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The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire

#culture #sexuality | The disappearance of the sex scene in American cinema, the suppression of the body under the moral imperative of commodities in neoliberal capitalism, and Verhoeven as antagonizer. This essay is a contribution to a special issue that explores the potential resurgence of the erotic thriller genre in contemporary US media landscape: “The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema and Streaming”

5 months ago | View Shared by tei

Getting High Off Your Own Supply | Liz Ryerson on Patreon

#toread #culture

1 year ago | View Shared by tei

Everyone needs to grow up | Dazed

#internet #culture | Infantilising yourself can often seem like a plea for diminished responsibility. Most of us will have encountered someone who, when criticised for behaving badly, appeals to their own vulnerability as a way of letting themselves off the hook. No matter what they do or the harm they cause, it’s never fair to criticise them, because there’s always some reason – often framed through therapy jargon or the language of social justice – why it isn’t their fault. Childishness grants them a perpetual innocence; they are constitutionally incapable of being in the wrong. But we will never make the world better if we act like this. Thinking of yourself as a smol bean baby is a way of tapping out and expecting other people to fight on your behalf. It also makes you a more pliant consumer. Social media is awash with the idea that ‘it’s valid not to be productive’, as though productivity were the only manifestation of capitalism and streaming Disney+ all day is a form of resistance. It’s much rarer to encounter the idea that we have a responsibility about what we consume, or that satisfying our own desires whenever we want is not always a good thing: “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” has morphed into “there is no unethical consumption under capitalism”.

1 year ago | View Shared by tei

I Should Be Able to Mute America

#culture #america | America insists that you bear witness to it tripping on its dick and slamming its face into an uncountable row of scalding hot pies. You do more than bear witness, because American Twitter has the same kind of magnetic pull as a garbage disposal unit. A sick part of you wants to shove your hand in. You want to let the blades cut into your knuckles, if just to see if you can slow them down a little.

2 years ago | View Shared by tei

Our Moloch

#culture #religion | It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).

2 years ago | View Shared by tei

Opinion | A Different Way of Thinking About Cancel Culture - The New York Times

#internet #culture | That suggests a different way of thinking about the amorphous thing we call cancel culture, and a more useful one. Cancellations — defined here as actually losing your job or your livelihood — occur when an employee’s speech infraction generates public attention that threatens an employer’s profits, influence or reputation. This isn’t an issue of “wokeness,” as anyone who has been on the business end of a right-wing mob trying to get them or their employees fired — as I have, multiple times — knows. It’s driven by economics, and the key actors are social media giants and employers who really could change the decisions they make in ways that would lead to a better speech climate for us all.

3 years ago | View Shared by tei

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