With that said, the term “pick-me” actually originated in the Black American online community in the early 2010s, and its meaning has since been altered because few people understand the context of its creation.

“Ladies! Your home should be clean while your man is at work. If you can’t keep house, don’t expect to keep a man.” These sorts of memes were common in the 2010s. Accompanying the caption was a photograph that typically featured the poster, a Black woman, posing as a domestic goddess.

The image above is of Dominican-American influencer and model, Amara La Negra.

This attitude isn’t all that surprising and is fairly common within Black American culture. It’s particularly prevalent among church-going types, although I’d say the community as a whole tends to be socially conservative.

Within that context, romantic relationships have clear gender role expectations. When I was a child, I don’t remember my father cooking or cleaning at all. That duty was left to my stepmother. This wasn’t considered unusual or unfair.

Anyway, as these images became more prevalent on social media, millennial Black women began to mock them. So in the original context, “pick-me” meant a woman who put down other women for male approval. The specific offense wasn’t having traditional preferences or even living traditionally—it was the public performance of superiority over other women, the “I’m not like other girls” energy paired with explicit put-downs.

Simple, right?

Most cultures have some version of women competing for male attention and approval. What made the original “pick-me” posts so offensive wasn’t that these women had traditional values or wanted to attract men with domestic skills. It was that they broke the unspoken rule: you’re not supposed to say it out loud. You’re not supposed to explicitly position yourself as superior to other women in the competition for male approval.

The whole discourse around “pick-me” reveals our collective anxiety about acknowledging that female competition exists. We’ve created an elaborate performance of female solidarity that requires pretending we’re not competing, even when we obviously are. The “pick-me” label functions as social punishment for breaking this code.

As the term left the Black community, it’s also lost much of its actual meaning.

Given that femininity and gender expression vary cross-culturally, this isn’t all that surprising. Mainstream liberal feminist leaning people have appropriated the term to basically mean “any woman who doesn’t perform progressive feminism correctly.” Which is …odd.

Woman like to cook for her boyfriend? Pick-me. Do women have traditional relationship preferences? Pick-me. Woman not identify with certain feminist positions? Pick-me. The term has become a catch-all for policing women who make different choices.

The irony is delicious. Calling someone a “pick-me” is itself a form of female competition. It’s just competing for social capital and moral status within female hierarchies rather than competing for male approval. Both are forms of intrasexual competition. We’re just more comfortable with one than the other.

We’ve collectively decided that competing to be the most enlightened feminist, the most politically correct, the most morally superior woman is acceptable.

But competing for romantic or sexual success by emphasizing traditionally feminine qualities? Unacceptable. Both involve women positioning themselves above other women. Both involve claiming “I’m better than those other women.” The only difference is what you’re claiming to be better at.

The original “pick-me” callout served a purpose: it named a specific toxic behavior of women tearing down other women for male validation. But now it’s been weaponized into a tool for policing any woman who steps outside progressive orthodoxy about gender roles.

The discourse has come full circle, and nobody seems to notice.

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A scandal in the Japanese idol world ranges from social rules being broken (like openly promoting oneself with a romantic partner, which breaks the illusion of availability) to actual legal violations. As I wrote in a previous post about my experiences working in the J-pop industry, most of the rules laid out for idols aren’t 100% real. In fact, what separates an “idol” from any other type of “talent” in Japan isn’t their modality of entertainment but rather arbitrary social rules that their fans are well aware of. Everyone knows the game being played. The question is what happens when someone breaks the unspoken contract.

The scandal getting the most press with Western audiences now is the firing of young gravure idol and actress Maya Imamori for the grand crime of… underage drinking.

Young Maya, just 19, broke the law by not being 20, which is the age of maturity in Japan and the legal drinking age. The actress made her grand debut earlier this year as the first Black female ranger in Super Sentai (the show on which the American series Power Rangers is based). When the news broke, her agency swiftly terminated her contract, erased her scenes from the series, and removed her name from all credits and promotional materials. Toei publicly apologized to fans and sponsors for the trouble caused.

When Maya was 17, she was legally able to be a gravure idol, an industry in Japan that features young women in bikinis and sensual posing. Let that sink in for a moment. Sexual imagery? Perfectly fine for a 17-year-old. Having a beer at 19? Career over.

Another, smaller idol scandal also occurred. This time, 17-year-old Fujisaki Azu posted an innocent photo of herself at the movie theater with a snack in tow. It didn’t take Japanese internet sleuths long to discover a man’s reflection in the plastic cup she was holding. As this post gained traction online, Azu’s management caved and posted an apology. The high schooler was sacked from her role as an idol and released a long letter of atonement for her “careless actions” of having a boyfriend.

The idol community isn’t new to such scandals. While management companies consider scandals to be financial burdens for them, it’s really a feature of the industry, not a bug. At any time, your favorite idol could be taken down by something as trivial as being photographed with the wrong person or as serious as a legal violation. The constant threat of exposure creates a perpetual state of tension that keeps fans invested and idols compliant.

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What Westerners Don’t GET

Due to the Maya Imamori scandal going viral, Western Super Sentai fans have provided a few theories as to why they think she has been punished so severely. Many of them have to do with identity. Imamori is half Filipino, and some have suggested that this is a racist representation. Others have suggested that this was just plain old misogyny.

People decry this as examples of sexism, and this is undeniably the truth in some instances. Take the case of Becky (the Japanese TV personality, not to be confused with British YouTuber Beckii Cruel), who in 2016 had an affair with a married guitarist and saw her entire career demolished while the man continued performing.

Or consider Maho Yamaguchi, the NGT48 member who was assaulted by two fans in 2018. When she spoke out about the attack and alleged that other members had leaked her personal information to her attackers, management forced her to apologize for “causing trouble.” She eventually left the group entirely after the company’s investigation cleared everyone involved and did nothing to address her safety concerns.

But many male Japanese celebs have lost their careers for drug use, too. Musician and actor Pierre Taki was arrested in 2019 for cocaine use and became essentially a non-person overnight. His music was pulled from stores and streaming services, his voice was removed from video games like Kingdom Hearts III and the Japanese dub of Frozen (he voiced Olaf), and his past work was wiped from airwaves and internet sites. This practice, known as “jishuku” or “self-restraint,” has been standard in Japanese entertainment for decades.

While the Japanese public tends to be unusually harsh towards women in similar social situations to men, there have been plenty of cases of Japanese male entertainers caught with drugs, having their entire careers cancelled. This isn’t purely about gender, though gender certainly amplifies the punishment in specific cases.

Idol Culture & The Economics of TRUST

Idols are so scandal-prone because the function of an idol operates as a high-trust figure within the Japanese media ecosystem. Idols, by and large, are salespeople whose relationships with fans are understood as parasocial relationships built on an “illusion of intimacy.” In Imamori’s case, she was a star for a children’s show and was expected to uphold certain high-trust standards in relation to this role.

Americans who bring up her gravure career don’t understand that sensuality in Japan isn’t perceived the same way that it is in America. There are politicians in the Japanese Diet who are former gravure models. This isn’t America, where the slightest sexual infraction is socially damning to a woman. Instead, it isn’t the fact that she drank alcohol that bothers people. It’s that she willingly broke a law and got caught doing it.

As for Fujisaki, who had a boyfriend, some of it is because she is a woman and serves as a pseudo-girlfriend for obsessive fans. But a lot of it is also because an element of trust is broken. The idol industry specifically incentivizes building relationships like this with fans, creating emotional and financial investments that fans perceive as reciprocal.

