Matt Christman from Chapo Trap House still wears diapers and makes his butler change them and wipe him down afterwards.— 𝙂𝙚𝙣𝙞𝙚✨ (@almightygenie) September 26, 2020
Not a butler, but Uber Wipes (or Wipr).
The slovenly chic among affluent gentrifiers stems from their status insecurity. Their main concern is preserving or rising in status, and that means no manual labor or maintenance of personal and domestic spaces, including their own body. They're not going to stoop that low.
However, they don't have enough money to hire a live-in staff to perform that lowly service labor. They've already blown their one-percenter wealth on housing in a 1% zip code -- living elsewhere would be just as fatal of a blow to their status-striving as doing their own laundry every week.
So that leaves little for outsourcing the domestic labor. Maybe they can hire some foreign scabs for this or that task, like delivering their overpriced meals, or chauffeuring them around without having to pay unionized rates.
Largely, though, the bugmen will just forgo that stuff altogether. Their slovenliness is a signal of their haughtiness combined with entry-level nouveau-riche wealth.
All the rest is just rationalization and branding. So punk, so indie, so against-the-grain. As usual, the punk realm of the contempo subculture-verse is the most compatible with neoliberal / libertarian goals. Rebel against society's rules, like paying unionized labor rates, doing your own laundry, preparing your own meals, taking others' concerns into account when grooming and dressing yourself, etc.
Collectivism = conformism. Or as Matt's even punkier co-host Amber repeatedly said on their neo-Daily Show, "community is reactionary".
Do you see it as confirming the 50-year violence cycle of Peter Turchin (radical chic was 50 years ago; bohemian chic was 100 years ago)?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure the fashion itself is cycling every 50 years, as much as their societal visibility is cycling due to their collective outbursts, which cycle every 50 years.
ReplyDeleteThis overall aesthetic and lifestyle was very much in vogue during my campus activist stint in the early 2000s, a period that was mostly free of collective violence etc., compared to 1970 or 2020. But because of that lack of nationwide chaos caused and encouraged and rationalized by them, they didn't break through into pop culture awareness.
In fact, a lot of those people are the same ones wreaking havoc today. Angela Nagle pointed out how old the antifa freaks are, judging from Andy Ngo's twitter recap of their mugshots and booking info. So many in their 30s and early 40s -- those who were black bloc babies back in 2003, now accelerating (with assistance from the CIA) into racial polarization rather than anti-war or anti-neolib globalization.
Same individuals, same look, but now "chic" because they've gotten the national media's attention by burning down urban neighborhoods. (The media wouldn't care if they were burning down rural trailer parks.)
How much of white-guy interest in Free Palestine is to meet sultry MENA hotties, akin to male feminist allies getting into abortion rights so they can meet girls who fuck before marriage?
ReplyDeleteI'm just remembering the one item in my college wardrobe that was rad-chic, although I didn't do that look or lifestyle overall. It was a black hoodie with a DIY patch on the arm that said "No to the Occupation!" in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.
I was doing it just to be rad-chic, but noticed that it always got me some pleasantly-surprised whispering and smiling chatter from the Middle Eastern babes. I then made it a staple for teach-ins, etc., that were Mid-East themed.
"Who's that daredevil...? And how does a faranji know how to write in Arabic? I wonder if he's not-racist enough to consider a swarthy girl like me attractive???"
As Steve Sailer detailed long ago, much of non-white female rage against racism is an ideologically dressed-up cry of anxiety over whether or not hot white guys find them attractive, fuckable, marriage-able, etc.
One reason why African women go so hard on the anti-racism theme, compared to MENA baddies. The latter know that they'll never be accepted as fully mainstream white people, but that there's a large-enough minority (or majority?) of hot white guys who not only find them attractive, but even more so than they do white girls (whether objectively, or due to the subjective exotic factor).
"Men" debating whether Aimee Terese is cute only happens when gays make up 75% of online left males. Forget which user poll that was from. The boring guy leading the charge on Twitter is wearing a gay-whoosh hair-do in google images, not surprisingly.
ReplyDeleteYes, the main reason is political: they are opposed to her non-leftoid politics and are resorting to personal attacks to silence a political rival. I'm saying, why do they so consistently choose her looks as the target of the personal attack?
First, infantilized gay misogyny seeking an outlet ("ewww, girls are yucky," stuck in 5 year-old boy mode).
Second, they're gay, they don't know what a cute girl looks like. When they try to conjure one up, they look like revolting drag queens -- tall, skinny, fake tits, clown make-up, sassy attitude.
How is it that their cluelessness is rarely called out? Because their audience is gay. They don't know any more than the meme-makers what a hot girl looks like. It's the blind leading the blind.
Fortunately Aimee's appealed to enough guys who are socially or culturally conservative, that she can't get gaslit about her looks. Online right males are only 49% gay, which still leaves a majority who "would" when they saw her iconic avi.
MENA baddies -- yet another demographic that WASP-y fags are driving away from the cultural left.
A sad reminder of how warped your mind will become if you hang out in such weird groups. Majority gay? That's so far away from real life. Break out of the bubble, before your brain turns itself inside out.