Girls: Sad + Empowered
November 25, 2015 6:15 PM Subscribe
In a recent Dazed article, artist Audrey Wollen explains "Sad Girl Theory" and how it's empowering women on the internet.
"Sad Girl Theory proposes that the sadness of girls should be recognised as an act of resistance. Political protest is usually defined in masculine terms – as something external and often violent, a demonstration in the streets, a riot, an occupation of space. But I think that this limited spectrum of activism excludes a whole history of girls who have used their sorrow and their self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination. Girls’ sadness is not passive, self-involved or shallow; it is a gesture of liberation, it is articulate and informed, it is a way of reclaiming agency over our bodies, identities, and lives."
"Sad Girl Theory proposes that the sadness of girls should be recognised as an act of resistance. Political protest is usually defined in masculine terms – as something external and often violent, a demonstration in the streets, a riot, an occupation of space. But I think that this limited spectrum of activism excludes a whole history of girls who have used their sorrow and their self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination. Girls’ sadness is not passive, self-involved or shallow; it is a gesture of liberation, it is articulate and informed, it is a way of reclaiming agency over our bodies, identities, and lives."
I'm torn. It obviously has a kind of power, but this kind of Judith Butler-inflected thing always reflects a kind of capitulation to sexism and essentialism. Why accept that protest as active, external, making demands on others -- is masculine? Nussbaum on Butler.
posted by grobstein at 7:34 PM on November 25, 2015 [13 favorites]
posted by grobstein at 7:34 PM on November 25, 2015 [13 favorites]
I'm torn.
tried to do some kind of joke about Natalie Imbruglia being sad and empowered, but it's not really coming together; use your imagination
posted by threeants at 7:38 PM on November 25, 2015 [25 favorites]
tried to do some kind of joke about Natalie Imbruglia being sad and empowered, but it's not really coming together; use your imagination
posted by threeants at 7:38 PM on November 25, 2015 [25 favorites]
It's definitely an interesting idea, and an interesting interview. Being the bright, chipper and together one is emotional labor, refusing to perform it certainly seems to qualify as an act of resistance.
Do we still do the NSFW thing? Because the Dazed article has a fair amount of her work embedded in it, some of which certainly is.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:48 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
Do we still do the NSFW thing? Because the Dazed article has a fair amount of her work embedded in it, some of which certainly is.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:48 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
Besides being ridiculous, this idea just denies women their own feelings in a different way. A man can feel what he feels for his own reasons, but according to this, a woman's sadness is just a common reaction. When she is sad, the sadness is not really her own, just a sign of her place in society or something.
posted by knoyers at 7:56 PM on November 25, 2015 [17 favorites]
posted by knoyers at 7:56 PM on November 25, 2015 [17 favorites]
Isn't this just kind of celebrating depression? I mean, she's literally talking about how cool self-destruction is, as opposed to actually doing anything. How is that much better than celebrating eating disorders, or celebrating rage that results in violence?
Being sad may seem glamorous when you're young enough, but it's a wretched way to spend your life and something you have to fight. I'm a pretty sad girl myself, and I have damn good reasons to be sad (don't get me started) but I fight endlessly to not descend into apathetic despair and self-pity. Screw sitting around feeling proud of yourself for being sad. Go live a life.
I'm surprised more people don't jump to the defense of the pro-anorexia and cutting sites, really. The argument could certainly be made that those are women making choices about their own bodies and being true to themselves and not letting men define them and all that. But we recognize these acts as disorders. I guess sitting around being miserable won't kill you directly like starving yourself or bleeding out will, but it can ruin your life and some people might just embrace the Sad Girl lifestyle so enthusiastically that they end up slitting their wrists.
(Also, Brittany Murphy is one of her faves? I get Sylvia Plath or Marilyn or other genuinely tortured but complex and intriguing characters like those, but the woman who starred in romantic comedies, did voices for Happy Feet and King of the Hill, dated Ashton Kutcher and died of an OD? Not to mock her in death, but why would she be a hero?)
I'm sorry if I sound mean and I am not trying to troll here. I genuinely feel a bit like a recovering heroin addict listening to people wax poetic about how heroin is so cool and world-changing and talking about their heroin heroes. I want to tell them to get a clue. You're not "disrupting systems of domination" if you're staring out the window, glumly smoking clove cigarettes. Stop pouting in your bedroom and do something more useful before it's too late.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:19 PM on November 25, 2015 [54 favorites]
Being sad may seem glamorous when you're young enough, but it's a wretched way to spend your life and something you have to fight. I'm a pretty sad girl myself, and I have damn good reasons to be sad (don't get me started) but I fight endlessly to not descend into apathetic despair and self-pity. Screw sitting around feeling proud of yourself for being sad. Go live a life.
I'm surprised more people don't jump to the defense of the pro-anorexia and cutting sites, really. The argument could certainly be made that those are women making choices about their own bodies and being true to themselves and not letting men define them and all that. But we recognize these acts as disorders. I guess sitting around being miserable won't kill you directly like starving yourself or bleeding out will, but it can ruin your life and some people might just embrace the Sad Girl lifestyle so enthusiastically that they end up slitting their wrists.
(Also, Brittany Murphy is one of her faves? I get Sylvia Plath or Marilyn or other genuinely tortured but complex and intriguing characters like those, but the woman who starred in romantic comedies, did voices for Happy Feet and King of the Hill, dated Ashton Kutcher and died of an OD? Not to mock her in death, but why would she be a hero?)
I'm sorry if I sound mean and I am not trying to troll here. I genuinely feel a bit like a recovering heroin addict listening to people wax poetic about how heroin is so cool and world-changing and talking about their heroin heroes. I want to tell them to get a clue. You're not "disrupting systems of domination" if you're staring out the window, glumly smoking clove cigarettes. Stop pouting in your bedroom and do something more useful before it's too late.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:19 PM on November 25, 2015 [54 favorites]
Why is Sad Girl Theory necessary right now, and why should we all be sad girls?
Audrey Wollen: I think Sad Girl Theory has a resonance now because feminism has made such a big “comeback” in the media lately. I feel like girls are being set up: if we don’t feel overjoyed about being a girl, we are failing at our own empowerment, when the voices that are demanding that joy are the same ones participating in our subordination. Global misogyny isn’t the result of girls’ lack of self-care or self esteem. Sad Girl Theory is a permission slip:
I think she has a point here, and this isn't a knock against her ideas, but I'm looking forward to the day when we don't need theories & movements because "all humans are humans just like you and their thoughts & feelings are important and valid just like yours - they aren't poorly written fictional characters on display for your amusement, except if they've consented to that" theory is already a given.
posted by bleep at 8:31 PM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
Audrey Wollen: I think Sad Girl Theory has a resonance now because feminism has made such a big “comeback” in the media lately. I feel like girls are being set up: if we don’t feel overjoyed about being a girl, we are failing at our own empowerment, when the voices that are demanding that joy are the same ones participating in our subordination. Global misogyny isn’t the result of girls’ lack of self-care or self esteem. Sad Girl Theory is a permission slip:
I think she has a point here, and this isn't a knock against her ideas, but I'm looking forward to the day when we don't need theories & movements because "all humans are humans just like you and their thoughts & feelings are important and valid just like yours - they aren't poorly written fictional characters on display for your amusement, except if they've consented to that" theory is already a given.
posted by bleep at 8:31 PM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
This is exactly the kind of art-speak I can't stand:
Girls’ sadness is not passive, self-involved or shallow; it is a gesture of liberation, it is articulate and informed, it is a way of reclaiming agency over our bodies, identities, and lives.
If this art is a way of "reclaiming agency," it's certainly not explained in the article. Like, if the agency described is a purely cerebral thing, then fine, but let's not confuse this with the sort of agency wrought by suffrage, the Civil Rights Act, etc.
Without that clearly defined, I call solipsism.
posted by andrewpcone at 8:33 PM on November 25, 2015 [10 favorites]
Girls’ sadness is not passive, self-involved or shallow; it is a gesture of liberation, it is articulate and informed, it is a way of reclaiming agency over our bodies, identities, and lives.
If this art is a way of "reclaiming agency," it's certainly not explained in the article. Like, if the agency described is a purely cerebral thing, then fine, but let's not confuse this with the sort of agency wrought by suffrage, the Civil Rights Act, etc.
Without that clearly defined, I call solipsism.
posted by andrewpcone at 8:33 PM on November 25, 2015 [10 favorites]
I'm torn. It obviously has a kind of power, but this kind of Judith Butler-inflected thing always reflects a kind of capitulation to sexism and essentialism. Why accept that protest as active, external, making demands on others -- is masculine?
Is that what she's saying, though? (I'm asking for real; I didn't get that impression from the interview, but I didn't follow any of the interview links to her other work.) I got the impression that she was more trying to say that rah-rah protest and melancholy withdrawal are equally valid.
I think there's value in pointing out that being "strong" and "positive" is an added burden we ask of marginalized women, especially women marginalized on more than one axis, and that there's revolutionary potential in refusing to perform that, since pointing out women's strength and positivity can be a way of dismissing our oppression. It may be that Wollen's not really making that argument, but that was my takeaway from the interview.
posted by jaguar at 8:35 PM on November 25, 2015 [12 favorites]
Is that what she's saying, though? (I'm asking for real; I didn't get that impression from the interview, but I didn't follow any of the interview links to her other work.) I got the impression that she was more trying to say that rah-rah protest and melancholy withdrawal are equally valid.
I think there's value in pointing out that being "strong" and "positive" is an added burden we ask of marginalized women, especially women marginalized on more than one axis, and that there's revolutionary potential in refusing to perform that, since pointing out women's strength and positivity can be a way of dismissing our oppression. It may be that Wollen's not really making that argument, but that was my takeaway from the interview.
posted by jaguar at 8:35 PM on November 25, 2015 [12 favorites]
Ursula Hitler nails it. Being "not happy-shiny-cool " does not equal "not-fucked up". It's possible to be easy-going, pleasant, cheerful _and intellectual/philosophical/smart.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:37 PM on November 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by Ideefixe at 8:37 PM on November 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
I'm coming at this in the context of having just read this essay, which included a quotation from Joan Morgan's When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: "The original ‘STRONGBLACKWOMAN’ and her alleged ‘super strength’ was a myth created by whites to rationalize their brutality."
posted by jaguar at 8:39 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by jaguar at 8:39 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
"If this art is a way of 'reclaiming agency,' it's certainly not explained in the article. Like, if the agency described is a purely cerebral thing, then fine, but let's not confuse this with the sort of agency wrought by suffrage, the Civil Rights Act, etc."
Well, I'll start by straight up defining "agency," in case you need it:
"In sociology and philosophy, agency is the capacity of an entity (a person or other entity, human or any living being in general, or soul-consciousness in religion) to act in any given environment."
Straight up lifted that right off Google. Hope that's not too cerebral or art-speak-y for you.
Anyway. The entire "Sad Girl Theory" is founded upon the premise that our patriarchal society doesn't look kindly upon girls who act anything but happy or complacent – or, at the very, very least, pacified. To be "sad" (or, god forbid, mentally ill) is "whiny," "melodramatic," and/or "crazy."
By blatantly acting "sad" to the point where it can no longer be ignored or suppressed, a girl "reclaims agency" by doing whatever the hell she wants in an arguably increasingly misogynistic environment: the internet.
Also, considering these girls live in a society wherein misogyny and sexism is so overwhelmingly potent, it literally manifests itself into a rampant rape culture, I wouldn't be so hasty to compare their lack of agency to other points in history.
This lack of agency is not only as important, but is also a contemporary issue; dismissing it won't do anyone any good.
posted by ourt at 9:09 PM on November 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
Well, I'll start by straight up defining "agency," in case you need it:
"In sociology and philosophy, agency is the capacity of an entity (a person or other entity, human or any living being in general, or soul-consciousness in religion) to act in any given environment."