I have a friend who was a young Western woman who went mega viral and became an idol in Japan. I won’t say her name because I’m not certain if this story is public, but most people would know her. She told me that she had a super fan who invested in buying her gifts she hadn’t asked for from the time she was a young adolescent. After she stopped being an idol, she became a normal influencer and showed off her boyfriend (as women do). This Japanese fan wrote an angry letter to her father that included an invoice for all of the gifts she’d received over the time span. “I was intending for her to marry me. Now that will not be happening, you need to pay me restitution for the time and money I spent on her.”

Giving & receiving monetary gifts for atonement or a breach of a social duty is normal in Japan. When Becky’s affair was revealed, Japanese law actually allowed Kawatani’s wife to seek damages from Becky as the “instigator” of the affair, even though Kawatani himself was off the hook since his wife chose not to divorce him. But about the fan who demanded payment from my friend specifically: this guy was absolutely delusional.

Yet to him and the rest of the Japanese idol fans who have their “trust broken” by their idol, it makes perfect sense. The industry specifically incentivizes building relationships like this with fans. Is this unethical? Probably. But I’m not sure how much of this reaction is “Japanese culture” or “sexism” or “racism” versus just human nature when one’s expectations are breached.

Research on idol fan psychology demonstrates that fans’ identities become so tied to their favorite idol that disruptions to this parasocial relationship cause major psychological distress. These relationships are understood as parasocial in nature, creating “one-sided relationships that subsist on an illusion of intimacy,” where fans project onto idols and form emotional bonds that feel real despite the relationship being fundamentally transactional.

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IS IT JUST MEMETIC OUTRAGE???

This is where specific quirks about Japanese culture come in. A lot of Japanese culture has some panic or hysteria around social morale and ostracism.

I have to wonder if much of the scandal in the idol industry is memetic outrage or something like the Streisand effect. If management companies just let’s say, ignored all of the fans’ outrage, how likely is it that it would pass over in a month or week? Would fans actually care in the long run? I think a lesson we’ve learned in the West from cancel culture is to just ignore mob tirades online because they eventually seem to pass over.

The Pierre Taki case provides an interesting counterpoint. Over 50,000 people signed an online petition calling for Sony Music to reverse its decision to pull Denki Groove’s music from stores and streaming. Public support remained surprisingly high, with many arguing the punishment was disproportionate to the crime. Yet the industry response remained unchanged, driven more by corporate liability concerns than public outcry.

Perhaps Japanese entertainment companies are locked into a pattern of overreaction, not because fans genuinely demand it, but because the system has created expectations that companies now feel compelled to meet. The cycle perpetuates itself: scandals lead to firing, which reinforces the idea that scandals must lead to firing, which ensures the next scandal will also lead to firing. Breaking this cycle would require management to simply... stop. To let the initial outrage dissipate without feeding it through dramatic gestures of punishment.

But that would require acknowledging something uncomfortable: that the entire idol system is built on a fantasy that everyone knows is fake, and perhaps it’s time to stop pretending the fantasy needs to be preserved at such devastating human cost.

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Last Saturday, I found myself at DNA Lounge in SOMA for AniClover, which is a monthly anime-themed club night. The night I went, the event specially featured Touhou Project music. A Touhou Project music nightclub event would be pretty niche, even in Japan. So to find this event scheduled in San Francisco, I was pretty shocked to say the least.

As a high schooler, I was heavily involved in the Midwest Touhou Project fandom. I hosted a meet-up or two at Chilis (lulz), was on a few fan panels to discuss the series, and witnessed my fair share of drama at fan communities. I also spent an embarrassing amount of time listening to IOSYS, COOL & CREATE, and various metal remixes of ZUN’s original compositions.

So - what is The Touhou Project? If you’ve spent a considerable amount online, you’ve certainly seen a Touhou meme, but I recently described the series to my housemate as “an open-source fandom”.

Since the late 1990s, Team Shanghai Alice (which is 1 Japanese guy named Junya Ota, aka ZUN) has been making these PC-98. Everything is done solo - ZUN does the programming, the music and the art. All of these things certainly look DIY, but it adds to the charm.

The series takes place in a Gensokyo where a Japanese shrine maiden (Reimu) has to investigate “incidents” involving Yokai (妖怪) which are essentially creatures from Japanese mythology. In the game, each level features a yokai drawn as a cute anime girl whom you have to dodge bullets from. The game is notable for its all-female characters.

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However, most fans of Touhou Project haven’t even played the games themselves. What’s most remarkable about the culture that Touhou Project has spawned is that the creator, ZUN, has given the entire internet permission to do whatever they want with the universe.

As with everything on the internet, the typical use case for this has been pornography. However, this radical openness transformed into something resembling a collaborative cultural commons. At Comiket, Japan’s massive biannual fan convention, Touhou dominated for years with thousands of fan circles selling original works. Musicians built entire careers on Touhou arrangements. Fans created so much content that Guinness recognized it as the “most prolific fan-made shooter series.”

With the music, there’s such a strong variation between creators, even when everyone is using the same source material.

Here’s a lullaby version of the song from the gameplay clip above, U.N. OWEN Was Her?

A metal version

Last, the most well known version which was a popular Japanese meme featuring Ronald McDonald.

The best part of this community is that anyone from any part of the world can creatively share something, and it becomes a part of the greater canon. The active fan community is so integral to the series’ success, more than the original content itself.

I also admire this story because it demonstrates that everyday people, with enough creativity and hard work, can put their “children” into the world and have them become “living”, and have a real impact on millions of people.

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I don’t care for horror as a genre and never really liked indulging in violent things (besides the Higurashi series, which is incredibly violent), but I enjoy thrillers from time to time because they feel intellectually engaging.

Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a cinematic masterpiece that’s been replicated countless times. It is said to have provided some storyline inspiration for Natalie Portman’s Black Swan, shot-for-shot homages in Requiem for a Dream, and allegedly influenced HBO’s The Idol. For those who haven’t seen it, the film is the perfect primer for showing how animation can be intellectually stimulating and made for adults. This is a crucial point, considering most anime exported out of Japan is explicitly created for little boys, which has led many to associate the medium with art made for little boys.

Perfect Blue follows Mima, a J-pop idol who leaves her moderately successful group to pursue acting. This career pivot was typical for idols in the 1990s. To firmly separate herself from her idol image, Mima takes on a role in a television show that includes a graphic assault scene in a strip club. This bold career choice allows her to pivot away from her “idol” image, but it enrages her disfigured superfan, Me-Mania, and unsettles her manager, Rumi.

The film unfolds in a dream-like state where the viewer can’t distinguish reality from Mima’s psychological distortions from her acting roles. Kon was one of the first filmmakers to use the now-familiar technique where a character delivers a line and then, cut, you realize it was just a scene within a scene. It’s a masterpiece.

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Why an Idol, Specifically?

I previously worked as an idol in Japan and have been immersed in the culture for nearly 20 years as a fan.

Before we discuss this further, I should also state that Perfect Blue originated as an extremely violent thriller novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi. So Mima was already an idol in the source material, but Satoshi Kon decided to do something intelligent with his interpretation of the story when he made it a film.

Much of Kon’s work is Jungian in nature, with Paprika being another example. So the idol wasn’t just a convenient plot device(or because it was previously a book) it’s culturally essential to understanding the film’s psychological mechanics.

