Daily-Dose

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From New Yorker

From Vox

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss becoming a meme that’s now used to point out the hollowness of capitalism or organizations like the CIA co-opting social justice talk feels like the last gasps of the girlboss. As the pandemic brought job losses and shined a light on wealth inequality, many of us may be more cynical and weary about our corporate overlords — no matter what form they take — than we were in 2013.

Solomon, who specializes in gender psychology at Northwestern, pointed me to Audre Lorde’s 1984 essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Lorde wrote about how systems like white supremacy and patriarchy perpetuate themselves and how difficult it is to break them apart:

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

In the context of girlbosses, putting these women in powerful positions was never going to buck the capitalist and patriarchal system because there was never an intent to change it — just wield it. Solomon explains that a lot of girlbosses learned to navigate and were supported by a capitalist system. The more they were exposed, the better the rest of us got at recognizing that it “sure as hell is just easier to use the master’s tools,” Solomon said.

Maybe mocking the girlboss to the point of redefinition takes back a little of that power. Redefined through comedy, she turns into a joke. The girlboss can’t hurt you if you can laugh at her.

Laughing makes it easier to admit that we got played, that we were once able to foolishly hope that a group of women were going to fix an entire system. It’s pretty funny, even if we wanted them to.

“Donald Trump brought a knife to a social media gunfight and came off looking weak,” opined NBC News — “and at the hands of a woman of color to boot.”

Teigen wasn’t a johnny-come-lately in her trolling of Trump, though. She’d been keeping him apprised of her general disdain for him for years before he took office, and strikingly, she did so in the same way she kept letting Stodden know she hated them. She seems to have held both Trump and Stodden in the same category in her mind, and she tended to use the same tactics on them both.

“hey! been a while,” Teigen tweeted at Trump out of the blue in 2012. “I fucking hate you.”

There is of course a difference between tweeting mean things to the president of the United States and tweeting mean things to a 16-year-old. There is also a difference between tweeting mean things to Donald Trump in 2012, when he was just a racist billionaire in his 60s and held no public office, and tweeting them to a 16-year-old. But that difference seems to have been hard for Teigen to see in 2012.

The Chrissy Teigen backlash has been building for years

 Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Chrissy Teigen and John Legend at the 2014 Met Gala.

A backlash against Teigen has been mounting for a while now. No one can be declared “the internet’s funniest (and frankest) person” without courting overexposure. Moreover, Teigen’s status as one of Trump’s most vocal celebrity critics has made her a favorite target of the right-wing spectrum of the internet. (She’s been extensively harassed by QAnon followers.) So hisses of incipient anger have been brewing around her every post for years.

In 2017, the popular celebrity gossip blogger Nicki Swift put together a video called “Shady Things About Chrissy Teigen Everyone Just Ignores.” Many of the offenses listed in the video are fairly benign, like Teigen’s tendency to discuss her and her husband’s sex life in more detail than a lot of other celebs would offer. But some of them tellingly foreshadowed the tweets to Stodden that would resurface in 2021: Teigen calling then-22-year-old Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham “a whore” who “everyone hates” in 2013; Teigen writing of then-9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis in 2013, “i am forced to like quvenzhané wallis because she is a child right? okay fine.”

In October of 2020, the Chrissy Teigen backlash began to simmer. That month, Teigen suffered a stillbirth, one she announced publicly with black-and-white photos of herself in the throes of grief. Some onlookers jeered at the photos, arguing that they reduced a personal tragedy into a tacky bid for attention. “Chrissy Teigen is so distraught over her miscarriage that she took the time to pose for a photo of herself crying, in black and white for dramatic effect, then shared that photo with the world along with her words. Stop it,” said one commenter.

A counter-backlash eventually emerged in that case, with multiple outlets arguing that taking photographs can be an essential part of the grieving process for the parents of stillborn children and that Teigen’s public vulnerability could lessen the stigma surrounding pregnancy loss. Teigen herself turned the whole incident into the fodder for a raw and vulnerable Medium post later that month.

“I cannot express how little I care that you hate the photos,” Teigen wrote. “How little I care that it’s something you wouldn’t have done. I lived it, I chose to do it, and more than anything, these photos aren’t for anyone but the people who have lived this or are curious enough to wonder what something like this is like. These photos are only for the people who need them. The thoughts of others do not matter to me.”