Straight up lifted that right off Google. Hope that's not too cerebral or art-speak-y for you.
Anyway. The entire "Sad Girl Theory" is founded upon the premise that our patriarchal society doesn't look kindly upon girls who act anything but happy or complacent – or, at the very, very least, pacified. To be "sad" (or, god forbid, mentally ill) is "whiny," "melodramatic," and/or "crazy."
By blatantly acting "sad" to the point where it can no longer be ignored or suppressed, a girl "reclaims agency" by doing whatever the hell she wants in an arguably increasingly misogynistic environment: the internet.
Also, considering these girls live in a society wherein misogyny and sexism is so overwhelmingly potent, it literally manifests itself into a rampant rape culture, I wouldn't be so hasty to compare their lack of agency to other points in history.
This lack of agency is not only as important, but is also a contemporary issue; dismissing it won't do anyone any good.
posted by ourt at 9:09 PM on November 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
Those quotes from Bwithh make me think Wollen is trying to be provocative and contrary more than she has anything really coherent or revolutionary to peddle.
Imma just say it: sometimes bad or dumb things are just bad or dumb, and they don't become awesome because Girl. There is such a thing as a bossy, awful person, and just because you are female that doesn't necessarily mean everybody who says you're insufferable is full of shit and you're just great the way you are. And there is such a thing as a self-pitying mope in a black turtleneck, and maybe your parents aren't just trying to stifle your delicate soul when they say you're 19 and you've got to sign up for trade school. Being good, happy and useful in this world is hard work regardless of gender, and being a woman doesn't justify our character flaws.
I get being depressed. Life can be awful, and oh lord, do I get feeling lost and lonely and hating everything. But it's something we have to fight. I am not saying, "Snap out of it, crybabies!" But I am saying that the literal celebration of passive self-destruction is not going to do anybody anywhere any good, and in fact will probably be mostly used to justify cruddy thoughts and deeds.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 9:10 PM on November 25, 2015 [31 favorites]
Imma just say it: sometimes bad or dumb things are just bad or dumb, and they don't become awesome because Girl. There is such a thing as a bossy, awful person, and just because you are female that doesn't necessarily mean everybody who says you're insufferable is full of shit and you're just great the way you are. And there is such a thing as a self-pitying mope in a black turtleneck, and maybe your parents aren't just trying to stifle your delicate soul when they say you're 19 and you've got to sign up for trade school. Being good, happy and useful in this world is hard work regardless of gender, and being a woman doesn't justify our character flaws.
I get being depressed. Life can be awful, and oh lord, do I get feeling lost and lonely and hating everything. But it's something we have to fight. I am not saying, "Snap out of it, crybabies!" But I am saying that the literal celebration of passive self-destruction is not going to do anybody anywhere any good, and in fact will probably be mostly used to justify cruddy thoughts and deeds.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 9:10 PM on November 25, 2015 [31 favorites]
It seems a lot like the backlash against being told by strange men to "Smile!"
posted by jaguar at 9:12 PM on November 25, 2015 [13 favorites]
posted by jaguar at 9:12 PM on November 25, 2015 [13 favorites]
I find the aesthetics of this troubling. Sad girl if it's pretty. This isn't about being sad when you're depressed and unhappy, surrounded by snotty tissues and unwashed dishes, or howling in grief at another loss - it's the poetically pretty ethereal sadness that's still resolutely tied to an external value of a predominantly sexualised gaze.
Real grief is horribly powerful, just as anger can be. Real sadness and rage are powerful emotions that can turn people around and fuel transformations and vulnerabilities and if they're turned inwards, devour you, but if you use them to fuel art or connections or work, they can do so much. A lot of people start and work in movements because of powerful sadness, but it's not that gendered.
And there's a huge pressure on women to have a very narrow socially-appropriate range of emotions, but there's just as much pressure on men for a different narrow range of emotions. I'd find a crying man far braver honestly. A sad girl (GIRL after all, not sad women) is acceptable to a point, especially a pretty sad girl.
This feels way too Cool Girl feminist doublethink for me, rather than actual critical thought.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:13 PM on November 25, 2015 [49 favorites]
Real grief is horribly powerful, just as anger can be. Real sadness and rage are powerful emotions that can turn people around and fuel transformations and vulnerabilities and if they're turned inwards, devour you, but if you use them to fuel art or connections or work, they can do so much. A lot of people start and work in movements because of powerful sadness, but it's not that gendered.
And there's a huge pressure on women to have a very narrow socially-appropriate range of emotions, but there's just as much pressure on men for a different narrow range of emotions. I'd find a crying man far braver honestly. A sad girl (GIRL after all, not sad women) is acceptable to a point, especially a pretty sad girl.
This feels way too Cool Girl feminist doublethink for me, rather than actual critical thought.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:13 PM on November 25, 2015 [49 favorites]
I mean, the thing about art is, it never seeks to answer anything for the audience. It's a proposition, a question, a hypothesis.
Wollen isn't looking to answer or solve any issues that girls might face. I took this work as an investigation into the taboo of being a "sad" girl. Not an angsty little tween who hasn't grown up, but a "girl" (of any age) who's forced to choose between either hiding her emotions and being sexualized, or displaying her emotions and being ridiculed for not being easier to sexualize.
I dunno. I think a lot of us are focusing on the actual execution of the work, as opposed to the questions that extend beyond it.
posted by ourt at 9:21 PM on November 25, 2015 [6 favorites]
Wollen isn't looking to answer or solve any issues that girls might face. I took this work as an investigation into the taboo of being a "sad" girl. Not an angsty little tween who hasn't grown up, but a "girl" (of any age) who's forced to choose between either hiding her emotions and being sexualized, or displaying her emotions and being ridiculed for not being easier to sexualize.
I dunno. I think a lot of us are focusing on the actual execution of the work, as opposed to the questions that extend beyond it.
posted by ourt at 9:21 PM on November 25, 2015 [6 favorites]
A sad girl (GIRL after all, not sad women) is acceptable to a point, especially a pretty sad girl.
I agree. But also. There's something to be said for reclaiming sadness, for saying that women are sad not because it's pretty but because we're sad, that we're pretty not because we're trying to attract men but because men fetishize our oppression.
I mean, I get the objections, and this is not my own aesthetic at all, so I'm not trying to say this is the only way of protesting patriarchy. But I think it's wrong-headed to hold art up to the same metric as theory; good art is complicated and inconsistent and contradictory and not adherent to a theory. I think it's an interesting artistic exploration.
posted by jaguar at 9:23 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
I agree. But also. There's something to be said for reclaiming sadness, for saying that women are sad not because it's pretty but because we're sad, that we're pretty not because we're trying to attract men but because men fetishize our oppression.
I mean, I get the objections, and this is not my own aesthetic at all, so I'm not trying to say this is the only way of protesting patriarchy. But I think it's wrong-headed to hold art up to the same metric as theory; good art is complicated and inconsistent and contradictory and not adherent to a theory. I think it's an interesting artistic exploration.
posted by jaguar at 9:23 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
I find the aesthetics of this troubling. Sad girl if it's pretty. This isn't about being sad when you're depressed and unhappy, surrounded by snotty tissues and unwashed dishes, or howling in grief at another loss - it's the poetically pretty ethereal sadness that's still resolutely tied to an external value of a predominantly sexualised gaze.
I was going to agree with this comment and say something like - trust me, men (I am a man) fetishize "sad girls" plenty.
But then I actually do think as jaguar says this might by trying to preempt and reclaim that? But I'm not completely sure what she's trying to say from the little bit that's here.
posted by atoxyl at 9:30 PM on November 25, 2015
I was going to agree with this comment and say something like - trust me, men (I am a man) fetishize "sad girls" plenty.
But then I actually do think as jaguar says this might by trying to preempt and reclaim that? But I'm not completely sure what she's trying to say from the little bit that's here.
posted by atoxyl at 9:30 PM on November 25, 2015
Heh. Sad white girl theory, more like. I am personally tired of sad white girls and the attention they monopolize, at this point.
posted by aielen at 9:30 PM on November 25, 2015 [23 favorites]
posted by aielen at 9:30 PM on November 25, 2015 [23 favorites]
The picture of the bathroom moaning Myrtle almost cos play tipped me over - it's a sad that looks cleaned up? Like, moaning myrtle was amazing to me because she had the hots for Harry potter and other boys, and while she was somewhat ashamed for being a bit of a voyeur, that she desired them was not dismissed. And she was annoying and plain and cried a lot, and still - she was also brave and sexual and tough.
That photo seemed to bleach all of that down to a schoolgirl fetish with the socks and pouty gaze. It's boring art because it's shallow.
Sadness in women has way more to be said and explored, but she's shrunk it down to a sanitised semi-commercial dribble that is 'accidentally' full of thin white mainstream pretty young women.
Give me Yoko Ono screaming as more interesting art any day.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:38 PM on November 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
That photo seemed to bleach all of that down to a schoolgirl fetish with the socks and pouty gaze. It's boring art because it's shallow.
Sadness in women has way more to be said and explored, but she's shrunk it down to a sanitised semi-commercial dribble that is 'accidentally' full of thin white mainstream pretty young women.
Give me Yoko Ono screaming as more interesting art any day.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:38 PM on November 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
Not that moaning myrtle is art but she does seem to be doing riffs on famous art and pop culture images, references in her pieces.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:39 PM on November 25, 2015
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:39 PM on November 25, 2015
I know a lot of women - particularly those marginalized in other ways, such as race or occupation (e.g. sex workers) - who have talked a lot about how they're not allowed to display vulnerability at all, because that would somehow damage their cred. The ones who are activists talk about how they're always on demand for emotional labor, they have to be Strong For The Movement, they can't stay sad too long because Viva La Revolution, etc - but no one cares if their mental health is further damaged as a result. They're tired of being strong, tired of being the Fairy Godmother, tired of being "the better one".
The ones that are not activists still deal with a lot of this, and I'm seeing this replicated in this thread. Think positive! Negativity is always bad! Stop being whiny, you don't know how good you have it, children are dying in Africa and women can't drive in Saudi Arabia! Stop being so entitled! It's not a big deal! It's a cry for attention! You're an attention-seeker! Shut up and just be accommodating! Who cares?! Get over it! Get over yourself!
And you see it in popular culture too. Strong female protagonist - never admits a moment of "weakness". Being a survivor is better than being a victim because "victim mentality" is bad. Law of Attraction - thoughts become things, so your bad luck is because you think negatively. Bella Swan is a bad role model because she's weak and gives into emotional abuse from Edward and doesn't hide it. Conceal, don't feel (at least this gets broken immediately after). Love your body always! Every woman should be a "bad-ass" and bad-asses don't admit defeat.
Be happy. Always be happy. Only ever be happy.
It's tiring.
Our humanity is taken away from us. We're expected to put on only one face, the face that doesn't disturb people. Any moment of "not strong" means we're failing at life, we should stop wallowing and just get on with it. We don't get time to grieve, we don't get time to rest, we don't get time to sit through our emotions and let them pass without judgement.
Insides Out was the first pop-culture thing that showed sadness as necessary and good. Joy gets the epiphany that Sadness is what allows Riley to get help - and eventually feel better. Sadness allows empathy, allows support. Riley was a mess because her parents wanted her to be their Happy Girl, and she wasn't allowed to grieve for her past. Once she managed to tap into her sadness, her relationship with her parents improved, and she was more able to deal with her new life.