In Japanese society, the idol exists as a blank, feminine slate for men to project fantasies onto in prosperous post-war Japan. What few Westerners appreciate is how rapidly Japanese society transformed after WWII. By the mid-1980s, the Equal Opportunity Employment Act was passed, making workplace discrimination against women legally unacceptable. This created social anxiety among men who had been coddled by doting mothers and emasculated by wartime defeat…men now confronted with women’s rising power.

In Perfect Blue, Mima is a former idol who aspires to be an actress and transforms her public perception through a graphically violent sex scene. The film demonstrates that this is a harrowing event for her, but more so, it is psychologically altering for those around her who viewed her as an idol.

In the West, much has been written about idols being marketed as pseudo-girlfriends, but less has been noted in Western analysis about idols being viewed as someone fans live through. Her fan and another character (no spoilers) take on Mima’s identity because they’ve already internalized her as an extension of themselves.

Rather than “my favorite celebrity did a sex scene,” Me-Mania’s violent reaction stems from how she’s marketed: as a projection of her fans. When Mima takes agency over her body, it becomes, by extension, an assault on their body and soul. The idol isn’t just an object of desire, she is a vessel for their vicarious, feminine, living.

In the film we’re shown a few scenes where Mima is stalked by her body double, an idealized version of her that is still an idol. She’s literally being haunted by the projection others have created. Kon dramatizes the trauma of breaking from societal expectations by making the idealized version of Mima a tangible presence, amplifying the film’s exploration of fractured identity and psychological breakdown. The visual medium for this is beautifully done, and I can’t imagine it taking off outside of anime.

By setting Perfect Blue within idol culture, Kon holds a mirror to the nature of toxic voyeurism, and the idol framework made the horror personal, psychological, and devastatingly real.

If Perfect Blue were made in America, what media figure do you think would represent this story instead of an idol?

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A month ago, I wrote about Amanda Seales’ Jubilee debate against Black “conservatives”. My primary issue is that she seemed to be focused on principles of fairness for injustices rather than addressing issues that many working-class Black people have. Taking a stance for fairness is a matter of ideology. And while ideology and a strong sense of justice are important for a society, they cannot be the primary means of activism. Especially if there’s no plan to make tangible changes.

I never see people on either side of the political spectrum discuss endemic trauma and its effects on the Black American community. Trauma hacks the body. It can destroy the mind and a collective culture. Why isn’t this a national conversation?

One study found that almost 40% of adolescent Black girls in Chicago Public Schools suffer from PTSD. That is double the rate of recent combat veterans. Other research from Baltimore found that out of a sample size of 37 Black men ages 18-24, all of them had witnessed an extremely violent situation. All had lost at least 1 loved one. On average, each participant experienced the homicide death of three loved ones, mostly peers, often beginning in early childhood. All participants had at least one symptom of PTSD. 73% of them qualified for the minimum viable diagnostic qualification for PTSD. To be clear, both of these studies were conducted in densely urban communities with high crime and violence rates. On average, the Black American PTSD rate is around 9%, with Black Women hovering around 14% which is double the total amount for White Americans at 7%. This number is still pretty high!

Seales’ stance is to recognize this trauma but to almost look past it to discover its root causes, which she would identify as enslavement or intertwined issues that came after it. Sure, she’s not entirely wrong. But I believe much of American society has accepted the detrimental impact that chattel slavery and a de facto caste system have had on Black American culture.

And, to that I say, now what?

It is imperative to reduce and treat trauma.

Other proposed solutions, such as reparations, mutual aid, funding schools, and funding police departments, will have little to no impact unless this compounding trauma is addressed directly.

Trauma doesn’t just make you sad or angry. It fundamentally alters how your brain processes information, how your body responds to stress, and how you relate to others. Complex trauma, which is the kind that comes from sustained exposure to violence, neglect, or systemic oppression, rewires your entire system for threat detection.

So, when you’re operating from trauma, everything becomes about immediate survival rather than long-term planning. You make decisions based on avoiding pain rather than creating joy. You relate to others through patterns learned in crisis rather than connection. You organize your life around what might go wrong rather than what might go right.

We live in a time of immense abundance. Resources need to go to diminishing violence and the trauma it causes. Trauma impacts brain development, community resources, and progress.

What would it look like to actually address trauma at scale in Black communities?

Community-based healing programs that don’t require people to pathologize themselves to access support. Trauma-informed schools that understand why some kids can’t sit still or focus without first feeling safe. Economic development that prioritizes community ownership and decision-making rather than outside investment that extracts wealth.

These aren’t pie-in-the-sky fantasies. These are evidence-based interventions that work when implemented with adequate resources and community buy-in.

Amanda Seales is correct that historical injustice has contributed significantly to this trauma. Her conservative opponents are right that communities need agency and self-determination. They’re both wrong to act like these realities are contradictory rather than complementary.

We have the knowledge, resources, and examples to address trauma at scale. What we lack is the political will to prioritize healing over debate, solutions over grievance, and community care over ideological purity.

The choice isn’t between acknowledging systemic oppression and promoting individual healing; it is between acknowledging systemic oppression and promoting individual healing. The choice is between continuing to argue about causes while people suffer, or actually addressing the consequences while we work on systemic change.

Trauma is the missing piece that makes both sides’ arguments incomplete. Until we name it, fund it, and heal it, we’ll continue to have the same debates while communities remain stuck in cycles they have the power to break.

There's this boomer copy-pasta story that I enjoy, about elephants in captivity, and I think it is especially pertinent to Amanda Seales' recent debate on Jubilee:

The Elephant and the Rope

As my friend was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from the ropes they were tied to but for some reason, they did not. My friend saw a trainer nearby and asked why these beautiful, magnificent animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away.

"Well," he said, "when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size of rope to tie them and, at that age, it's enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free." My friend was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn't, they were stuck right where they were.

This metaphor captures something essential about Amanda Seales' recent Jubilee debate that transcends the typical left-right discourse on Black American issues.

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The Debate

Jubilee has done a few of these videos where they'll have one master debater (lulz) and a group of random people with opposing views. Typically, the main debater is better at articulating their arguments because it's their profession, but occasionally, you'll get some gem moments like Jordan Peterson, who has become a full caricature of his former self, yelling at 19-year-olds.

Typically, it's hard for the episode to stay on one topic as people often kitchen sink it, which is also great for Jubilee's views.

To concisely summarize Amanda Seales' general argument of the video:

• There are historical and present systemic factors that impact the Black American community in a dire way

• Much of the violence and trauma may be explained by systemic or historic injustices

At its core, her arguments aren't incorrect. In fact, I was disappointed that many conservatives regurgitated the same mid Thomas Sowell talking points and couldn't reach this basic conclusion. Enslavement and mistreatment have been the status quo for much of human history, but we don't have firsthand accounts of what happened in Rome a century or two after various groups were enslaved by the Romans. We have little idea how it impacted their family structures, cultures, livelihoods, and place in the wider society. I believe that the long-term impacts of social death should not be taken lightly.

I also understand Amanda's perspective while taking issue with many of her solutions. My family is pretty politically radical and sent me to an Afrocentric elementary school. In 1st grade, I was shown a vividly illustrated image of a scalped Native American man on Thanksgiving to learn about the perils of colonialism. This was contrasted to mainstream Black American Midwestern culture, which is incredibly conservative; much of my extended family voted for Reagan, and many voted for George W. Bush. Twice.

