Light spoilers ahead for Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma!

There’s one summer that I hope to never forget. Freshly out of college, with no prospects in sight, I was settled at my parents’ house during an intense heatwave, sleeping on a mattress I had dragged into the living room because I was slowly roasting under the rooftop of my childhood bedroom. During these sleepless nights, I started watching all the slashers I could possibly find. The Fear Street trilogy, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, I even binge watched the whole Scream franchise for the first time.

I couldn’t get enough. I knew I loved horror, but for some reason slashers were hitting a different spot: the blend of thrill and horror, of death and sex, the constant oscillation between extremes, the soothingly predictable survival of the final girl.

So naturally, when I heard of Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma, I knew it was made for me, specifically. I had an illegal amount of fun watching it last week, mostly because it scratched an itch and answered questions I often ask myself when it comes to the pleasure and thrill I get out of watching slashers: Why do I enjoy watching girls getting slashed? This is obviously so misogynistic, so why do I like it? Am I… the worst feminist in the world?

When I went on Reddit to try and find out why other women love slashers too, a response I found time and time again was that slashers are actually feminist because of the final girl: the last woman standing, who triumphs over the killer.

Except that slashers are arguably anti-feminist, and I don’t think the final girl’s resilience makes up for the fact that I personally never felt an ounce of political fulfilment watching a woman’s breasts bounce as she ran for her life.

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I expect you to make some tea, grab a snack, and snuggle in your favourite chair to read this long-form analysis of Possession, Secretary and The Piano Teacher as they appear in girls’ meme culture

What is girlhood if not the unbearable weight of expectations?

Growing up, to me, was a matter of swallowing a tacit playbook of all the things I shouldn’t do and shouldn’t be. Before I even knew who I was, I realised I couldn’t get grumpy without someone cheekily asking if it was that time of the month. I knew being a woman would be a game dictated by how much I was able to keep inside.

I’ve always coped with the highs and lows of womanhood through an almost never-ending exchange of memes with my best friend — all with various levels of absurdity. Often, we made our own fun, sharing images and clips with a concerning mismatch between the situation depicted (say, a man screaming and putting his kitchen on fire) and a caption along the lines of “me fr.”

I’m sure this is far from a unique experience. Girls’ culture has a wide range of memes for every delicious flavour of modern life — like the feminist satirist website Reductress which often makes the rounds on social media with headlines like “Brave! This Woman Embraces Her Masculine Side by Not Helping Clean Up After Dinner.”

And yet it remains an under-studied field1, more likely to be criticised than properly studied. When “girl dinner” and other ‘girl’ memes took the internet by storm, more time went into labelling them as “infantilising” than into looking at why and how they resonated. This is true of girl culture more broadly — we’re quick to dismiss it, quick to get enraged by it, but slow to actually engage with it.

On Pinterest, I stumbled upon a darker genre: memes about psychosexual movies that were all about relating to the protagonist no matter how twisted or controversial. I was fascinated! I started digging, collecting them like playing cards. I noticed that three movies kept recurring: Possession, Secretary and The Piano Teacher.

Secretary follows Lee, a young woman who, right after getting out of a mental hospital, takes a job as a secretary where she gets into a BDSM relationship with her boss. Possession relates the story of Anna, who starts acting in increasingly more disturbing ways after asking for a divorce.The Piano Teacher is about Erika, a forty-year-old piano teacher who is stuck with her mother in a cycle of constant abuse, and escapes at night into extreme sexual fantasies.

Anna, Lee, and Erika have all internalised rigid expectations of womanhood, and struggle to conform. Smothered by expectations, they each find a way to release the pressure — and none one of these films are interested in making their coping mechanisms palatable to the viewer.

All three protagonists present as models of modest femininity, feigning conformity on the outside, while their interiority reveals something much more deviant.

For that reason, they all fit Louise Kaplan’s theory in her seminal work Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, where she argues that female perversion is a matter of identity, not sexuality.2 According to her, female perversions are a reaction against the oppressive myth of “normal femininity” — a subversion of feminine ideals of submissiveness and purity.

In that context, it makes sense to me that women and girls would find these characters so resonant. Anna, Lee and Erika annihilate the idea of female normalcy. They’re “female perverts,” a term often used in the memes and an echo to Kaplan’s work. And yet, when I presented this body of work on Instagram, a reaction I got enough times to report it back here was that girls and women who enjoy these movies are “romanticising abuse,” an accusation thrown time and time again at the most controversial aspects of girl culture.

Yet, that doesn’t make it any less a part of it. There is a whole subculture of ‘dark memes’ in girls culture. The Female Pervert memes, for example, can be understood as adjacent to “femcel memes,” as defined by Hazel June in this article: a defining feature is their tendency to depict over-the-top emotions and reactions that mismatch the weight of the situation depicted.

In this essay, I aim to provide an analysis of ‘The Female Pervert Canon” — which I define as movies that depict a repressed woman’s sexual awakening in very unconventional ways. They’re movies that are considered disturbing, but yet, have found resonance online in girls’ meme culture

What makes each of them feel cathartic and relatable to women and girls?

Let’s look at Possession, Secretary and The Piano Teacher.

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Processing my complicated feelings about my hometown through Vampire Diaries, the only way I know how

Spoilers ahead for Vampire Diaries Season 4!

I remember that one long, never-ending summer in what I feared was the beginning and the end of my world. I had no plans in sight and everyone I knew had left town. Meanwhile, I was left to contemplate how slow time passed when you were left staring at a clock.

My surroundings felt less like a place than a sequence of memories. My town felt so predictable, its edges so delineable, its people so encounterable that I preferred to imagine I was stuck in some guy’s fucked up miniature of a small town, rather than admit this was my reality. Nothing new was allowed to flourish; I was more haunting this place than living in it.

That one summer, I started wondering: did anyone truly leave that town? After all, I was only surrounded by those who stayed. High school sweethearts who decided to stay put in the only town they’ve ever known. Or worse, those who left, only to come back later and settle.

Oh god, how I couldn’t wait to leave my hometown and never come back.

Locked in my bedroom, I used shows as an escape: Buffy, Pretty Little Liars, Riverdale, Vampire Diaries. Except that it wasn’t much of an escape: the defining feature of those teenage shows is that the characters are completely stuck in their hometown. No matter what they do, no matter where they go, all roads lead back to the place they dreamt of escaping. Even when they are freed from the shackles of high school graduation, they will always have a reason to come back. Some sort of unfinished business worth going back for. Which, really, is just another term for a curse.

To me, the most fascinating hometown curse was the one inVampire Diaries. Stuck in perpetual autumn, Mystic Falls is a very small town with a ginormous gravitational pull: even vampires with the world as their oyster don’t seem very keen on staying away from it.

When the Salvatore brothers come back to Mystic Falls after a long departure, it is under the guise of ‘unfinished business’ — something about freeing a lover sealed in a tomb for the past hundred years, or whatever excuse they had to avoid admitting that they simply wanted to go back home.

Their house is a place I understand coming back for: books stacked from floor to ceiling, moody lamps from a different time, thick dark oak woods, silky velvets and a cellar packed with wines bottled before I was even born. While the house is a dark academia wet dream, it is also, before anything else, a remnant of the past, filled with the brothers’ tragic history, located in the town that they tried to run away from.

The Salvatores are immortal and hot, two things that should suffice to keep them far far far away from their hometown. So why the hell do they keep coming back?

In an interview with the Daily Beast, Anne Rice, the author of Interview With the Vampire, said that she loved the vampire show True Blood but hated Twilight because « the idea of vampires going to high school forever seems like hell to me. » Just like me, Anne Rice is appalled by the figure of the vampire, a being who has the possibility to taste everything life has to offer, yet still fixates on its past.

After all, the vampire wasn’t always a sensual creature of hedonism. Vampires used to be gross and confined to their crumbling castles, closer to a living corpse than an immortal being, skin more akin to putrefying flesh than pale and sparkly.

But under Anne Rice’s gaze and her genre-defining Vampire Chronicles, the vampire became almost.. aspirational1. Liberated from its mortal condition, the vampire was an aristocrat who, having accumulated wealth over centuries, was able to lean into all of life’s greatest pleasures. Of course, Anne Rice was fully aware that being a vampire was not a walk in the park; it also had a price. Her stories interrogated the burden of eternal life, the existential condition of the vampire, the unshakeable guilt of being turned into a predator2.

But while Anne Rice was interested in the existential cage of the vampire, she would never have dared to make it material. Her vampires might be existentially cursed, condemned to question their place in the world over and over again, but at least they got to do so while listening to jazz music in New Orleans or devouring croissants in Paris. In other words, they were not tethered to a sense of place.

Meanwhile, Stefan graduated from Mystic Falls’ high school more times than anyone can count.

There is, after all, a dimension of the vampire’s curse that Anne Rice didn’t want to consider because it made her feel too claustrophobic: its obsessive relationship with the past. The modern teenage drama vampire rectifies that by taking a long hard look at the chokehold the past has on its eternal beings.

In Vampire Diaries, when Elena, the woman both brothers are in love with, inevitably turns into a vampire, only one person makes her want to cling to her old self: her little brother. So, naturally, when he dies, she completely shuts off that part of herself. And in doing so, she burns down her childhood home, the one that contains all the painful memories along with the happy ones. Elena isn’t interested in the past anymore, because this is where her humanity lies along with her grief.

It’s an act of destruction the Salvatore brothers couldn’t fathom; when things go wrong, they know they will always need a place to call home.

The Salvatore brothers are always coming back to Mystic Falls, always repeating their past: going back to high school, living together in the same old house, falling back in love with the same exact woman over and over again, always fighting each other over her.

But for all their turmoil, I don’t think they would have it any other way.

Yes, being a vampire promises an eternal life and an open world, with all its possibilities. Yet, the past is all they crave. In some sense, the modern vampire is more akin to a ghost3.

The Salvatore brothers taught me an existential problem with being alive: that for better or worse, not even all the time in the world could guarantee a more attractive place than the familiar. Maybe I, we, vampires, fool ourselves into thinking that there is such a thing as moving on, as a linear, continuous approach to the fabric of time — ignoring the irresistible pull of what we left behind. The past doesn’t cease to exist as long as there is a sense of place to go with it.

And maybe, if you gave me an eternity to live through, I too would be haunting my old high school.

Thanks for reading! xx

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Some updates: I’m currently working on my next video essay which will hopefully come out between October and November, it’s a big one. In the meantime, I started a series on The Female Pervert Canon on Instagram!

I have more stuff coming here soon too, stay tuned<3

And in case you missed it, I’ll be in London on September 21st hosting an event with four brilliant writers where they will confess a time they identified with the villain. Would love to see you there if you happen to be around!

Villains! will be a very special Coy Collective x Crying Spells night on September 21st where four brilliant writers will take the stage and confess a time they identified with the villain.

You can get your tickets here<3

When consuming media of all kind, we’re often implicitly encouraged to identify with the hero or the victim. But rarely are we encouraged to identify with the villain on our screen or in our pages.

So, we asked four writers to respond to the prompt “share a time you identified with the villain.” They wrote something specifically for this occasion, so, you’re not going to want to miss this!

Without further ado, here’s the lineup:

is a writer whose work has appeared in Vittles, Teen Vogue, Cake Zine, Eaten, Design Observer and more. Her reporting has won a James Beard Media Award and her fiction was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize Discoveries 2026. She writes regularly on Substack and hosts the podcast Further Reading.

Sihaam Naik is a writer, video essayist and cultural commentator based in London. As a certified web weaver, her passion lies in accessibility in the arts, cyberfeminism and linking obscure themes to larger concepts. You can find her work in Vogue, Dazed, Polyester and Nowness. She writes the substack Web Weaving, and makes video essays on art, books, film and TV.

Elle Jones is a writer from London. She writes the Substack Notes in My Handbag. She also does bits for magazines, and writes books.

Ellie Redpath is a fiction writer based in South East London. She has work featured in In Jest, The Cult Collective, Vernacular Journal and more. She is particularly interested in the viscerally uncomfortable.

All four of them are amazing writers, friends and Substack babes — we’re so excited to have them for this event!!

If you’re in London we would love to see you there, this is first and foremost an opportunity for us writers and readers of the platform to meet in real life and share a drink while listening to some exquisite writing from our peers.

You can get your tickets here<3

Hope to see you there!!

Eve & Mel<3

I made a new video essay about ‘collective horror,’ and our contradictory need for proximity and individuality:

A few months ago, a friend came over to help me build a piece of furniture. After we relaxed around some wine and dumplings, she made a confession: she hadn’t watched Sinners yet. My wife and I sat her down and made her watch it with us. I recommend doing the same with anyone who hasn't yet received the gospel.

On this second watch, we noticed something new: the similarity with Pluribus, which we had watched the week before. Not the plot, not the setting (which couldn’t be more different) but the central idea: being forced to lose your individuality to accommodate a merge with a group.

So this became my obsession for the following months. Had this type of horror always been a thing? Or was it a response to these past few years of crushing loneliness?

Horror is my comfort. I’m someone who is anxious beyond repair, but a good horror movie never fails to catalyse my anxieties. It’s often said that horror holds a mirror to our cultural fears, and it does, but I’m also interested in how it holds a mirror to our desires, the ones too big for us to even begin confronting.

Because, while “collective horror” is usually framed as terrifying, some media manages to paint it as tempting: Neon Genesis, Sinners, The Faculty, Pluribus. Why is that? What is so alluring about losing your sense of self? But also, what makes it so frightening?

This is the idea I explore in this video essay: a recurring horror narrative about surrendering your individuality to integrate a larger community.

It’s an extreme depiction of assimilation, conformity, and group-thinking, but it’s often through the edges that we get to understand ourselves a little bit better.

Watch the video!

Here are some additional words on the process and texts that helped bring this video to life:

A goal with this video was to veer more art and philosophy than politics. I basically wanted to challenge myself and see if I can put a coherent piece without saying the word “capitalism” (very hard).

This is a film-heavy piece. The idea was to analyse protagonists and villains alike to try and understand why we struggle so much to connect with others, to accept being part of a community, to abandon ourselves to others.

One of my hunches is that pain is such an integral part of what we think makes us who we are that even though we think we want to get rid of it, we're too scared to imagine others helping us carry it. But also because pain, for all its hardships, is the fuel behind most of our culture and most of our art.

The vibe I was going for was “ambiguous, lowkey on the villain’s side.” I try to interrogate whether losing our individuality is really that bad, and whether the collective villain is really that terrifying. After all, they have good intentions, don’t they?

It took some time to catalogue and create a sort of taxonomy of the collective villain: its origins, its motives, etc. IMDb was my friend. I spent a long time going through the horror catalogue looking for films that seemed to be about this topic, watching (or re-watching) them, then trying to find patterns: what made them similar, what made them different.

To build the central argument, I read or re-read a few texts. I went deep into the idea of replacement at some point — which ended up not making the cut because it diluted my main argument too much — but I read Replace Me by Amber Husain, a book that explores our ancestral fear of replacement and our need to feel unique and irreplaceable.

I also read The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher while researching this piece, and it ended up shaping one of the sections. What I love about that framework is how broadly it can be applied, how horror can help us envision different worlds, different futures. The weird and the eerie give us an "outside-in" perspective: the ability to look at ourselves from the outside.

I also used a chapter from one of my favourite books, Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion, specifically her chapter on pain, which looks at how individual experiences of pain shape our collective ones, and how pain can be deeply isolating.

This is different from what I usually do: more of an exploration and a reflection on why the idea of surrendering one's individual identity to a group can be so terrifying.

I talk about pain, loneliness, community, art, suffering. It probably veers closer to draft philosophical thoughts than some of my previous work, but I had a blast putting this one together, and I hope you'll have a blast watching it.

If you do, please let me know. It means the world to me.

Light spoilers ahead for Mad Men, Past Lives and Eternity

I’m not a bad person, but I have thought of doing bad things.

Sometimes, I regret not using the innocence granted to early mistakes more often. I regret not acting on morally questionable impulses, those I’d reflect on with the wisdom of hindsight, punctuated by “I was so young, I didn’t know better,” and a cheeky smile that’d betray how much I don’t really mean it.

One of them is standing someone up. A man, to be exact. Back when I was dating men, I was too much of a goody-two-shoes, always showing up on time, always texting back in a timely manner. I wish I had used my power more. I wish I knew then I even had any at all.

In my wildest fantasies, I schedule a date with a man after a few messages exchanged on a dating app, then he asks me out and I say “yes, would love to :)” I let him pick the place, I look up the vibe on Google Maps and select my outfit accordingly. Then, the day of, I have a change of heart. I actually don’t feel like going anymore.

For a split second I think about texting him about it, then decide against it. I go to bed that night fantasizing about this man, looking around the restaurant, sitting at a table dressed for two, waving the waiter off with a polite smile when he comes to ask if he’s ready to order yet, checking his phone frantically and turning around every time he hears the door open.

I fantasize about a man, waiting.

Some might call it cruelty, I call it eroticism, although the line between the two can sometimes easily blur.

In her essay Ladies in Waiting, Becca Rothfeld discusses the gendered expectations of waiting. It’s Penelope waiting for Odysseus, the widow who never remarried, the cheated wife who patiently waits for her husband to come home every night, the husband who asks the mistress utter devotion with no end in sight.

In Mad Men, it’s no secret that Don Draper is a little sicko. But by far one of his sickest power plays happens in season six, when he convinces his mistress to wait for him in a hotel room, refusing to let her know when he’ll be back, and forbidding her any distraction. Don is aroused at the idea of a woman with nothing else to do than desperately await his return. A reversal of the situation would do nothing but turn him off, Don Draper with his carefully constructed manhood couldn’t fathom surrendering his time.

Waiting is a traditionally feminine occupation, an act of devotion with a predictable gender.1

For that reason, a man waiting is transgressive, and therefore erotic. It wrecks expectations. So, it’s no surprise that some of the most compelling romantic media narratives feature exactly this uncommon trope.

In Eternity, an elderly couple die a week apart after sixty-five years spent together. Larry, the husband, gets to the after-life first and has a week to pick an eternity. He could also wait for his wife, Joan, delay his access to heaven and wait in an intermediary space. He chooses an eternal beach vacation instead, trusting she will just follow him there.

But when his wife arrives, Larry is confronted with an unexpected competitor: her first husband, Luke, who died young in the war and waited for her since then. Sixty-seven years of waiting, not knowing when she'd show up. Longer than she spent on earth married to Larry.