So yes, I am here for sad girls, whether they're sad as a political statement or not. Whether they're sad because of brain chemistry, trauma, petty reasons, whatever. Let us be sad. At least for once in our life.
posted by divabat at 12:18 AM on November 26, 2015 [31 favorites]
The ones that are not activists still deal with a lot of this, and I'm seeing this replicated in this thread. Think positive! Negativity is always bad! Stop being whiny, you don't know how good you have it, children are dying in Africa and women can't drive in Saudi Arabia! Stop being so entitled! It's not a big deal! It's a cry for attention! You're an attention-seeker! Shut up and just be accommodating! Who cares?! Get over it! Get over yourself!
And you see it in popular culture too. Strong female protagonist - never admits a moment of "weakness". Being a survivor is better than being a victim because "victim mentality" is bad. Law of Attraction - thoughts become things, so your bad luck is because you think negatively. Bella Swan is a bad role model because she's weak and gives into emotional abuse from Edward and doesn't hide it. Conceal, don't feel (at least this gets broken immediately after). Love your body always! Every woman should be a "bad-ass" and bad-asses don't admit defeat.
Be happy. Always be happy. Only ever be happy.
It's tiring.
Our humanity is taken away from us. We're expected to put on only one face, the face that doesn't disturb people. Any moment of "not strong" means we're failing at life, we should stop wallowing and just get on with it. We don't get time to grieve, we don't get time to rest, we don't get time to sit through our emotions and let them pass without judgement.
Insides Out was the first pop-culture thing that showed sadness as necessary and good. Joy gets the epiphany that Sadness is what allows Riley to get help - and eventually feel better. Sadness allows empathy, allows support. Riley was a mess because her parents wanted her to be their Happy Girl, and she wasn't allowed to grieve for her past. Once she managed to tap into her sadness, her relationship with her parents improved, and she was more able to deal with her new life.
So yes, I am here for sad girls, whether they're sad as a political statement or not. Whether they're sad because of brain chemistry, trauma, petty reasons, whatever. Let us be sad. At least for once in our life.
posted by divabat at 12:18 AM on November 26, 2015 [31 favorites]
The ones that are not activists still deal with a lot of this, and I'm seeing this replicated in this thread. Think positive! Negativity is always bad! Stop being whiny, you don't know how good you have it, children are dying in Africa and women can't drive in Saudi Arabia!
I hope you weren't including me in that, because that is absolutely not what I meant or what I said.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 12:39 AM on November 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
I hope you weren't including me in that, because that is absolutely not what I meant or what I said.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 12:39 AM on November 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
divabat, of course sad girls are not merely a phenomenon restricted to certain classes or races. But my issue with this artist is that she reduces "sad girls" to "sad white/western girls" - at least in the article, and from what I've read/seen of her work. Any references she makes to other races or cultures seem minimal, superficial or verging on cultural appropriation. The "sad girls" she cites and uses in her message are all very... white/western. In the hands of another artist, this "sad girls" concept might be more powerful, might look very different. Like you've elucidated, the concept of sad girls has a lot of potential and could be expressed in a way that speaks to all kinds of women/girls. Unfortunately, I don't think Audrey Wollen does that, and it doesn't seem to occur to her that sad girls can be found across different races and classes.
posted by aielen at 12:52 AM on November 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by aielen at 12:52 AM on November 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
tbh Ursula Hitler some of your comments about how you have to "fight the depression" did spark my comment. Because what I'm trying to say is that for many women, there's constant pressure to "fight", and if they don't fight they're stigmatized for being "weak" or "wrong" or "giving in".
posted by divabat at 12:53 AM on November 26, 2015 [10 favorites]
posted by divabat at 12:53 AM on November 26, 2015 [10 favorites]
I think it's one thing to allow yourself to feel, and respond to happenings in your life, of course that's important. Especially if you're held up to challenging expectations (and especially if those extend beyond yourself).
It's another thing to aestheticize sadness (especially when it's represented as extreme, almost pathological), and claim that's a political act. Ongoing (real, not arted up) sadness is inward, inarticulate; definitely self-destructive, if it's allowed to run riot. (Close) others might pay for it when that happens, but those costs are usually personal, not political. It's just pain spread around, nothing changes for the better.
We identify with the limitlessness of the beautiful corpse. Lana gives us permission to be everything and nothing at the same time.
I mean, what kind of nihilistic shit is this. I don't identify with that. We're not limitless, we're extremely finite. This is an indulgence for young people. Ach, Ursula Hitler's said a lot that rings true for me. I've spent too many years soggy with sadness, hiding. I'm done with it. Or if it turns out I'm not, I certainly don't find it romantic right now. Anger is movement, joy is precious, life is short, fighting is better than retreat, gender notwithstanding. (As a way of living, I mean. I don't have the knowledge to really talk about art.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:07 AM on November 26, 2015 [9 favorites]
It's another thing to aestheticize sadness (especially when it's represented as extreme, almost pathological), and claim that's a political act. Ongoing (real, not arted up) sadness is inward, inarticulate; definitely self-destructive, if it's allowed to run riot. (Close) others might pay for it when that happens, but those costs are usually personal, not political. It's just pain spread around, nothing changes for the better.
We identify with the limitlessness of the beautiful corpse. Lana gives us permission to be everything and nothing at the same time.
I mean, what kind of nihilistic shit is this. I don't identify with that. We're not limitless, we're extremely finite. This is an indulgence for young people. Ach, Ursula Hitler's said a lot that rings true for me. I've spent too many years soggy with sadness, hiding. I'm done with it. Or if it turns out I'm not, I certainly don't find it romantic right now. Anger is movement, joy is precious, life is short, fighting is better than retreat, gender notwithstanding. (As a way of living, I mean. I don't have the knowledge to really talk about art.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:07 AM on November 26, 2015 [9 favorites]
This is an indulgence for young people.
(By "this" I was meant the "beautiful corpse full of nothing and everything" inanity. Not sadness full-stop, or allowing yourself to feel vulnerable when you haven't been allowed to.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:18 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
(By "this" I was meant the "beautiful corpse full of nothing and everything" inanity. Not sadness full-stop, or allowing yourself to feel vulnerable when you haven't been allowed to.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:18 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
"And my hair clinging to my face in the rain
Like a goddess from the cult of beautiful pain."
posted by namespan at 1:19 AM on November 26, 2015
Like a goddess from the cult of beautiful pain."
posted by namespan at 1:19 AM on November 26, 2015
That’s what every girl wants to be: Jackie and Marilyn simultaneously. We identify with the limitlessness of the beautiful corpse.
Pfft. Speak for yourself.
I'd be giving this much less side-eye if the author weren't tying sadness in with beauty quite so much, both explicitly and implicitly. I know the whole "everyone is beautiful" thing is very in vogue at the moment, but really, here is a perfect opportunity to reject the necessity or even very concept of beauty and instead... hot gothy pretty girls for the male gaze.
posted by Dysk at 1:33 AM on November 26, 2015 [9 favorites]
Pfft. Speak for yourself.
I'd be giving this much less side-eye if the author weren't tying sadness in with beauty quite so much, both explicitly and implicitly. I know the whole "everyone is beautiful" thing is very in vogue at the moment, but really, here is a perfect opportunity to reject the necessity or even very concept of beauty and instead... hot gothy pretty girls for the male gaze.
posted by Dysk at 1:33 AM on November 26, 2015 [9 favorites]
When I was seventeen, I wallowed in theatrical angst and read a lot of Plath; if they'd invented smartphones at the time, I'd have taken a lot of sad selfies. Much later, when I was 29, I had a bad six months of clinical depression. The two experiences had nothing in common. (Plath, of course, suffered depression but my romantic appropriation of her work had nothing to do with that). I think the idea of being Strong All The Time is bad because of what it says about and to the depressed and angry and wounded, but this has nothing much to do with aesthetically enjoying images of sadness and finding it basically erotic. I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with romanticising sadness but there's nothing political about it.
posted by Aravis76 at 1:58 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Aravis76 at 1:58 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
fighting is better than retreat
Here is where we diverge. I don't see either one as better than the other - I see both as necessary, but retreating gets a lot of flack. You're not going to be any good in the fight if you're injured, and besides, not everyone functions by fighting, or should.
posted by divabat at 2:00 AM on November 26, 2015 [13 favorites]
Here is where we diverge. I don't see either one as better than the other - I see both as necessary, but retreating gets a lot of flack. You're not going to be any good in the fight if you're injured, and besides, not everyone functions by fighting, or should.
posted by divabat at 2:00 AM on November 26, 2015 [13 favorites]
Netflix has had two shows recently, Sense8 and Jessica Jones, that practically wallowed in the Sad (Attractive White) Girl theory. I wonder if that's related. On the one hand, I found them boring and uncomfortable ... on the other hand, they're focused intensely on trauma and PTSD, and that's argued to be a valuable story to tell.
Anyway - The reasoning Audrey gives, I like. It's the same line of reasoning that leads me to talk frankly about my period. And mental illness. There are additional reasons for both of those, but at the heart, it's this contrarian impulse: "I will not eat this pound of dirt to make you feel better. I will not hide it or lie about it; I will not pretend the world is fair and just. And I most certainly will not smile."
It sort of reminds me of this -
"When Ophelia appears onstage in Act IV, scene V, singing little songs and handing out imaginary flowers, she temporarily upsets the entire power dynamic of the Elsinore court. When I picture that scene, I always imagine Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Horatio sharing a stunned look, all of them thinking the same thing: “We fucked up. We fucked up bad.” It might be the only moment of group self-awareness in the whole play. Not even the grossest old Victorian dinosaur of a critic tries to pretend that Ophelia is making a big deal out of nothing. Her madness and death is plainly the direct result of the alternating tyranny and neglect of the men in her life. She’s proof that adolescent girls don’t just go out of their minds for the fun of it. They’re driven there by people in their lives who should have known better. I think Shakespeare probably understood that better than most people do today."
It's not revolutionary if only some girls get to Be Sad. But I think it would, actually, be revolutionary to extend this to women of color. Let them be sad about the pound of dirt they have been given; let them make it visible and loud; let them even throw it in our faces, so we are forced to see it.
[We're not talking (in this case) about someone Being Sad instead of doing something productive. All of these examples are women working as a student, an artist, an actor, a writer, etc. and also Being (publicly, performatively) Sad.]
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 3:09 AM on November 26, 2015 [7 favorites]
Anyway - The reasoning Audrey gives, I like. It's the same line of reasoning that leads me to talk frankly about my period. And mental illness. There are additional reasons for both of those, but at the heart, it's this contrarian impulse: "I will not eat this pound of dirt to make you feel better. I will not hide it or lie about it; I will not pretend the world is fair and just. And I most certainly will not smile."
It sort of reminds me of this -
"When Ophelia appears onstage in Act IV, scene V, singing little songs and handing out imaginary flowers, she temporarily upsets the entire power dynamic of the Elsinore court. When I picture that scene, I always imagine Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Horatio sharing a stunned look, all of them thinking the same thing: “We fucked up. We fucked up bad.” It might be the only moment of group self-awareness in the whole play. Not even the grossest old Victorian dinosaur of a critic tries to pretend that Ophelia is making a big deal out of nothing. Her madness and death is plainly the direct result of the alternating tyranny and neglect of the men in her life. She’s proof that adolescent girls don’t just go out of their minds for the fun of it. They’re driven there by people in their lives who should have known better. I think Shakespeare probably understood that better than most people do today."
It's not revolutionary if only some girls get to Be Sad. But I think it would, actually, be revolutionary to extend this to women of color. Let them be sad about the pound of dirt they have been given; let them make it visible and loud; let them even throw it in our faces, so we are forced to see it.
[We're not talking (in this case) about someone Being Sad instead of doing something productive. All of these examples are women working as a student, an artist, an actor, a writer, etc. and also Being (publicly, performatively) Sad.]
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 3:09 AM on November 26, 2015 [7 favorites]
Not everyone functions by fighting, or should.