None of the ideas presented in this video, on either side, were new to me, and I have spent the majority of my life thinking about them and refining my opinions on them as I gain knowledge and experience.

My background is also why I’m critical of Amanda and many members of the Black intelligentsia, as they do not seem to give much of any proposal on what to do besides yelling about grievances. It is self-promotion via endless gnashing of teeth with the immediate concerns of poor Black people laid to wither at the wayside! Redlining is an abstract idea when your kid or family is under an endemic threat of violence.

There was a part of the debate where a young woman from the south side of Chicago mentioned having people close to them die as a result of gun violence by people within their community. Amanda attempted to push back by saying "violence happens intracommunally" without acknowledging that, per capita, Black young people are far more likely to be victims of homicide at disproportionate rates. Amanda knows this, so her attempt to explain it away by using proximity felt disingenuous. The young woman even mentions this to her, and she retorted back to "This is a result of slavery and institutional violence."

A few years ago, my cousin, who had just finished law school, went to a bar with her boyfriend to celebrate her new job at a law firm. She was shot and murdered by a stray bullet because two strangers got into an argument. These stories are a dime a dozen, and it's unfortunate that the privileged members of the Black intelligentsia, like Amanda, who don't have to consider this violence.

Yes, this country had a race-based caste system for much of its history. Black Americans still feel widespread psychological trauma, cultural disruption, and general imbalance because of this, AND we have so much more agency than our ancestors could dream of! Instead of giving history lessons and finger-wagging, she would better reach people by offering solutions that aren’t pie-in-the-sky reparations, which are both unpopular and politically unfeasible.

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Tone and General Optics

I wrote a comment on X about Amanda's tone, and I'd like to clarify these points:

1. There are cultural differences in communication. I don't actually think she's that "angry," and if you see the episode in its entirety, plenty of people in the clip are also just as animated as she is. I didn’t take this as arguing, but many Black people get excited when talking.
   

2. With that said, certainly Amanda understands that this vibrant expression is not allowing her arguments to be heard by the general public. Especially as a woman.
   

A few years ago, when advising me about professional matters, my father told me, "No matter what, never show emotion around them."

This advice probably sounds extreme, but it's fair. We are an expressive people, and our emotions and expressions may seem disproportionately large to others. I am not condemning this matter on a personal preference. In fact, I believe that the traditionally Western Protestant-ish attitude towards completely suppressing emotions in conversation is pathologically odd and possibly unhealthy in other ways. However, I think from a politically strategic perspective, the approach that she is taking limits her effectiveness.

Another clip making the rounds on social media is Seales pointing her finger at and scolding a young Black man, claiming that he ought to have more respect and treat her like his mama. Again, this is another cultural aspect that I personally dislike, but I understand the context a bit better.

In Western society, this comes across as incredibly emasculating (although she would have done it to a young woman, tbh), and not great practice for a debate, but it wasn’t really that shocking to me.

Side note: Here’s a video that made the rounds on Black Twitter a few years ago, where Maya Angelou scolded a young woman for calling her by her first name.

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AGENCY

So, back to the elephant metaphor. I feel for Amanda and many Black intelligentsia because I understand their grievances. Residual communal trauma is absolutely real, and the psychological impact runs deep. But the metaphor captures something important: the gap between perceived limitations and actual possibilities.

Amanda Seales represents a particular strain of Black intellectual discourse that correctly diagnoses historical injustice but struggles to translate that diagnosis into an actionable strategy for people living with the daily consequences of that history. When someone mentions losing a family member to violence, responding with "slavery" isn't intellectually wrong, but it's strategically and emotionally inadequate.

The challenge isn't choosing between acknowledging systemic oppression and embracing individual agency: it's learning to hold both truths simultaneously. I don’t understand what good can come of continuing to tell Black Americans that we are victims. Things certainly are not perfect, but we have more power, collectively and individually, to break free than we sometimes realize.

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A small San Francisco production of a musical about Luigi Mangione (the alleged UnitedHealth CEO murderer) is taking the city by storm. I had an opportunity to watch it with a new friend last night, so here’s my review.

Initially, I felt conflicted about the premise: the growing worship of Luigi Mangione strikes me as a bit morally bankrupt. We need to be clear that he is accused of killing a man, in cold blood, with whom he had no personal relationship before. This was a targeted assassination act. I understand empathizing with him, similar to how many empathize with the man who assassinated a certain controversial Japanese prime minister who was affiliated with the cult that the man’s mother gave her life savings to. That’s a very human story. Just as I empathize(perhaps even more so than Mangione) with Gary Plauché, the father who killed his son’s kidnapper on live television in the 1980s.

Luigi Mangione, as Jesus, projected onto a building in Manhattan, NYC.

The fanfare that Mangione has received since the UnitedHealth incident is mass hybristophilia. He is a young, sexy Italian man. If that were different, Mangione would probably receive some passive empathy, but not to the level of fanfare he’s gotten. He also (allegedly) murdered a man, which makes him 1000x hotter to the monkey-brains of many Americans. However you feel about the state of American healthcare, we have a legal and social agreement that we don’t murder people!

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The actual review

I’ll stop being a nerd about murder. I loved that this show had the audacity to make a gay, campy, horny musical about a cold-blooded murderer. I’m pretty much as close as you can get to being a free speech absolutist, and I think that art should be chaotic and irreverent. So the musical gets an A+ on that.

I won’t spoil too much, but parts reminded me of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. Not necessarily in plot, but in how campiness, shock value, and ultraviolence convey white-male angst directed not at an “other” but at an unnamed system. I think whether you agree with that premise is beside the point; it should be clear by now that young white men, across the board, are angry.

Other characters include P. Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried. Allow me to be the friend who’s too woke: some moments felt like minstrelsy in a liberal way. In the way that Saturday Night Live feels sometimes (lulz).

I expected it to be progressive in a woke-scolding way, but was pleasantly surprised to find it a bit more intelligent than that. This makes me wonder if the Millennial order of the endless finger-wagging of the 2010s is finally fading as Gen Z comes of age and creates. As a lifelong fan of South Park and having enjoyed The Book of Mormon by its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, this musical felt closer to that than to Hamilton*. Thank God.

*I still like Hamilton and saw it on Broadway! I just think society has Hamilton fatigue(lulz)

Anywho, the entire musical was ridiculous and a small production. It wasn’t polished, and I loved it for that. It was also incredibly gay: a woman plays P. Diddy and a non-binary actress plays SBF. The plot contains various homosexual love stories and was very Wattpad-coded. Apparently, the writer/actors came up with the idea at The Eagle, a leather daddy Gay Bar in SF that occasionally hosts fun comedy nights. They even used to have a giant Leather Daddy pride flag that you could see as you got off the freeway in San Francisco.

Overall, the silliness exceeded my expectations. Amazing. We need more silliness in the world. I imagine this is what it was like in ancient Greece or old London, where writers staged the biggest scandals of the day. I’d gladly watch this over reality TV.

As we shift toward a more creative economy, I predict an increase in meme musicals and hyper-local productions tailored to niche subcultures. The entire Mangione saga was very theatrical, and I appreciated the production’s meta-awareness of that.

They’ve been sold out for the past few weeks and have added one more show, on August 11th. Buy a ticket: Luigi The Musical

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I finally read Osamu Dazai’s (left) No Longer Human, a novel I had known about for years but somehow avoided. Dazai’s story of Yozo, the perpetual “clown,” still haunts Japanese youth who feel alienated from their families, workplaces, and nation. My own connection to Yukio Mishima (right) is more mischievous: in 2017, I released a farewell idol track called “Seppuku” that samples his voice and is pretty troll-ish.