While waiting for Joan all this time is hot, what’s not so hot is that Luke seems to believe his waiting makes him more worthy of her desire. Waiting means he deserves Joan to choose him, a proof of his devotion, and his devotion an act to be rewarded. This is an entitled waiting.

In order for waiting to be truly burning hot, real erotic and all, it needs to be rid of expectations. Like a never-ending unrequited crush, or a husband letting his wife question their marriage in peace.

In Past Lives, Arthur loves his wife so much that he questions whether he was the right choice for her. Nora is Korean, he’s American, there is a whole part of her identity that he’ll never fully understand. He gets sad at the thought of not being able to understand her when she mumbles in her sleep. He tells her: “you dream in a language I can’t understand.”

When her Korean childhood lover, Hae Sung, re-enters the picture, he wonders if he’d be a better fit. He asks her if she’s attracted to him, betraying his budding jealousy by asking a question he already knows the answer to.

At a speakeasy, the three of them sit in palpable awkwardness. Nora tries to bridge the language gap between the two men before switching to Korean, locking herself and Hae Sung in a world Arthur doesn’t have access to. The conversation is full of “what ifs,” a necessary closure for the both of them.

The whole conversation, Arthur sits silently beside them. He doesn’t interject or get upset, he simply sits there, letting his wife have the conversation he knows she needed. He doesn’t know the outcome, if Nora will have a change of heart and decide to run away with the man she keeps feeling pulled towards. But he is willing to take that bet, to sit in the discomfort of the wait, with no control or entitlement over the outcome.

It had been a while since I saw a heterosexual man on my screen willing to devote himself so fully to the woman he loves, to risk the feminization of waiting.

The first time I witnessed an act of utter male devotion was through the song “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved” by The Script. A man whose girlfriend has left him settles in the corner of a Los Angeles street, where they met for the first time, hoping it will be the first place she will go if she ever changes her mind.

He renders himself homeless in the hope she will find him, abandons himself to time, waiting for her indefinitely. The song is full of “maybes,” it reeks of uncertainty. He doesn’t know if she’ll ever come back, but if she does he doesn’t want to miss her. When the policeman tells him he can’t stay here, he responds:

“There’s someone I’m waiting for

If it’s a day, a month, a year”

Time bends to fit his boundless act of love, rendered meaningless.

How thrilling to watch a man wait, threaten his position as assertive and in control, surrender to uncertainty and devotion.

Thanks for reading, I’m currently working on my next video essay which should come out in 2-3 weeks!

If you’ve been a Crying Spells reader for a while, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

I have new projects coming to you this year, your support means everything<3

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In this essay I’ll discuss Pretty Little Liars, American Beauty, Miller’s Girl and The Crush with (what I consider) minor spoilers — but I’ll also discuss the book Half His Age in more details, so feel free to skip the last section if you don’t want to get spoiled!

The Normalisation Of Forbidden Desires

At first, Ezra does what every grown man is supposed to do.

It’s his first day at the high school he will be teaching English at. As he finishes spelling out his name on the blackboard, he sees, sat at the back of the classroom, the girl he was making out with at a bar just the day before. Clearly, she was not the college student she pretended to be. After class, he lets her know that it was a mistake and that they will not be seeing each other again. But Aria is persistent. She says “I know it’s not just me, you feel like this is right for us too,” grabbing his hand. But Ezra is adamant that it isn’t right.

His stance doesn’t even last the runtime of the show’s pilot.

By the end of the first episode, Ezra backtracked on his moral stance. He kisses Aria at her friend Allison’s funeral. From then on, a forbidden romance unravels: will-they-won’t-they, star-crossed lovers, sneaking kisses in dark corners, trying desperately to resist their fated connection for the sake of “what is right.” As the show unravels and Aria gets older, it will try — and succeed — at turning grooming into a misunderstood love story, and a young girl into a mature-beyond-her-years teenager.

If you’re not familiar, Pretty Little Liars was a seven-seasons-long soap opera that had most teenage girls, including and especially myself, in a chokehold. Over its seven-year run, the show followed a group of four teenagers as they grappled with the mysterious death of their friend-bully Allison, and the consequent birth of an anonymous yet omniscient villain loosely related to a never-ending string of strange events and crimes that plague the town they live in.

Aria’s adultification was commonplace in the show itself and in the wider landscape of teenage TV drama. Similarly to shows like Gossip Girl, Buffy, and Vampire Diaries, PLL made sure you never forgot that, under these circumstances, teenagers were not regular teenagers. Having to rise above their condition to do crime, survive, and outsmart adults, their precocious maturity was used to justify their instant connection to older men.

Whether it was a town plagued by supernatural events or the world of the very-rich and very-unsupervised, the adultified circumstances these teenagers were grappling with helped justify the unjustifiable. ‘Mature-beyond-her-years’ made the pill of age gap relationships easier to swallow.

For the longest time, media had two options when showing an inappropriate age gap relationship between an older man and a younger woman: normalisation or ‘forbidden desire’ fantasy, oftentimes riding the line between the two.

In the movie American Beauty, a depressed middle-aged executive falls in love with his teenage daughter’s friend, Angela. The movie carries classic themes of suburban boredom and midlife crisis, making it very clear that Lester’s infatuation with Angela is a desperate attempt to turn his life upside down and feel something again, reaching desperately for youth and beauty to soothe himself. Angela embodies both. She is pretty, and she is seventeen.

Seventeen and eighteen are the ages these narratives love to play with. Technically on the verge — or at the beginning — of legal adulthood, but still with one foot planted in childhood. Technicalities aside, a 17 or 18 year old girl is a child, but this is often a realisation she will only have in retrospect, looking back at her younger self, realising she was making decisions cosplaying as an adult, not yet granted the wisdom and hindsight that can only come with age. For the older male protagonist, this is the perfect fantasy: toying with a kid, shielded by the fact that she is on the brink of adulthood, while harbouring the arousing realisation that she is not quite there yet.

American Beauty is a phantasmagorical piece: the fantasy of an older man over a manic-pixie-dream-like young girl, frequently appearing covered in rose petals in his wildest dreams. The movie perfectly magnifies the defining condition of most age-gap fantasies: the need for the young girl to be utterly objectified, a shell of herself in the protagonist’s eyes, a blank canvas he can paint his fantasies on. In order for it to work, the young girl needs to be devoid of personality, all the traits that make her a teenager annihilated, to make room for the ones that frame her as mature and different from her peers, leaving only the trail of a personality thin, mature and intellectual enough for the male character to fantasise about her without needing to confront the fact that she’s just a kid. Unless it serves him.

Her subjectivity is not completely removed from her, no no no — it is selectively toggled on and off depending on how it serves the man’s story. She is a kid when he needs to put boundaries, and an adult when he wants her in his bed.

After fantasising about Angela the whole movie, Lester finally gets a chance to act on his fantasy. But as he starts undressing her, Angela whispers “this is my first time” — a visible air of distress and nervousness on her face, so far from the ferocious confidence she had been exhibiting in earlier scenes. Suddenly, Angela loses her appeal to Lester, who sees her for what she really is: a vulnerable teenager with no experience.

Lester knew she was a teenager all along, but having proof of a teenage sensibility that operates outside the realm of his carefully constructed fantasy is enough to make him change his mind. This is supposed to hand him his redemption — him “doing the right thing” — without really questioning why consciousness didn’t strike him earlier.

Her interiority belongs to him, or more specifically, to the writers, who get to grant a teenager her subjectivity — or specks of it — depending on whether she is supposed to appear mature-beyond-her-years to de-responsibilize the male protagonist, or like a kid, when he needs to be redeemed.

Because inappropriate age gap media has too often played with the girl’s subjectivity and agency in ways that serve to de-responsibilize the older man, I’m interested in analysing media that subverts this condition.

Which is why I loved Half His Age and what Jeanette McCurdy did with Waldo, her seventeen-year-old protagonist who gets infatuated with her forty-year-old English teacher — a classic retelling of the teacher-student forbidden desire trope. I think what Jeanette did was brilliant and subversive, a welcome narrative twist. But before I get there, we need to talk about two previous attempts at subverting the young girl’s subjectivity in age-gap media: Miller’s Girl and The Crush.

The Girls Are Reckless

Miller’s Girl’s opening shot shows Cairo, a young girl walking to school through the dark woods near her house, as she narrates: “Lonely girl longs to be loved. Books make longing seem romantic but it’s awful. It’s greedy. And I wear longing like a fucking veil.”

Beautiful opening. I was hooked. I thought Miller’s Girl was a promising movie. I loved the idea of an age-gap relationship told mostly from the POV of the girl.

The movie recounts the story of a young prodigy whose teacher gets “infatuated” by her intelligence, giving her special attention after class, extra assignments, clearly flirting with her, to the point where he ends up kissing her. But when Cairo writes a short story inspired by this kiss — recounting what she imagines could happen after — Mr. Miller panics, asks her to erase the story, threatens to fail her, and suddenly talks to her like she’s a reckless child who needs to be put back in her place. Feeling belittled, Cairo decides to report his behaviour to get him fired, not because she felt abused, but in an attempt to reverse the power imbalance.

Miller’s Girl was clearly inspired by The Crush.

In The Crush, Nick is a new hot shot in town who moves in next to Adrian, a 14-year-old girl. Adrian is framed as precocious. She is smart beyond her years, talks like a 30-year-old, writes better than him, and is a piano prodigy. But more importantly, she pursues Nick persistently. The film even attempts to frame her spying on him in the shower as a predatory act (even though it makes no sense, because she is literally 14 years old.)

Act I is dedicated to framing Adrian as “not so innocent,” to justify why Nick was enabling her behaviour. This young girl is made to behave like an adult so that his interest can be redeemed — he even asks her one night, when she confidently grabs his cigar, “are you sure you’re only 14?” - “almost 15!” she responds smiling.

Act II builds a thriller on this ‘mature-beyond-her-years’ foundation. After Nick suddenly rejects Adrian following a kiss, all hell breaks loose. Adrian’s intelligence becomes the fuel of her villainy, while Nick is recast as a helpless man who did his best to do the right thing.

In both Miller’s Girl and The Crush, older men have a strike of consciousness when they realise that their actions and fantasies are yielding real-life consequences — without ever admitting that they brought it on themselves. They both hope to do what men have been doing forever: flirting with young girls with no consequences in sight. Both entertain a fantasy, comforting themselves that there is no harm in what they’re doing, but get terrified once the girl goes ahead and materialises what was supposed to remain implicit.

It’s a promising premise. If the girl’s agency is often removed from or granted to her in order to serve the male protagonist, these movies offer the opposite: the maturity he saw in her doesn’t get to disappear when he decides to get rid of her. Her outstanding intellect becomes her strength to plot against the man who so easily rejected her once she became inconvenient. In that sense, her subjectivity is not controlled by him at all — it belongs to her, and becomes any grownup man’s nightmare, making a point of showing that he can’t have his cake and eat it too. In Miller’s Girl, Cairo tells Miller: “you can’t blur the lines and then expect me to see a boundary when I suddenly cross it.” Miller is scared because he isn’t in control anymore.

But there’s a reason both movies failed spectacularly. As promising as the premise is, its materialisation is nothing but problematic. They tap into the dangerous narrative reversal of ‘the prey is actually the predator,’ which sounds compelling on paper, but can quickly read as a fulfilling fantasy for men who want to de-responsibilize themselves when things turn against them1 — and has historically recast their victims as biblical archetypes: seductress, temptress. It’s a particularly fitting narrative in a post-MeToo culture that has attempted, and succeeded, to seed the idea that when women claim to be victims, they’re actually the abusers, weaponizing their tears. A dangerous and false narrative.

It’s not that the execution of Miller’s Girl or The Crush could have been particularly different — it’s that this narrative device is structurally bound to fail the ‘empowerment’ of its protagonists. So, while subjectivity does get granted to the girl, it only serves to perpetuate the convenient idea that ‘preys can be predators’.

He’s Not All That

Half His Age is Jeanette McCurdy’s first novel. It follows Waldo, a seventeen-year-old girl grappling with an irresponsible mom, loneliness, poverty, her first sexual experiences, and a shopping addiction. The book fails on some accounts — its lazy description of an Alaskan town the author didn’t care to research beyond Wikipedia facts2, and its vivid depictions of class that ring hollow given that Jeanette herself, a child star, never had to deal with it. But beyond those elements, I truly think the book succeeds at doing something necessary and refreshing in the landscape of age-gap media: granting Waldo an uninterrupted interiority, and de-mythologizing a dynamic that is far too often romanticized.

Age-gap media too often justifies or glorifies the age gap by showing that their connection transcends it. If the young woman is mature-beyond-her-years, the older man is a deep, misunderstood thinker. Half His Age subverts this. While Waldo connects with Mr. Korgy — because she thinks they just “get each other,” both carrying around a similar heavy sadness that she reads as depth and mutual understanding — the book makes it clear that there is nothing fated about their connection. Yes, they’re both sad, but for wildly different reasons. Waldo is a kid who had to grow up too fast, and Mr. Korgy is a frustrated 40-year-old teacher with unachieved dreams. That doesn’t mean they understand each other on a cosmic level. They’re just two sad people, for wildly different reasons.

Half His Age’s strongest suit is its deconstruction of the fantasy mechanism. It offers a full evolution: from forbidden romance, to the irresistible pull, to the complete disillusionment of the young woman. It’s a reversal of the fantasy age-gap media usually offers. Waldo slowly removes her rose-tinted glasses and sees the man in front of her for what he really is. Not some tragic figure, or some tempted man who surrendered. Just a regular 40-year-old who is very unsatisfied with his life and couldn’t resist the attention a young woman was giving him. And as time goes by, Waldo is simply repulsed by him. Their story doesn’t end with a bang — just with silence and disillusionment.

I think it’s an important narrative arc for young women to internalise — not that their fated connection with an older man was tragic and heart-wrenching (which it might be), but that with the power of hindsight, they’ll see the love story for what it really was: a young girl grappling with her place in the world, falling for a man who sees a version of her she hasn’t reached yet.

When really, what he truly sees is just another blank canvas to paint a new version of himself on.

2

I recommend reading this review by Aurora Fox where she gets into details about this:

Aurora Fox

Review: Half His Age Doesn't Even Make It Halfway

In Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel, Half His Age, McCurdy aims to write a disturbing, biting tale of lust, destruction, and obsession, but falls short with a novice execution, inaccuracies of Alaskan life, and a worldliness that is unconvincing for her sheltered protagonist, seventeen-year-old Waldo…

Read more

8 months ago · 53 likes · 13 comments · Aurora Fox

I wrote about the underlying homoeroticism of rivalry in media, particularly for women, and made it into a video:

I thought a lot about how to bring this piece of work to you. At first I tried writing an essay off of the video essay, which I quickly realised was insane and doing a disservice to the actual work I did.

So instead, I decided to opt for an account of the work that went behind this video essay and a selection of the readings, movies and looks that built this project.

The Process

I’ve always wanted to make a video essay, before I even joined Substack. I grew up on them, my late teens to early adulthood cadenced by countless video essays devoured at odd hours of the night. I love the format so much. I see it as a testament of where we’re at in digital culture. I love that they blend academic essays, pop culture, memes, and especially performance, ultimately making “big ideas” accessible to a wider public. Video essays are a lot of work and you can tell when watching them; they’re both entertaining and informative.

But for the longest time I never imagined myself capable of making one, until recently.

The script for this video essay had been sitting in my drafts for the past two years. I didn’t work on it continuously, but I added notes and thoughts as time went by, which accumulated into a behemothian doc that was honestly scaring the shit out of me. Every time I’d try to approach it, I’d get overwhelmed.

Then, I started telling everyone I was working on a video essay, and adding it to all my descriptions and bios for adjacent projects, all of them ending with a daunting “..she is currently expanding her work to video essays.” The pressure was on — suddenly I pictured myself being held accountable by a huge imaginary crowd.

I wanted to make an essay based on a question I asked myself one day after listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s song ‘Obsessed’: “why is jealousy so homoerotic?” — especially between women. And then it seemed like I couldn’t stop thinking about relationships between women, like I couldn’t un-see the latent obsession that Olivia was singing about.

When the Wicked media cycle of madness was at its peak, a lot of people couldn’t comprehend Cynthia’s and Ariana’s very close relationship as anything beyond the binary of hate or love. People either thought that they hated each other, were trauma bonded, or were in love with each other. It was hard for the public to perceive their relationship in a more nuanced light — the intensity of it all constantly alternating between extremes

It made me reflect on my own female friendships: how intense, hurtful, and confusing they had been, especially as a teenage girl. My main recollection was how quickly they could turn to hate. You could be the best, closest friends one day and mortal enemies the next with no in-between. It turns out it’s such a common teenage girl experience — the constant female rivalry, the sudden sourness. And so, it made me wonder: is it a default of female relationships, especially for young girls? Are they always at risk of turning to jealousy or hate?

Then I binge-watched America’s Sweethearts, the Netflix documentary about the Dallas Cheerleaders, and I was really surprised by it. I expected to witness a cutthroat environment, with lots of competition and shunning between these young women all trying to get a spot on one of the most competitive cheerleading teams in the US. But instead I was really moved by how close these girls grew to one another, how they all cried when one of them got eliminated, the deep bonds they seemed to create with each other. It felt like a counter-argument to the idea that female rivalry was inevitable.

This is a glimpse of the thoughts and experiences that helped me put together the premise for the video essay. My central question was: why is female rivalry in media so homoerotic? And what does it say about female friendships? It’s an exploration of the latent homoeroticism of media that depicts rivalry between two women, but conveys a homoerotic subtext instead.

My main media source is what will forever be one of the best comedy dramas in my eyes: Mean Girls. I wanted the rivalry between Cady and Regina to be the focal point because I’ve always found it fascinating to watch Cady metamorphosing throughout the movie as her hatred for Regina grows alongside her admiration. I love how the movie perfectly depicts the blurred line between obsession and hate in female relationships.

Overall this is a video essay that’s an ode to female relationships. I wanted to make something positive, because we so often find ourselves being very critical of the toxic environment young women have created for themselves — the constant judgement, competition, backstabbing and all — which is very valid and true, but I wanted to dissect that ‘negativity’ through a more generous lens instead. That maybe there is more to it than mere rivalry and fighting over boys; maybe it’s a proxy for desire and belonging.

So the video essay does many things. It first dissects what male homoeroticism is — I talk about the latent, unintentional homoeroticism of the American movie, a phenomenon that is very widespread especially in the action cinema of the 80s and 90s, and that I already touched on in my previous essay. I then talk about what I coined “post-homoeroticism”: movies, mostly directed by women, that subvert the homoerotic subtext of these films — movies like Point Break or Saltburn — which take a self-aware approach to the intense aggression that exists between men and sometimes feels more like a plea for proximity. “You create intricate rituals to touch the skin of other men,” and all that jazz.

