-aid society could be composed of people like that is a useful exercise, because it immediately reveals why we were shunned to begin with. I, at least, wasnât worth a damn and wouldnât have made a good member of such a scene; I was lost in my own problems, lashing out all the time, delusional about who I was, etc. Such people do not, as a rule, assemble into compelling local cultures. Besides: none of us wanted to be approved of by other losers; although I at least was in deep denial about it, I think we all wanted to be loved by good people, to be admired by capable people, to be desired by beautiful people. We raged at society for reifying things we were laboring to pretend we rejected but which we secretly believed in very deeply. How could we not? It is better, after all, to be good than to be bad; itâs what the words mean.
Iâll never forget telling a friend that âI would never date a cheerleader,â explaining that I felt contempt for superficial scenes like the world of athletics. Let me tell you: if a cheerleader had asked me on a date, Iâd have died of happiness. Indeed, when in high school a cute preppie girl strayed from her scene to pluck me out of the crowd and make me her boyfriend, I liquidated my gloomy alternative accessories in an instant.
The Creep / Heap Problem
I have bipolar disorder, but every bipolar scene Iâve been in seems dominated by people who get relatably and sympathetically depressed and gently and harmlessly hyper. My own intuitional view of the disorder âand itâs âgatekeepingâ to say this, please know I donât really mean it intellectuallyâ is that if youâve never done something literally unforgivable, you probably donât have it. I found it surprising how anodyne they all were.
But perhaps it shouldnât have been. Any group large enough to be seen by the world, to have a public presence or social consequence, will tend towards typical scaled-group dynamics. In particular, scaled groups reflect averages of their memberships, such that âwhat a scene representsâ is usually a genericized, low-information set of attributes, values, preferences, and so on. What do a million bipolar people have in common? Not much, actually.
Beyond this raw mathematical fact, in all scenes some things remain true: status games will abound; the craven will outcompete the sincere; the commons will meet with tragedy; and so on. If there had been a community of ugly kids to join in 1995, the most popular people in that group would tend to be those whose ugliness wasnât, in fact, terminal; they might not be âtraditionally beautiful,â but they sure as shit wouldnât look like I did! If thereâs a community of bipolar people, the most popular people in that group will also be good looking, typically, but in addition theyâll be the ones who never say extremely fucked up shit, because by definition extremely fucked up shit tends to alienate people. This dynamic was vividly revealed when Kanye West took his heel turn: the Internet was full of bipolar influencers saying âThis is not bipolar disorder; bipolar disorder doesnât make you say fucked up shit.â
Motherfuckers, please! As
has pleaded many times: stop pretending that mental illness doesnât have real costs. Attempts to âreduce stigmaâ cannot involve falsifying the thing you wish to destigmatize; if they do, we are stigmatizing it even more! Bipolar people definitely say extremely fucked up shit sometimes.1 And thatâs really the least of it; what we do can be far, far worse than mere speech. Now I have to feel ashamed of this not only around sane people who almost never say fucked up shit, but also among bipolar people who say they donât either! No thanks. (Iâm not in any bipolar scenes, obviously).This all relates to the unavoidable problems of scale and social performance and, I think, holds true across âconfessionalâ groups. The worst drug addicts arenât posting, and theyâre not in rehab; theyâre covered in their own filth in crack houses planning ways to steal from their kids to get more drugs. If youâre in such a state, the memes and bromides of addiction scenes are a cheesy bore, utterly distant and irrelevant to you. Articles about âimposter syndromeâ are not written by imposters but by successful people, who seem all the more charming as we learn that their many achievements have not rendered them more emotionally secure. âI confess: despite all the Ws, I still feel awkward when I enter a room sometimes.â In the comments: âIt is so awesome to see someone like you admit to this!â And so on.