(Album art of me committing Seppuku with candies coming out of my stomach by Japanese guro-artist Shintaro Kago)

Both men were more alike than not. They came from privileged families, caught fire in the immediate post-war literary scene, and died by their own hand, Dazai by lover’s suicide in 1948, Mishima by ritual seppuku in 1970, yet their temperaments and politics could not be further apart. However, we can examine their literature, lives, and reactions to a difficult post-war period as precursors to some of the cultural issues facing Japanese youth today.

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Dazai vs. Mishima

Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) wrote in a confessional key, and I have to admit it’s pretty annoying at times. Apparently, this style of writing is called an I-novel, which is a somewhat fictionalized memoir that was quite popular at the time. His tone, however, is almost drunk on its own despair. Critics have called his style whiny both then and now. He’s been compared to JD Salinger by many Western literary critics. This comparison is usually due to the sophomoric tone of both of their most well-known protagonists, although, less discussed is the childhood sexual abuse he hinted at in No Longer Human, which is interestingly another comparison to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher In The Rye. I understand the appeal of such stories and what they offer young people in societies that rarely discuss feelings, but I can see why Mishima would find this annoying.

In post-war Japan, Dazai’s wounded voice struck a nerve with readers who felt equally dislocated. He was quite the troubled man and has a colorful Wikipedia page. Throughout his life, Osamu Dazai has made multiple failed suicide attempts, including two separate double suicide attempts with various women, before “succeeding” with Tomie Yamazaki. No Longer Human’s draft was completed mere days before this event.

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Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) recoiled from Dazai’s decadence. At a 1947 literary dinner, he complained that Dazai “clowned around and wasted everyone’s time,” later writing essays that blasted the “school of self-indulgence.”

In fact, Mishima wasn’t the only person who took issue with Dazai’s style at the time. He was quite controversial among his contemporaries.

(A relationship map outlining the relationships Dazai had with his contemporaries, in the style of teen girl magazines. Posted by this X user. I’m not very familiar with all of these literary figures, so I won’t expand on them, but I found it hilarious.

Mishima cultivated an opposing persona to the meek, perhaps even exposed and vulnerable, style of Dazai. He was a (semi-closeted) homosexual bodybuilder who was obsessed with the male physique and an evangelist for emperor-centric nationalism. And just like Dazai, some of his stories foreshadowed his own real-life death; his books, "Patriotism" and The Sea of Fertility, feature characters who die by seppuku. It’s no stretch to see Mishima and his fatalistic romanticism of yore as a forefather of Japan’s modern right wing and even a touchstone for some Western reactionaries.

The feud remains relevant because it reflects the choices facing Japanese men today. Sanseito, the Japan First political party, is rapidly gaining power, and behind them is a leader who insists on re-establishing imperial rule. Mishima’s outward-projected aggressiveness, echoed in online nationalism and the cult of stoic self-improvement.

On the other side is Dazai’s inward-looking despair, which resurfaces in contemporary hikikomori and even the phenomenon of “herbivore” men.

Both of these reflexive impulses arise when traditional scripts of duty collapse and economic confidence fades. These are men, from a traditionally masculine society, who have been emasculated by a defeat on the global stage and post-post-modernism. As we look at the state of the industrialized world and the morale of men, maybe Japan itself a peer into the future of post-post-modernism

Japan’s task is to forge a masculinity that neither wallows in Dazai-style fatalism nor reenacts Mishima’s balcony theatrics. A healthier model would own historical failures, cultivate civic courage, and marry technological creativity with emotional literacy.

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Supplementary content: This is all in Japanese, but it features a scene depicting the notorious confrontation between Dazai and Yukio Mishima. It’s from a film about Dazai’s affairs as a womanizer.

“Good Genes / Good Jeans”

Was the ad racist? Imagine the same blonde, blue-eyed Sydney Sweeney, but 100 pounds heavier, therefore not seen as sexually attractive by mainstream society. Would we still cry racism? Or would the outrage evaporate because her sexual power had been neutralized? My hunch is that 99% of the backlash targets her perceived attractiveness in a conventional way that we have tried to decide shouldn’t exist.

I get why the pun is controversial, but I’m still uncertain whether that was the actual issue or just a convenient way to make this incident outrageous. Months ago, when Sweeney released her bath water in soap, there were complaints(albeit minor) of her “sexualizing herself”.

“Slut-Shaming” as Morality Policing

Before sexual permissiveness went mainstream, the quickest way to cut a pretty girl down to size was to brand her a slut. That label no longer flies in a culture that celebrates sexual autonomy as feminist progress, so the rhetoric shifts: she’s guilty of cultural appropriation, self-objectification, or promoting unrealistic standards. The moral fervor stays the same; only the vocabulary changes. Because we have no polite way to voice envy or unease at a woman’s sexual power, we package the discomfort as a moral crusade, even if that means a bit of self-deception!

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Anti-Bullying Overcorrection → Cancel Culture

The “cancel culture” wave of the 2010s was, in many ways, a delayed overcorrection to the anti-bullying campaigns of the late 2000s. Those campaigns gained momentum after several high-profile suicides of teenage girls harassed, often by other girls, on early social-media forums.

Openly mocking someone for being too beautiful (or too odd, or too poor) is now taboo, so we invent socially acceptable justifications for our dislike. Righteous finger-wagging offers the perfect camouflage: we’re not jealous, we’re holding her “accountable.”

Under that veneer sits ancient resentment. Young, beautiful women wield sexual capital that feels unearned.

• Heterosexual men may fear the loss of control, either sexually or emotionally. They may even quietly envy advantages they can never access.

• Women see competition for limited romantic and social resources. They may also project feelings of their inadequacies or project their romantic resentment onto women they perceive as more sexually successful(therefore holding more interpersonal power).

Intrasexual competition and violence are real. 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, dismissing these dynamics, actually did little to help women in their daily lives and interactions with one another. In reality, feminism should have advocated for loving kindness and sisterhood among all women, rather than the meta-purity challenges that assess women’s allegiance to specific feminist doctrines.

When we deny the messy mix of advantages and disadvantages that beauty confers, we do young women a double disservice. First, we leave them unprepared for the real marketplace, where their looks are silently appraised. Second, we encourage them to turn on one another. Power that feels arbitrary breeds resentment, and resentment seeks an outlet. This outlet is often expressed in the form of moral crusades against whoever happens to be in view. A healthier response would be to acknowledge the beauty economy for what it is, teach girls how to navigate it without shame, and attempt to broaden our definition of value so that looks are only one piece, never the whole mosaic, of a woman’s worth.

What caught my attention was its underlying assumption about class. A yoga instructor is not perceived as the same social class as a carpenter.

Yes, affluent coastal guys will happily date yoga teachers, but you rarely see them dating hairstylists who probably make way more money than those teachers.

Why?

That disconnect highlights a larger collective blind spot: in America, social and cultural capital are not directly tied to wealth. This post unpacks that idea. First, I’ll offer a quick primer for Midwestern or “fly‑over” readers on what social and cultural capital looks like on the coasts. Then we’ll look at why wealth alone doesn’t grant high status, and how understanding the subtler codes of class can expand your mobility.