Then I get into the heart of the video essay, which is female homoeroticism — I explain what that even is and lay out one of my central points: female homoeroticism, contrary to the male one, almost always uses a third party to channel the erotic tension — usually, a man. I get into the intensity of female friendships, the latent homoeroticism of Victorian women’s friendships, the perceived idea of a “hierarchy of femininity” — and essentially offer a light theory to understand female rivalry, in media and in real life. I’m trying not to say too much here so you can discover it all by yourself.

The research for this one was a little different from my previous work. I focus on media, film and pop culture, so usually my research sources are pretty media-theory focused. But here I was analyzing a phenomenon that went way beyond the screen: female relationships. So, my main textual sources spanned history, sociology and psychology — but the project was also informed by media theory and fiction.

So, to give you a taste, below is a selection of three books I used to build this project, an extract of some of my looks and set design, and a list of three movies that were central to the video essay.

Syllabus

BOOKS

Between Women - Sharon Marcus

Sharon dissects the role women’s relationships played in cultivating femininity, marriage, and family life in Victorian England, primarily between 1830 and 1880 - she argues that Victorian society actively promoted diverse bonds between women and viewed them as complementary, rather than antithetical, to heterosexual marriage. The research is based on “Lifewriting” — manuscripts, published diaries, letters, memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies, written by the women themselves. Often, researchers (like me) theorize a lot about people’s relationships and motives without ever asking them directly, so I loved the idea of relying mostly on first-hand accounts instead.

I loved the idea of having a counter-example to the claim that female rivalry is inevitable. The book really opened my eyes to a possible alternative to the current state of female relationships, and is committed to think beyond binaries. Of course, Victorian women are not the most relatable figures you could think of, but it’s interesting to know that life-long, close female bonds were expected and encouraged.

Queen Bees & Wannabes - Rosalind Wiseman

I've always wanted to read this book and finally had a good reason to. It's a high school survival guide aimed at parents of teenage girls. The book was a direct inspiration for Mean Girls, and it shows in a lot of ways. It theorizes the intricacies of what the author calls "girl world" — it dissects the psychology of a teenage girl and maps out the politics of cliques: the different roles, the structure, what they feed on, from the top of the pyramid to the bottom.

It's supposed to help confused parents understand their teenage daughters' behaviour and navigate high school alongside them, especially the toxic parts like bullying and abusive boys. But this book is actually a poli-sci book in my opinion — it's an account of how power takes shape in groups, who owns it, and how. It also contextualizes young girls' fights over boys in a way that was useful for my research: as a means to an end, one of the many prizes women need to claim their spot in the girl world hierarchy.

Natural Beauty & Immaculate Conception - Ling Ling Huang

I devoured these two books last summer. I stumbled upon the first one by chance and it was so incredibly up my alley. Natural Beauty follows a young ex-musician who gets a job at a dystopian beauty clinic that strongly encourages its employees to undergo increasingly insane and life-altering cosmetic procedures. It’s a horror, sci-fi, sapphic book that I absolutely loved.

Immaculate Conception is about the intense friendship between two art students, told through the eyes of Enka — a working-class student who becomes fascinated by Mathilde, an art prodigy and revered performance artist. While the two women grow extremely close to one another, Enka can’t help but get slowly consumed by her envy towards Mathilde.

Both books use sci-fi/horror as a background for complicated relationships and self-reckoning. Ling Ling Huang is incredible at capturing the homoeroticism of female friendships and the latent, destructive envy that can come with them. I especially loved Natural Beauty because it is explicitly sapphic and the line above directly informed the last part of my video essay.

VISUALS

For all my shots, I went for a pastel, blue-ish and pink-ish color palette. I wanted it all to look dreamy and a little bit elevated, but still as if you were having a conversation with me in my living room — which you are, because.. it is my living room. Most shots feature my opulent (fake) snow-leopard blanket from Magma, which I think really adds to the cozy vibe, and my lava-glaze West Germany lamp (my baby).

Except for the introduction, I committed to wearing different shades of pink to fit the vibe of the video essay. I shot the video essay over one weekend that I entirely committed to locking myself inside my flat, staring at a camera.

I shot the “real” introduction at the very end, because the original one was not great — I was too stressed. But by the time I had shot the rest, I felt confident enough to deliver my lines, and chose a completely different outfit: a loose-fit white shirt with wooden buttons from the Parisian brand Sarafina. It’s a vintage piece that belonged to my mom.

This is one of my favorite visual set-ups — the sun was setting and the colors turned very "sunset-like." I'm wearing a piece that I wear for most of the video essay: a pink crocheted poncho that I absolutely love, bought on Vinted and inspired by this piece I found on Pinterest.

At this point in the video essay, I was TIRED. I had re-shot this sequence too many times, so I didn’t bother to put on a full outfit and am proud to admit that these are my PJ pants that I’m rocking with my pink poncho. I actually think the pants matched the set effortlessly — plus it adds another layer of coziness, doesn’t it?

Here, I'm sitting at the dinner table, talking to the camera like I mean business. It's shot in a more visually charged part of my apartment, which I was scared would detract a little but actually turned out well. On my left is my precious Jennifer Coolidge poster. I'm wearing a pink tunic that I bought at my local vintage shop, a crocheted black rose necklace that I bought on Vinted, and my hair looks extremely black for some reason — which I think gives me some edge.

MOVIES

Of course, this is a media essay, and I reference quite a lot of movies and TV shows. Here are three of them, besides Mean Girls.

Black Swan (2010)

Black Swan is one of my favorite movies ever. I love the blend of ballet, obsession, drama, and competition, all of which culminate in a high-stakes, tense finale. Plus, it is visually gorgeous.

I draw on the movie to introduce the “indirectness” of female homoeroticism, because it is very on-the-nose in this one. Nina is obsessed with the role, and Lily happens to be in her way — yet the homoeroticism is palpable and textual, even though it is channeled into a third party: a cursed role in a ballet.

Respire (2014)

Respire is a French movie that I've never been able to forget, even though I probably watched it about 10 years ago. It's about a sudden, intense friendship between two teenage girls, Charlie and Sarah, that turns sour when Sarah suddenly feels hurt one day.

The rest of the movie makes it hard to breathe — the title says it all — as Sarah becomes increasingly abusive towards Charlie, culminating in one of the most haunting endings ever. But what a great source for discussing the intensity of female friendships!

Death Becomes Her (1992)

An iconic movie that has been getting some well-deserved love recently, especially with last year's Broadway musical! It was also a direct reference for Sabrina Carpenter's music video "Taste."

The visuals, the story, the acting, the cast — a perfect movie. It follows Helen and Madeline, two rivals who want the same man and drink a magic potion that will make them live forever and maintain an eternally youthful look to seduce him. But the movie makes a point of showing that all it really gets them is each other. I used it to show how the signifiers of femininity can be performed for other women.

Hope you enjoyed! And if you do watch the video essay, please let me know your thoughts — it would mean the world to me.

I am also currently working on another project, a written essay this time, probably horror-focused — so watch your inbox or something.

Thank you for taking the time to read <3

It’s no secret: women love to watch men getting it on.

The stats are in. Over a third of gay male porn viewers are women1, male-on-male romance and erotica has an estimated over eighty percent female reader base2, and slash fanfic of male protagonists from Star Trek to Sherlock is mostly authored by women.

Why are women, especially straight women, such a huge audience for a genre that seems tailored for gay men? Most research conducted on the subject approached it “by theorising rather than by asking readers for their reasons,” notes Lucy Neville in her book Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys3, rendering most of the research on the subject one-dimensional and based on popular assumptions.4

But female desire, just like women’s penchant for male-on-male erotica, is both complex and simple. Complex, because women are not a monolith. Each one has a different reason for why this type of media appeals to her.5

Simple, because as much as I love overthinking things and telling you why, for a lot of women, male-on-male erotica is a fantasy of surrendered power, broken hierarchies, and unscripted desire... at the end of the day, women just want to see pretty boys fuck!

But overcomplicating things is fun. So when I binged Heated Rivalry – a very spicy gay romance show about two opposing hockey players who get into a decade-long situationship – I did so with a notebook in hand, a pen and a dream.

What caught my attention was the show’s similarities with another homoerotic piece of media: Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s movie that follows a love triangle through the world of tennis competition. Stylistically, the show borrows some of its features. Notably, the very upbeat soundtrack during competition between the two protagonists, which enhances the eroticism of the scene, as the music seems to signal that something is about to happen..and it has nothing to do with hockey or tennis.

But overall, it’s the high-stakes world of competition. A very masculine and serious context, that both pieces use as a stage for rivalry and eroticism between two men.

In an interview with GQ, Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter of Challengers, said:

“I remember growing up, me and all my straight guy friends would watch WWE. And you’re watching guys in underwear who are jacked up and have oiled themselves up so their muscles are glistening, they’re wrestling each other. And the stadium is full of men—I’m sure most of them identify as straight—who are cheering them on. And so, you’d have to really try not to see the homoeroticism of sports.”

And I agree. It’s hard to ignore the homoeroticism of same-sex competition.

Lucy Neville’s book Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys answers the question “why do women love male-on-male erotica?” with care and precision. But watching Heated Rivalry left me with even more questions:

What is it about male-on-male erotica in the context of male competition that is so enticing for female audiences? Why does it have us panting in front of our screens?

And ultimately, why is it so cathartic?

Sweating and Grunting, Competition Is Erotic!

The war movie, the Western, the action movie are all genres that pay tribute to male virility. Men can be seen in full effort and at various stages of undress. They’re sweating, grunting, sometimes even touching each other, but always for a higher purpose; whether it is war or a fight scene. But the focus on proximity between male bodies inadvertently conveys a different idea for those with the eyes to see: the American film is packed with undeniably homoerotic visuals.

And yet, when men get naked near each other on screen, they always have a good reason for it, “reminding viewers they remain in control, still agents of movement.” We rarely get to see “a soft, disarmed male body.”6

Challengers and Heated Rivalry subvert this expectation by offering a bridge between the action-packed homoerotic genre and explicitly erotic media. They use sports competition, one of the most intense displays of emotions between men, as a catalyst for erotic tension. As Justin Kuritzkes says in that GQ interview, “there’s a lot of repression in the world in general, and especially sports,” because “sports competitively are usually played by people of the same gender, they’re homoerotic. And it’s sort of there, pretty nakedly on display whenever you watch sports.”

The difference is that Challengers uses tennis as a display for the erotic, whereas Heated Rivalry uses hockey as a bridge to the actual consummation of the erotic act.

In a scene at the beginning of the show, the two protagonists get on bikes at the gym, next to each other, without a word said between them. They start cycling as fast as they can, glancing at each other to see where the other one is at. They’re sweating, grunting. The homoeroticism of the scene is undeniable: sweat and anger, which are the signifiers of competition, here carry undeniable erotic charge.

If this was a regular sports movie, we’d only get that scene! But instead, this tense competition leads to the characters actually having sex afterwards.

Sweat is profuse. But it doesn’t just appear on our male protagonists’ foreheads during their intense sports effort; it is also present when they touch each other. In other words, nothing is “repressed” about Heated Rivalry. The homoeroticism transcends the subtext because the protagonists actually fuck. The desires of the audience are granted, satisfied.

We get to see the completion of the subtext we always read in intense competition between men. We see them transition from a state of “control,” usually granted to them in competition and other action-packed genres, to “softness.”

Two Strong Independent Men Kissing Each Other

In both their personal lives, the two characters of Heated Rivalry are under a lot of pressure. Ilya has to deal with a brother who is constantly asking for money, a dad with dementia, and the pressure of keeping his sexual identity secret because of the lack of tolerance in his home country. While Shane... well, Shane is mostly fine in comparison, but his management team (mom and dad) is greedy, and he’s also a high-profile closeted gay man.

It’s a similar pattern to another gay romance, Red White & Royal Blue, where the two protagonists live a very high-pressure public life (one is from the royal family and the other is the US President’s son; it doesn’t get more high-stakes than that!), which forces them to constantly prove their worth and put their family’s interests first.

Both pieces of media depict the protagonists in a high-profile, high-pressure position—echoing how many men wish they were perceived (important, level-headed), a fantasy media often indulges. Except that both pieces of media also stage the vulnerability of the two male protagonists in a way that feels gratifying. We see these men in positions of power cracking under pressure and finding solace within each other.

When they’re together, they don’t need to be manly and strong; they can just be soft and disarmed. In Heated Rivalry, after seeing Ilya in alternating states of being mean and cocky to his opponents or yelling at his brother on the phone, we finally see him melt in the arms of his lover, crying as he recounts to him everything he’s had to go through in the last few years.

It’s a vulnerable display of emotion. And for a lot of women it’s satisfying to see men on screen capable of being soft and vulnerable. For the female viewer, it gives her an in: a way to project herself onto the screen, to break through their usual tough performance. To borrow Suzanne Moore’s term, it “dephallicises”7 men, presenting them not “as all-powerful.”8

Prolonged Foreplay and Yearning

All in all, it could be that the success of the show can be attributed to the word of the year: yearning.

In an interview for Them, the actor who plays Ilya uses a term I absolutely love to describe what might entice straight women to watch Heated Rivalry: “prolonged foreplay.”

I couldn’t agree more. I think the way the story is built, with both an “enemies to lovers” and an “opposite sides/Romeo and Juliet” structure, gives room for a long, never-ending yearning between the two characters. Or as they say to each other every time they finish having sex after a tournament, not sure when they’ll be in the same city at the same time: “see you next season.”

Two men on opposite teams is the perfect site for a slow erotic burn. When Ilya and Shane start seeing each other, it is in the secrecy reserved for queer people trying to protect their identity. Their late-night meetings in hotel rooms, furtive exchanges of their room numbers, all echo a very familiar depiction of queer relationships as “secret,” but also help build up the slow development of their relationship over time.

Heated Rivalry, while having some of the most explicit sex scenes I’ve seen in a decade, relies on subtlety as a narrative device. What the characters increasingly feel for each other is not spelled out; it can only be caught in the in-betweens. I think it’s an approach to romance that female audiences are particularly attuned to. Gestures that mean everything, contained in brief fleeting moments that one has to catch in order to feel the heat.

For example, one of the most romantic scenes ever has to be “the hand flex” scene in Pride and Prejudice. A scene that is the epitome of passion and subtle desire: Darcy helps Elizabeth get in her carriage; for a brief moment, their hands touch; in the next scene, Darcy is seen flexing his hand, a simple gesture meant to capture Darcy’s growing affection for Elizabeth.9

It is very short; blink and you’ll miss it. But its power is discussed to this day.

In Heated Rivalry, when the characters have their first erotic encounter, it all starts with a bottle of water. Exchanging it back and forth while maintaining eye contact, Shane and Ilya make a point of making sure their hands graze the other’s every time they pass it. Later on, during a press conference, while they are being questioned by journalists, their feet under the table slowly get closer, until they finally touch.

This is not a feature exclusive to male-on-male erotica, but one that is common to any erotica authored by a woman, or at least tailored to a female audience. The enemy/arch-nemesis dynamic only adds to the “prolonged foreplay.” These two men cannot be with each other for reasons beyond their control. Yet, reason goes out the window in the presence of each other.

And maybe this sums up the power of a romance like Heated Rivalry. Men on film seem to insist they get depicted as gods, as people whose reason transcends their humanity, and whose vulnerability is not made for display. Yet, male-on-male erotica insists that men can yearn, be unable to resist each other, surrender to passion, get sick with love.

So maybe male-on-male erotica is a sort of great gender equalizer for human passions…

…Or, maybe.. women just love to see men fuck each other.

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What is the role of horror movies besides cheap thrills from the comfort of a couch? If we believe the words of Barbara Creed1, first film theorist to actually reflect on female monsters on screen and what they say about societal anxieties, horror movies function as modern purification rituals, in a similar way to religion. A bold claim? Maybe, but let me walk you through it.

Horror as Purification Ritual

Horror is folklore; it pushes the boundaries of terror and asks us to confront the abject2 (corpses, bodily waste, you name it) in order to ‘redraw the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman.’ In other words, horror movies stage a crossing between the symbolic order (civilisation)3 and the abject (horror), only to restore boundaries in the end. That way, horror makes it clear what belongs in the human world, and what ought to be expelled.

Of course, horror movies are not notorious for their happy endings. Sometimes, the villain wins, or leaves irreparable damage. But the purification ritual of horror is not about the defeat of the monster, but about making it clear who and what is threatening to civilization as we know it, and needs to remain outside.

Feminist Era Witches

Take one of the most used monstrous-feminine figures: the witch. Always feared, sometimes admired, the witch is a prime example of an abject figure used in horror movies to repulse and terrify. Through her depiction as abject (surrounded by repulsive things, and often depicted herself as abject) and with un-womanly characteristics (dangerous and utterly selfish), the witch is often a clear antagonist in horror movies, here to destroy the innocent community she infiltrated.

But as Payton McCarty-Simas, author of That Very Witch, explains4, this type of depiction of the witch is characteristic of moments of resurgent conservatism (the 80s, the 2000s), where the witch “loses some or all of her power to frighten, often taking on a more comedic cast.” But during periods of heightened feminist activism (the 60s, the 90s, the 2010s), it’s more common to “see powerful witches proliferate in the horror genre.”

And so, for instance, horror movies of the 2010s were more likely to use abject female figures, not to terrorise, but to question the patriarchal order in place. If the witch traditionally messes with the symbolic order at large, the empowered witch of the 2010s is represented with powers that are a threat to male power specifically. In Midsommar and The Witch, two horrors occur at once: danger is lurking and palpable; something non-human is threatening the community they belong to. But the real danger is increasingly revealed to be the community they thought they were a part of. The ‘threat’ becomes the woman’s very power against an oppressive society.

In Midsommar, the horrors are twofold: a group of young Americans are trapped in a sinister Swedish folk commune, while Dani, our female protagonist, navigates extreme grief. She relies on her long-term boyfriend, Christian, who completely neglects her, makes her feel like a burden while being too much of a coward to even break up with her.

This paragraph contains spoilers for Midsommar:

As the commune’s hostile practices escalate, so does Dani’s realisation that her boyfriend is cruel. She warms up more and more to the commune that, in spite of its homicidal tendencies, offers her sisterhood and unconditional support. And so Dani ends up on the side of the entity that was framed as a threat all along, while the audience is made to root for her as she watches her boyfriend burn alive with a smile on her face.