If you're talking about in the external sense, of fighting from or retreating from the world, then yes, both are sometimes necessary. But if we're talking about depression, fighting it is definitely better than retreating from it. Retreating is what you do when you're backsliding, when you've lost the will to fight it. But as soon as you can force yourself to get back up, you have to charge right back into the fight.
I am the last person to get sneery about somebody's "first world problems" or say that because they are a particular gender or ethnicity, they have no business being sad. I hate that stuff. I say what I say as somebody who is trans and has had cancer and is dealing with ongoing medical horror and all this other stuff: depression is the shits. I am not minimizing depression. It's damn hard work to fight it, but it's work we just have to do. The alternatives are to be numb, to spend our lives wallowing in self-pity or to just die. There is no glamour in true depression. True depression saps your will and makes you not return phone calls and not pay bills and not wash yourself. It is an evil force and it must be fought.
But there is depression, and there is moping. They're acquainted, but depression lives in a tenement drinking all day and sleeping on a futon full of roaches, and moping is just a confused, lost rich kid who's slumming. (Of course, it's not too rare for adolescent moping to becoming full-fledged depression, or for depression to be written off as moping. But they are distinct things.)
It sounds to me like these women and girls are trying to turn moping into something cool. They are acting as if moping itself is somehow a revolutionary act. It's not. Moping is a somewhat inevitable part of growing up, but it's not something to celebrate. It's like zits.
Use your pain for something. Write a damn book about your pain. Start a band and yowl about your pain. Or see a shrink and try and get happier. You have to do something. That is the only way anything will ever get better.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:09 AM on November 26, 2015 [10 favorites]
If you're talking about in the external sense, of fighting from or retreating from the world, then yes, both are sometimes necessary. But if we're talking about depression, fighting it is definitely better than retreating from it. Retreating is what you do when you're backsliding, when you've lost the will to fight it. But as soon as you can force yourself to get back up, you have to charge right back into the fight.
I am the last person to get sneery about somebody's "first world problems" or say that because they are a particular gender or ethnicity, they have no business being sad. I hate that stuff. I say what I say as somebody who is trans and has had cancer and is dealing with ongoing medical horror and all this other stuff: depression is the shits. I am not minimizing depression. It's damn hard work to fight it, but it's work we just have to do. The alternatives are to be numb, to spend our lives wallowing in self-pity or to just die. There is no glamour in true depression. True depression saps your will and makes you not return phone calls and not pay bills and not wash yourself. It is an evil force and it must be fought.
But there is depression, and there is moping. They're acquainted, but depression lives in a tenement drinking all day and sleeping on a futon full of roaches, and moping is just a confused, lost rich kid who's slumming. (Of course, it's not too rare for adolescent moping to becoming full-fledged depression, or for depression to be written off as moping. But they are distinct things.)
It sounds to me like these women and girls are trying to turn moping into something cool. They are acting as if moping itself is somehow a revolutionary act. It's not. Moping is a somewhat inevitable part of growing up, but it's not something to celebrate. It's like zits.
Use your pain for something. Write a damn book about your pain. Start a band and yowl about your pain. Or see a shrink and try and get happier. You have to do something. That is the only way anything will ever get better.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:09 AM on November 26, 2015 [10 favorites]
Netflix has had two shows recently, Jessica Jones and Sense8, that practically wallowed in the Sad (Attractive White) Girl theory.
See, your categorizing JESSICA JONES as "sad" is something that crystallizes one objection I have - are you sure she was sad, rather than angry?
There are people, I'm sure, who do use their sadness as a tool of activism or protest - but I suspect several of those who do are only doing that because they have been so trained out of negative emotion that "sadness" is the only form of protest they feel they can do. Anger would be RIGHT out for them - too upsetting to those around them.
but rather than trying to encourage more people to weaponize their sadness, I'd much rather encourage those people to express their anger if anger is indeed what they feel; and I'd also much rather encourage those around them to recognize that anger AS anger and not "hormones" or "weird shouty sadness" or whatever. Then we can all maybe finally go back to just feeling sad if we feel sad rather than feeling sad because it's a political statement or whatever.
I mean, sheesh, sometimes maybe you were just watching OLD YELLER or something.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:26 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
See, your categorizing JESSICA JONES as "sad" is something that crystallizes one objection I have - are you sure she was sad, rather than angry?
There are people, I'm sure, who do use their sadness as a tool of activism or protest - but I suspect several of those who do are only doing that because they have been so trained out of negative emotion that "sadness" is the only form of protest they feel they can do. Anger would be RIGHT out for them - too upsetting to those around them.
but rather than trying to encourage more people to weaponize their sadness, I'd much rather encourage those people to express their anger if anger is indeed what they feel; and I'd also much rather encourage those around them to recognize that anger AS anger and not "hormones" or "weird shouty sadness" or whatever. Then we can all maybe finally go back to just feeling sad if we feel sad rather than feeling sad because it's a political statement or whatever.
I mean, sheesh, sometimes maybe you were just watching OLD YELLER or something.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:26 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
Retreating is what you do when you're backsliding [...] You have to do something. That is the only way anything will ever get better.
If I want to do something later, I need to do nothing now. And nothing you say fetishizing struggle and "hard work" change my ability to do that, or my need to take care of myself so I can do that later.
You seem to have put a lot of effort into finding out what you have to do to take care of yourself, maybe allowing everyone else the same opportunity would be good too.
posted by frijole at 3:34 AM on November 26, 2015 [8 favorites]
If I want to do something later, I need to do nothing now. And nothing you say fetishizing struggle and "hard work" change my ability to do that, or my need to take care of myself so I can do that later.
You seem to have put a lot of effort into finding out what you have to do to take care of yourself, maybe allowing everyone else the same opportunity would be good too.
posted by frijole at 3:34 AM on November 26, 2015 [8 favorites]
I don't think anyone's fetishizing struggle; it's just unavoidable. No one can get through without fighting for themselves somehow or other.
You have to do something. That is the only way anything will ever get better.
There's a time when licking your wounds is necessary, or indeed all you can do, I think most of us have been there - but what UH said is simply true, sorry. Getting help, connecting, expressing, that is how things improve.
(I think I'm not really able to respond to this work as art. It's offending me on a level beyond that. I have worked hard to try to get past the feeling behind that posture - to get the fuck up - and sometimes (on very low days, when things have been going wrong for a bit), that progress feels fragile. On another day, I might have thought it more silly than anything. Just today, someone trading on suicide chic - and trying to inflate that effort with political claims - is coming across asa little straight up tacky, to me.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 3:55 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
You have to do something. That is the only way anything will ever get better.
There's a time when licking your wounds is necessary, or indeed all you can do, I think most of us have been there - but what UH said is simply true, sorry. Getting help, connecting, expressing, that is how things improve.
(I think I'm not really able to respond to this work as art. It's offending me on a level beyond that. I have worked hard to try to get past the feeling behind that posture - to get the fuck up - and sometimes (on very low days, when things have been going wrong for a bit), that progress feels fragile. On another day, I might have thought it more silly than anything. Just today, someone trading on suicide chic - and trying to inflate that effort with political claims - is coming across as
posted by cotton dress sock at 3:55 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
I did say it's not easy, and I don't pretend to have my shit figured out. I am a creature of strong moods and sometimes my words get away from me and it takes way too long before I realize I've gone too far. This may turn out to be one of those threads I regret.
But I know this: you can easily spend your life miserable, or you can do something else. Doing something else takes hard work. There are indeed times when we need to heal or grieve. That is not wrong. Sometimes we're all gonna stumble and fall, sometimes we can't go another step and need to rest. Sometimes we need to eat too much ice cream and listen to the sad songs we loved when we were 16. That stuff is all OK, in moderation. But it's a problem when sadness becomes a lifestyle.
Anyway, frijole, I'm not trying to throw down and I wish a happy Thanksgiving to everybody who celebrates it. Let's go spend the day trying to be grateful for something! (In my case, I'm grateful that Obamacare will probably pay for the next round of ghastly surgeries I'll need so I don't die before I'm 50. Yay?)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:01 AM on November 26, 2015 [9 favorites]
But I know this: you can easily spend your life miserable, or you can do something else. Doing something else takes hard work. There are indeed times when we need to heal or grieve. That is not wrong. Sometimes we're all gonna stumble and fall, sometimes we can't go another step and need to rest. Sometimes we need to eat too much ice cream and listen to the sad songs we loved when we were 16. That stuff is all OK, in moderation. But it's a problem when sadness becomes a lifestyle.
Anyway, frijole, I'm not trying to throw down and I wish a happy Thanksgiving to everybody who celebrates it. Let's go spend the day trying to be grateful for something! (In my case, I'm grateful that Obamacare will probably pay for the next round of ghastly surgeries I'll need so I don't die before I'm 50. Yay?)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:01 AM on November 26, 2015 [9 favorites]
Feeling better is a choice. We have to choose to find whatever joy we can in life. I hope you choose to feel better too.
This is patronising as hell and does not speak to everyone's experience. If it's how you experience existence, great, but you're speaking in very general terms, and it comes across as pretty moralisingly finger-wagging, and rather seems to blame people with no joy in their lives for that predicament when that isn't always the case.
posted by Dysk at 5:40 AM on November 26, 2015 [15 favorites]
This is patronising as hell and does not speak to everyone's experience. If it's how you experience existence, great, but you're speaking in very general terms, and it comes across as pretty moralisingly finger-wagging, and rather seems to blame people with no joy in their lives for that predicament when that isn't always the case.
posted by Dysk at 5:40 AM on November 26, 2015 [15 favorites]
It's not revolutionary if only some girls get to Be Sad. But I think it would, actually, be revolutionary to extend this to women of color. Let them be sad about the pound of dirt they have been given; let them make it visible and loud; let them even throw it in our faces, so we are forced to see it.
I appreciate the general intent of what you're saying, but in a sense women of color don't need you to "extend" this permission to be sad - they already are. You don't need to let them be sad, or let them make it visible - throughout history and even now they have been expressing and manifesting this. It's just that Audrey Wollen (and most of this "sad girl movement", it seems) make it white (whether intentionally or obliviously), and by making it white, they ignore intersectionality and come across as pretentious and disingenuous.
Wollen cites Virginia Woolf, Brittany Murphy, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Lana del Rey.... (etc).... as her inspirations and models of her theory. ("Sad Girl Theory is born out of the cult of tragic queens that have always fascinated young girls: people like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, or Virginia Woolf". Obviously her idea of "young girls" is actually a very specific and rather exclusive class of girls.) If she wants to discuss "girls who have used their sorrow and their self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination", are these really the best/only examples she should be using?
Sad girl films: Why not films like Persepolis or Raise the Red Lantern? She talks about Ophelia and Plath; I'm reminded of Maggy Delvaux-Mufu - a Congolese Belgian woman who self-immolated in protest of racism - as well as the practice of sati. She references Brittany Murphy and Nicole Kidman in pop culture. How about Minami Minegishi, member of J-pop band AKB48 who was dismissed from the band, forced to shave her head and film an apology for spending the night with her boyfriend? I am kind of tired of white females assuming that their world is the only world there is, that their very specific white feminist definitions are universal, that they have the right to impose these beliefs and narratives on other less privileged women in the name of feminism.
posted by aielen at 5:51 AM on November 26, 2015 [14 favorites]
I appreciate the general intent of what you're saying, but in a sense women of color don't need you to "extend" this permission to be sad - they already are. You don't need to let them be sad, or let them make it visible - throughout history and even now they have been expressing and manifesting this. It's just that Audrey Wollen (and most of this "sad girl movement", it seems) make it white (whether intentionally or obliviously), and by making it white, they ignore intersectionality and come across as pretentious and disingenuous.
