I’m back from my break and happy to see you here. Please feel free to share this post with a friend if you enjoy reading it. <3
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A Sontag-forwarded copy of Barthes on semiotics sits on my lap as I watch season one of Sex and the City. I’ve seen this show in pieces, mostly the edited version on E! as a preteen, so many scenes are as uncannily familiar as a fever dream. The last two days I’ve spent on the couch sick and sapped of energy, only alive enough to drain my phone’s battery on Instagram and Twitter. Alternating shitposting with half-watching, half-sleeping, definitely not-reading. It’s not covid according to the rapid test. A spring cold. That icky malaise I know isn’t going to send me to my deathbed but I act like it anyways. There have been times I have pretended I was sick to get attention. Mostly because I did not want to go to school. My personal ethos modeled on Shel Silverstein’s “Sick.” Years of practice have paid off because now I am both sick and getting attention! I’ve won, despite attention not being a cure for the bad things I’ve felt this week: a low abdominal pain, a vague headache, a blister I’ve peeled, drip from my nose to throat, sleeplessness, the looming dread I’ve forgotten to do something or be somewhere but not knowing what or where. I do my best Simone Weil and only eat hard bread. I do my best Nietzsche and contemplate the void (aka Carrie Bradshaw’s psyche).
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Rayne Fisher–Quann’s viral “The cult of the dissociative pout” article interrupts my waning away on the couch. Some meme accounts I follow post the headline atop their own pouting selfies, not-so subtly poking fun at the essayist’s intellectualization of bimbofication. Though of course you’ll never know what’s ridicule and what’s jester’s privilege with memes. Erykah Badu also reposts the article with a dismissal to the tune of get off social media.
Fisher-Quann’s piece doesn’t ridicule what she terms the “dissociative pout” or the so-called detached feminism that pairs with the pose. Its tone is vacantly concerned, mostly hovering in the safe zone of analysis. (As I write this and remember a professor’s comments on an essay: “tightly analytical but lacking original argument.”) Most of her argument is outlined in the mouthful of the drophead. She doesn’t invoke tropes like the male gaze, or toss in blanket statements about “doing a capitalism” as lesser writers are apparently required to include. This is to say she knows better than I did at 20 when I was writing girlbossy articles for my college newspaper. Which also is to say she is incredibly smart, as evidenced by her Substack and TikTok.
But it’s hard to tell exactly Fisher-Quann’s position in the piece, or if she means for anyone to be troubled by the rise of these pouts. “And listen, I’m partial to [the dissociative pout] as well. It makes my lips look great,” she writes, acknowledging her place in the cult, or preempting the excavation of incriminating evidence from her ig—she poses and links it. Is this the girl-philosopher’s mode, to never be too harsh, too condemning? To plant yourself in the middle? I write this because I’ve done this, too.
Did Tobey Maguire invent the dissociative pout?!
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A few months ago, a friend offers to take my headshot. I am ecstatic. She is cool, great taste. We’ve been talking about Benjamin, Jung. I am frantically writing her recommendations into my notes app. I tell her I’m not photogenic, all my headshots have been terrible. She says, no, no — no one has made you comfortable while taking your picture. You have to capture someone’s essence, but this can’t happen if the photographer makes you feel alien. We start talking about theory again. I mention Barthes’ Camera Lucida, and don’t call it “Camera Lucinda” like I did one time before and someone had to gently break it to me this was not in fact the title.
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Aesthetically, Rayne Fisher-Quann is right about the trend. I’m not sure it needed to be named but now it has. It exists, it’s happening, it’s been happening. She knows this. And she also must know it’s not exactly novel to stare dead-eyed or pout into the camera.
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Susan Sontag, in On Photography, says there is aggression in every use of the camera. Aggression from the subject and the shooter. What is captured is violence, as it is an act of aggression to capture. Photography when Sontag was writing had started to become more social. Obviously it’s even more so today. Sontag writes, “It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.”
The dissociative pout photo has power! Sure it wields an absurd power, but so does any other picture someone posts. It wants to subvert. The aughts duckface selfies gave women leverage in online spaces originally created to rank their hotness. The ugly, unflattering contortion required by the duckface subverted sexiness into goofiness.