The backlash died down, but it hadn’t been fully averted. In February of 2021, Teigen started a Twitter prompt thread on an apparently anodyne subject — “what’s the most expensive thing you’ve eaten that you thought sucked?” — and paired it with a jokey anecdote about having once accidentally ordered a $13,000 bottle of wine. Her followers erupted into an eat-the-rich fury.

“I don’t think I have ever had 13 thousand dollars at one time, but great story Chrissy!” wrote one.

“is someone forcing you to tell the world these things,” tweeted another.

“Chrissy Teigen” began trending worldwide on Twitter, signifying that Teigen had become that day’s main character. “worst nightmare,” Teigen tweeted in response.

People were starting to get bored with Teigen, and it sure seemed like many of them were looking for any excuse to turn on her. Teigen was too savvy to the ways of the internet not to see it coming. In 2019, she told Vanity Fair she’d turned down an offer to host “a high-profile nighttime talk show” for fear of overexposure.

“It was just too much attention and focus on me,” she said. “It’s almost like the more things you do, the closer you are to getting canceled. It’s so scary to me — to have the world turn on you and hate you.”

Teigen is well aware of how cancellation works on Twitter. In 2020, she was central to the cancellation of food writer Alison Roman, who lost her New York Times column and (Teigen-produced) cooking show after criticizing Teigen and Marie Kondo in an interview for “selling out” with their product lines. Teigen publicly announced her hurt feelings, and the Alison Roman backlash took off.

In that case, Teigen accepted Roman’s apology and made a point of noting that she didn’t support the swarms of her followers who had attacked Roman. She added that she identified with Roman.

“I remember the exact time I realized I wasn’t allowed to say whatever popped in my head-that I couldn’t just say things in the way that so many of my friends were saying,” Teigen tweeted. “Before, I never really knew where I stood in the industry, in the world. Eventually, I realized that once the relatable ‘snarky girl who didn’t care’ became a pretty successful cookbook author and had more power in the industry, I couldn’t just say whatever the fuck I wanted. The more we grow, the more we get those wakeup calls.”

So Teigen could see her cancellation coming. But it wasn’t until May 2021, when Stodden revealed how Teigen had bullied her, and it became clear that Teigen had done something genuinely horrible and not just a little cringey, that her cancellation truly arrived.

The targets of Teigen’s Twitter bullying were all people who the pop culture of the 2000s treated as acceptable targets

 Michael Tullberg/Getty Images
Courtney Stodden at the Hollywood Museum on December 5, 2019, in Hollywood, California.

In the wake of Stodden’s video post, news outlets have unearthed other old Teigen tweets that, it is now clear, were in dismayingly bad taste. “Lindsay adds a few more slits to her wrists when she sees emma stone,” Teigen tweeted in 2011 of Lindsay Lohan, who has admitted to struggling with self-harm. Those Farrah Abraham tweets from 2013 that made the rounds in Nicki Swift’s 2017 video are now circulating again.

Teigen’s reputation-damaging tweets all share a certain essential DNA. They are all tweets mocking girls and femmes whom the pop culture of the late ’00s and early ’10s had made it clear were fair game for mockery: People who read as girls (Stodden did not come out as nonbinary until 2021), and who the culture at large considered to be too trashy, too slutty, too showy. Girly, but not in the right way. (Not that there was a right way.)

What Teigen said on Twitter about and to those people was genuinely horrible, and it is clear that she targeted them because pop culture had given her permission to do so. Even outlets like Jezebel, “a supposedly feminist website,” were mocking Stodden in 2012. Doing so was part of the snarky ethos that defined Jezebel and its more famous cousin, Gawker.

So in the early ’10s, these tweets didn’t hurt Teigen. Instead, they were part of what made her seem real and funny. Then, as now, Twitter rewarded cruelty, as long as it was directed at those the in-group considered to be “the right people.” But then, unlike now, “the right people” could include teenagers trapped in abusive relationships with adults.

The attributes on display in the tweets that have led to Teigen’s downfall appear to be some of the same attributes that made Teigen so widely beloved for so long: her lack of filter, her love of roasting people widely agreed at the time to be terrible. What’s changed is that now, it’s clear that the way she wielded them was fundamentally misdirected.

Our great reckoning with how we talk about women and femmes over the course of the Me Too decade has changed the way Twitter works. And in the process, it’s bringing down the woman who used to rule it.

From The Hindu: Sports

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