Wollen cites Virginia Woolf, Brittany Murphy, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Lana del Rey.... (etc).... as her inspirations and models of her theory. ("Sad Girl Theory is born out of the cult of tragic queens that have always fascinated young girls: people like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, or Virginia Woolf". Obviously her idea of "young girls" is actually a very specific and rather exclusive class of girls.) If she wants to discuss "girls who have used their sorrow and their self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination", are these really the best/only examples she should be using?
Sad girl films: Why not films like Persepolis or Raise the Red Lantern? She talks about Ophelia and Plath; I'm reminded of Maggy Delvaux-Mufu - a Congolese Belgian woman who self-immolated in protest of racism - as well as the practice of sati. She references Brittany Murphy and Nicole Kidman in pop culture. How about Minami Minegishi, member of J-pop band AKB48 who was dismissed from the band, forced to shave her head and film an apology for spending the night with her boyfriend? I am kind of tired of white females assuming that their world is the only world there is, that their very specific white feminist definitions are universal, that they have the right to impose these beliefs and narratives on other less privileged women in the name of feminism.
posted by aielen at 5:51 AM on November 26, 2015 [14 favorites]
Dysk, how else does feeling better happen? Tell me. If there's another way, an easier way, a way that doesn't involve you having to work damn hard to improve your situation and attitude, I would sure like to know.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:55 AM on November 26, 2015
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:55 AM on November 26, 2015
Feeling better is demonstrably not a choice for many, many, many people in this world. People who would love nothing more than to feel better but cannot, for a variety of reasons. It even feels weird typing this because I thought this was one of those things that was obvious on its face.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:02 AM on November 26, 2015 [16 favorites]
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:02 AM on November 26, 2015 [16 favorites]
Sometimes, no amount of hard work will matter because of external factors. You cannot always chosoe to feel better. Sometimes those external factors improve because of things beyond your control. If you're on disability benefits being kicked around like a political football, you haven't always got much agency in your quality of life or happiness, for example.
posted by Dysk at 6:02 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 6:02 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
I think it's pretty simple. Wallowing in sadness is a choice. Fetishizing what is inherently a negative place to be for longer than you need to be there is a choice. Struggle is how people enact their choices against a world that doesn't inherently make life easier for them. The choice to struggle should be simple but takes awhile to get there, to be ready. Fine. But don't kid yourself and thinking your inaction is constructive or instructive. Wallow in sadness all you want while overconfident gits take what they want from the world and continue to make it a taker's paradise.
Inaction is a choice to be apathetic that is made from moment to moment and we're all entitled to long stretches of apathy just so long as we don't go around evangelizing needlessly long stretches of wallowing and self pity. That's what a culture can't fetishize. Struggle is fetishized because giving up is weakness and weakness is to be discouraged by things like cultures that wish to survive.
I'm plenty weak and have wallowed a lot over the years and still will from time to time. It sucked. That's embracing it, realizing it was necessary and it sucked and is not an end game. Everyone in a culture that wishes to survive will be discouraged from burying their sadness just as they should be encouraged to pick up the pieces and move on, because that's what most people do. Issues of privilege dictate how intense that struggle will be hence the comments about how it's easier for a white girl to wallow in sadness (I was jealous that Allie Brosh got to wallow for so long, why not me). Instantly feeling better is of course not a choice but realizing that rolling around in self pity is a choice is part and parcel to making the choice to engage sadness head on is a decision that is typically made unless you completely surrender or live in a "chick flick" clique that will magically pull you out.
Sad girls are being fetishized in this article and I think the cultural obsession with "getting over it" is not automatically helpful, cultures do typically have an immune response of downplaying depression when members of the culture start promoting what appears to be detachment and self pity. The culture is specifically going to lash out at larger pronouncements to "get your sad on!" For better or worse. It is what it is. Maybe it'll get better and less like the worst of our moms and dads. Maybe.
posted by aydeejones at 6:06 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
Inaction is a choice to be apathetic that is made from moment to moment and we're all entitled to long stretches of apathy just so long as we don't go around evangelizing needlessly long stretches of wallowing and self pity. That's what a culture can't fetishize. Struggle is fetishized because giving up is weakness and weakness is to be discouraged by things like cultures that wish to survive.
I'm plenty weak and have wallowed a lot over the years and still will from time to time. It sucked. That's embracing it, realizing it was necessary and it sucked and is not an end game. Everyone in a culture that wishes to survive will be discouraged from burying their sadness just as they should be encouraged to pick up the pieces and move on, because that's what most people do. Issues of privilege dictate how intense that struggle will be hence the comments about how it's easier for a white girl to wallow in sadness (I was jealous that Allie Brosh got to wallow for so long, why not me). Instantly feeling better is of course not a choice but realizing that rolling around in self pity is a choice is part and parcel to making the choice to engage sadness head on is a decision that is typically made unless you completely surrender or live in a "chick flick" clique that will magically pull you out.
Sad girls are being fetishized in this article and I think the cultural obsession with "getting over it" is not automatically helpful, cultures do typically have an immune response of downplaying depression when members of the culture start promoting what appears to be detachment and self pity. The culture is specifically going to lash out at larger pronouncements to "get your sad on!" For better or worse. It is what it is. Maybe it'll get better and less like the worst of our moms and dads. Maybe.
posted by aydeejones at 6:06 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
I think it's pretty simple. Wallowing in sadness is a choice.
While that may be true (arguable, I'd say) it certainly does not follow from there that feeling better is a choice. Structural constraints, external factors, etc.
posted by Dysk at 6:14 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
While that may be true (arguable, I'd say) it certainly does not follow from there that feeling better is a choice. Structural constraints, external factors, etc.
posted by Dysk at 6:14 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
Sadness in Inside Out led to action and comfort, and the message was that experience is a mixed bag of emotions, not sitting around in a singular state. It was an argument for complexity of experience, not a flip from happy to sad.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:17 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by warriorqueen at 6:17 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
Sometimes, no amount of hard work will matter because of external factors.
My argument is that there will probably always be something to be grateful for, and you have to find it. You read my last post, right? I've got all that going on, and more besides. I could rip my eyeballs out and go crazy forever, or I could do everything I can think of to try and live a happier life. So I choose the later, every day I can make myself do it. And I'm not boasting about that, I'm saying that choosing to try and be happy is really the only freaking choice we've got.
It was an argument for complexity of experience, not a flip from happy to sad.
I really hope that wasn't in reference to what I'm saying, because if anybody is reading all this and thinks I'm saying, "Hey, there is no reason to be sad ever and nothing useful comes of being sad and if you're sad you're a big whiny pussy so just shut up and BE HAPPY NOW," I think you're having an argument with somebody who isn't me.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:27 AM on November 26, 2015
My argument is that there will probably always be something to be grateful for, and you have to find it. You read my last post, right? I've got all that going on, and more besides. I could rip my eyeballs out and go crazy forever, or I could do everything I can think of to try and live a happier life. So I choose the later, every day I can make myself do it. And I'm not boasting about that, I'm saying that choosing to try and be happy is really the only freaking choice we've got.
It was an argument for complexity of experience, not a flip from happy to sad.
I really hope that wasn't in reference to what I'm saying, because if anybody is reading all this and thinks I'm saying, "Hey, there is no reason to be sad ever and nothing useful comes of being sad and if you're sad you're a big whiny pussy so just shut up and BE HAPPY NOW," I think you're having an argument with somebody who isn't me.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:27 AM on November 26, 2015
UH, has it occurred to you that you're putting forward a very oversimplified binary? That maybe there are people who do try and meditate on what to be grateful for, who do try and seek what little happiness they can, but to little or no effect? Your experiences are not a reflection of how everyone else works, and I think you know this, so this lecturing of how people ought to "choose" to feel better because you managed to do it comes across as super dismissive; like there's doing it your way or just not getting it. Maybe reconsider how you're coming across here.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:44 AM on November 26, 2015 [17 favorites]
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:44 AM on November 26, 2015 [17 favorites]
My argument is that there will probably always be something to be grateful for, and you have to find it. You read my last post, right? I've got all that going on, and more besides.
I'm not about to play oppression Olympics with you, but ready assured that not everyone has something in their lives to be grateful for in the same way.
posted by Dysk at 6:52 AM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]
I'm not about to play oppression Olympics with you, but ready assured that not everyone has something in their lives to be grateful for in the same way.
posted by Dysk at 6:52 AM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]
I think there's a missing piece in the argument here over boundaries around sadness? Like sadness (and grief, bitterness, depression, misery etc) are human emotions that just plain exist. But our agency over how we perceive that interior state through our own mix of culture and personality and intent, and then how we express this interior state through communication and action, that's something that is shaped and created through the tension of what we feel and what we understand we're "supposed" to feel and then do with that feeling.
The boundary around my sorrow to turn it into something neat and manageable for the people around me was to make it aesthetic and comfortable and limited. It could be very compelling - people do like a tragedy, especially if there's a moral or at least an element of sexual danger to it - and the more poetic and moving the image or story, the more comfortably simple the image, the easier to handle. Then they get to pick it up and admire it and put it back down in its place.
It's always making someone else's pain easier for you at a cost to them, but being around someone else's pain is a cost too.
It makes people so uncomfortable to be around misery. It drains you and you need to have good sources to replenish that, especially around very sad adults. Children's grief is manageable, because they can be comforted or distracted, but pain is just very very hard to bear when it's someone else's and you have the option to leave. There's such pressure to fix it or ease it, to stop the pain somehow.
So there's a trade in a way - you stay longer if they moderate or arrange their grief in a way that is less difficult for you to bear, because it really does hurt the close witnesses and the comforters too.
But it doesn't seem to hurt the bystanders. That's what she might be talking about, clumsily. But the more I look at her art, the duller it is. It's a great idea, that sadness in women is worth artistic exploration, but executed very poorly.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:04 AM on November 26, 2015 [11 favorites]
The boundary around my sorrow to turn it into something neat and manageable for the people around me was to make it aesthetic and comfortable and limited. It could be very compelling - people do like a tragedy, especially if there's a moral or at least an element of sexual danger to it - and the more poetic and moving the image or story, the more comfortably simple the image, the easier to handle. Then they get to pick it up and admire it and put it back down in its place.
It's always making someone else's pain easier for you at a cost to them, but being around someone else's pain is a cost too.
It makes people so uncomfortable to be around misery. It drains you and you need to have good sources to replenish that, especially around very sad adults. Children's grief is manageable, because they can be comforted or distracted, but pain is just very very hard to bear when it's someone else's and you have the option to leave. There's such pressure to fix it or ease it, to stop the pain somehow.
So there's a trade in a way - you stay longer if they moderate or arrange their grief in a way that is less difficult for you to bear, because it really does hurt the close witnesses and the comforters too.
But it doesn't seem to hurt the bystanders. That's what she might be talking about, clumsily. But the more I look at her art, the duller it is. It's a great idea, that sadness in women is worth artistic exploration, but executed very poorly.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:04 AM on November 26, 2015 [11 favorites]
Surely there's a massive zone between "sadness is great and excellent and political and we should revel in it and cultivate it" and "sadness is not your fault." I'm on board with the latter but not the former.
posted by Aravis76 at 7:16 AM on November 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by Aravis76 at 7:16 AM on November 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
dorothyisunderwood articulated beautifully what was bothering me about this.
The moniker "Sad Girl Theory" is going to generate a lot of clicks without a lot of reflection, methinks. "Sad WOMAN Theory"? Yeah, reeks too much of pilled cardigans and snot-crying. Elizabeth Wurtzel has been playing the sexy sad girl card for a couple of decades now.