While these movies align the female protagonist with the abject and the monstrous-feminine, the audience is still made to root for her. We witness how these women were pushed into these roles by a symbolic order that never had their best interest at heart in the first place. In that sense, society becomes the real monster of the story, and we understand why she’d leave it behind.

I think this was a really fun, refreshing era of monstrous-feminine depiction on-screen. But things are shifting. If horror functions as a mirror to cultural progress and anxieties, it makes sense that in a post-Me Too era marked by rising authoritarianism, horror is adopting a different stance when it comes to female power and villainy.

In this essay, I want to talk about two recent movies, Strange Darling and Weapons, that are products of this era and share a narrative formula: the idea of the female monster as hidden in plain sight, performing vulnerability to infiltrate and destroy for their own gain.

Preys as Predators

This whole section contains major spoilers for the movie Strange Darling

Strange Darling opens with two vivid shots: a shot of a man’s upper body strangling a woman, and a steady shot of a woman running towards the camera, a panicked look on her face. As she gets closer to the camera, we realise that blood is running down her face. Another shot: a man in a car, racing behind a woman also in a car, the same woman we saw in the previous shot. She looks panicked, he looks focused. He stops the car, gets a rifle out, and aims at her. Our protagonist has everything of a predator. “Chapter 3” is announced—the story will be told a-chronologically—its title: “can somebody help me?”

Strange Darling evokes a classic American serial killer movie, a game of gendered cat and mouse that feels all too familiar to the public, even for those who were not born during the pocket of time when male serial killers were roaming around the United States on killing sprees.

But Strange Darling is a movie that spins this expectation on its head. Quickly, it is revealed that the wounded woman who is framed as the victim is actually the serial killer, while the man framed as a serial killer is nothing but her prey. The story is told in a disjointed way so as to subvert the audience’s expectation: who you think is the victim here is actually the predator.

One scene cements the obvious subtext: the female protagonist, now alone and handcuffed by the male protagonist, manages to pull her own pants down to fabricate an apparent rape scene before the cops arrive. When the police arrive, the female cop rushes to help, while her male colleague hangs back, doubtful, asking “what really happened here?” Later, as the female protagonist turns a gun on them, revealing that she tricked them all along, the female cop is stunned, while her colleague shakes his head knowingly, murmuring “you dumb bitch.”

As this review of the movie perfectly says:

“The audience laughs, derisively. They look at this woman, who saw another woman lying helpless on the ground, who probably imagined herself in the exact same scenario, who rushed to help the woman who had surely been through something unimaginably painful, they look at a woman who decided to show empathy, and they are made to laugh at her, for daring to believe that a woman lying on the ground with her pants around her thighs might just have been the victim of sexual violence.”

The Performance of Feminine Distress

The film frames ‘feminine distress’ as a performance, and empathy as naive. It uses the cues of helplessness as a decoy for a murderer who weaponises it against those foolish enough to believe her. But most importantly, it divides the audience into two groups: the female cop, who would rush to help another woman in danger, like a fool, and the male cop who is smart and discerning enough to know that ‘women can lie too.’ The film rewards the latter.

This is what I mean by “hidden in plain sight”—the use of female vulnerability cues to code a villain as purely deceptive and performative. This narrative device is conveyed through two elements: 1) it doesn’t contextualise the violence of our female character as ‘revenge’; the violence needs to be unprovoked, and 2) our character’s violence is contained within a vulnerable-looking exterior that she performs and emphasises deliberately.

It encourages the audience to be suspicious of those who look vulnerable, punishing the protagonists and audience alike for believing the performance of female distress. It validates an “I knew I was right” gut feeling when vulnerable groups are revealed to be dangerous—which is, to say the least, a dangerous idea in this current political climate.

Strange Darling is symptomatic of the post-#MeToo backlash, a reactive depiction of female vulnerability as inherently deceptive. As writer RFQ observed about the overwhelmingly degrading reactions to Amber Heard during the defamation trial in 20225, “a material backlash erupt[ed] in response to a movement that was never allowed to be anything more than aesthetic.”

Strange Darling operates similarly, weaponising anxieties born from a movement that brought visibility but sparse structural change, offering a corrective fantasy to a male audience, where suspicion of women’s claims proves justified.

But “Hidden in plain sight” is far from being a new concept. In Rosemary’s Baby (1968), our protagonist willingly invites Minnie Castevet in her home. Petite, old, with a high-pitched voice, bubbly personality, colorful makeup, and over-the-top friendliness, how could Rosemary ever suspect that Minnie is a witch with a (satanic) plan for her? Rosemary seals her fate the minute she forgets to suspect that Minnie’s vulnerable performance might be a mask for something sinister.

As Payton McCarty-Simas points out6, Minnie was an obvious inspiration for the villain of our second movie, Weapons.

First, They Came for the Children

Weapons starts pretty strong; in a small town, sixteen children from the same class all vanish on a random night. No sign of struggle or premeditation is found; the only thing that’s clear is that all these kids left their house in the middle of the night and never came back.

The movie does a good job of dissecting the intricacies of a mass tragedy, and its pipeline from grief to moral panic, especially when children are involved. When something horribly wrong happens in a community, and no clear explanation can be found, there needs to be a scapegoat. So, naturally, all eyes are on the teacher of this class. The parents harass her, convinced that she must have something to do with it. In red letters, someone paints on her car the words “Witch.”

The audience is fully aware that Justine, the teacher, is not a witch. She clearly cares about these children and is just as distraught as the parents when it comes to their sudden disappearance. But the movie frames her as living by herself, involved in a relationship with a married man , and having a slight drinking problem—all deviant characteristics for a woman, which make her the ideal target for a witch hunt

Beginning of spoilers for Weapons

But here’s where the movie’s ‘plot twist’ takes a turn. After building up the tension and the unjustified ‘witch hunt,’ the movie quickly reveals that there actually is a witch in this peaceful little town.

There is a lot to say about how the real witch is depicted. Gladys, the vilain, displays every regressive witch stereotype Barbara Creed identified7. Behind closed doors, her skin is deteriorating, her hair hangs by a thread, and she can be seen vomiting from her condition—tuberculosis—sealing the idea that Gladys is a parasitic witch who has been around for centuries, so desperate to live that she steals the life force of innocents around her.

But when Gladys faces outsiders, she puts on a performance of excessive femininity supposed to put people off her scent: orange wig, excessive makeup, colourful outfits, and a high-pitched voice that drops as soon as the doors close. As this Letterboxd user explains, all these elements “comprise a failed performance of ‘normal’ femininity that instantly marks her out as Other.”8

Sure, I trust that the moviemakers had more in mind her potential for Halloween costumes, an opportunity for the movie to market itself. But also, Gladys’ character gets coded as queer in the movie—not necessarily a conscious choice, but one that nevertheless can be found in the subtext.9 Needless to say that this feeds into decades of moral panic and insidiously feeds into the idea that those who are Other and perform femininity are out to get the children.

End of spoilers for Weapons

Gladys perfectly illustrates the idea of “hidden in plain sight” that I’ve been discussing in this essay: vulnerable performance as being a cover for intentional damage of others.

I’ll be honest, I had a good time watching Weapons. It wasn’t my favourite movie of the year, but it had enough twists and turns to make me gasp and cover my eyes. Strange Darling, on the other hand, felt deeply unpleasant from first to last minute.

But regardless of my personal opinion on these movies, what I’ve been trying to convey here is that horror movies are powerful. If horror is a purification ritual that clarifies what is a threat to civilisation, then what are these films conveying to the public by coding vulnerability as deception and empathy as naivety?

Because sometimes, the way evil gets coded in horror doesn’t just reflect our collective anxieties, it feeds into them.

One of them is the two-brothers love triangle. It’s hard to escape it, especially in the year of the astronomical success of The Summer I Turned Pretty and My Life With the Walter Boys. But before these two, it was Legends of the Fall, Vampire Diaries, Moonstruck, and countless other pieces of media where a beautiful woman is torn between two men from the same genealogical tree. Whether she starts off with the safe choice or the “bad boy” varies, but what doesn’t is the rivalry between the two brothers, their characteristics, and the fact that she will end up with the “dark” one.

In Vampire Diaries, when Elena meets Damon for the first time, she is both scared and intrigued by the man’s dark demeanor. Damon turns out to be everything that his brother Stefan is not: cruel, sarcastic, and deeply hedonistic. This is why Elena almost immediately chooses Stefan. After all, he is the right and safe choice for her, the logical one. But as the show progresses and countless events—one more traumatic than the other—unfold in Mystic Falls, Elena is forced to grow, learn, and become more powerful. And as her narrative arc develops, so does her attraction to Damon. Framed as all-encompassing and inevitable, her push and pull between the two brothers gave birth to one of TV’s most iconic love triangles.

But what is it that makes the trope so captivating for audiences, even in all their predictable glory?

A Triangular Theory of Love

In a 1986 paper for the Psychological Review (A Triangular Theory of Love), Robert J. Sternberg argues that romantic love between two people takes the shape of a triangle, where each tip represents three components:

1) Intimacy, which is about connectedness and warmth,

2) Passion, which involves physical attraction and sexual desire,

3) Decision/Commitment, which involves the willingness to maintain love and stay in the relationship.

The two-brothers trope messes with the triangle of love because each brother embodies two out of three components, creating tension in the protagonist’s decision-making process.

Brother A—the good boy—represents safety. He aligns with both intimacy and decision/commitment, what Sternberg theorizes as “companionate love”: long-term, committed, almost friendship-like.

Brother B—the bad boy—is brooding, impulsive, passionate, and irredeemably hedonistic. He tends to distract our protagonist from her safe, predetermined path. He’s supposed to be the hottest of the two: deeply unreliable yet gifted with a je-ne-sais-quoi that attracts her against all odds. Though often coded as “dangerous” through volatility (or literal murderous instincts), he softens around our protagonist, suggesting only she can change him.

To sum it up: both brothers destabilize the triangle by offering what the other lacks. Yes, Stefan can offer passion, but his “good boy persona” means his passion will always pale compared to his brother’s emotional impulsiveness. As this writer says about The Summer I Turned Pretty, “At times I feel myself on both team Jeremiah and team Conrad. They both have what the other doesn’t.” Which perfectly sums up both the protagonist’s torment and the thrill for the audience: choosing between two camps that are radically different. The trope forces us to consider different aspects of masculinity that fork into two different life paths, each with its own blend of thrill and intimacy.

But what else makes the trope so compelling?

Post-feminist media and the Fantasy of Choice

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. One of the most appealing features of the love triangle is the multiplication of desire—having two men desire you at the same time and at similar intensity is a widespread fantasy in a culture that defines women’s value through the eyes of men.

But what differentiates the two-brothers trope from the classic love triangle is the added element of proximity. What are the odds that two attractive, men would want you and only you?1 The proximity effect enhances the appeal of the multiplication of desire. It also has practical consequences: there are more chances for physical encounters when the two men live together or are in each other’s lives, and therefore more opportunities for tension and drama.

Also, two brothers in the same triangle raise the stakes. It’s not just two men fighting over one woman but two men risking their sacred brotherly bond over one woman. “I don’t understand why they keep fighting for her when she is causing so much tension between them!” says this writer. From the female protagonist’s POV, and the audience, this raises her value and makes the fantasy even more potent because two men are ready to sacrifice a sacred bond over one girl.

But most importantly, the trope resonates because it’s one of the few mainstream narratives where a woman’s attractiveness translates directly into agency. As Rosalind Gill theorizes in Post-feminist media culture, femininity in media gets framed as a bodily property, which means the female body is presented as both a woman’s identity source and a source of power. She explains that today’s media positions a ‘sexy body’ as the key to femininity (as opposed to sociological constructions of femininity that position caregiving as an essential feature.)

In a love triangle, the power and freedom of choice promised by the achievement of femininity become tangible. The Summer I Turned Pretty, both the title and the premise, echo this point. When Belly “turns pretty,” she knows this summer will be different, and it is: her beauty gets her two guys she gets to choose from.

Another defining feature of post-feminist media is the shift of the female character from sex object to desiring sexual subject2. The brotherly trope achieves this by filming from the woman’s POV as she’s torn between the two men. We follow her and see the men through her eyes. In some sense, the trope offers a reversal of the male gaze, because not only is she getting “subjectified,” but the men are getting “objectified.”

They might have lives of their own, but they serve a specific purpose in our heroine’s journey; they represent not just a desire for romantic love but a choice between two different paths.

In that sense, the trope is not just romance but a fantasy about female agency and choice, one where being desired by two different men serves her own subjectification, their objectification, and becomes a metaphor for transformation and choosing who you want to become.

Passion and Disavowal

But is choice really a thing here or simply an illusion? I find it interesting that choice is often positioned as a defining feature of feminism and post-feminism, especially in media, when “lack of choice” is also central and embedded into desire fantasies. In the brother-triangle-trope, the woman might have agency and the opportunity to choose between two different men, but the “dark” brother always perturbs that.

No matter how bad and irrational the “dark” brother gets painted as, the female character is still irredeemably pulled toward him. It’s almost as if there were no choice for her when it comes to the effect this man has on her. The passion and the fire he ignites in her is all-encompassing. It’s Elena when she says about Damon: “He just sorta snuck up on me. He got under my skin and no matter what I do, I just … I can’t shake him.”

In the movie Moonstruck, the passion and the irredeemable pull is articulated by Ronny (the “dark” brother (I ought to find a better term for this)). Ronny is Loretta’s irrational choice. While she is engaged to his brother Johnny (a banal man) she falls in love at first sight with his estranged brother. In one of the many scenes that show Ronny and Loretta’s unavoidable passion, which she desperately tries to pull away from in the name of reason, Ronny tells her:

Everything seems like nothing to me now, ‘cause I want you in my bed. I don’t care if I burn in hell. I don’t care if you burn in hell. The past and the future is a joke to me now. I see that they’re nothing. I see they ain’t here. The only thing that’s here is you - and me.

Ronny has all these very dramatic, passionate quotes that Loretta, even though she doesn’t verbally respond to them, resonates with, as shown through her actions. What she feels is conveyed through Ronny. Even though she keeps saying she should stay with her original fiancé, her safe choice that “she likes,” her heart keeps pulling her toward his brother.

Loretta in Moonstruck, just like any of our female protagonists stuck in a brotherly-love-triangle, are pulled towards the “wrong choice” through inexplicable forces that go beyond reason. This is the fantasy disavowal mechanism3, or the “process of constructing fantasy situations where your desires are gratified without having to assert or even acknowledge the desire.” Through this narrative device, female protagonists get to make choices that are “bad” for themselves without having to rationalize them.

So, Loretta might have the privilege of choice, but is it really a choice if her attraction to Ronny, whom she just met, is framed through the inevitability of “fate,” of passion, of being “moonstruck”?

And whether it is feminist or not I’m not sure but.. isn’t it kind of romantic?

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I love horror movies for the most obvious of reasons: I get a kick out of being more anxious than I already am while knowing it has an end. I’ve learned so much about myself through what makes me scream, what makes me laugh and what stays in my brain years after I’ve watched it.

This is what horror movies will do to you, they are hard to forget. Part of the reason might be that they are a reflection of collective anxieties we are not fully aware of yet, fears we can only understand in hindsight.

Mid 20th century, cultural paranoia about ‘the other,’ the cold war, and the general fear of having ‘innocents’ attacked by ‘others’ was channeled in the creation of monsters like King Kong or alien invasion movies.

And if we believe the words of John Krasinski, there was recently such a thing as "elevated horror," marking the era of the 2010s. Although the term has been mocked countless times since then - offering a strange snobbish distinction between horror for the masses and horror for film bros who love to over-explain the hidden-not-so-hidden meaning of "Get Out" at parties - it does seem true that the last decade of horror movies emulated a version of social criticism with flair. Get Out, Hereditary, The Babadook, The Witch, and more made the horrors of white supremacy, motherhood, misogyny, and generational trauma palatable to a whole new audience who felt like horror "with a message" had more merit than mindless slashers.

Horror always had, and always will have, a message for those willing to dig. Even a sub-genre such as 'slashers' gets a cheap thrill reputation, but actually has so much more to say about an era where the anxieties of the sexual liberation movement were catalysed into narratives that put a moral prize on virginity.1

But once in a while a new horror sub-genre appears (or reappears) and give audiences a new appreciation for the genre. Recently, a not-so-new horror genre is making a come-back: body horror.

Evolution of body horror:

You might have bravely watched Titane, or let curiosity bring you to The Substance, but in any case, chances are you've been introduced, one way or another, to the new wave of body horror movies.

Body horror is not new, having peaked during the Cronenberg era, especially during the 70s and 80s. Although the genre manifested before him, David Cronenberg has arguably stamped and sealed his name on the body horror genre forever. And although it may have existed before, I really believe he was the first to cement the body as a terrain for horror.

Sometimes, body horror's definition seems to incorporate anything. For example, zombies get put into the category simply because of their rotten flesh, even though Zombies relate more to 'invasion' and the fear of having everybody around you slowly transform into brainless entities than to body horror.

To me, body horror needs to be about a threat coming from within, something attacking the body of its host until it becomes unrecognisable. While it can blend outsider and insider threats - like the Alien franchise and its alien parasites that destroy and invade each person's body on a ship - body horror is at its best when the threat seems utterly organic.

In Cronenberg's work, body horror is often an experiment gone too far. In one of my favorite movies of all time, The Fly (1986)2, a mad scientist obsessed with uncovering the key to teleportation accidentally lets a fly enter the cabin, condemning him to slowly metamorphose into one. All he can do is watch in horror as he slowly transforms into a beast, ostracised from society and the one he loves.3

Cronenberg’s work is often a reality holding a distorted mirror to ours - it uses body horror as a device to document technology's excesses and human greed. But it always goes back to the same central ideas: the fear of being othered and ostracised through transformation, the man-made horrors of technology, and what it even means to be human.

Individuality as the new battleground:

A new kind of anxiety seems to be settling into culture, and is palpable through horror. Traditionally, horror had a very external quality - the threat came from outside, it was about invasion, bad guys, and stranger danger.

But recently, horror seems to explore threats that come from within. To make a sweeping generalisation, the last era of horror had all the classics - monsters, home invasions, cults - but there was a more external quality to it, something where the horror came from the outside, threatening what was inside.

The 2020s have seen more movies exploring something else: domestic spaces and individuals that are already, or are becoming, compromised. The threat comes from within - whether from the familiar, ourselves, or our relationships. These are themes that began emerging in the previous decade but have become dominant.