So why not subvert goofiness into (occasionally played-up) emptiness? Nietzsche: She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live. A smile or a pout, they are both presentations of the face as the shooter/subject wants you to see it. There’s nothing necessarily beneath either, especially not evidence for a decaying society. You can look elsewhere for that (insert blanket statements: the government, a failing government), but it’s not written on the face of a terminally online girl. It’s as absurd to play up a pout as much as it is absurd to smile on command in a photo. She knows this.
Very moved by this photo of Emma Chamberlain’s reaction to Jack Harlow’s presence at the Met last week.
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Fatigue is the mood of the moment. Freshman year of college when I complained about mono symptoms, a friend said that I’d been complaining about fatigue since the day we met. Johanna Hedva writes in Sick Woman Theory, How can you throw a brick through the window of the bank if you can’t get out of bed?
At work today, someone asks if I’m feeling better. I am, I say. Not as fatigued, but it’s hard to tell because I am always fatigued.
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This detached feminism theory, as first described in this cited piece, doesn’t convince me. My theories: the detached feminists are simply defunct feminists; no one is gatekeeping depression; it’s always a losing game to try to define feminism; and, the dissociative pout’s popularity is praxis, or another iteration of the hot, mean girl online.
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(Dispatch from bed): Every time I get sick I truly believe no one has ever been this sick, or as wan as I am now. This is my favorite narrative! I don’t have covid but I do have brain fog, something I do not think is exclusive to covid. Anyone who has chronic sinus infections can tell you this. I learn from Heather Clark’s excellent biography Red Comet: the Short Life & Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath that Sylvia Plath suffered from lifelong viral infections. The most solidarity I’ve felt in weeks. Until I read she worked in bed through her illnesses. Betrayal! I squint at the screen for two hours on Sunday before closing my computer.
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Lobotomies have been on my mind. Not just because the article’s subheader declares “Lobotomy Chic” as In. Lobotomy Chic has entered the lexicon. Lobotomy Chic is sweeping the nation. Excuse me, miss, do you have any Lobotomy Chic nightgowns? When a friend reads the title of the article and its drophead, he laughs out loud.
I’m reading the section of Red Comet where Plath is checked into McLean Psychiatric Hospital. She dreads the possibility of a lobotomy. She dreads the electroshock therapy she receives against her consent. I ask Hayes if he knew what exactly a lobotomy entails. He says, they stuck a metal rod up your nose to touch your brain. I am under the impression the skull was drilled into and a part of the brain is removed. We were both half-right. I love when this happens! According to Wikipedia, the most common method of lobotomy was a metal pick through the eye sockets to poke misbehaving neurons. No parts of the brain were removed in the making of this perfected woman — though earlier methods did involve drilling into the skull. I win again.
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Or maybe I just want an excuse to pout in photos. Have you ever noticed you look way better in selfies than in photos taken by someone else? Or is this only me? The camera is a mirror, one I also use to check if I have food in my teeth.
my own attempts (lol) at the dissociative pout (plus a medieval cat, Elon Musk’s take on Wellbutrin [lol] and Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette who had her own lobotomy of sorts)
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From the drive-thru window, the pharmacist instructs me on the PCR test. Insert the cotton swab far enough into your nose to gather fluid, but not far enough that it will hurt you. I’d like it to touch my brain, even though I now know it wouldn’t be the right entrance. I push the cotton swab a little higher than the pharmacist recommended, to feel a little something on a hot afternoon when my body hasn’t felt like itself for days. Maybe I want a lobotomy, or just to simulate one. Maybe I think it will help improve my selfies because my eyes will deaden from the contact. Months ago, there were selfies with vaccinated arms, the occasional action shot of swabbing, everywhere. Smiling.
After, I get a vanilla milkshake from McDonald’s. This is the one cure to every ill I’ve ever felt. I highly recommend it. I drink it within ten minutes and my sinus symptoms are not cured. I remember I’ve been in my body this whole time.