But I did like this: "Once you’ve accepted that you are going to be affirming a sexist cliché no matter what you do, because those clichés are designed to swallow our entire existence, you can do what you actually feel like." If there's a good takeaway, it's that.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 7:18 AM on November 26, 2015 [7 favorites]
The moniker "Sad Girl Theory" is going to generate a lot of clicks without a lot of reflection, methinks. "Sad WOMAN Theory"? Yeah, reeks too much of pilled cardigans and snot-crying. Elizabeth Wurtzel has been playing the sexy sad girl card for a couple of decades now.
But I did like this: "Once you’ve accepted that you are going to be affirming a sexist cliché no matter what you do, because those clichés are designed to swallow our entire existence, you can do what you actually feel like." If there's a good takeaway, it's that.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 7:18 AM on November 26, 2015 [7 favorites]
As someone who both treats and has suffered from depression, there is value for many people in learning that it's ok to feel sad. Depression can happen because people wall off their negative feelings because they're terrified of feeling them; learning to feel them, rather than habitually pushing them away while sitting in rigid terror of them welling up, can help treat the depression. (That is not true of everyone, I know. It's true of a lot of people, however.)
I think there's value in saying "This world hurts me." Because this world hurts a lot of people. Yes, anger helps give us energy to change that, but I think it's valuable to acknowledge the hurt that's there, too. I don't think any artist is trying to say "Feel only this way, forever!" It's an exploration of that feeling, not an instruction manual. But the "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you strong" mandate can keep people from accessing, and therefore processing, their pain, which means it gets stuck. And that's not good, either.
posted by jaguar at 8:23 AM on November 26, 2015 [12 favorites]
I think there's value in saying "This world hurts me." Because this world hurts a lot of people. Yes, anger helps give us energy to change that, but I think it's valuable to acknowledge the hurt that's there, too. I don't think any artist is trying to say "Feel only this way, forever!" It's an exploration of that feeling, not an instruction manual. But the "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you strong" mandate can keep people from accessing, and therefore processing, their pain, which means it gets stuck. And that's not good, either.
posted by jaguar at 8:23 AM on November 26, 2015 [12 favorites]
The relative lack of women in STEM careers could be seen as a passive protest- girls are "sad" that they are rejected and rebuffed in the science majors that would lead them to such careers. And in response, there are hand-wringing attempts to address the problem that often boil down to "cheer up! Science is cool!" rather than addressing the root causes of the problem- sexism and racism. Being sad only gets you so far.
Where I work, sexual harassment of young women was rampant. Then something magical happened: young women stopped tolerating it. They complained. Instead of doing what my generation did (avoid those people, avoid those situations) they complained, got the worst offender fired and cowed the lesser assailants. They have made our workplace a safer place for women to have a career in science. They were not sad. I am so proud of them.
posted by acrasis at 8:50 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
Where I work, sexual harassment of young women was rampant. Then something magical happened: young women stopped tolerating it. They complained. Instead of doing what my generation did (avoid those people, avoid those situations) they complained, got the worst offender fired and cowed the lesser assailants. They have made our workplace a safer place for women to have a career in science. They were not sad. I am so proud of them.
posted by acrasis at 8:50 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
Mod note: Couple comments removed; this should probably be a little bit less of an argument about whether people should feel how they feel, and any site-level metacommentary needs to go elsewhere.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:06 AM on November 26, 2015
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:06 AM on November 26, 2015
Wow, this got really negative.
I mean, I think Wollen's take on it is shallow; mostly because she's a college student, and her "body of work" appears to be mostly selfies on Instagram. And the article doesn't go much deeper.
But there's an interesting seed in her Instagram and the way she talks about this concept. There's pictures of her in a hospital gown, looking regal. She's not fetishizing her own suffering; she's portraying herself ... in the actual circumstances of her life, mostly doctors' offices ... portraying herself with dignity.
Even the Moaning Myrtle picture - with its caption -
- communicates a frustration with herself (for having a breakdown);
- and a frustration that this would make her a "psycho" in the eyes of her coworkers;
- it portrays some of the mess she's feeling (bags under her eyes, face red, hair bedraggled);
- at the same time, the picture is taken after she's regained control of herself, conveying agency;
- and it's clear that she's going to go back to work like nothing's wrong - and equally clear that she's sick of this.
It's not shallow, and I don't think it's fetishizing. It's full of intent. And framing herself as pretty, in this context, is precisely how she frames herself as being human and having dignity. She is not the one conflating those two things - the entire damn culture does that. (cf. entire avenues of employment that are only available to attractive white women.)
Most of all, I see in her work a backlash against the idea that womens' sadness is frivolous, childish, worthy of disdain.
---
All the messages in this thread of "Stop wallowing! Don't be passive! Take action, address your sads, stop -- " -- ugh.
One, talking about misery and arting about sadness is by definition not passive; it's communicative.
And two, just, ugh, I'm glad other people have held on to a positive outlook. Me, I've tried this positive thinking shit. Sometimes it helps. Someday it'll work, and I'll feel better, but it won't be tomorrow, and it probably won't be next week, and eventually I'll smile but right now I'm goddamn allowed to be sad. And I button it up for other people's sake because I know it's a drag but honestly I'm really, really sick of doing that, and I'm allowed to be ticked about that too.
I appreciate the general intent of what you're saying, but in a sense women of color don't need you to "extend" this permission to be sad - they already are. You don't need to let them be sad, or let them make it visible - throughout history and even now they have been expressing and manifesting this. It's just that Audrey Wollen (and most of this "sad girl movement", it seems) make it white (whether intentionally or obliviously), and by making it white, they ignore intersectionality and come across as pretentious and disingenuous.
Thanks for the links in that post. You're right - I was speaking to a white perspective, and I didn't even realize it.
See, your categorizing JESSICA JONES as "sad" is something that crystallizes one objection I have - are you sure she was sad, rather than angry?
wish I had time to reply to this, because you're right, i was oversimplifying.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 9:09 AM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]
I mean, I think Wollen's take on it is shallow; mostly because she's a college student, and her "body of work" appears to be mostly selfies on Instagram. And the article doesn't go much deeper.
But there's an interesting seed in her Instagram and the way she talks about this concept. There's pictures of her in a hospital gown, looking regal. She's not fetishizing her own suffering; she's portraying herself ... in the actual circumstances of her life, mostly doctors' offices ... portraying herself with dignity.
Even the Moaning Myrtle picture - with its caption -
- communicates a frustration with herself (for having a breakdown);
- and a frustration that this would make her a "psycho" in the eyes of her coworkers;
- it portrays some of the mess she's feeling (bags under her eyes, face red, hair bedraggled);
- at the same time, the picture is taken after she's regained control of herself, conveying agency;
- and it's clear that she's going to go back to work like nothing's wrong - and equally clear that she's sick of this.
It's not shallow, and I don't think it's fetishizing. It's full of intent. And framing herself as pretty, in this context, is precisely how she frames herself as being human and having dignity. She is not the one conflating those two things - the entire damn culture does that. (cf. entire avenues of employment that are only available to attractive white women.)
Most of all, I see in her work a backlash against the idea that womens' sadness is frivolous, childish, worthy of disdain.
---
All the messages in this thread of "Stop wallowing! Don't be passive! Take action, address your sads, stop -- " -- ugh.
One, talking about misery and arting about sadness is by definition not passive; it's communicative.
And two, just, ugh, I'm glad other people have held on to a positive outlook. Me, I've tried this positive thinking shit. Sometimes it helps. Someday it'll work, and I'll feel better, but it won't be tomorrow, and it probably won't be next week, and eventually I'll smile but right now I'm goddamn allowed to be sad. And I button it up for other people's sake because I know it's a drag but honestly I'm really, really sick of doing that, and I'm allowed to be ticked about that too.
I appreciate the general intent of what you're saying, but in a sense women of color don't need you to "extend" this permission to be sad - they already are. You don't need to let them be sad, or let them make it visible - throughout history and even now they have been expressing and manifesting this. It's just that Audrey Wollen (and most of this "sad girl movement", it seems) make it white (whether intentionally or obliviously), and by making it white, they ignore intersectionality and come across as pretentious and disingenuous.
Thanks for the links in that post. You're right - I was speaking to a white perspective, and I didn't even realize it.
See, your categorizing JESSICA JONES as "sad" is something that crystallizes one objection I have - are you sure she was sad, rather than angry?
wish I had time to reply to this, because you're right, i was oversimplifying.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 9:09 AM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]
Struggle is fetishized because giving up is weakness and weakness is to be discouraged by things like cultures that wish to survive.
I can't tell what the intent of this statement was (satire? sincere? something else?) but this sentiment is toxic. Giving up is fine. Weakness is fine. They are what they are - part of life.
Being "strong", to the exclusion of everything else (and usually reflecting a very white het male version of "strong" that emphasizes stoicness and lack of emotion), is overrated.
posted by divabat at 9:14 AM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]
I can't tell what the intent of this statement was (satire? sincere? something else?) but this sentiment is toxic. Giving up is fine. Weakness is fine. They are what they are - part of life.
Being "strong", to the exclusion of everything else (and usually reflecting a very white het male version of "strong" that emphasizes stoicness and lack of emotion), is overrated.
posted by divabat at 9:14 AM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]
Here is a more substantive criticism of positivity culture by Barbara Ehrenreich, in a very neat video.
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:57 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:57 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
Giving up is fine. Weakness is fine. They are what they are - part of life.
Weakness and temporary retreat, yes, fine, part of the human experience. Giving up, as in finally, ultimately giving up - maybe a more complicated question. People feel how they feel about that; personally, I'm not a fan if it can be avoided in any way.
All the messages in this thread of "Stop wallowing! Don't be passive! Take action, address your sads, stop -- " -- ugh.
I definitely don't advocate denial, repression, an achingly false positivity. You have to feel your life. Certainly. But hell yes, address your sads. Of course. Sadness is a place to visit, not take up residence if at all possible. Depression - by its nature, the chemical goings on in it - is vegetative. Very depressed people look and sound very similar, have you noticed? Flat voice. Darkness under the eyes. Moving as if through molasses. I can spot that in a stranger from twenty feet (because I've looked like that). It stalls thought, chokes feeling beyond a narrow range - it paralyzes people. It is painful. The brain states of physical and psychic pain light up not too differently on an MRI. Yes, it's a crude measure, but I'm going with it: prolonged, untended pain is objectively bad. It isn't how you want anyone you love to live, it's not something to aspire to. Fight that shit.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:42 AM on November 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
Weakness and temporary retreat, yes, fine, part of the human experience. Giving up, as in finally, ultimately giving up - maybe a more complicated question. People feel how they feel about that; personally, I'm not a fan if it can be avoided in any way.
All the messages in this thread of "Stop wallowing! Don't be passive! Take action, address your sads, stop -- " -- ugh.
I definitely don't advocate denial, repression, an achingly false positivity. You have to feel your life. Certainly. But hell yes, address your sads. Of course. Sadness is a place to visit, not take up residence if at all possible. Depression - by its nature, the chemical goings on in it - is vegetative. Very depressed people look and sound very similar, have you noticed? Flat voice. Darkness under the eyes. Moving as if through molasses. I can spot that in a stranger from twenty feet (because I've looked like that). It stalls thought, chokes feeling beyond a narrow range - it paralyzes people. It is painful. The brain states of physical and psychic pain light up not too differently on an MRI. Yes, it's a crude measure, but I'm going with it: prolonged, untended pain is objectively bad. It isn't how you want anyone you love to live, it's not something to aspire to. Fight that shit.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:42 AM on November 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
Sadness and depression are not the same thing. I think Wollen conflates them, too, but I'm not sure it's helpful to do so.
posted by jaguar at 10:44 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by jaguar at 10:44 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]
True, jaguar.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:46 AM on November 26, 2015
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:46 AM on November 26, 2015
Interesting circularity in this thread. The "anti-sad" faction is against a particular expression of individual choice in favor of a duty to act in the cause of social justice. But of course the end goal of social justice movements is the elimination of cultural and material differences that obstruct individuals' freedom to live out their conception of the good. Anti-essentialist ideology devours itself.
posted by fraxil at 11:05 AM on November 26, 2015
posted by fraxil at 11:05 AM on November 26, 2015
in favor of a duty to act in the cause of social justice.