The fear of being replaced by something better and stronger is obvious in the wave of AI movies (or films that take a supposedly feminist approach but still drive home our fear of AI as 'better' and 'stronger' than us like Companion). There’s also literal threats from within and lack of trust (Bodies Bodies Bodies), the compromised domestic space (The Night House), and so much more.

It's in this context that body horror is getting revived. The genre is being used as a device for our current anxieties. From aging out of relevance and the extremes we'll go to avoid it (The Substance), to the body horror of trauma and family life (Titane) and having our privacy stripped away from self-inflicted technological horrors (Possessor).

The body horror revival is using the body as terrain to explore anxieties that have been simmering for a while: loss of individuality and sense of self.

So what could be the greatest horror of them all?

Romance as the new new horror

If there is one thing that very-late-stage capitalism encourages us to value and nurture, it's individuality. In The End of Love, Eva Illouz explains that "the capitalist market and consumer culture compel actors to make their interiority into the only plane of existence that feels real." Autonomy, freedom, and pleasure become the ruling principles of our interior lives - attributes that need to be protected at all costs.

But romantic relationships interfere with them, making the rules that define our plane of existence compromised as they get reshaped by the presence of another being with the same ruling principles.

Being with someone in a romantic relationship inevitably means compromise and losing pieces of yourself. Like two cells merging together, not every part will survive the fusion as both accommodate the new unit. I've read that merging isn't just psychological - after getting used to another human being for a long time, your brain will experience withdrawal symptoms if kept away from the other for too long. "Love addiction" they call it.

When partners are separated, whether for a few days or more permanently, individuals whose brains have become accustomed to releases of bonding chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins through physical touch can experience distress. As one internet therapist explains, breakups are devastating because "your identities got fused together" as "you literally expand your sense of self to include your partner." The merging might not be physical, but our brains perceive it all the same.

This is why TOGETHER is arguably one of the best movies I've seen this year. It feels like a breath of fresh air in the body horror category, exploring the horrors of codependency and what it means to merge with your significant other - which, in most cases, seems to be an essential parameter of long-term relationships.

As the director himself said, the idea came when he realised that he had been with his partner for 10 years and their lives had become so intertwined - they ate the same food, breathed the same air, had the same friends - that their individual identities were shrinking.

So, why not share the same body then? Does this sound horrifying? Not just because the intricacies of the merge - flesh melting, bones cracking and all - seem pretty gruesome, but maybe because codependency and loss of individuality are arguably among the most distressing concepts of the century.

In the movie, long-term couple Tim and Millie (played by long-term couple Allison Brie and Dave Franco for more meta effect) move away from the city to a secluded house in nature. It's hard to tell at first if they're together because they want to be, or because they're used to each other; if they're in love, or if it's simply hard to know where each person's identity starts and the other's ends. This becomes the plot device for a body horror movie that gives literal meaning to couples becoming one. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that something horrifying is happening to Millie and Tim. They are slowly, but surely and painfully, merging together.

In a TikTok reaction to the movie, a young woman explains that to her, the real horror was imagining losing your identity to this extent. She said it gave her a panic attack to imagine losing yourself so completely in someone else. And I’m pretty sure she’s not the only one feeling this way.

Yet, having been in a committed long-term relationship, I'm afraid I'm beyond fear. I find comfort and solace in the merge. I love having my every day rhythmed by hers. Here I am, at the dinner table writing this essay, and all I can think about is how much I miss my partner. No, she didn't leave me - at least, not completely. She's on a trip for a few weeks, but all I can feel is how much a part of me is missing, probably the best one. My body is searching for a thousand ways to make the pain go away: binge-watch a show, smoke a cigarette, anything strong enough to numb the mind.

I know it sounds dramatic, I swear I used to be a person.

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Exploitation in Pin-Up World

To understand how Marilyn's likeness could have been so easily capitalized on without her consent, we need to take a quick look at pin-up culture.

The term "pin-up" probably evokes vivid imagery: legs at the center of the frame, bright red lips often in a surprised "o" shape, curled hair, curved body, and some revealing clothes. This is how you build a pin-up. But while the term seems to suggest anonymity, most pin-up imagery of the early 1940s came from real women. More specifically, famous actresses who men fantasized about so intensely that America's nascent mass production capabilities were harnessed to reproduce and distribute these images on a massive scale. This is how actresses like Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth found themselves "pinned" in soldiers' lockers and painted on aircrafts.2

As pin-up imagery in the 1940s was mass-produced to motivate troops, it started appearing in magazines, calendars, posters, newspapers, and postcards. So while pin-up imagery has a specific aesthetic, its massive reproducibility is what truly defines it.

Pin-Up Imagery as Simulacra

Simulacrum ( pl. : simulacra or simulacrums, from Latin simulacrum, meaning "likeness, semblance") : Originally referring to copies or representations in philosophy, were redefined by Jean Baudrillard as copies that have become so detached from their original that they "bear no relation to any reality whatsoever."3

As these images were mass-produced, the reproductions became simulacra of the original models, sometimes having their curves amplified, their clothes removed further, but especially appearing in places they hadn’t consented to pose for. The original woman's agreement to participate in one photoshoot launched a circulation of images of her likeness over which she had no control.

This is how Marilyn Monroe found herself as the face of a magazine she never agreed to appear in. Years earlier, she had done a nude photoshoot for $50 with photographer Tom Kelley, who then sold the images for $900 to a calendar production. The images were published as part of a "Golden Dreams" pin-up calendar before Hugh Hefner bought the rights from the calendar company for $500. All of this happened without Monroe's knowledge or compensation. She even had to buy her own copy of the magazine to see herself in it.

Pin-ups are based on real famous women whose identities enable both cultural and financial profit. When Marilyn posed for Kelley, she was unknown and signed with a different name to ensure anonymity. By 1953, however, Marilyn Monroe was famous, and Hefner didn't hesitate to link her identity back to the photoshoot for commercial success.

Baudrillard describes simulacra in four stages, the last being where the sign has "no relation to any reality whatsoever." During that photoshoot, Monroe was dressed differently than usual, wore her makeup differently, and signed with a different name—making the images a perfect candidate for true simulacra. But pin-up simulacra can never reach this final stage because their commercial viability depends on the original's identity. Hefner's decision to capitalize on Marilyn's fame prevented the complete divorce between the real and the hyperreal that defines Baudrillard's fourth stage.

Pin-up simulacra can never be fully achieved because the original's identity is too valuable. Sexualized images of women are infinitely more valuable when they relate to someone people fantasize about, and Hefner knew that all too well.

So, if women's identities can never be completely divorced from circulated sexualised reproductions of their likeness, the question becomes: can there be any semblance of agency over sexual simulacra?

Reclaiming Agency over Sexual Simulacra

In the midst of the Sabrina Carpenter buzz, I'd argue that she is doing just that with her album cover, whether intentionally or not.

Sabrina Carpenter clearly taps into the feminine aesthetics of pin-up culture with corset-style mini dresses and mid-century-styled hair. But in the 1940s, women had no control over becoming pin-ups—it was something that happened to them without their consent or control. So if Sabrina Carpenter were a pin-up, she'd be the final boss—one with almost total control over her likeness and its circulation.

In that sense, the very criticism people have of Sabrina Carpenter might also be her strength: she circulates sexualised imagery of herself as both model and author. While this imagery usually occurs through performance captured by her audience, she went a step further by releasing the highly controversial album cover.

The cover shows Sabrina on all fours, dolled up, looking straight at the viewer while her hair is pulled by a mysterious man who is almost entirely out of frame. The sexual nature of the image shocked many and ignited debates, but what's interesting to me is the ownership she has over the image.

It’s not Sabrina’s first rodeo with posing in suggestive poses, she hasn't shied away from posing nearly naked for various magazine covers. But unlike her usual sexual imagery, this one appears on her art—her album. This isn't an AI-generated image of Sabrina Carpenter on all fours, but an image she shot, modeled for, and used to represent her music. Sabrina is owning her simulacrum.

Additionally, the image itself is quite particular. Pin-up images usually follow one pattern: the woman is almost naked, smiling or with parted lips, and above all; she is alone. This type of imagery fits men's sexual fantasies. During the war or flipping an issue of Playboy, they could stare at Rita Hayworth or whoever they so desired and pretend she was just for them. The suggestive posture and the absence of execution (through a sexual scenario, or with the presence of another man) let their imagination fill the rest.

But Sabrina Carpenter's album cover clashes with traditional sexualized pop-culture imagery. First, she's not naked—her body is covered. But even more interestingly, she depicts a sexual fantasy that leaves little room for projection. Unlike parted-lips, nearly naked, solitary pin-up imagery, the scenario here is complete. Sabrina positions herself submissively, looking straight at the viewer, with a man's silhouette in the frame. She's already depicted submitting to a man on her own terms (dressed up and styled), removing the viewer's opportunity to let their imagination run wild. She reclaims ownership over the viewer’s sexual fantasies, imposing her own.

Subject-Object Dynamics

Sabrina Carpenter is often criticized for objectifying herself, which is considered degrading. This argument is frequently made about women who embrace feminine stereotypes and engage in sexual depictions that seem straight out of Laura Mulvey's theories.4

But something feels missing in this critique. Doesn't objectifying oneself make you, by definition, a subject? I want to make room for a Subject-Object—women who author their own objectification, who play with tropes and expectations in ways that are almost parodic. In media, I believe there is power in this approach.

There's something almost cartoonish about Sabrina Carpenter's objectification—a performance of sex and hyper-femininity so heightened that I don't think it truly appeals to men, but rather to women, queer people, and anyone who understands drag as a distorted mirror held to our expectations. As so perfectly concludes in her essay Men don’t even like Sabrina Carpenter:

“Sabrina Carpenter’s persona might have been designed to attract men, but it seems to thrive almost exclusively in female and queer cultural spaces. She doesn’t seem to resemble a blueprint of heterosexual male fantasy so much as a symbol of femininity that lives largely outside of it.”

There is agency in her process in ways that Marilyn Monroe could only have dreamed of: by owning both the origin of the sexual simulacra and an embodiment of femininity that resembles drag. A process about sexualizing herself on her album covers—on her own artistic objects that will be reproduced thousands of times but originate from her likeness and remain owned by her.

The imagery is uniquely hers, slightly off and distorted compared to traditional depictions of femininity through a male lens, ensuring that its endless circulation can never stray too far away from her authorship. It guarantees that no matter how much the images circulate in the digital universe, they remain distinctively hers.

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4

Referencing Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

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Further readings and acknowledgement

Thank you for reading till the end! Sabrina Carpenter is a very polarizing topic this year, and I love being able to write about and discuss her with my peers on this website and beyond. Pop culture really is fun when you get to over-analyze it for your own pleasure.

I've always loved Simulacra and Simulation as a theoretical text and lens through which to understand media. It is quite a heavy text though, so I do recommend watching this video if you are interested in understanding more:

Additionally, I recommend reading these Substack essays about Sabrina Carpenter. One is the essay I quoted earlier, which looks into how Sabrina Carpenter isn't really for men by :

the digital meadow

Men don’t even like Sabrina Carpenter

Most discussions on Sabrina Carpenter orbit the same well-worn questions: Is she feminist or not? Is the “sweet little girl” image ironic, or are we regressing? Is she performing for the male gaze or the female one…

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a year ago · 328 likes · 64 comments · bea

The other is pretty famous on this platform, written by the incredible . If you haven't gotten around to it, I recommend reading it—it explains how Sabrina Carpenter's aesthetics tap into cultural pedophilia, and it is, in my opinion, one of the most important essays written last year:

JADE FAX

your fave is selling a pedophilic fantasy

I’m going to allow you to read the title of this essay, take a deep breath, then join me in the discourse…

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2 years ago · 18153 likes · 710 comments · jade hurley 💌

From Institutional Disillusionment to Rogue Agent

When Ethan Hunt takes on a mission, he knows there is no glory in success and no mourning if he fails. From the first instalment to the last, his destiny is as a rogue agent operating outside official channels.

The IMF already operates on disavowal as standard protocol—every mission's instructions coldly state at the end: "Should you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions." Pretty classic for Hollywood spies who accept that their failures won't be forgiven.

But Ethan Hunt works against institutional currents to an even higher degree. In nearly every film, he's accused of horrendous crimes, framed as a terrorist, or discovers corruption within his own agency. He must work as a fugitive to accomplish his mission, survive, clear his name, and regain trust—only to do it all over again.

This is why by Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, a disillusioned Ethan Hunt, framed once again as a terrorist, becomes an official fugitive. From then on, he stops trying to claw his way back into any sort of institution. He remains outside official frameworks as he progressively radicalises himself. Hunt becomes increasingly anti-establishment as he understands that humanity's survival is at odds with national interests.

His new-found philosophy culminates in the latest Mission: Impossible when an AI called "The Entity" develops some cartoonishly grandiose plan to control the world and destroy humanity. Of course, governments and private parties alike want to control it under the pretext of keeping it contained. But Ethan knows what we all know: humans, especially those in power, are blinded by self-interest. No one can be trusted with such a powerful weapon, it shouldn't even exist in the first place.

Acting as the "terrorist" they've already classified him as, Ethan has one goal: reach the Entity first and keep it outside any system.

As the audience, we trust his intentions are pure—that he alone can be trusted with it. In his hands, we believe whole-heartedly that the Entity will be neutralised. He could keep it in his nightstand for all we care.

So, why do we trust Ethan Hunt with the fate of the world?

The Sacrificial Victim

Throughout the Mission Impossible franchise, one villain truly stands out: Solomon Lane. Sometimes dismissed as a mere terrorist, Solomon is actually someone with ideology and rational explanations behind his actions, which makes him infinitely more terrifying.

But above all, Solomon Lane serves as a twisted mirror of Ethan Hunt: the difference between Lane and Hunt isn't their goal, but their methodology. Lane is an agent of chaos, he believes in saving the world by first burning it to the ground. But his goal is the same as Ethan's: saving humanity.

The difference is in the methodology. While Solomon believes in sacrificing the world to get there, Ethan believes in sacrificing himself, over and over again. Two men, two radically different definitions of sacrifice.

Ethan Hunt perfectly fits René Girard's theory of the sacrificial victim. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard argues that sacrifice serves as catharsis for societal violence. It is "pure violence committed to prevent impure violence." Rather than dismissing ancient sacrificial rituals as gratuitous brutality, Girard argues that they functioned to absorb societal turmoil, unsupervised violence, rivalry, and tensions. "The sacrifice protects the whole community from its own violence."1 This framework applies to modern society, only in different forms.

No system already caught in cycles of mimetic violence and retaliation can offer its own solution, which is why they need a sacrificial victim that occupies a liminal space, neither complete outsider nor full insider.

This is precisely why Ethan Hunt cannot belong to any single system. His rogue status—consistently operating outside official channels while maintaining a vague connection to the IMF—positions him as the perfect sacrificial victim.

Self-Sacrifice and the Illusion of Choice

Where Ethan Hunt diverges from Girard's original theory is that the sacrificial victim is supposed to be chosen by society. But Ethan Hunt chooses to sacrifice himself, over and over again.

Hunt is a willing sacrificial victim who sees his fate as his destiny, and his destiny as entangled with the world's fate. Luther2's monologue in Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning captures Ethan's philosophy perfectly:

"Like it or not, we are masters of our fate (…) Any hope for a better future comes from willing that future into being."

Luther places choice as central to Ethan's self-sacrifice, a concept central to the franchise, as encapsulated by the signature line: "Your mission, should you accept it." Technically, no one forces him to do anything.

But what Luther's monologue inadvertently reveals, is that Ethan has only been presented with the illusion of choice, because no one else can do what Ethan does or be who he is. Hopes of a better future, rely on him willing that future into being through action.

Through cycles of self-sacrifice, Ethan proves his willingness to risk everything for humanity and his ability to succeed, crystallising both his fate and the world's dependency on him. Hunt lost his free will the day he joined the IMF.

What does Ethan sacrifice exactly? Well, first, his health and comfort. Hunt breaks bones and flirts with death more than once. His lifestyle is nothing but pain and discomfort. But above all, Hunt sacrifices the possibility of a 'normal life,' signalled by his decision to distance himself from his wife. After putting her in danger, Ethan realises his destiny is incompatible with loving someone who hasn't agreed to a life of peril.

Paradoxically, this brings him solace. Ethan can only be close to those who consent to danger for the greater cause—which is how he finds his chosen family: Benji, Luther, Ilsa and later on, Grace.

This chosen family, who willingly put themselves in harm's way along his side, are the franchise's emotional core. Incongruously, Ethan—who refused attachments to protect others—finds people he would repeatedly risk everything to save. This gives meaning to his constant sacrificial cycle: his willingness to sacrifice himself for humanity is channeled through love for his friends. Sacrifice becomes not just a social mechanism, but a choice made from love.

Ultimately, I think this is what makes Mission Impossible a superior action franchise, precisely because it has so much heart. It repeatedly reminds us that life is pain, but the people in our lives make everything worthwhile.

Is Ethan Hunt.. a Prettier Jesus?

Ethan Hunt isn't perfect; he's made mistakes, he's let weapons of mass destruction escape just to save a friend. He leads with his heart, and sometimes this conflicts with his higher duty of protecting the world. But ultimately, he always chooses sacrifice because he believes in a version of humanity that deserves salvation.

In a way, it's hard to ignore the parallels between Ethan Hunt and Jesus Christ. In Girard's later Christian theology, he argues that Christ's willing sacrifice represents a fundamental break from primitive scapegoating, one that is motivated by love rather than social necessity. Ethan is probably closest to this definition of sacrifice.

Like Christ, Ethan exists in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth—sacrificing himself through near-death experiences, only to return in the next film ready to risk everything again for humanity. He cannot truly die because balance relies on his willingness to die repeatedly for the world's infinite sins. Whether facing pandemics, nuclear weapons, or a malevolent AI, the underlying issue remains the same: humanity's expansive and infinite propensity for violence.

Ethan's presence on screen is compelling because it represents cathartic hope against global anxieties. Whether it is through the Bible or an action-heavy franchise, we always need stories with figures willing to carry the weight of humanity’s shadows. Ethan Hunt might not exist, but our need for him does. And if cinema is your religion, perhaps Ethan Hunt can be your Jesus.

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Oh hi! Thank you for reading this whole essay. Mission Impossible is one of my favourite franchise of all time—these are my comfort movies and I've watched them all an obscene amount of times, so this was just so fun to write.