American Class Mobility

America has this fascinating cultural quirk where we celebrate stories of class mobility while simultaneously refusing to discuss how class works. We see exurban car dealership millionaires with their McMansions decked out in grey vinyl and insist that class does not exist in America because even our "elite" lack basic aesthetic taste. But they are not the "elite" by any social consideration of the term, despite their net worth.

In the land of new money, class and capital can be challenging to discern due to our traditional associations with them, which often center on dollar amounts, cash, and net worth.

Before I go forward, I should clearly state that social capital and cultural capital aren't technically the same. However, for the sake of this post, I'm conflating the two as they often go hand in hand. Someone such as Donald Trump may have a lot of social capital but not much cultural capital. Early 20th-century Russian immigrants who read Dostoevsky while living in tenement apartments would have had relative cultural capital, but may have lacked social capital due to their immigration status, which limited their ability to accumulate broader social influence.

What Is Perceived as "High Status" if Not Wealth?

This seems obvious, but I think it's worth stating that class isn't directly tied to wealth. Often, one depends on the other, but it doesn't have to be.

Let's say there are two women, one born in San Francisco and the other in a so-called flyover state, who both live in San Francisco.

Suppose the one who moved became a yoga instructor and works paycheck to paycheck. She has her necessities, but not much left over for luxuries. The other, a lifelong resident of San Francisco, is a hairstylist who makes $150,000 per year. This is also not "wealthy," but by no means is it living paycheck to paycheck. The hairstylist has a considerable amount left over each month for small luxuries, such as outings and occasionally a vacation.

Both of these women have professions with similar levels of licensure. The hairstylist may even have more credentials than the yoga instructor. We also know that the hairstylist earns more than the yoga teacher and that she is a native-born coastal resident. Both of their professions are also commonly done by women, so there's no gender dynamic at play. Yet, a hairstylist would be perceived as blue-collar and probably not as "high status" as the yoga teacher.

A framework that may explain this is that social and cultural capital is often gauged by:

• Relationships

• Consumption habits

• Ideology and beliefs

When we consider a yoga teacher, we think that she is probably friends with other yoga teachers, maybe gurus, DJs, or artists of some sort. Despite these not being "elite" jobs, they all carry some prestige for being in creative fields. We also assume that she eats vegan/vegetarian/organic foods; perhaps she wears linen clothes, and her idea of a vacation is a retreat to Bali or Tulum. Having moved from another state is also a bonus because it implies a specific agentic nature in her life.

When compared to a hairstylist, we have no context on this person beyond the fact that they are a woman who has chosen a profession commonly pursued by women. It doesn't tell us much about their consumption habits or taste. Nor do we know about her friends or partners. Therefore, based on this limited information, we assume that she is probably from an average, ordinary background. For the elite, this is not a good signal because social and cultural capital in America is largely about signaling that one lives outside the mass-produced ecosystem of industrialization. I’ll talk more about that later when I discuss consumption habits.

Start Young

Young people possess something invaluable: unrealized potential. When you're young, others still project possibilities onto you rather than fixed limitations based on what you have (or have not) done. This optimism creates genuine opportunities for mentorship and network building that become increasingly rare with age. Although you can make dramatic life shifts at any age, if you're seeking some form of class mobility, it's best to start as young as possible. If you reach out to people for coffee chats or informational interviews, they are far more likely to grant it to you if you’re perceived as young and eager to learn. Others are willing to give you chances that people may be otherwise skeptical of providing to someone under 25 years old.

Elite Universities

I believe that credentialism, as we have understood it over the past few decades, is undergoing rapid change. With that said, as of now, the (relatively) easiest way for a young person to signal class and accumulate social capital is by attending an "elite" four-year institution.

Suppose your intentions for attending university are to make money without further thought. In that case, you should be intentional about where you attend and make the most of those four years, because the cost of a relatively unknown 4-year university may not measure up to the pay you’ll receive after attending.

If your purpose is class mobility, simply attending a state school or any university for the sake of a degree may not promise the return that it once did. I'm sure your state school has excellent programming, but the point of universities (outside of fundamental research) isn't to learn. It's socialization and signaling. It signals that you can stick with something for four years to get a rubber-stamp of approval from the intelligentsia. Keep in mind that, having met and known average graduates from "elite universities," I haven't found them to be remarkably smarter than average university graduates from less prestigious schools. My point is that many people still care about which university someone attends, and if you intend to work for someone or raise capital for a business, it will probably work in your favor. The network it opens you up to, as well as understanding how people from other social classes operate, is incredibly important. It will open doors that you did not even know were there.

Consider a Gap Year

If you don't think an elite university is an option or you don’t care about applying to one, I suggest considering a gap year. Not only will this increase your network and the perception that others have of you, but it'll also widen your perspective of the world. American students are, unfortunately, quite limited in the places where they can obtain a working holiday visa, so you may have to research other ways to travel as a young person without a university education.

You may also consider going to a larger US city, working at a coffee shop, and getting roommates for a year while you learn about life. Due to the high cost of living, I realize that this is inaccessible for many people, and I believe it is a massive disservice to American social mobility that we don't have easier paths for people to live in cities. With that said, if you can make it out of your small town or state, consider doing so, even if only to broaden your ideas of what you believe to be possible.

Live Among Them

Although I have not personally experienced either of these roles, I believe that working as a nanny or an au pair is an excellent way to gain a better understanding of class mobility.

Keep in mind that if someone feels that they're doing you a favor (as many who employ others tend to think), they may not perceive your abilities to be broader than what they hired you for. So this may not be a direct path to wealth itself. Yet, domestic work, whether as nannies, tutors, or personal assistants, provides unparalleled access to the private behavioral codes and relational networks that define upper-class social mobility.

My closest experience was tutoring the 17-year-old son of an elite East Asian banking family in mid-2010s Tokyo. It began with answering a university bulletin board advertisement seeking a "warm and empathetic woman”.

The family operated within Tokyo's multicultural financial elite. The father held a senior position at Goldman Sachs Asia and appeared regularly on Forbes lists. At home, the mother orchestrated a domestic ecosystem that included two live-in Southeast Asian “helpers” to assist with their eldest son's severe disabilities and day-to-day household operations.

I was assigned to tutor the younger, 17-year-old son, who was brilliant, which initially confused me. His room contained advanced physics and calculus texts far beyond my capabilities, yet his family insisted I tutor him in SAT history and literature despite his native-level English. The disconnect became comprehensible when I understood my function within their discipline system: I was leveraged as a reward when he behaved well, withdrawn as a consequence for poor behavior.

Once, the boy accidentally revealed to me that when he misbehaved, his mother would threaten: "If you don't do [whatever she was asking him to do], no more pretty tutor." This transactional framing revealed multiple layers of social positioning and how people from certain social classes view interpersonal relationships with others, especially those they employ. The mother did not yell because she didn't need to. People from certain social classes often collect and utilize others strategically to make their lives easier. These dynamics, while initially disorienting, provided crucial insights into how affluent families perform their cultural capital and manage their social hierarchies.

Become an Artist

If you neither want to attend university nor take on assistant roles with wealthy individuals, you can come in from the top by becoming an artist of some sort. Culture as we know it flows downstream from artists and tastemakers, positioning creative work as a potentially powerful vector for social capital accumulation.

This pathway operates on different principles from traditional networking strategies. Rather than seeking proximity to existing power structures, artistic practice creates alternative circuits of cultural influence that can intersect with and sometimes supersede conventional elite networks. The caveat is that you must genuinely enjoy the work, remain comfortable with consistent failure, and accept living in relative poverty during the initial years. Artistic credibility cannot be purchased; it must be cultivated through sustained practice and genuine engagement with creative communities.