Well, speaking for myself, I'm operating on a very simple, hedonistic, health-based notion of the good, nothing more than that.
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:08 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
Well, speaking for myself, I'm operating on a very simple, hedonistic, health-based notion of the good, nothing more than that.
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:08 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
I love that video about Ehrenreich's criticism of positivity, but I think the best thing about it is her impatience with the idea that you can change the world by changing what's happening in your head - as opposed to by undertaking a realistic analysis of problems and then cooperating with others to solve those problems that can be solved (and, presumably, grieving those that can't). You can't just think or pose your way to a better world. You have to act. In that sense, the video reminded me of the Nussbaum piece linked earlier in the thread, which argues that ironic performance isn't a substitute for activism and becomes destructive when it pretends that it is.
On preview, I don't think the argument is that individuals shouldn't be free to live out their conception of the good, where that conception = a lifestyle of romanticised sadness. They're free to do that, as they are free to take up finger-painting or belly dancing or running marathons. My objection is only to the idea that this choice, unlike finger-painting, is actually importantly political because it articulates a feminist point and challenges misogyny. I don't see how it does. So I don't feel any need to celebrate it as a piece of feminist activism or as a feminist statement.
It's true that a certain female stereotype is that of the ever-beaming perfect Strong Woman, and this sad girl stuff contradicts that, but I don't think that makes it a feminist statement. It's just so deeply consistent with other (and, it seems to me, older) stereotypes of women/girls - fragile, tearful, irrational, self-destructive. Lumping Plath in with Marilyn Monroe makes that obvious to me. Who cares about the work of those two very different women? All that matters is the sexy suicide. What matters about the woman is her - dead but still beautiful - body. Her mind is neither here nor there. That's an old trope, and a powerful one, but what feminist point is it making?
posted by Aravis76 at 11:26 AM on November 26, 2015 [12 favorites]
On preview, I don't think the argument is that individuals shouldn't be free to live out their conception of the good, where that conception = a lifestyle of romanticised sadness. They're free to do that, as they are free to take up finger-painting or belly dancing or running marathons. My objection is only to the idea that this choice, unlike finger-painting, is actually importantly political because it articulates a feminist point and challenges misogyny. I don't see how it does. So I don't feel any need to celebrate it as a piece of feminist activism or as a feminist statement.
It's true that a certain female stereotype is that of the ever-beaming perfect Strong Woman, and this sad girl stuff contradicts that, but I don't think that makes it a feminist statement. It's just so deeply consistent with other (and, it seems to me, older) stereotypes of women/girls - fragile, tearful, irrational, self-destructive. Lumping Plath in with Marilyn Monroe makes that obvious to me. Who cares about the work of those two very different women? All that matters is the sexy suicide. What matters about the woman is her - dead but still beautiful - body. Her mind is neither here nor there. That's an old trope, and a powerful one, but what feminist point is it making?
posted by Aravis76 at 11:26 AM on November 26, 2015 [12 favorites]
It is also interesting how much more health vs disease arguments are invoked in the absence of a shared conception of the good. On the surface, health is assumed to be a non-ideological goal, but particularly with behavioral disorders any attempt to define impairment can have ideological implications. See eating disorders, deaf culture etc.
posted by fraxil at 12:16 PM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by fraxil at 12:16 PM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
@fraxil - yes, true, definitions of health are normative. Interesting that Nussbaum was brought up; she's explicitly normative & universalist, with her notion of the good (iirc), and uses it as the ground for a particular framework of human rights (with which I'm sympathetic).
posted by cotton dress sock at 12:29 PM on November 26, 2015
posted by cotton dress sock at 12:29 PM on November 26, 2015
Mod note: Couple comments removed, please cut it out.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:39 PM on November 26, 2015
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:39 PM on November 26, 2015
@Dysk - it's true that it's not so much a question of choosing responses to the awful things that come one's way. Emotions come unbidden; they're faster (and older) and often more powerful than our ability to direct them. Some people have had to face more awful things than others; some people have fewer internal and external tools available to them to cope with what does happen, less support. I'm with Nussbaum again (or at least my understanding of my read of her, some years ago now) that it is, basically, luck that makes health, or the good, or action, possible. And it is hard when those are absent or unimaginable. My (lucky, very lucky) experience has been that in pushing through (or really, just waiting out, or holding on) through dark moments, unpredicted events have happened such that whatever forces within or without me have happened to tip things (generally, more lately than not) towards hope and (incrementally) towards action, even if it is limited. (And what looks like worthwhile action and worthwhile living to me has changed over time.) Is it "choosing" to fight; not really… I see it as, maybe, leaning on a lucky moment, when it happens - sort of willing (within a constrained subjectivity), vs choosing, as such - or waiting in the (maybe naive, unfounded) faith that a moment like that will come. It may. I hope it does for all those who don't feel it now. I know not everyone is lucky.
I also think there are times sadness can slip into depression, and there's much more room for leaning before that happens; I think it is better, more helpful, to be vigilant, if possible. (This is far off from the original article, sorry.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:33 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
I also think there are times sadness can slip into depression, and there's much more room for leaning before that happens; I think it is better, more helpful, to be vigilant, if possible. (This is far off from the original article, sorry.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:33 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
By coincidence, Nussbaum also argues that emotions aren't just events that happen in us, wholly independent of our will, but are results of our choices. I'm not even a third of way through her very strange book on this subject (which I recommend as interesting, although I don't know if it's actually persuasive), but so far she is arguing that our core value judgments underpin how and when we experience passionate emotions like grief, anger, and disgust. The implication seems to be that we could, over time, shape our emotional responses by reshaping our values - not so that we wouldn't feel anger or grief or disgust but would learn to feel them only when they aligned best with our chosen values. (Her example is that we feel disgust at cruelty but don't, unlike former generations, feel disgust at the sight of two men kissing; our moral principles have developed and our emotional responses have followed suit.)
Now that I say it, I find the idea that you get to will your emotions, so that they respond appropriately to your chosen values, quite robotic and creepy - it probably isn't where she winds up with her argument, as I'm just crudely paraphrasing where I think it could be going and leaving out most of the nuance. And obviously mood disorders and mental illness are a special case, though there could be a possible connection between her argument and CBT therapies.
posted by Aravis76 at 2:24 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
Now that I say it, I find the idea that you get to will your emotions, so that they respond appropriately to your chosen values, quite robotic and creepy - it probably isn't where she winds up with her argument, as I'm just crudely paraphrasing where I think it could be going and leaving out most of the nuance. And obviously mood disorders and mental illness are a special case, though there could be a possible connection between her argument and CBT therapies.
posted by Aravis76 at 2:24 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
It's true that a certain female stereotype is that of the ever-beaming perfect Strong Woman, and this sad girl stuff contradicts that, but I don't think that makes it a feminist statement. It's just so deeply consistent with other (and, it seems to me, older) stereotypes of women/girls - fragile, tearful, irrational, self-destructive.
I'm wary of the argument that because something fits a stereotype it can't therefore be used as a means of breaking stereotypes and empowerment. It smacks too much of things like femmephobia or discrimination against sex workers (because they buy into stereotypes of women as objects, apparently) or PoC who don't assimilate.
What's wrong with being conscious of your sadness and working with it, making it a statement?
posted by divabat at 7:17 PM on November 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
I'm wary of the argument that because something fits a stereotype it can't therefore be used as a means of breaking stereotypes and empowerment. It smacks too much of things like femmephobia or discrimination against sex workers (because they buy into stereotypes of women as objects, apparently) or PoC who don't assimilate.
What's wrong with being conscious of your sadness and working with it, making it a statement?
posted by divabat at 7:17 PM on November 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
Dagnabbit. Ourt, you threw this pair of big sad puppy eyes off the porch to a bunch of big dogs. It appears Mefi is crawling with a bunch of grown women. It appears many of us have been sad, disappointed, and often broken. So sadly, and "patronizing"ly: we know sadness. We also already know that the state of being sad is NOT fighting a good fight. An emotional response, however legitimate, is NOT agency- it is reactive; there is nothing inherently proactive or agency-establishing about it. You cannot call a reaction "agency" if the only thing it accomplishes is telling the world that it made you sad! It is moping, it is inertia, and it doesn't deserve the art-form (?)/act of defiance moniker this young person implies. As you can see, I can't see this viewpoint as legitimate. It's really upsetting to think that even one young girl would be driven to this dramatic ennui self-immolating expletive because she saw it as a statement! Jesus Xrist, I've spent DECADES or so being sad (and I didn't look pretty doing it- my own issue, I reckon. Heck, maybe this would have meant more to me if I did.) The only thing, though, that established my own agency, was ACTION on my own behalf. I'm not telling you to cheer up, but gaddammit, DO SOMETHING other than take pretty pictures of yourself being sad. And get the hell off my lawn while you're at it-
posted by JulesER at 7:23 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by JulesER at 7:23 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
What's wrong with being conscious of your sadness and working with it, making it a statement?
Nothing, necessarily; there are many who've explored their pain and found something in it, and it's true that facilitating simple expression of that pain is worthwhile (so if exploiting and articulating one's sadness helps with that, that's a boon). There are people actually paid to wail and lament at funerals, in some places. Songwriters give us their pain and help us voice our own. (I do think actually giving voice to one's pain, in words or sound, help give it sense - and imo it's in making sense of it, and feeling it through, that things get better (and I guess, that's an implicit goal I take for granted as mattering, getting better - for yourself or people around you). Visual representations are necessarily limited in that way, I think (but I'm no expert).)
As Aravis76 pointed out, the statement, in this instance, appears to be "dead pretty Ophelia / Marilyn / Jackie are pretty and sexy in their pale deadness, and my sadness looks like that and so I am pretty and sexy like that also" and then …. idk.
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:00 PM on November 26, 2015
Nothing, necessarily; there are many who've explored their pain and found something in it, and it's true that facilitating simple expression of that pain is worthwhile (so if exploiting and articulating one's sadness helps with that, that's a boon). There are people actually paid to wail and lament at funerals, in some places. Songwriters give us their pain and help us voice our own. (I do think actually giving voice to one's pain, in words or sound, help give it sense - and imo it's in making sense of it, and feeling it through, that things get better (and I guess, that's an implicit goal I take for granted as mattering, getting better - for yourself or people around you). Visual representations are necessarily limited in that way, I think (but I'm no expert).)
As Aravis76 pointed out, the statement, in this instance, appears to be "dead pretty Ophelia / Marilyn / Jackie are pretty and sexy in their pale deadness, and my sadness looks like that and so I am pretty and sexy like that also" and then …. idk.