The feeling that âall confessions are in fact status-accruing performancesâ comes from our sense of these things; we know, on some level, that if your confession were truly shameful, youâd probably not be rewarded for making it in public. If you were actually being âvulnerable,â youâd be attacked. Performances of vulnerability are everywhere now, and while I know from experience that they often feel sincere to those responsible for them, itâs also the case that a part of our brains is forever calculating how weâll be received, even in moments of extreme pain. Being a social creature is inescapable.2
All of that aside: you can be a creep, a loser, hideous, whatever and you can find fellow-feeling in small contexts and various other places; but the moment thereâs sufficient scale, a scene will revert to the usual hierarchies, and thatâs because âtry as we might to pretend otherwiseâ they reflect how most of us feel most of the time.3 As the heap of weirdos grows, who will emerge as the influential, the important, the valorized? Whoever appeals to the greatest number. Who appeals to the greatest number? The good, in whatever senses: the beautiful, the charming, the strong, the creative, the talented.
Thereâs no home for you here
I donât believe there can be a solution to this. The situation is:
I struggle with a defect; I feel shame, isolation, anguish. I may or may not theorize that I shouldnât feel these things; I may or may not blame âsocietyâ for my feelings or the existence of the category of defect that I am ashamed of. But either way: I feel bad about myself.
I seek others to both commiserate and theorize with; the commiseration is: âDoesnât it suck to suck?â The theorizing is: âIs it possible that in some way, we do not suck? And it is perhaps others who suck?â
As the scene grows, theorizing outpaces commiseration; it is more scalable âa single theory can resonate with millions, whereas effective commiseration requires small groups and real intimacy and gets complicated fastâ and âservesâ more members of the scene, and perhaps serves them better; it allows them to reinterpret their defect as âgood, actually,â or to shift emphasis to how everyone else is evil / stupid / needs to change in ways they specify.
Who can best embody these re-evaluative theories? Who is the best bipolar person to argue that âactually, bipolar is neutral or good; society is defective in how it relates to us; everyone needs to learn and change to better accommodate us; we are blameless and to be treated as high-status for our innocent suffering?â Definitely not Kanye! (Let alone the many bipolar criminals and abusers and lunatics who exist). Instead, itâll be a handsome or beautiful bipolar person who has never said or done anything truly horrible, only things that are generically relatable to large crowds along a wide distribution. Who will be the best ugly person to argue that being ugly is good, or is unfairly stigmatized? Probably a pretty attractive one! To Deeâs point, they probably wonât have cystic acne.
Once the scene has scaled to where itâs dominated by this hybrid form of popular-aristocratic hierarchy, many will feel excluded: anyone who e.g. has problems outside the boundaries of what is now its norm-set. That will actually be a lot of people, and at this stage such groups often have a curious emptiness to them, a vagueness of definition and content that I believe is palpable even to those still included. I think this comes from the fact that the scene, now adjacent to mainstream culture (having discarded the real outliers) really does shift its orientation outward; itâs no longer about e.g. âwhat is true of being ugly,â itâs about âhow do we prevail with our group aims in the broader world.â These aims, being basically a kind of politics, are now mostly to do with an other, usually an opposed group that disagrees with the sceneâs values or ideas; theyâre also straightforwardly concerned with making the scene mainstream-accessible: thatâs where the growth is, anyway!
This is how you arrive at a state where crowds of bipolar people say âitâs bad to discuss Kanye because it gives ammunition to people who want to stigmatize mental illnessâ âor worse, pretend Kanyeâs behavior isnât classic bipolar shitâ thereby in their own marvelous way stigmatizing the hell out of mental illness.4 These aren't members of community looking to bond, share, learn from one another; they're members of an MLM looking to persuade strangers that being bipolar is good and cool and that this disorder causes nothing disorderly, just photogenic tears (ugly criers can go to hell) or a lot of creative output. To do so, they need to forcibly reject anyone who acts mentally ill, which is extremely funny. The famous observation that âevery organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponentsâ is probably related to this general phenomenon.5
Compensations instead of scenes
It will not surprise
that this all called to my mind one of my favorite remarks, from the philosopher Simone Weil6:âA beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.â
The diction is important: Weil is saying that the ugly know something the beautiful do not. This knowledge âabout who we areâ is vitally important to our happiness, to our capacity to make sound decisions in the world, to our ability to love and be loved. The compensation for defects is knowledge of this kind, and it is enough, in my opinion, that the failure of scaled scenes of support isnât terribly unfortunate. Indeed: I think they may sometimes stand in the way of this kind of knowledge: âNo, you are your face! And you should identify deeply with your face! Every face is equally good!â All of this is well-intentioned but untrue. It flows from resentment-driven avoidance and delays whatâs really needed: personal acceptance of the facts as they are (and a proper situating of them in a broad context: a life in this universe that ends in death; a world of billions which has lasted for eons).