Let me know what made you think, what made you twitch, what part you mentioned at the family function, what quote you messaged to your cousin you didn’t talk to in two months, if you'd like to read more of this, etc. Crying Spells is fuelled by the writer's hubris; I love to read any comments and thoughts you may have, whether publicly or through my DMs <3

Leave a comment

Bibliography

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Popović, Tijana. "René Girard: Sacrifice, Violence, and Scapegoating." The Collector, https://www.thecollector.com/rene-girard-sacrifice-violence-scapegoating/.

Mission: Impossible film series. Paramount Pictures, 1996-2025.

While there is much to discuss about Doechii's Met Gala performance, social media has fixated on one particular moment: when she raised her voice at her staff. Hidden behind white panels, Doechii asked her team to better shield her from lurking paparazzi, resorting to a raised voice and a little bit of cursing as she requested better coverage of her outfit.

This was Doechii's first Met Gala. The entire point of the event is to reveal outfits on the red carpet, not before. Understandably, the situation was stressful.

Headlines and TikTok commentary quickly labeled this as "mistreating" her staff. One TikTok headline declared that "celebrities yelling at their minimum wage employees is a labor rights issue," referring to the outburst. Comments and news outlets had a field day, with Doechii branded a "brat" and a "diva" — and not in a complimentary way.

In other words, the situation escalated from 'conflict' to 'abuse' in the public eye almost immediately. As @Sarah Schulman details in her book on the subject, "at so many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn escalate rather than resolve."1

The Tacit Contract of Pleasantness

Outbursts are not the nicest displays of emotions to witness or be the recipient of, but famous people are especially prone to scrutiny if they react negatively to the people around them. That’s because celebrities operate through the tacit contract of constant pleasantness. Whether it is at the Met Gala, during concerts, or even at the mall, celebrities are expected to smile, nod, and be patient no matter what, with the implicit agreement that they owe everything to the public.

By gendered definition, female entertainers face an additional layer of difficulty. They're expected to be nurturing and grateful to their fans and, by extension, their staff and everyone around them.

, though, clearly doesn't take her success for granted. She makes a point to engage her audience during concerts—even asking the crowd which song they want to hear next, she released "Anxiety" after significant fan demand, and still engages with her fans on social media despite her astronomical success.

While she did fulfil expectations perfectly, it only takes one misstep to erase all previous actions. So when Doechii fails to show up as her usual nurturing-smiling-and-nodding-grateful-self, just once, discomfort arises.

The Politics of Control

Beyond failing to embody the nurturing archetype, I think discomfort arises from the expected gendered dynamic of who gets to control what.

Do all instances of public yelling get escalated to the level of 'abuse'? Is it only a matter of unbalanced power dynamics?

If it was, more people would have objected when Gordon Ramsay yelled at his subordinates on national television, for years. But instead, it was widely perceived as entertaining. Even more so, it was expected of him. Compilations of his yelling fits are all over social media, and they're not labeled "Gordon Ramsay being abusive to staff."

A man (especially a white man) yelling from a position of authority is playing his role. He brings back order and maintains the status quo, making the situation better. In that context, the yelling man is taking back control, that he is expected to have, over his surroundings.

A woman (especially a Black woman), however, is not expected to yell because yelling is a display of how she lacks control over her own emotions, a type of control that a man is not expected to have in a similar situation. She is supposed to control herself, not her surroundings. She should always be ready to welcome the unexpected, while remaining calm and collected.

"Intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses."

In her book Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin argues that creative intelligence in women is seen as something they are not supposed to have. When they do possess it, they are supposed to renounce it. If they decide instead to exercise it, they are bound to get punished for it, denied the respect necessary to sustain creative intelligence in the long run.2

In that context, a woman famous for her creative intelligence is an anomaly. Because it is not a career encouraged by the world around them, women don't create successful careers on their own terms by playing with the cards that were handed to them; they do so by affirming themselves in cut-throat environments. Doing so inevitably clashes with expectations of agreeableness.

I'm not necessarily saying that 'yelling' should be a widely accepted method during stressful situations, but rather that it is commonly understood that people tend to yell during high-pressure moments. Yet who gets forgiven or not depends, too predictably, on the person's race and gender.

Likability politics are clearly a rigged game for women. There doesn't seem to be a way to win once you're in the public eye. Let's not pretend that those who never yelled, who never stopped smiling at the camera, garnered more respect from their public.

Let women yell on the red carpet.

People always say you have to respect yourself before demanding the respect of others. That if you're nothing but an empty shell of a person you won't amount to anything. That people will smell the emptiness on you. It will be in your hair, on your skin and your clothes will be drenched from the stink. They will smell you and know exactly how to treat you.

I'm afraid I haven't learned self-respect yet. To be honest, I didn't think I would have to learn it. I just thought it would happen. One day, I would wake up unexpectedly grown and full of myself. But I'm afraid I'm not a real person yet. Worse, I'm afraid I'm not a serious person.

Two years after Succession's last airing, and I'm still haunted by this one line.

In one of the last scenes of the show, the Roy family is fully gathered, a rare phenomenon outside of family functions and impromptu royal-business reunions. This encounter, though, is in one of the silliest environments you could imagine, one where you wouldn't have pictured the Roy's patriarch ever stepping foot into: a karaoke room.

After a myriad of blindsides on each side, Logan is trying to bury the hatchet with his children, as a last far-fetched attempt to negotiate with them a high stakes business deal. Trading an apology for millions of dollars.

The show Succession, as hinted by its name, is about siblings fighting desperately to inherit their father's billion-dollar empire, as a substitute for his validation. Logan Roy manipulates his kids constantly, dangling his affection before them to turn them against each other, to divide and conquer, to extract what he needs from them when he needs it.

But for once, he cannot get his way with them. So he goes to them, in that purple and pink karaoke room. The patriarch steps out of his castle to negotiate with the fools he's created.

High on a newfound sibling solidarity, the four of them—more specifically Kendall and Shiv—stand up to him. Telling him, in business jargon that barely conceals the voice of their wounded inner children, to go fuck himself. It's hard to tell, as is the case throughout the series, if this is about business or simply sticking it to daddy.

Defeated, and knowing when to retreat, Logan looks at them in the eyes and delivers one of the sharpest lines ever uttered on TV: "I love you, but you're not serious people." Before stepping out of the multicolored-lit room.

But what does it mean, to be a "serious person"?

Seriousness, the way I see it, is yet another word for respect, for being a real person.

The Roys' self-respect is fragile and constantly at risk, because their self-worth belongs to their father. A lifetime of placing it into his hands has given him the opportunity to crush it whenever he feels like it.

The only shield to a lack of respect is self-respect. Joan Didion once said "The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough." In that scene, the Roy children make it apparently clear that they do not even possess that.

I used to love F. Scott Fitzgerald growing up. I pretty much read every book he ever wrote. Far from me the idea that me and this man had nothing in common. I felt understood and seen by him, the way only a delusional 13-year-old oblivious to class and gender constraints could be. Still, my brown closeted self, reading This Side of Paradise, was convinced that the main character, Amory Blaine, a white straight privileged man was me. "Amory is a handsome, charismatic, intelligent, and insecure boy who grows up to be a handsome, charismatic, intelligent, and insecure man."

I was pretty much convinced this would be my fate, and part of me was seduced by it. After all, Amory was still handsome, intelligent and charismatic, who cares if he never learned to validate himself? I, too, wanted to live through the eyes of others, being granted an extraordinary-ness that I might never be able to fulfil.

I was obsessed with the idea of my own potential.

Amory Blaine, if I remember well, referred to himself and his actions as "mediocre", or maybe I invented that detail because I repeated that word to myself too many times. Regardless, he was wallowing in a state of privilege and self-obsessed categorization that would make Jemima Kirke squirm1.

I too was convinced of my own mediocrity. I felt like I wasn't completely a failure, but never truly a success either. I had tried many different sports, from gymnastics to fencing, always lured in by competitions I would glimpse on TV, the winners' triumphant faces provoking a surge of envy within me. I wanted to graze greatness with the tip of my fingers. Yet, I'd get disinterested the second I realized I wasn't naturally gifted at it — a repetitive pattern when it came to any sort of physical activity.

To be fair, I stopped fencing after 3 months because the teacher kept choosing a young boy with ADHD and ambidexterity as my opponent, which in other words made him both unbeatable and untirable.

But it wasn’t just physical sports, I brought this aloofness to pretty much everything in my life.

I picked up violin at 8. My teacher would marvel at my potential, rave about it to my mom whose eyes would illuminate, pushing me to study more and more, to help it blossom. But I only put less and less work into it as time went by.

I loved hearing from her that I had potential. That word meant everything to me. I feared more than anything to prove her wrong, for her to see me put in the actual work, only to look at me with disappointment when it wouldn't hatch on the appropriate timeline. So one day, when I showed up to an audition, having very obviously not studied my part, and failed miserably, she looked at me with nothing but disappointment and she asked "do you even want to play violin?"

That’s the type of disappointment I could bear. Disappointment at not seeing me get to the end of the road. At least she didn't get to see what happened when I actually worked, and neither did I.

I cruised through my academic life with the most inconsistent grades. Top of my class one day, last the next. I never really cared to care anyway.

All I wanted to hear was that if I wanted to, I could.

I never had that drive in me to push me to do things, to persevere even when things got hard. I always had that aloofness to acquiring skills, that feeling that if it didn't work out, maybe it wasn't meant to be. I was never taking myself very seriously.

Part of me, I know now in hindsight, thought that if I never really tried, I'd never really get blamed for failing anyway. It couldn't be a marker of my lack of intelligence, if I never put the work into it in the first place. Or so I thought. But still, like Amory, I was convinced that one day, I would know immeasurable success. That someday, I would meet my own destiny. And it would be glorious.

This Side of Paradise is a boring book, in my opinion, but it was to me a deeply relatable one. It's honest, at least. It is boring the same way life gets boring when you convince yourself of your own shortcomings, when you let yourself wallow in your own perceived mediocrity, and let life do the rest, hoping, somehow, that destiny will find you along the way.

Taking yourself seriously means putting in the work. It means understanding that the world is mean, and no one will give you the flowers you do not deserve.

Self-indulgence, I understand, is the defining trait of an individual's experience. Amory Blaine is often described as a narcissist in literary reviews. But the way I see it, it's only because Fitzgerald let us peek into his interior world, his thought process, the contrast between his exterior that seems to be throwing careers at a wall to see what sticks, and his deeply insecure self.

All convinced that our interiors matter most, we are all someone else's narcissist.

Logan's children see the empire as their righteous destiny. There is no way in the world they should not deserve it. Not because they worked hard for it, but because they are owed it by blood. Because to them, the empire is a testament of their dad's approval, and they deserve that too. After all, they've done nothing but do what was expected of them, never deviating from their father's expectations of how a life should be led.

All dedicated to his notion of success, working for him, with him and even against him. They've never carved out their own path for fear of compromising the very thing that would validate their existence.

But when Logan tells them they're not serious people, what he means is that imitation is not a substitute for character. Trying really hard to act like him, means means they never got to become themselves. Anyone could clock from a mile away that they look like nothing but pale dupes of him.

In Succession, the Roys believe that being there is testament enough of deserving their father's empire. They've been here all along, they've sat there, they've done what they were told, they've put in the work. Isn't it enough?

When failing started to have consequences for me —like during my first year of college where I almost had to retake the year, I cried a lot. Then, I decided to make a change. Having potential stopped being cute, so I started working—really working—both academically and internally. I tried to understand what I truly wanted and forced myself to go for it, even if it meant letting others see me trying something different. I stopped engaging in activities simply because I was seduced by the success of others, or because it looked good on paper, or because adults told me I could be great at them.

Seriousness is not about just being there and doing what you were told; it's about proving that your consciousness is there, to yourself first. It's about recognizing that underneath it all is a real person convinced of their own credibility, with enough self-respect to go up there and demand what they are owed, not what they think they should be asking for.

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Thank you for reading to the end!

This is a slightly different format than usual. I am experimenting with more personal, quick-turnaround personal essays/self-reflection. Part of me feels like I trapped myself by only putting out long-form, super analytical essays that take me months to put together. But I want to use this space to write more, so I might try to put out more stuff like this, little glimpses into my interior world with some media analysis thrown in (when I feel like it).

I've also added my own illustrations for the second time. I love it. I started drawing again and it makes me very happy <3

As always, let me know what you think, in the comments or in my DMs, that means so much to me<3

1

This was heavily inspired, and written through the lens of Contrapoints’ video essay “Twilight”, more on that at the end of the newsletter

When I went to see Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, it did not change my life the way I thought it would. During a late night showing at my local theater, snuggled in the dark with my girlfriend, ready to experience cinema with a big C, she fell asleep about 15 minutes in. I made fun of her, hiding my own battles to not start audibly snoring in the theater.

While selecting a late night showing on a busy work day probably didn't help my case, I also simply felt a bit bored during the movie. The pace was too slow for my liking, and the acting felt, at times, a little bit over the top. But one thing kept me going: the movie was a gorgeous tapestry.

Stunning visuals, mind-blowing costumes, and acting performances which made me wonder if I was watching a play instead of a movie. I concluded that Robert Eggers' Nosferatu was an aesthetic and theatrical piece of work, a fitting choice when it comes to telling a Gothic story on the big screen. And I redeemed it.

The aesthetic quality of the movie also spotlights its unconventional erotic elements, its dark twisted romance. I decided to frame Nosferatu as a sort of fucked up iteration of the Beauty and the Beast trope, partly due to its display of erotic scenes between a monster and a "beauty." A retelling that is darker, uglier, and ultimately, makes it the most transgressive one in the evolution of the trope.

This essay will also analyze two of the latest Beauty and the Beast iterations: Your Monster, Caroline Lindy's movie where a nice-and-a-little-bit-of-a-doormat musicals actress meets the monster who lives in her closet, and Lisa Frankenstein, where a young woman brings back to life, and falls in love, with a dead man in all his corpse glory.

The reason I'm so fascinated by this trope is because Beauty and the Beast type of romance have always shaken feminist circles and started conversations at two ends of the spectrum: are they regressive fantasies that glorify abuse, or are they feminist anti-capitalist stories that depict a subversive threat to patriarchal structures and women's complex desires? Questioning the morals of a story that portrays an imbalanced power dynamic is a rite of passage for any fictional dynamic that portrays a helpless woman and a monster, or a shy brunette and a sado-masochistic billionaire employer. The dissection of female desire erotic fantasy is a long held tradition in academic circles. Let me add my two cents to it.

The Gentle Rogue

The first unspoken rule of a Beauty and the Beast story, is that the beast is never entirely a Beast. He is capable of great harm, but softens in the presence of the woman he loves. And that is what makes it a fantasy: yes, he might be violent, sometimes a little bit abusive, and he might randomly kill people who piss him off. In sum, something is definitely, obviously, wrong with him1. But his softening around the heroine serves as the stepping stone for his character arc; she has the power to actually change him. He is a "gentle rogue"2—a violent male who is "capable of both ruthlessness and tenderness."

In Your Monster, Melissa Barrera's beast is the perfect depiction of a gentle rogue. He growls, is violent, and has a blast terrifying her in her own flat. Yet, one night, as they watch Royal Wedding on the couch, the Beast’s emotional side is revealed as he cries at the end of the movie. From then on, he is framed in a different light; he is charming, cultured and shares her passion of theater. Plus, he listens to and is protective of her. Yes, he has violent tendency, but he’s also pretty charming and becomes increasingly docile the more time he spends with her.

His beastly appearance only contributes to his gentle rogue essence. Furry, wild and untamed, this beastly exterior will only highlight our heroine's success in taming and domesticating him by the end of the movie. This is the classic mechanism of the Beauty and the Beast tale we’ve all seen a thousand times; the beast is not really a monster, just a wild animal who needs the right woman to tame him.

But what does it mean when the beast doesn't borrow from the aesthetics of furry animals, but instead is shaped like a real monster?

From Furry Beast to Putrefying Corpse — Abject Horror and Desire

I love when the beast/monster appears in a romance as truly repulsive, instead of just wild. The earliest attempt I can recall is Beastly, that fever dream of a movie with Vanessa Hudgens. But their version of "repulsive" featured Alex Pettyfer bald with tattoos on his face—which is like every guy I encounter in the metro during Paris Fashion Week, but in 2011 was the definition of repulsive, I guess.

Usually, when the beast is designed to be repulsive, it borrows from the aesthetic category of the ‘unknown’. Like in The Shape of Water, where the monster is a fish-humanoid. Fur might feel ‘dangerous’ but it also feels warm, and appealing, while fish-like people connect to horror more naturally.

But Nosferatu and Lisa Frankenstein go even a step further to anchor their monster in the unknown: they are built off the registry of abject horror. Abjection, as theorized by Julia Kristeva, refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a “threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other."3 It borrows from Lacanian theory to create a sort of opposite to the "object of desire.”4

Abject horror is supposed to create a sense of dissociation. Our rejection when facing the abject is self-preservation in some sense. By having a gut, repulsed reaction to horror (from the skin that forms on the surface of milk when left too long outside, to corpses and vomit)—we distance, and therefore protect ourselves from it.

Their bodies are rotting, their flesh is bare. In Lisa Frankenstein, our monster expels green liquids out of his putrified flesh— he is literally a corpse. Nosferatu, in the light of day, doesn’t look much more appealing— he is a rotting corpse, and when he dies, it's in a spectacle of rotting flesh and flooding blood. They’re not just monsters, they’re corpses, abject figures.

Yet, while horrified and disgusted by his appearance during the first encounter, Lisa's attraction to the monster slowly grows— languorous looks, and a brief sex scene solidify the romance between Lisa and a corpse-like character. In Nosferatu, the desire is even more intense, Helen aches for Orlok— and his appearance never seems to elicit any disgust from her.

Both movies do not try to make the erotica aspect implicit, but instead explicitly depict an erotic attraction to an abject figure.

So, while their aesthetic borrows from the abject, supposed to elicit a reaction of disgust and distance, Lisa and Helen’s attraction to objects of horror, convert them, in some sense, into objects of desire.

The Beast is crossing to an entirely different category, appearance wise, because Beauty and the Beast stories are not really about the Beast, they’re about the female character’s desires and internal world. And in order to represent them in all their glorious complexity, there needs to be a stance taken; the Beast borrows from the unknown because female desire does not fit a neat category either.

Subversive Powers and Anti-Patriarchal Desires

While the beast can borrow from the abject to signify that the heroine’s desires cannot be easily categorised, most movies will make an effort to give the beast some redeeming qualities, to make the heroine’s desire to him understandable.