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:00 PM on November 26, 2015
(not just Aravis76, aydeejones and dorothyisunderwood and many others, too, apologies.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:05 PM on November 26, 2015
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:05 PM on November 26, 2015
(like here, there is definitely a glamour about it, a call to intoxication with the feeling behind the pose, that stops at the surface [has to stop at the surface, it's about surfaces]. maybe that's at least partly what i find off-putting.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:20 PM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:20 PM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
I'm grateful for the women of MeFi who can articulate the nuances of this issue, on both sides and the middle and the edges. But as art, I find Wollen's work not much different from the nice guys who'd never dream of painting a girl/woman in a sexy way but only ever depict her looking sad and wistful. It's just a different form of objectification. In the same way that porn bears little resemblance to real, lived sexuality, I don't see the sadness and trauma and resignation I sometimes find in myself and my friends and family represented here. It's not tapping into anything real, for me. Perhaps other women get something from it and that's cool, but it doesnt work for me.
posted by harriet vane at 1:27 AM on November 27, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by harriet vane at 1:27 AM on November 27, 2015 [3 favorites]
Gah, I hit post too soon! I meant to say that I think ourt was right to post this even if it's not something I like. It's interesting to hash out the nuances together with smart people even when we disagree. I'd hate it if we couldn't have different tastes in art just for the sake of politics. If something speaks to you, it speaks to you even if no-one else is feeling it.
posted by harriet vane at 1:33 AM on November 27, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by harriet vane at 1:33 AM on November 27, 2015 [6 favorites]
I just want to with Harriet Vane. I am not impressed by the artist. (I think both Inside Out and Frozen -- Disney cartoons! -- are much more authentic and interesting explorations of the value of allowing yourself to feel sadness than this is. This seems to pander to the "male gaze" far too much.) But I am really impressed by this thread, and have gotten a lot out of commments on both "sides."
posted by OnceUponATime at 6:11 AM on November 27, 2015
posted by OnceUponATime at 6:11 AM on November 27, 2015
Well, JulesER, here's the funny thing: I'm not sad! I'm actually quite happy with myself, and my ability to understand art is complex and multifaceted and able to be investigative or explorative without being entirely "right" or "good!"
posted by ourt at 2:37 PM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by ourt at 2:37 PM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]
My objection is only to the idea that this choice, unlike finger-painting, is actually importantly political because it articulates a feminist point and challenges misogyny. I don't see how it does. So I don't feel any need to celebrate it as a piece of feminist activism or as a feminist statement.
Exactly, it is a statement about her own aesthetic preferences, as such it's likeable or not, shareable or not, more or less bullshit-sounding depending on our own individual tastes. But it most definitely is not a political statement, and her claiming her aesthetics as a form of political protest is delusional at best, disingenuous and self-serving at worst.
I get what she's saying, she's trying to reclaim that aesthetic and give it a deeper meaning, but just wanting to reclaim something you like as subversive and politically relevant does not make it so.
She does makes a couple of good single points about it but it still doesn't lift it into the realm of political action. (I know I know everyone does it these days, especially with feminism, just demand what you do or like is taken more seriously than what it actually is, twist and abuse the concept of the personal being political into meaninglessness, but eh just because we're getting used to this, it doesn't make it any less bullshit.)
And, incidentally, what a messy superficial mix of female figures to suggest as inspiring or subversive - from Virginia Woolf to Brittany Murphy? and what's this about "we all" want to be Jackie and Marilyn at the same time? really? No, we all sure don't!
Incidentally, too: poor Lana del Rey, she's destined to be misappropriated and misread and over-analyzed right left and center, how about appreciating her for what she does which is make some good catchy sexy pop music. You know, in the spirit of appreciating the variety of female artists for their talent, rather than use them as blank canvases to project on and use to promote yourself.
(I'm coming at this after watching the new M.I.A. video, which I have mixed feelings about but is undeniably stunning and overtly political, whether it's politically exploitative or not, it is political. I'm old school like that. Political is a word that still does mean something that's not as vague and self-serving as some would like.)
(Speaking of, that link posted above to the video with the words of Barbara Ehrenreich - that is definitely far more substantive and political, good example as contrast there).
posted by bitteschoen at 6:51 PM on November 27, 2015
Exactly, it is a statement about her own aesthetic preferences, as such it's likeable or not, shareable or not, more or less bullshit-sounding depending on our own individual tastes. But it most definitely is not a political statement, and her claiming her aesthetics as a form of political protest is delusional at best, disingenuous and self-serving at worst.
I get what she's saying, she's trying to reclaim that aesthetic and give it a deeper meaning, but just wanting to reclaim something you like as subversive and politically relevant does not make it so.
She does makes a couple of good single points about it but it still doesn't lift it into the realm of political action. (I know I know everyone does it these days, especially with feminism, just demand what you do or like is taken more seriously than what it actually is, twist and abuse the concept of the personal being political into meaninglessness, but eh just because we're getting used to this, it doesn't make it any less bullshit.)
And, incidentally, what a messy superficial mix of female figures to suggest as inspiring or subversive - from Virginia Woolf to Brittany Murphy? and what's this about "we all" want to be Jackie and Marilyn at the same time? really? No, we all sure don't!
Incidentally, too: poor Lana del Rey, she's destined to be misappropriated and misread and over-analyzed right left and center, how about appreciating her for what she does which is make some good catchy sexy pop music. You know, in the spirit of appreciating the variety of female artists for their talent, rather than use them as blank canvases to project on and use to promote yourself.
(I'm coming at this after watching the new M.I.A. video, which I have mixed feelings about but is undeniably stunning and overtly political, whether it's politically exploitative or not, it is political. I'm old school like that. Political is a word that still does mean something that's not as vague and self-serving as some would like.)
(Speaking of, that link posted above to the video with the words of Barbara Ehrenreich - that is definitely far more substantive and political, good example as contrast there).
posted by bitteschoen at 6:51 PM on November 27, 2015
Just wanted to add, I've actually browsed through her instagram and there are a few things in there that do not come through at all in the interview:
- she also does the occasional straightforward political statement, a direct call to political action ("if u live in the U.S. pls find time this weekend to email or call yr senator and ask them to vote NO and keep funding women's health!"), so, it seems she's not so opposed to that as her comment on protest being "defined in masculine terms" and the "limited spectrum of activism" would make you think! hmm, interesting isn't it?
- she does have a sense of humour, including about herself and what she's doing ("internet friendly pseudo-empowerment in soft blue tones" ha!)
- as reflected in the discussion here, the interview does give the impression she's kind of glamourising depression/sadness/illness/giving up or whatever, but seems she actually doesn't want to do that ("as some of u may know, 9 yrs ago yesterday was the day i was diagnosed with cancer at 14. during the past few weeks, ive been coping with the possibility of a recurrence, which has been v stressful and sad, bringing up a lot of tragic baggage. but ✨GOOD NEWS✨ today i found out that i am clear, no evil lumps trying to kill me. i write a lot about being sad (like, all the time) but i never want to give the impression that i am not grateful and eager for the chance to live out this wondrous, horrible, wildly beautiful life. thankyou to those who stick thru it with me and solidarity w/all my fellow chronic illness queens getting thru another day")
So, yeah, hers is still a kind of aesthetic that is very much a matter of taste and claiming it as a political act in itself is very much debatable BUT her stuff is not as one-dimensional as it'd sound from that interview. It's a lot more contradictory, and therefore more interesting, than it sounded from the article.
posted by bitteschoen at 12:30 AM on November 28, 2015 [7 favorites]
- she also does the occasional straightforward political statement, a direct call to political action ("if u live in the U.S. pls find time this weekend to email or call yr senator and ask them to vote NO and keep funding women's health!"), so, it seems she's not so opposed to that as her comment on protest being "defined in masculine terms" and the "limited spectrum of activism" would make you think! hmm, interesting isn't it?
- she does have a sense of humour, including about herself and what she's doing ("internet friendly pseudo-empowerment in soft blue tones" ha!)
- as reflected in the discussion here, the interview does give the impression she's kind of glamourising depression/sadness/illness/giving up or whatever, but seems she actually doesn't want to do that ("as some of u may know, 9 yrs ago yesterday was the day i was diagnosed with cancer at 14. during the past few weeks, ive been coping with the possibility of a recurrence, which has been v stressful and sad, bringing up a lot of tragic baggage. but ✨GOOD NEWS✨ today i found out that i am clear, no evil lumps trying to kill me. i write a lot about being sad (like, all the time) but i never want to give the impression that i am not grateful and eager for the chance to live out this wondrous, horrible, wildly beautiful life. thankyou to those who stick thru it with me and solidarity w/all my fellow chronic illness queens getting thru another day")
So, yeah, hers is still a kind of aesthetic that is very much a matter of taste and claiming it as a political act in itself is very much debatable BUT her stuff is not as one-dimensional as it'd sound from that interview. It's a lot more contradictory, and therefore more interesting, than it sounded from the article.
posted by bitteschoen at 12:30 AM on November 28, 2015 [7 favorites]
I think without meaning too, when people insult traits that are associated with a trope they find annoying or over represented, it comes across as insulting of people who happen to actually relate to that. Like what if some people actually feel like way for reasons other than wanting to act out a trope? Also sometimes having your sorrow witnessed IS part of the healing process. Not being asked to change but for others to share your pain.
That is the point of large funerals with more than just immediate families. People see each others grief and support each other. Some people are dealing with long term damage, pain and grief and might want to be able to let it hang, and to be met with more support than shaming and requests to go to a therapist because the social function of a therapist is to let the rest of humanity forget what it means to have a heart and see and be there for others in their pain.
posted by xarnop at 3:22 PM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
That is the point of large funerals with more than just immediate families. People see each others grief and support each other. Some people are dealing with long term damage, pain and grief and might want to be able to let it hang, and to be met with more support than shaming and requests to go to a therapist because the social function of a therapist is to let the rest of humanity forget what it means to have a heart and see and be there for others in their pain.
posted by xarnop at 3:22 PM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Essentially I think there is a deliberate movement to shun people in pain and only let them access therapists for social support until they can play the part of happy well adjusted and pleasing to others. I know I have to be fake around everyone and I play the part well but I don't feel I have any real friends because I know no one wants to see what I really endure. Lock that away to a therapists office where it belongs amirite? Just, then I have a whole part of myself I have to lock away and I can't have real intimacy because no one really knows how much I suffer.
I'd personally like to break that down, especially because I'm not even sure that a lot of us WANT to cut of people we love when they're hurting, but we're told to see them as diseased DEPRESSION and that is sorrow doesn't match insane DSM criteria than block then shove the person into as much therapy and meds as possible and if they resist cut them off socially!
There's a certain industry that's been feeding off the idea that human beings are incompetent to support each others trauma and long term pain and that intense mourning, long term grief, and complicated emotional injuries need to all be classified as medical disease that only they can possibly understand-- which also helps feed the idea that what causes these issues is "random biological misfiring" rather than say, rape, beatings, getting screamed at, stalked, knowing men are violent and you can't take them on safely, sexism, lack of economic opportunity, loss of family or loves ones, lack of stable healthy food, housing.... on and on and on. All the shit that plagues humanity that can reduce us to shambles not because there is something wrong with US but because THIS PLACE CAN BE HELL ON EARTH FOR TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Psychiatry too often feeds the societal desire to erase those people stating their truth because it's ugly, it's horrifying, it's unbearable. It hurts to witness. So we label THEM diseased instead of their surroundings. It's the people who do this who have a disease.
posted by xarnop at 4:00 PM on December 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I'd personally like to break that down, especially because I'm not even sure that a lot of us WANT to cut of people we love when they're hurting, but we're told to see them as diseased DEPRESSION and that is sorrow doesn't match insane DSM criteria than block then shove the person into as much therapy and meds as possible and if they resist cut them off socially!
There's a certain industry that's been feeding off the idea that human beings are incompetent to support each others trauma and long term pain and that intense mourning, long term grief, and complicated emotional injuries need to all be classified as medical disease that only they can possibly understand-- which also helps feed the idea that what causes these issues is "random biological misfiring" rather than say, rape, beatings, getting screamed at, stalked, knowing men are violent and you can't take them on safely, sexism, lack of economic opportunity, loss of family or loves ones, lack of stable healthy food, housing.... on and on and on. All the shit that plagues humanity that can reduce us to shambles not because there is something wrong with US but because THIS PLACE CAN BE HELL ON EARTH FOR TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Psychiatry too often feeds the societal desire to erase those people stating their truth because it's ugly, it's horrifying, it's unbearable. It hurts to witness. So we label THEM diseased instead of their surroundings. It's the people who do this who have a disease.
posted by xarnop at 4:00 PM on December 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
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