I donât pretend bipolar disorder is a desirable, quirky eccentricity unfairly maligned; I also feel only mild and IMO appropriate âshameâ about it, and Iâve learned a lot from being bipolar. My version of Weilâs aphorism might be:
A sane person reviewing their thoughts may well believe that theyâre reliably able to self-assess. An insane person knows they are not.
I wouldnât trade this knowledge for anything, even as I can get quite sad imagining how my life mightâve been different without the disorder. Thatâs life: complex tradeoffs and attributes (that donât define us) playing unpredictable roles in what sort of experience we get here on Earth.
I donât know; Iâm not a group person, so this could all be my own projection; there are no doubt many groups that avoid this fate, and Iâd have problems with lots of them, too. But Iâve come to think that âlike these groupsâ Iâve looked outward too much over the course of my life, and that especially anything scaled is dubious. What was needed, for me, was to sort out my relationship with myself and my flaws without society, which doesnât know shit anyway. It was better once I realized no one out there could make me whole, and certainly no community. No new language, no new social order was likely to matter as much as shedding my entanglements with social concerns altogether. I try even to forget language, to forget all these theories, to live a little bit removed from the words themselves and just with myself and with people. After all: Iâm not ugly, and Iâm not bipolar. Thatâs just what theyâve called me, and while itâs useful to coordinate around these concepts and I freely accept them as socially real (and consequential), I try not to get carried away. Theyâre more sounds coming out of more mouths, none of which will be audible to me in the casket and which therefore shouldnât be on the beach, either.
Not always, but enough that to pretend otherwise is unjustifiable IMO!
These games of ambiguous intention âa âvulnerableâ âconfessionâ that earns only praise can seem both sincere and obviously calculatingâ are possible because we all believe in several sets of values at once: for example, we may believe that âbeing mentally ill is totally fine and good and chill, and even virtuous in a way: it entails suffering, which we celebrate, and it produces difference, which can be good, and itâs sometimes artistically valuable,â and so on; and at the same time: âFuck no, I wouldnât want my kid to be bipolar, are you kidding me? Iâve seen those screaming homeless people, that would be so sad for them to wind up like that.â Both of these statements are, as people mysteriously say these days, âvalid.â The space between them accounts for some of the incoherence of our cultural processes: a group exists to support âthe uglyâ but inevitably prefers the beautiful, for example.
In Nietzschean terms, I like both âresentmentâ morality and âaristocraticâ morality and think they should be productively in-tension across society; I tend toward the former âa deep element of my beingâ but I reject criticism of the latter. Itâs perfectly valid and has a lot to recommend it.
I donât care about this at all, incidentally.
Itâs one of Conquestâs laws.
Sophia has objections to this statement, I should note!
Abjection Doesn't Scale
As someone with a parent whose bipolar manifests in the Kanye register on a good day, this all tracks with my observations!
Feel like thereâs real potential for a good stand-up bit about impostor syndrome in unglamorous jobs, like the people hired by Rent the Runway to smell the returned items and determine whether they were properly dry cleaned. âItâs too much pressure! Everyone else on the crotch sniffing team has advanced degrees. How are they trusting ME with this responsibility?â
Reminds me of debates about âelite captureâ in social justice movementsâ the tendency of the most respectable, the best educated, the most privileged members of X marginalized group to become the most public & lauded spokespeopleâ thus kicking off a cycle of jealousy, resentment, critique, cancellation by more âmedianâ membersâ and at no point during which much real change ever happens