In Lisa Frankenstein, the Monster might borrow from the aesthetics of the Abject, but Cole Sprouse's character is still a gentle rogue— he is mute, docile, and devoted to Lisa. As Lisa's desire for him grows, his appearance softens. The monster contains multitudes and through his redeeming qualities, Lisa learns to love him. And so do we.

In other words, the heroine's desire for the monster is made palatable to the audience. It's a common mechanism in Beauty and the Beast stories. There needs to be something, at some point in the movie, that makes the audience go "oh, I get it now," or “hear me out..”

But not all beasts are made of the same cloth, and Robert Eggers' Orlok certainly isn't. Orlok breaks free from the 'palatable' constraints usually put on monsters and beasts; he is not soft in the slightest. Orlok is a monstrous, repulsive creature who terrorizes and kills mercilessly; he doesn't have any redeeming qualities. Orlok is the incarnation of death, cruelty and hopelessness.

Yet, Helen still desires him. Her desire is not redeemed nor made more palatable to the audience.

As said so well: "Thematically speaking, Vampires often function as the personification of desire, usually the sexual kind. So if Ellen, who has been conditioned by the patriarchy, thinks of her sexual desire as wrong, ugly, and unclean, it makes perfect sense that the physical manifestation of her desire appears in a form that is wrong, ugly, and unclean"

And that's where the subversive powers of Beauty and the Beast tales truly lie; the Beast is a vessel for the heroine's desires and internal world. The Beast has always had a subversive element to it. Linda Williams already wrote in 1984 about the Beast, explaining that it is a subversive figure, acting as a mirror held up to the heroine who sees in a monster their similarity as potential threat to patriarchal structures.5

The Monster as Vessel: Deflection and Expression

But I think recent movies are going a step ahead. Not only are they moving away from even trying to direct the heroine's desires towards an approachable category (like a furry beast, or a very tattooed man), but they're going beyond a mere representation of anti-patriarchal desire. They’re about personifying the heroine’s internal world.

In other words, the story isn’t just a Beauty falling in love with a Beast, but a Beauty becoming a Beast.

"Fantasies are not literal wishes, they construct situations where emotional needs are met and inhibitions to pleasure are removed. So for example in a fantasy where the dangerous alpha male is the aggressor, the woman remains innocent. The bad boy is bad so that the good girl gets to stay good. We can call this disavowal, the process of constructing fantasy situations where your desires are gratified, without having to assert or even having to acknowledge the desire." - Contrapoints6

The 'disavowal' mechanism of fantasy, as Contrapoints explains, is a staple of women's erotic fantasies, and at the core of most Beauty and the Beast tales. But what's interesting is that in both Lisa Frankenstein and Your Monster, the 'disavowal' mechanism is not there to fulfill their erotic fantasies, but to enact their desire for violence and revenge on past lovers, sexual assaulters and other people who hurt them. But as women, they’ve been conditioned to never really stand up to them. So in both movies, the Beast steps in to do just that: kill and hurt those who harmed them.

For our heroines, homicidal urges are the fruits of years of repressed anger in favour of a good girl persona. But the Beast, by being protective of the Beauty, acts as a vessel for their violent urges, enabling them to both get their revenge, and keep their hands clean. Eat their cake and have it too. "The bad boy is bad so that the good girl gets to stay good."

The Monsters get to represent our heroines' deviance, packaged as an outside force. Her rage is outwardly, and by being attracted to the Beast, she is attracted to her own power. It's the ugliness of female rage that shapes the beast, and in turn, shapes their desire for one another.

In Nosferatu, deflection takes another shape. Helen's passions are inappropriate for a white upper middle class woman in 1838 Germany. But in one scene, alone with her husband Thomas, she does not act quite like herself. Helen gets mad. She screams, enraged, and tells her husband things she kept to herself for too long. Shortly after, she initiates rough sex, stating to her husband, in a voice that barely sounds like hers, "you could never please me like he could."

Throughout the whole scene, Helen is clearly possessed by Orlok, letting her emotions out while she is not completely herself. This is deflection—Helen is compelled to act out her desires and other "unwomanly" attitudes by Orlok. It happens to her. The monster serves as a third party, a vessel for Helen to express an interior world deemed dirty and inappropriate.

The monster is desire, the monster is deflection, the monster is her.

In a short story from the collection Cursed Image by Reuben Dendinger, written from the POV of the Beast, the Monster says of the woman he's about to sleep with:

"She wanted to be possessed, and so I possessed her, used her. It was sex, just sex, but for us it was something much worse. We both knew it without words, that like a pair of murderers we had shared in a crime that would bond us together forever."

And I think this could have been written by Orlok himself.

Becoming the Beast: Merging Outcasts

In her essay When the Woman Looks, Linda Williams says "the woman's look at the monster offers at least a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality. Precisely because this look is so threatening, it is violently punished."

Because women's desires that are outside of the patriarchal norm are framed as dangerous, the Beauty and the Beast cannot stay in their original state. Their pairing is too threatening, societal reintegration needs to happen. Previously, the most common end would be that the Beast either goes back to its human form, or dies (à la King Kong).

But recent movies expanded the ways this can happen. It can be that the beauty herself becomes a monster to remain with her lover for eternity. It can also be that death becomes the ultimate consummation for both of them, with the Beauty and her monster intertwined in a final, fatal embrace. Or that there never was a Beast, that the Beauty truly was the Beast all along.

This final merging - whether through death or transformation - completes the cycle. The Beauty doesn't just desire the Beast or use it as a vessel for her own forbidden desires; she ultimately recognises herself in it. The subversive power reaches its peak when the distinction between Beauty and Beast dissolves, challenging the very categories society has imposed.

Yet in all their subversiveness and transgressions, Beauty and the Beast stories still have a problem that hasn't evolved along with the Beast. The Beauty still encapsulates very conventional standards of attractiveness. Whether it is Lisa, Helen, Laura—or any actress cast as the "beauty"—they all are mostly white or white-passing, thin, and possess conventionally attractive traits. The Beauty hasn't evolved with her Beast. As the Beast becomes uglier, it only widens the beauty gap between the two lovers.

When taking on the responsibility of telling a Beauty and the Beast story—one that is transgressive at its core and challenges assumptions about female desire and agency—wouldn't it make more sense to have the Beauty challenge the very stereotypes she's supposed to fit into? Together with the Beast, they could form a lethal threat to a fragile patriarchal power, entwined in a subversive tenderness on our screens.

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Acknowledgments and recommendations:

Wow, thank you for reading this fully!! I don’t have a prize for you but I do have some additional yapping.

First of all, special thanks to the lovely who read this essay in avant-premiere, and helped me edit it and honestly gain a lot of confidence as a writer and in my ideas!! She's the best. Go read her work, I recommend her beautiful essay on desire, to stay in the theme: desire, i want to turn into you

I also strongly recommend diving into "Twilight" by ContraPoints, a video essay that goes in depth into the Beauty and the Beast trope, and spans centuries of literature and moral panics around the frequent depiction of an imbalanced power dynamic between a man and a woman. It's a story as old as time, and she does a fantastic job of exploring every facet of it. This video essay completely inspired me to write this essay as it gave me a new lens to watch movies through, and it made me want to question why Nosferatu's beast looked so different, aesthetically and behaviorally from previous iterations, and what that says about women's desires on screen.

I also highly recommend 's published essay Wanting as an Act: Female Desire in “Nosferatu” and “Babygirl”, which is a fantastic read.

Finally, as you might have noticed, this is the first time I bridge the gap between two mediums I love: drawing and writing. Would love some thoughts and feedback on how it all panned out! Would love to explore different mediums in the future to convey ideas like this, so yeah, more of this coming up I guess?

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The homewrecker is an archetype.

She behaves in predictable ways.

She is evil and manipulative.

But also sad, lonely, and to be pitied.

She is a heteronormative role almost exclusively attributed to women and doesn't shape-shift to the rhythm of their individuality; her motives and methods are pretty much always the same.

Adultery might not be violence per se, but it used to be punished as such. From the Babylonian empire to ancient Greece, adultery could be punished by banishment, mutilation, torture, public humiliation, and death. With, for example, a betrayed husband having the right to kill his wife's lover to restore his honour. But the reverse was not possible. In laws, a cheating husband and his mistress were pretty much dismissed. No honour, nor sympathy, for the cheated wife.

Cheating remains by far one of the most unanimously agreed-upon, high-degree betrayals. But now that cheating isn't a good enough reason to execute partners and their lovers, the punishment has become social. A 2007 study1 explored the social consequences of adultery through a small community in Mexico and found that through gossip about extramarital affairs, maximum damage could be caused to those involved—from being disowned by family members to financial loss and job termination.

Reputation damage has replaced the physical punishment of adulterers, the same way ingrained discipline in modern societies replaced medieval torturing devices—same outcome, more socially acceptable methods.

With the internet and the advent of celebrity culture, our social networks have grown wider and more intricate, amplifying behaviours from small communities to worldwide social networks. From gossip to tabloid culture, from small-scale shunning to public shaming—cheating gets culturally punished. It's apparent in the existence of subreddits like r/adultery_hate where cheating affairs, big and small, get dissected and the adulterers shamed. It's obvious in the public's response to John Mulaney's potential cheating on his ex-wife, or any other cheating scandal you could think of, like those that helped demystify the “wife guy.” The public is not tender with cheaters.

But it's always a little bit surprising (not really), when a cheating scandal erupts where the man allegedly cheated, and the public ends up turning against the woman he cheated with. In 2022, Adam Levine was unmasked as a serial cheater by several women, including one he had a lengthy affair with, Sumner Stroh. The public response was ugly: Sumner was painted as a homewrecker, insulted for days, accused of victimising herself, being a clout chaser, and failing to uphold the speculated well-being of another woman.

She is far from being the only one it happened to.

While the "other woman" lacked legal punishment, the void has been filled by her social punishment. She got elevated to the rank of "homewrecker." In the collective imagination, the other woman's role is deeply vilified—she lacks empathy, is willing to dismantle another woman's life for personal gain, and, perhaps worst of all in 2025, she is not a "girl's girl."

But because her role is intrinsically indirect, the other woman only gets framed by getting her responsibility inflated, her motives speculated on, and her personhood questioned.

This is why in the case of Ariana Grande, the scandal made waves about a year ago when a series of alleged statements from Ethan Slater's ex-wife surfaced, including claims about being "devastated" over him dating Ariana. Other unverifiable statements also emerged, prompting the internet to dig into timelines and construct an accusatory story that painted Ariana as the villain.

It all seemed to die down as the massive Wicked marketing campaign unfolded, until The Cut published a personal essay by Dr. Lilly Jay herself, Ethan's ex-wife. In the piece, she recounts the living hell she endured: a painful divorce shortly after giving birth and nearly dying, all while her suffering played out publicly. The worst part being that Wicked—the movie that'll forever remind her of the worst period of her life—benefited from one of the most inescapable marketing campaigns of all time.

Dr. Lily Jay, in her letter—which I highly recommend reading—never mentioned Ariana Grande by name nor directly accused her of anything. Instead, it was an essay that eloquently recounted the personal struggles of enduring a very public breakup. Yet, according to tabloids, TikTokers, Redditors, and self-proclaimed moral juries across the internet, Ariana Grande was a homewrecker and responsible for ruining a mother's life.

The existence of the homewrecker as an archetype enables the public to punish the women they see fit for that role. She is both familiar and guilty to the public before they get the confirmation that a home was wrecked or not. Because, ultimately, it does not matter.

Far from being a newcomer, she's been around for a while, shaped by the different eras she went through. Today, she's the modern incarnation of the mythological Temptress, repackaged to fit the complexities of post-industrial, heteronormative dynamics. An enduring—and often unquestioned—cultural obsession rooted in the Bible's fixation on women's sins, with a habit of portraying them as inherently dangerous, seductive, and prone to the moral corruption of good Christian men.

Homewrecker scandals themselves still carry biblical connotations. Ariana Grande is regularly called "evil" for allegedly getting involved with Ethan Slater while his ex-wife had just given birth, and is portrayed as “stealing” him away. Meanwhile, the internet has cast Ariana and Dr. Lily Jay into a kind of Madonna-Whore contrast.

Ariana is framed as the attention-seeking, famous "whore" who always needs to seduce another woman's man, while Dr. Lily Jay is portrayed as a mother who endured hardship and didn’t deserve to have her life upended. They are pitted against each other in a dichotomy of virtue and evil. Very biblical.

This makes sense because, from biblical texts to modern movies, the homewrecker or temptress is portrayed as vicious and hell-bent on destroying a family's life. Leading to death, violence, or tragedy for all parties involved. This archetype cannot exist without the triangle: the homewrecker, the virtuous wife, and the husband—either hopelessly naive or a man simply "succumbing to his urges."

Fatal Attraction is one of those movies that solidified the homewrecker trope. A man has an affair while his wife and child are out of town. He quickly realises it was a mistake and wants to move on, but the other woman refuses to let go. She is relentless and dangerous.

The tension in Fatal Attraction—and the movie trope more broadly—is that the affair has consequences. But the harm doesn't come from, say, the husband's unhappiness or any internal issues threatening the family structure. Instead, the other woman is the external force causing the disruption. Adultery is framed as a threat outside the home, perpetrated by temptresses lurking outside.

Another example is the movie Chloé. If you have questionable taste in movies, you may have seen it. Chloé is a sex worker who falls in love with Julianne Moore and fabricates lies to come between her and her husband. She has sex with both of them (iconic), disrupting their household.

She ultimately kills herself, just like in Fatal Attraction. Order is restored. Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore kiss kiss and supposedly live happily ever after.

In both movies, the resolution can only follow one of two paths: either the husband leaves with the homewrecker, shattering the family structure, or she literally disappears—taking all the blame with her—allowing the wife to forgive her husband and peace to be restored in the household. Only the second option can be cathartic; the first one is too close to reality.

In an anti-capitalist version, they'd either become a ménage à trois, or Chloé and Julianne Moore would run away together.

But who are these women running around trying to annihilate happy homes? Well, you probably understand now that they don't exist. The homewrecker is a patriarchal invention that allows the man to cheat with limited consequences, while pinning the blame elsewhere. It’s a deeply capitalist narrative in which she serves as the scapegoat to preserve the sanctity of the household.

When Angelina Jolie was the homewrecker of the year 2002, after she got involved with Brad Pitt during his divorce from Jennifer Aniston, the public's reaction to her was, predictably, cruel. A recent Reddit post on r/AdulteryHate spits hate at her (20 years later), calling her an "altruistic narcissist" and a serial homewrecker—all while framing Jennifer Aniston as the Madonna in the dichotomy discussed earlier: beautiful, perfect, and "deserving of the best."

Calling women "serial homewreckers" is common because it's never about righting the wrongs for that one instance. No, they must be framed in a full narrative of repetitive evil, for the scapegoating to be cathartic.

When Ariana Grande faced an onslaught of accusations in the context of the homewrecking narrative, she was labeled a "serial homewrecker", but it also gets darker than this; some tweets retrospectively blame her for the Manchester Arena Bombing and too many blame her for ex-boyfriend Mac Miller's death.

It's not Ariana Grande's first rodeo with internet vilification; those exact same accusations and more have been thrown at her throughout her career. My point is that this time, the public dragging, while disguising itself as a self-righteous effort to address something deemed morally unacceptable in modern society, is quite clearly another instance of finding a socially acceptable excuse to destroy a woman's reputation under the guise that she deserved it.

And that's why I think that Ariana—as other women who found themselves in the unforgiving public eye —is not just a scapegoat to restore the idealised peace of what a household and a "good" marriage should look like, but also a scapegoat for restoring order to what it means to be a "good" woman. A girl's girl!

The Girl’s Girl Fallacy

In an interview with People magazine, Dr. Lily Jay allegedly used that term when discussing Ariana Grande. Except that she confiscated it from her, something akin to a jail sentence in girl's world: "She's not a girl's girl."

Though framed as solidarity, the self-policing to determine who is a 'girl's girl' directly benefits capitalist and gendered systems while setting us back decades. The scapegoating of womanhood itself is an all-too-common occurrence, and we've seen its playbook through other female celebrities countless times.

It's safe to say that being a girl's girl has become a staple of womanhood, a badge of honour for those who are willing to create strong bonds with other women. It's about prioritising women over everything you've internalised. It's like a little "my name is" tag on a polo shirt that signals to others: I'm safe to bond with. I know the codes.

So, being a girl's girl, I reckon, kind of adheres to the loose framework of pleasantness. A non-updated framework that claims that a girl's girl is the one who always privileges the comfort of other girls, even though the comfort of other girls is still mostly restrained by patriarchal standards.

In October, it seemed as though the entire world suddenly turned against Blake Lively. Snippets of her promoting the movie It Ends with Us—a film about domestic abuse—in a tone that many found too lighthearted and tone-deaf began circulating online. Meanwhile, the internet did its thing, digging up all of Blake's past mistakes and quickly making her the internet's enemy number one for a few weeks.

The nail in the coffin was when an old interview clip of her being rude to another female interviewer—who titled the video "The interview that made me want to quit my job"—began circulating. Blake Lively being rude to another fellow woman for no apparent reason sealed her reputation as this month's worst woman in the world. She failed the girl's girl test.

Turns out this was all part of a coordinated smear campaign to destroy her reputation and distract from allegations of sexual harassment against Justin Baldoni. The campaign worked so effectively that even the PR agency behind it reportedly expressed surprise at how well it succeeded. Turns out all they needed to do was plant some proof of her rudeness here and there, before the internet did its thing.

If you are a connoisseur of the quarterly campaigns of public women-hate campaigns, you'll notice that the pattern is mostly the same. One deviant set of behaviour from a woman and the whole world swears she’s not with us.

When Amber Heard found herself in a very public trial where she was painted as the abuser instead of the domestic violence victim she was, the consensus was that she could not be a "real" victim because she didn’t act like one. After the trial, a Twitter-based open letter titled “We Will Not Stand With You” started circulating.

Denying solidarity to someone being annihilated online becomes a way to signal that they are tarnishing the reputation of the group. It’s also a punishment for failing to conform to the group’s standards.

Similarly, when Ariana Grande is labeled a homewrecker and not a "girl's girl" by an overwhelming number of women, it’s another way of signalling that this is not how women behave. Women don’t hurt other women. Women don’t prioritise their relationship with a man over another woman’s well-being.

Sisterhood, it seems, is a solidarity that is difficult to earn—especially when the rules to deserve it are constantly shifting, and the path to progress remains unforgiving. It is built on the fear of being hurt. It stems from the dichotomous belief that men hurt and disappoint us, but women don’t, and if they do, they no longer deserve a seat at the table.

