Two video essays
May. 28th, 2026 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonster...that I found thought-provoking. Two hours long each, but very talky - I listened/semi-watched while doing other stuff, and I don't think I missed much that way.
If Pretty Is a Privilege, Ugly Is a Curse by Olurinatti: This is not, as I half-expected from the title, someone's personal plea to be less mean to unattractive people. It is actually a very thorough analysis of lookism as a form of structural inequality. It's SO uncomfortable to watch, because more than just about any other "category" of person I can think of, labelling someone as conventionally unattractive still feels like a malicious personal attack as opposed to an objective trait that materially affects their life. And yet, there is a very strong cultural consensus around beauty standards that operates independent of who a given individual does or doesn't find attractive, and these standards affect everything from employment opportunities to criminal justice outcomes. Our reluctance to discuss the issue in structural terms is really just one more example of lookism in action: we wholeheartedly embrace the premise that ugliness is an inherently bad thing, and a personal failing to be addressed on a personal level by some combination of grooming, lifestyle changes and beauty therapies. We can no more envision a movement of class solidarity among ugly people than among dishonest people, or selfish people, or people who are in any other way choosing to suck.
I'm not ready for this tier of activism, tbh. I'm too much in the thick of existential despair over the erosion of my own pretty privilege by ageing and weight gain. But hey, who knows, maybe the video has planted a seed?
The Rise and Fall of Misery Memoirs by Sarah Z: This video essay connects misery memoirs, the satanic panic, fraudulent holocaust survivor stories and the phenomenon of "celebrity" defectors from repressive regimes as different iterations of the same storytelling template within our hyperindividualist society: a vulnerable, childlike narrator recounts the unspeakable exotic horrors they have endured through a strictly personal lens, ending with an uplifting message about overcoming adversity through personal resilience. The audience enjoys a good, cathartic cry and a sense of virtue for having borne witness to the suffering. No further action is asked of them. No analysis of the structural failings that allowed that suffering to occur is admitted. Survivor stories that DO demand action or advocate for policy change, or that end with the survivor failing to perform the expected inspirational boostrap-pull, get shunted aside.
In my teens I remember voyeuristically devouring the "trauma" parts of popular mismems without much interest in the "uplifting" final act; I spent a good chunk of my twenties reading about the Holocaust and North Korea and various recent wars in the Middle East. So I've never had much interest in the bootstrappy stuff, but that's not a virtue so much as a mismatch between the bootstraps and my more cynical aesthetic tastes; I am absolutely guilty many times over of consuming real hardships as entertainment. Like Sarah Z, I'm left with no idea what to do about any of this, nor do I think that curiosity about the dark stuff in other people's lives is something it is necessarily either possible or desirable to excise from human nature. But it's something I think is worth reflecting on, especially when that natural human ghoulish streak collides with broader political trends in a way that discourages reform, rewards fraud, and silences the large majority of survivors whose complicated life stories do not fit into a neat narrative template.
If Pretty Is a Privilege, Ugly Is a Curse by Olurinatti: This is not, as I half-expected from the title, someone's personal plea to be less mean to unattractive people. It is actually a very thorough analysis of lookism as a form of structural inequality. It's SO uncomfortable to watch, because more than just about any other "category" of person I can think of, labelling someone as conventionally unattractive still feels like a malicious personal attack as opposed to an objective trait that materially affects their life. And yet, there is a very strong cultural consensus around beauty standards that operates independent of who a given individual does or doesn't find attractive, and these standards affect everything from employment opportunities to criminal justice outcomes. Our reluctance to discuss the issue in structural terms is really just one more example of lookism in action: we wholeheartedly embrace the premise that ugliness is an inherently bad thing, and a personal failing to be addressed on a personal level by some combination of grooming, lifestyle changes and beauty therapies. We can no more envision a movement of class solidarity among ugly people than among dishonest people, or selfish people, or people who are in any other way choosing to suck.
I'm not ready for this tier of activism, tbh. I'm too much in the thick of existential despair over the erosion of my own pretty privilege by ageing and weight gain. But hey, who knows, maybe the video has planted a seed?
The Rise and Fall of Misery Memoirs by Sarah Z: This video essay connects misery memoirs, the satanic panic, fraudulent holocaust survivor stories and the phenomenon of "celebrity" defectors from repressive regimes as different iterations of the same storytelling template within our hyperindividualist society: a vulnerable, childlike narrator recounts the unspeakable exotic horrors they have endured through a strictly personal lens, ending with an uplifting message about overcoming adversity through personal resilience. The audience enjoys a good, cathartic cry and a sense of virtue for having borne witness to the suffering. No further action is asked of them. No analysis of the structural failings that allowed that suffering to occur is admitted. Survivor stories that DO demand action or advocate for policy change, or that end with the survivor failing to perform the expected inspirational boostrap-pull, get shunted aside.
In my teens I remember voyeuristically devouring the "trauma" parts of popular mismems without much interest in the "uplifting" final act; I spent a good chunk of my twenties reading about the Holocaust and North Korea and various recent wars in the Middle East. So I've never had much interest in the bootstrappy stuff, but that's not a virtue so much as a mismatch between the bootstraps and my more cynical aesthetic tastes; I am absolutely guilty many times over of consuming real hardships as entertainment. Like Sarah Z, I'm left with no idea what to do about any of this, nor do I think that curiosity about the dark stuff in other people's lives is something it is necessarily either possible or desirable to excise from human nature. But it's something I think is worth reflecting on, especially when that natural human ghoulish streak collides with broader political trends in a way that discourages reform, rewards fraud, and silences the large majority of survivors whose complicated life stories do not fit into a neat narrative template.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-28 02:40 pm (UTC)I think I got about halfway through the Sarah Z video and got bored. Or not bored, but I had to pause it for some reason, and wasn't compelled to finish it later. Or do remember the grifters who faked traumatic backstories for the cash grab, and it left me feeling very slimy. Despite my love of horror movies, I don't have much taste for nonfiction misery porn, specifically because it's nonfiction. True crime is the same way. It does feel voyeuristic to me.
I do have a habit of reading advice columns that probably scratch the same itch, though. Stories of women dating terrible, terrible men who ask things like, "How can I make him stop being so mean to me?" and the answer is clearly, "OMG DUMP HIM!" I'm sure it comes from the same place. It's frustrating to read those, and worth reflecting on why I keep doing it, as you say.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-04 09:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-05 02:48 pm (UTC)Advice columns are definitely my guilty pleasure. I don't think I realized it until fairly recently. It's a problem!