The strategic advantage lies in how cultural production positions you within tastemaker circles that often precede and influence broader social trends. Successful artists don't merely reflect existing cultural values; they participate in their creation and transformation.

Understand the Consumption Habits of Upper-Class People

Consumption patterns across all class levels shape Americans. The standard narrative is that poor people are addicted to consumption, but in actuality, consumption patterns look different for different groups of people. In an age of ever-decreasing scarcity, consumption habits often signal status in ways that may appear invisible to the unaware.

Some of this is region-dependent. If you're on the East Coast, you may signal this by purchasing physical art or artisanal craft goods. If it's a bohemian bourgeois crowd, it may involve wellness retreats. For some groups, it may include consuming arthouse films. Keep in mind that one thing that consistently defines the upper-middle class is their anxiety about being mistaken for "common." They typically have class anxieties and have worked too hard to be confused with mainstream culture.

Common people consume common things: mass-produced blockbuster films, mass-produced resorts, mass-produced chain restaurants, mass-produced fast fashion, top-40 music, and bestselling fiction books.

The elite distinguish themselves by consuming things that require cultural knowledge, time investment, or insider access. It could be obscure musicians, independent films, artisanal products, or experiences that can't be easily replicated through mass consumption. Although “quiet luxury” is a TikTok trend, few understand that the distinction isn’t in wearing monochrome outfits or avoiding flashy labels. It utilizes tastefully unique consumption patterns to emphasize one’s intellectual and aesthetic superiority over the masses in a way that many can’t replicate.

Don't Directly Talk About Class, Status, or Wealth

This goes against the very premise of this blog post, but in social contexts, it makes sense. Stop asking people "What do you do?" as your first conversational question (and "what's your story" is also incredibly clichéd, so stop saying that too and just have an everyday conversation).

Don't ask people their university "rank," don't talk about salary with people you don't know, don't discuss test scores (IQ, SAT, ACT, whatever) unless it's relevant. Also, avoid discussing status in such a transactional manner. I was at a party in San Francisco for someone well-known on social media, and throughout the night, multiple people announced loudly that "So-and-so is so famous, right?! They have X amount of followers!" Yes, we all know that. That is why we're all here.

This comes across as transactional and tacky to discuss money and status brazenly, even if it's your own. It doesn't impress people who have these things, and it makes you look fraudulent.

Don't Be Humble (But Don't Brag)

This may seem like the opposite of the statement I wrote above, but genuinely, don't be humble. You need to find ways to signal your intelligence, capabilities, and worth to others (because if you come from a non-elite background, people may routinely try to patronize you). Don't do it by bragging. Do it by being an extraordinary person and having your work demonstrate that. Casually mention your accomplishments in a way that neither diminishes them nor comes across as a desperate attempt to prove yourself due to insecurity.

You can find subtle ways to showcase your abilities and accomplishments through competence, insight, and genuine contribution rather than self-promotion. Let your expertise shine through your conversations, your taste be evident in your choices, and your intelligence emerge in your observations.

The Reality of American Class Mobility

The uncomfortable truth is that American class mobility requires understanding unspoken rules that nobody explicitly teaches.

Success in this system often comes from strategic positioning (through education, geography, or networks) combined with authentic excellence in your chosen field. The goal isn't to abandon your background but to expand your toolkit for operating across different social contexts.

Class mobility in America is possible, but it requires first acknowledging that class exists. Once you understand the game, you can decide how you want to play it, whether that's working within the system, creating alternative pathways, or building something entirely new.

The most effective approach combines awareness of these dynamics with genuine personal development and contribution. After all, the best way to transcend class boundaries may be to become so valuable in your chosen field that the traditional rules bend around you.

The 2015 revelation that Rachel Dolezal, president of Spokane's NAACP chapter, had been presenting herself as Black while being born to white parents crystallized three of our era's most volatile social tensions. Her case became a perfect storm for mid‑2010s media outrage.

It intersected with our evolving understanding of mental health, the gendered mechanics of cancel culture, and the increasingly fluid boundaries of identity in an age of technological body modification.

The Female Sacrifice Machine

American mass media operates through a well‑established ritual of discovering ordinary women and transforming them into vessels for our collective anxieties. Anna Nicole Smith, Monica Lewinsky, Amanda Knox, Stormy Daniels, Octomom, the ever‑changing “Karen” of the week in the late 2010s, Caroline Ellison, the police officer who allegedly slept with her entire squad, “Hawk Tuah,” the new HR representative at the Coldplay concert…take your pick. These women are ciphers. They allow society to externalize and debate complex moral questions by destroying their individual lives while the American public tosses stones and squeals “aw, shucks.”

The pattern is remarkably consistent: select a woman, preferably white and reasonably attractive, who has committed some perceived transgression, then subject her to a public trial by tabloid for two to three weeks.

Rachel Dolezal fit this template perfectly. She had committed what appeared to be a clear moral violation in the late 2010s: racial fraud. Yet her case was particularly insidious because it occurred during the most ruthless period of cancel culture, when the mere accusation of deception could erase years of legitimate activist work. The irony was stark: a woman who had dedicated herself to advancing civil rights was destroyed not for harming the Black community, but for allegedly “appropriating” Black identity while serving it.

More interestingly, this case revealed how strange our perceptions of mental illness had become and hinted at what I believe will be the core culture‑war issue of the twenty‑first century: naturalism versus transhumanism.

Mental Illness in the Age of Overcorrection

Our contemporary relationship with mental health has created a peculiar paradox. Decades of destigmatization efforts have produced an overcorrection in which mental illness is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It is invoked to explain behavior we find sympathetic, yet denied to those whose actions we deem morally reprehensible.

We refuse to label Mass shooters as mentally ill because, under this new paradigm, such a label would somehow absolve them of murder. Others are also not mentally ill because that would imply their identity group or behavior pattern may be pathological, which society finds unacceptable.

We have created a binary in which mental illness either absolves all responsibility or cannot coexist with moral culpability.

I am not entirely sure of Dolezal’s mental status, nor can any of us claim to be. However, many accounts suggest that her childhood was marked by fundamentalist religious control and documented abuse by her father. Research consistently links profound early trauma to identity fragmentation.

Identity fragmentation within dissociative identity disorder is common, and it can sometimes present as confusion around race. Consider Donyale Luna, one of the world's first Black supermodels, who obscured her racial identity behind blue contacts and an ethereal persona, never admitting she was an African American from Detroit. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye famously features a young character who suffers identity fragmentation after a sexual assault. These examples are widely empathized with because society views Black womanhood as pitiable. Our shared understanding of identity fragmentation within the context of DID is that it can alter many elements of someone’s sense of self. Disordered eating(whether leading to extreme obesity or anorexia)is highly correlated with early life trauma. Some studies also link gender dysphoria with DID. Whether you believe this research or not, please consider all the ways complex trauma may fragment a person’s identity.

So, let us suppose Rachel Dolezal is indeed mentally ill. Was it acceptable for her to represent herself as Black while working on behalf of the NAACP? That would involve some form of fraud, which we generally deem undesirable. But what if she genuinely believed her racial identity was authentic?

Is her deception more morally egregious than Elizabeth Warren’s or Zohran Mamdani’s disputed claims about their ethnic backgrounds to advance within institutional systems?