It makes sense that, in redefining what it means to relate to other women, we’d imagine a utopia—one where solidarity is by design, men don’t matter, and centuries (no, millennia) of internalised misogyny and patriarchal conditioning have been unlearned.

Of course, it’s all wishful thinking, and as so eloquently puts it, “She's not a girl's girl' is a cautionary tale that shrinks the paradoxes of girlhood into a narrow and limiting moral code.”2

If being a girl's girl is yet another parameter of girlhood and womanhood, I'd compare it to a black box where the rules are encoded but keep shifting, getting everyone who misbehaves out. Until, eventually, everyone is out.

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Like a lot of 7-year-old girls, I was diagnosed with an early-onset addiction to Barbie. I wanted it all—the dolls, the movies, the posters, the clothes—anything imprinted with the Barbie logo wasn’t safe from my chubby little hands. I was a full-on Barbie hoarder. So naturally, when MP3 players became a thing and Barbie released its own version, I wanted it so badly that I developed a case of temporary sleepwalking, whispering "Barbie MP3... Barbie MP3" to my mom in the middle of the night. Apparently, it was weird and scary, and to this day, no one believes me when I say I barely remember it.

The Barbie MP3 is a true relic of the 2000s. Not only did it connect you to the online game Barbie World through a premium account (endless shopping, pink hair, the world was your oyster), but the MP3 itself was customisable - it came in the shape of a Barbie with a range of hairstyles, clothes, and shoes. I was obsessed.

Although nothing quite matched its level of customization, the Barbie MP3 fit into a broader collection of digital artifacts made in the same spirit. At home, phones came in all shapes and colors: my mom had a red and white Nokia, my dad—true to dad fashion—had a gigantic grey phone with a keyboard attached (for no apparent reason?), and my brother had a simple black flip phone that perfectly mirrored the laid-back nature of a teenage boy. I didn’t have a phone yet, but I did have a very tasteful pink digital camera with a Hello Kitty keychain dangling from it. All our digital devices—MP3 players, iPods, Walkmans, Tamagotchis, Nintendos, you name it—came in a multitude of colors, shapes, and styles. You might have had a similar experience.

The gadgets were distinct by design; each device had a specific function, which necessitated its unique hardware. But it wasn’t just digital devices—the 90s and early 2000s were the pinnacle of unique, tacky, hyperbolic designs and personalization. To put it simply, everything was fun, from personal style to flip phones and cars. The popularity of Pimp My Ride — a show about maximalist car modding— tells you everything you need to know about that era. And when social media platforms like MySpace and Tumblr arrived, the focus was still on ultra-personalization, letting users express their identities through their profiles with favorite music, colors, and curated images. There’s a reason why many look back on that era as a time of visual abominations—aesthetic boundaries weren’t really a thing. But it’s also why many more remember it as a time of fun and creativity, aesthetic boundaries weren’t really a thing.

I love looking back on that stretch of time. My early digital experiences felt so different—more palpable, less pervasive. It was a radically different era compared to whatever is happening between me and my phone now. Like most people born around the 1990s and onwards, I got access to the internet and its boundless wonders when my brain wasn’t even fully developed, my neurons expanding and entangling with each megabyte in a danse macabre.

But there's also the bittersweet realization that this danse comes at an even higher cost than anticipated; trading attention for fun. It’s a violating feeling, knowing that your attention is part of something bigger - a sinister medley of corporate interests and surveillance.

The Attention Economy might not be new, but its monopoly by a handful of corporations is. Since it mainly occurs through a hyper-connected rectangular piece of metal, the solution has seemed pretty straightforward: going back to the other pieces of metal that did not have the capacity to hold our attention so greedily. This is partly how dumb technology has become so popular, with 42% of Gen Z adults and millenials expressing a strong desire to use devices that lack “advanced digital capabilities into their daily lives”.

While there's a clear fight to reclaim our attention, I believe something else is at play: digital and tech has become utterly boring. Inside, outside, hardware, software—they all look and feel the same, don’t they? You and I probably have the same Netflix catalog. Whenever someone my age shows me a Pinterest board for their home, I’m horrified to find it’s identical to mine. Google Maps will basically recommend the same exact type of minimalist coffee shops no matter where you are in the world—encouraging them, in turn, to proliferate in every corner of the earth. And I’ve lost track of what version of the iPhone is coming out next, they all look the same. Digital experiences are now so homogenised that, in contrast, the technology and digital culture of the 90s and 2000s feel like Willy Wonka’s factory—playful, random, personalised.

When I search "Phone" on Pinterest, I mostly find pink, glittery dumb phones that make a wannabe it-girl like me salivate. Chances are, Pinterest has flagged me as such, knowing only devices from the early 2000s match my aesthetic—because phones just don’t look cute anymore. It’s as if only the Y2K era can cater to those craving aesthetically pleasing technology. Even MySpace, early blogs and websites seem like a dream for someone with a Substack and a desire to display their personality on the homepage beyond fonts and limited color palettes.

What I'm saying is that the analog revival is tied to a long-standing Y2K aesthetic—one that cannot find a home in today’s sleek and minimalist digital world. So while many buying dumb phones genuinely want to detach from technology, another part craves the aesthetics of an era that can only be captured through its old digital devices, and these groups often overlap. This is why digital cameras have been experiencing such a revival1. You see posts on TikTok showcasing the digital cameras themselves, but it's also about the unique feel of what they capture2. I've been eyeing digital camera listings for a while because they not only look cool but also anchor me in reality in ways smartphones never could. Smartphones record and sanitize moments, cameras capture memories and life itself3. When describes the immediate nostalgic power of using a digital camera in her essay, she explains perfectly how "it's an activity to take photos, not something that takes me out of the now"—something smartphones have failed to achieve.

This is what Charli XCX's birthday shots were desperately trying to recreate through digital camera-esque photos, but the presence of smartphones ruins the effect, rendering the results uncanny. It’s as if the memories are stuck in a transient nostalgic space, trying to imitate real moments but failing because of how manufactured it all looks.

But there’s a reason we got here - smartphones and all. As digital evolved, the demand for more efficient and integrated experiences grew—carrying five different devices and hoarding music and movies was not ideal anymore. At the same time, there was a need to capture people’s attention in ways that were both efficient and measurable. So, devices began to prioritize integration over collection, homogenization over self-expression.

I sometimes consider deleting my Spotify account because my algorithm seems more interested in force-spooning me Sabrina Carpenter than letting me gravitate towards her naturally, like I would in a record shop. So recently, when the aux in our car broke, instead of buying yet another one, my eyes lit up with the most genius alternative: “Let’s just buy some CDs.” We’ve been going around music stores shopping for albums and vinyls, while this annoying voice in my head keeps saying, “Wow, just like in the movies.” No algorithm to tell me what to listen to, thousands of choices at my fingertips, and that unbeatable feeling that I’m being an active participant in my life - choosing, rather than being chosen for.

But here’s the catch: every object looks shinier through nostalgia-tinted glasses, making it hard to distinguish those that truly belong to the past from those born out of corporate interests and manufactured nostalgia. Enter Nokia’s latest flip phone in collaboration with Mattel: a $130 pink Barbie flip-phone that aims to “take smartphone-addicted teens back to simpler times.” It’s like a digital Frankenstein, stitched together with longings for past aesthetic devices and hopes that they can also fix our attention spans. The bastard child of my Pinterest feed and I.

To me, it represents a shift in analog, where it's not just about returning to old devices but creating new ones that imitate the past and cater to the desire for disconnection. Basically, the effort to fight online addiction using nostalgic devices has led to the creation of new digital objects that mimic the old, all to align with current corporate interests.

The reason this happened, in my opinion, is partly because addiction to digital is both misunderstood and mismanaged. There's this inherent belief that the only way to avoid being addicted to social media is to have no social media at all, that to avoid endless scrolling, you need nothing to scroll on. But what if reclaiming one’s attention can only be done internally, not externally? At least, it certainly isn’t something that can be fixed by the very entities that created the problem in the first place.

Buying dumb phones and digital cameras is innocent, nostalgic, satisfying, and grounding. The act itself is harmless. The problem arises when curiosity gets translated into new revenue streams, like when a brand-new $130 Barbie dumb phone is marketed to fit the interest for analog.

Where our attention goes, corporations follow. If they know you want a dumb phone, they'll give you one—even a thousand—in every color you could think of. And just like that, we end up right back where we started. From the moment TV became available to the average consumer, the commodification of attention became an issue. Moving to the next digital device never fixed it, it simply allowed it to shape-shift.

Attention is a scarce currency, and it will always be preyed upon. Reclaiming our attention is easier said than done. With tech corporations’ grip on it growing beyond even their own understanding, to the point where life feels indistinguishable from our connected devices, there may be no escaping the Attention Economy, at least not entirely. The only option left might be to reclaim it on your own terms—at least, I know I’ll keep trying to do so.

Because capitalism thrives on selling solutions to the very problems it creates, there will always be a brand popping up around the corner, ready to tackle the next issue, arms open, brand-new Barbie phone in hand. One day, going down the street to buy a new CD for the car, I might find myself in a Spotify-branded record shop without even noticing.

Oh, how ironic.

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I was 14 when I first told my mom that I wasn’t sure I still considered myself a Muslim. Sitting across from her at the dinner table, I couldn't bring myself to look up. Her gaze felt heavy

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It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God or that I felt no attachment to Islam. I just needed to find my own way back to it, to understand what it meant to me and how I related to it before I could fully commit.

It took me some time to decide what faith truly meant to me. I had a vague idea—I knew I believed in God, but I wasn’t sure I accepted a graphic version of heaven and hell or a God who would condemn me to eternal flames just because I liked girls. I knew I didn’t believe in a rigid set of societal rules that one had to obey to be deemed worthy of resting on fluffy clouds forever. I didn’t believe in an unforgiving God, nor in one who expected believers to look and act a certain way. But I did believe in something greater than myself. I believed in higher forces, whatever that meant, and I believed that having faith in something—whether in myself or in the idea that things would turn out okay—could help good things materialise.

Yes, I believed in being delusional as a spiritual practice before it even started trending.

"Anyone who's anybody was delusional," says current it-girl Julia Fox on a podcast. In a TikTok clip from the episode, Fox offers her advice on how to "make it." The TikTok video has a similar vibe to that clip of Kim Kardashian advising young women to work hard because “no one wants to work these days.” The common thread in both pieces of advice is that, while these women likely worked hard, they can’t really pinpoint what led them to a level of astronomical success that most people can only dream of. Putting it all on pure luck isn't glamorous or inspirational, so the only advice left to give is that Lady Serendipity favours those who try.1

Failure has a bad rep. Our entire system relies on convincing people that they are the masters of their own destiny and can, therefore, avoid it. Meritocracy, the American Dream, upward social mobility—all these deeply rooted societal beliefs rest on the idea that trying and working hard will inevitably move you up the ladder. These beliefs are spiritual in their own right, grounded in the conviction that your actions can positively and inevitably impact your life’s trajectory. And if someone can’t seem to climb the ladder? They simply didn’t believe enough. What’s characteristic of these beliefs is that they evade the spiritual label by masquerading as fact: if you try hard enough, you will succeed.

But the “delusion” trend carries some of these sentiments while taking a more explicit approach to faith. On TikTok, being ‘delulu’ falls under the “Manifestation” side of the app, or what trend journalists sometimes refer to as “New Age Spirituality.” Being delulu is all about believing in something so intensely that it eventually materialises. This belief holds that your thoughts can mould the universe like a piece of Play-Doh. These delusions include, but are not limited to, making someone fall in love with you, landing a dream job, gaining Instagram followers, getting rich, and whatever else your heart desires.

Being “delulu” is “manifesting” on crack, but in both cases, it’s all about putting actions and thoughts to work—though mainly thoughts—and believing that the outcome you’re hoping for will happen. Just as people have believed they could escape their social class through sheer will and hard work since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

“TikTok’s greatest trick is its ability to rebrand things that have always existed.”2 Manifesting, or being delusional are far from being new practices, but as they go viral on TikTok, they get picked up as novelties that get to define a whole generation’s approach to spirituality. If you search for 'modern spirituality' on Google, you'll mostly encounter sensationalist headlines explaining how Gen-Z’s spirituality is now defined by manifesting success, the occult, and other niche practices. As always, TikTok is so culturally influential that people often forget how far it is from being a truthful representation of young people’s approach to life.

I also think that TikTok often provides easily digestible and self-explanatory examples for those eager to diagnose an entire generation with cultural narcissism. For instance, in a recent essay, cultural commentator Freya India argues that her generation’s approach to religion is fundamentally egotistical and lacks the depth and moral guardrails that once made religion valuable. Most of the examples she pulls are from TikTok trends. She uses a dichotomous lens to contrast a supposedly glorious past with a disheartening present. The core of her argument is this:

“We define ourselves by our diagnoses. And we mimic religion, all the time. We don’t pray at night; we repeat positive affirmations. We don’t confess; we trauma dump. We don’t seek salvation; we go on healing journeys. We don’t resist temptation from the devil; we reframe intrusive thoughts. We don’t exorcise evil spirits; we release trauma. And of course we don’t talk to God, c’mon—we give a “specific request to the universe” that “has a greater plan””

By using a vague “we” to supposedly define the actions of a monolithic generation (and to coerce agreement3) Freya laments the decline of a generation that has traded God for the algorithm. She specifically critiques a generation that would rather invest in therapy-speak and mimic religious sentiments than commit to an actual religion. A generation that, sadly, prefers to worship itself rather than God.

While much of the essay critiques what religion is lacking, it also sets the stage for a solution—her solution. Freya states, "What's missing, then, from this new religion, is moral guidance," and adds, "I think we underestimate how hard it is for young people today to feel their way through life without moral guardrails and guidance.”

But there's a significant gap in her argument. Her depiction of modern spirituality reads like a hasty conflation of various TikTok trends, framed as a lament for the decline of Christianity—not just religiously, but also culturally. This is evident in the language she uses and in the specific aspects of religion she claims are missing: prayer, confession, seeking salvation, the absence of God, and the moral aspects of faith. These are presented as solutions to the emptiness and instability she perceives in young people.

I won’t delve into the specifics of how pieces like Freya’s borrow common concerns to subtly introduce conservative ideological solutions, but I highly recommend reading ’s piece on this topic, which dives into the politics of Freya’s blog. Liberty encourages us to read these pieces critically and to ask questions like, “What ideal world or system is being proposed, and what needs to change in order to achieve it?”

In this specific case, it's pretty clear that the essay is more about manufacturing the conditions to justify the need for a return to Christian dogma and rules than offering a genuine assessment of faith. Her assessment of modern faith is unfortunately quite in line with what journalists tend to report when it comes to ‘Gen-Z spirituality’, but isn’t interested in what spirituality really looks like. Because Freya isn't truly mourning the decline of spirituality; she's lamenting the decline of its institutionalised version—the one that influences politics, provides moral guidance, enforces societal rules, and, you know, discriminates against those who aren't cis or straight.

I think this is important because we need to be wary of narratives that depict an entire generation as lost and unstable while simultaneously offering packaged solutions rooted in conservatism and cultural Christianity. Freya’s essay was particularly alarming to me because of how popular it became and how many people agreed with her arguments and solutions, even those I know who don’t share her politics but seemed oblivious to the underlying subtext.

Not to summon him again, but this is reminiscent of how 'thinkers' like Jordan Peterson draw young men into muddy right-wing waters by presenting solutions to their problems that are anchored in conservative and culturally christian values. My concern with these narratives is their omnipresence and how easy it is to fall for them. The pipeline from self-improvement or seeking meaning to encountering cultural pieces like Freya’s or books like Jordan’s, only to slip into conservatism and bigotry, is dangerously easy to slip into.

To be clear, I’m not discussing Christianity as a religion, but rather as a set of rules and a cultural force often invoked by the right to uphold the status quo. As David Taylor reports on the riots in the UK, 'Tommy Robinson recently led a protest in central London where “Christ is King” was chanted from the stage. A Pentecostal bishop also stood on stage and declared that he and the crowd were “at war” with Muslims,' lamenting the use of religion to incite hate."

"Moral guardrails" often translate into rigid societal rules that oppose individual freedom and clash with the status quo. In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson (who was wearing a jacket with the Madonna and Child), Elon Musk described himself as a 'cultural Christian,' meaning he believes in Christian values but isn’t a practicing Christian. He went on to say that a society that loses religion starts to become anti-natalist, adding that 'having a child is a vote for the future.' It’s ironic to hear this from the same man who declared his daughter was dead to him because she became transgender and who has also spread lies and hate about female boxer Imane Khelif.

The narrative that spirituality and religion are dying, becoming egocentric or esoteric is hasty. The truth more likely lies somewhere in the fact that people are unlearning decades of religious teachings that taught them being themselves was incompatible with a religious or spiritual practice.

In a recent article for Teen Vogue, Liz Bucar writes about the rise of spirituality among young people. She explains that “the issue turning young people away from religion more than any other is the anti-LGBTQ+ positions of some religious communities,” and indeed, “A recent study by PRRI found that 60% of young adults who no longer identify with their childhood religion left because of negative teachings and treatment of gay and lesbian people.” Someone in the article, Stovin, who identifies as queer, says ‘More people who are raised Christian are becoming more spiritual because the faith may still be important to them, but the institution is hostile.’

For the longest time, I struggled to reconcile my religion with my sexual identity. I love Islam—I truly do. I find peace and comfort in it. But for a while, I felt like I didn’t belong, that anyone I spoke to who practiced this religion would tell me I’d burn in hell anyway, so what was the point? I’ve had to redefine what it means to be Muslim (and still am.) What’s helped is seeing how much Islam is evolving with new generations, adapting to more accepting societal values. Pages like The Queer Muslim Project mean the world to me. I love, love, love that we’re finding new ways to redefine institutionalised religions that for so long made us feel like we didn’t exist.

I love that ‘my generation’ is redefining what religion and spirituality mean beyond the institutions that have tried to confine and imprint societal rules on them. It’s not that spirituality is dead; it’s that the traditional form of spirituality, which has empowered the same type of people for centuries, is evolving, becoming mainstream, and slipping out of the realms of control. Conservatives often gatekeep faith, insisting that it requires a specific set of rules to be considered true religion, because anything that grows outside of that framework is seen as uncontrollable. When people choose to find their own path to religion—believing they can be gay, trans, or any other identity supposedly forbidden by sacred texts, while still believing in God and praying in their own way—it’s a little bit of a revolution, isn’t it?