I do have to impress on anyone who wasn’t around for it how batshit the reality boom of the 2000s could be. Especially on Fox.
Here are some 100% real 2000s reality shows:
Who’s Your Daddy? A woman has to guess which of eight men is her biological father. One of them really is, and if she guesses right she wins $100,000. If one of the seven fake dads convinces her to guess them, he wins $100,000.
Black. White. A white family learns about racism by living a month in blackface, while a black family spends a month in whiteface. The black family was a real family, but the white family was just some actors hired to put on blackface to prove racism exists
Welcome to the Neighborhood. Three conservative white families in a Austin subdivision decide which diverse family gets to move in. Unaired due to being literal housing discrimination
Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay. Two straight men try to pass themselves off as gay and whoever seems more gay gets $50,000. Unaired due to. Due to. Due to
Playing It Straight. A woman tries to find love among fourteen men, half of whom are straight and half of whom are gay, and she must eliminate two men she believes are gay each week. If she ended up picking a straight man in the end, they’d split a million dollars; if she picked a gay man, he’d win a million dollars
Boy Meets Boy. This was Playing It Straight but starring a gay man and he had to eliminate straight people
Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? He wasn’t a multimillionaire. He didn’t even have a million dollars in liquid assets. He had a battery conviction Fox claims they didn’t see. Because it was the 2000s, somehow this ended up with the woman he won being widely vilified and turned into a national punchline. How dare she complain about a massive corporation tricking her into marrying a lying abuser, good thing Matt Lauer’s there to take her down a peg
The Swan. A “ugly” woman is given plastic surgery and wins a prize if she’s the hottest at the end of the season. If she’s not hot enough by the show’s standards she’s eliminated and called ugly on national TV
The Biggest Loser. Overweight people engage in competitive crash weight loss that often led to awful health complications. Studies showed basically everyone on the show regained any weight they lost once it was over and they didn’t have abusive trainers demanding they take huge health risks to win a competitive weight loss competition. Like the others, this one was cancel-oh, it was a massive hit that ran for 18 seasons? Yikes!
Wife Swap and Trading Spouses. These were the same show and had a wife from one family go to another family that was different politically, racially, culturally, religiously etc. Most famous for the God Warrior
At the time people focused on the likes of Fear Factor but looking back it’s wild how many of the worst shows toyed with politics. So many of these shows have a premise that’s like “what if we exposed these conservatives to these people they hate?” or hyping themselves up as Important Experiments. Then they’d freak out when they got the kind of viral bigoted freakout they were trying to construct the whole time.
There were also a bunch of horrible reality shows, thankfully this time mostly unpopular, in the 2010s that based themselves around economic themes as a response to the market crash, but that’s a story for another time
i have become radicalized as a pawpaw agent, pollinate a flower or two on your local tree!
More isolated, further north = less likely to be self-pollinated. You need different genetics around and enough awake pollinators to make sure you get fall fruit, so lend a helping hand
thinking about how the romans regarded extremely muscular men as weak and effeminate because for whatever reason (demands of labor, eroticism of the flesh) they couldn’t neglect their bodies enough to study learned tomes in cultivated leisure. We should bring that back
I’m joking ofc, but it deeply fascinates me that fascists like to gesture to marble busts of roman senators as the alpha male ideal because those romans would point at their gym bodies and call them a cinaedus. Same story for medievalist fash and their valorization of noble warrior knights, who were mostly doughy weirdos who lived to party and funded partying with the odd highway robbery or kidnapping
The American bourgeois masculine ideal revolves around self-investment in a way that would not make sense in most historical cultures or places. Indifferent to nature or beauty, hostile to both when they exceed his control. The ideal is a man who makes a million dollars a year and spends it all on a body he regards as weak, a house he regards as too small, a collection of utility-toys he never uses (guns, cars, etc). He has no emotional attachments to anything, and no one depends on him. He might fuck out a few kids but their job is to surpass and kill him. Bleak, dismal life. It’s little wonder that the people whose ideological task is to defend this absurd ideal from its imagined enemies have to resort to bricolage from alien masculinities, barely understood and even less sincerely appreciated
Actually, I love coming into contact with cis people who have said trans people have taught them how to love who they are, and what their gender means to them. It’s so heartwarming.
I love talking to cis men who say that trans men have taught them what being a man truly entails, that manhood isn’t a predestined book written by the gods. That has taught me how to love being a man and, honestly, just seeing positive manhood being shared and celebrated has brought me closer to cis men I thought wouldn’t ever accept me. It’s taught me the opposite is often true.
As someone who is currently figuring out where they are between cis, nonbinary and trans I just want to thank all my beautiful trans siblings who make me feel so at ease on where I will end up. You are so beautiful and I love you all so much
“When we see violent characters who kill for primarily political reasons, they are often anti-heroes at best, outright villains at worst. The idea of the full circle revolution - of the secret dictator hiding in the throat of every rebel leader, waiting to leap out and betray the non-ideological hero - is utterly pervasive. It appears in videogames, where good old-fashioned all-American heroes like Jim Raynor of Starcraft or Booker DeWitt of Bioshock Infinite are betrayed by villainous revolutionaries Arcturus Mengsk and Daisy Fitzroy (and after all they’ve done for them!). It is common in films, from supervillains like Magneto and Killmonger, liberationists written as would-be conquerors, to the rebels of The Hunger Games, who vote to continue the games as soon as they’re in power, except with the children of the dethroned elite rather than the children of the poor. The same reversal is mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire, where rebel slaves, once liberated, enslave their former masters; in the TV version, an evil fundamentalist visits the kind of cruelty on the King’s Landing nobility that they visited on others. In all these examples we see an echo of the primal fear of every oppressive class, the nightmare at the heart of modern white supremacy: what if someone did to us what we’ve done to them? Liberation is re-imagined as the world turned not so much upside-down but mirrored.”
So… how do we convince these big polluters to stop letting us buy all this plastic and gasoline from them?
Sincerely, every time you are about to reblog a post about the relatively small number of companies that are making the most damaging impact on our habitat remember that they’re not doing it just for shits and giggles. They’re doing it for profit and as long as we make doing harm profitable someone will do harm.
‘To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable parasite and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.“
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Daycare teacher: We never use time-outs. But we have a designated “me-space” where the kids themselves can choose to go if they feel the need for some quiet time alone.
My kid, a few weeks later: That’s the “me-space” (points). That’s where the teachers put [name] when he is being too loud.
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