Dolezal has continued to live as a Black woman, and it is evident from her lifestyle that she believes herself to be “transracial.” Does it matter whether this belief stems from mental illness or a personal aesthetic choice? What tangible harms does her lifestyle cause to society at large?

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Identity in the Age of Technological Transformation

This media episode emerged at a historical moment when aspects of identity once thought to be immutable were becoming increasingly fluid through medical and cosmetic interventions. Dolezal did not undergo surgery, yet the methods she used to obscure her race, curly hair perms, and tanning techniques enabled her to present as mixed-race with little scrutiny. Such options would not be widely available without recent technological innovations in beauty care.

Suppose the twentieth century was, as filmmaker Adam Curtis suggested, the “century of the self,” in which identity was shaped through consumption and lifestyle. In that case, the twenty‑first century confronts us with the possibility that fundamental biological markers might also be transformed through consumer choices.

The civil‑rights movement’s “born this way” argument, later adopted by gay‑rights activists and transgender advocates, relies on appeals to biological essentialism. Yet suppose we simultaneously accept that gender is socially constructed. In that case, a claim that science supports only partially makes the boundary between socially constructed gender and supposedly immutable race increasingly challenging to defend.

Dolezal's case forces us to confront uncomfortable questions. If identity can be shaped by environment, sustained commitment, and genuine cultural immersion, what distinguishes legitimate transformation from fraudulent appropriation? Her decade of work within Black institutions, her advocacy, and her lived experience of anti‑Black harassment; do these constitute an authentic racial experience, or does her biological ancestry render them permanently illegitimate?

What made Dolezal's case so explosively controversial was not any single element, but their convergence. She represented the collision of anxieties about female authenticity, confusion about the relationship between mental health and moral responsibility, and uncertainty about the boundaries of identity in an era of unparalleled technological possibility.

Her destruction served multiple functions. It reinforced traditional racial boundaries at a moment when other identity categories were becoming fluid. It channeled our discomfort with identity transformation into the familiar ritual of female sacrifice. It allowed us to avoid confronting the psychological complexity of identity formation by framing her story as a simple case of fraud rather than a nuanced human phenomenon.

The Rachel Dolezal case was not ultimately about one woman's identity fraud. It was about our collective inability to hold complexity, our need for clear moral categories, and our persistent tendency to resolve anxiety by publicly destroying women who transgress social boundaries. In killing her, we shielded ourselves from grappling with unresolved questions:

• Where do legitimate identity boundaries exist?

• How do we balance individual psychological complexity with social responsibility?

• What happens when our frameworks for understanding selfhood prove inadequate to lived realities?

These questions did not disappear with Dolezal’s public exile; they have become even more pressing as technological capabilities expand and traditional identity categories continue to blur.

We live in a strange moment. It’s often hard to tell if anyone genuinely means what they say, if they’re being “ironic” or using “irony” to shield themselves from the consequences of saying what they believe. Online, in art, and everyday conversation, everything comes filtered through layers of irony, self-awareness, and detachment. Also, isn’t the term for this act technically sardonic?

Some cultural theorists call this the “post-ironic” condition: a state where we’re constantly hedging, performing, signaling that we’re in on the joke. It’s a way of staying emotionally safe. Sincerity feels dangerous. It makes you vulnerable. And we’ve trained ourselves to avoid that risk.

You can see it everywhere. People write, “This is so cringeworthy but…” before saying something heartfelt. We confess our real emotions through memes. We post Wojaks to say, “I feel empty”. Saying “I love you” feels too raw, so we send a shitpost instead.

And it’s not just how we speak. It’s how we make. Cultural production has shifted in the same direction. Instead of saying something earnest, people make content that mocks the idea of earnestness. TikToks that parody influencers. Songs that imitate emotional depth only to undercut it in the chorus. Brands pretending to be self-aware about capitalism while still selling you stuff. (Think Duolingo’s mascot roasting you online or Slim Jim’s ironic brand account “deep-frying” its own masculinity.)

What’s happening here isn’t just stylistic. It’s psychological. We’ve built a culture where detachment is a coping mechanism. It’s a way of dealing with uncertainty, moral complexity, and the fear of looking foolish or “cancellation”. We’re terrified of being earnest because we associate it with being naïve. So, we preemptively undercut ourselves.

Lately, I’ve been trying to practice sincerity. Even online. Saying what I mean, even when it’s awkward. Admitting that I care about something. Telling people I admire them or their work without couching it in “lol”… And it’s more complicated than it sounds. The reflex to self-censor is strong. But every time I resist it, I feel a little more human.

Maybe the most radical thing you can do right now is mean it. Not as subversion or a growth strategy. But as a genuine attempt to speak, feel deeply, and risk being seen.

Because without that, we’re just talking to ourselves in mirrors. Reflected endlessly through layers of cleverness, never quite reaching each other.

The recent installation of a large Black statue in New York City has drawn predictable criticism from right-wing commentators. However, what has received far less attention is the growing frustration among Black women. (see some of the commentary).

Once again, Black women are positioned as both the face of liberal social dissent and the inevitable targets of conservative backlash. This method of “inclusion”, casting Black women as visual symbols of leftist rejection of traditional beauty norms, is not just tired, it’s blatantly offensive.

Last year in San Francisco, I walked past a similar statue by the same artist on the Embarcadero. A towering figure of a casually dressed young Black woman stood there, striking and confrontational. It’s not beautiful because it isn’t meant to be.

It’s intentionally austere, making a direct political statement, as is the artist’s right. But it’s worth noting that the artist is not a Black woman, but a well-meaning progressive who may not understand why this kind of representation feels so exhausting.

I tweeted about it at the time. My thoughts then mirrored those of many Black women now expressing about the Times Square installation.

Why couldn’t the statue depict a beautiful, feminine Black mermaid? Or a seafaring goddess? Instead, the artist chose a figure that rejects beauty entirely. That may be a legitimate artistic position, but choosing Black women as the canvas for that rejection comes with rarely acknowledged implications. It’s not as radical or progressive as it postures itself to be.

For the past decade, well-intentioned efforts at “visibility” have left Black women in a state of confusion. While we are increasingly included in the media, we are rarely allowed to be portrayed as feminine or beautiful. Publicly, there’s a broader push to reject harmful beauty standards for women and girls. Still, in doing so, the media often relegate Black (and sometimes Asian) women to the role of the politicized “ugly” other. Meanwhile, traditional beauty remains reserved for the same groups it always has.

Black American culture is, by and large, culturally conservative and does not embrace the coastal middle-class bohemian bourgeois liberal disdain for beauty. Yet those who create media insist on representing Black women through this lens. Therefore, inclusion becomes a form of aesthetic and political punishment.

To be clear: dark-skinned Black women, fat Black women, older Black women, masculine Black women, and working-class “ghetto” Black women deserve to see themselves reflected in media. But I don’t know many Black women who want to be the left’s default symbol of defiance.

Media in the 1970s, for all its flaws, arguably did a better job of including Black women as beautiful, desirable figures.

What strikes me most is the underlying assumption of these works: that Black women require external validation through distorted portrayals, rather than meaningful authorship of our narratives. That we must be cast as imposing foils to statues of old white men. But who asked for this? We certainly didn’t.

This kind of performative progressivism does nothing to address the material conditions Black women face. Instead, it offers symbolic gestures designed to appease white liberal guilt, who may flagellate themselves in front of the tall neo-mammy caricature. We have become props to uphold someone else's narrative of progress. Our needs, desires, and beauty are all secondary to the political capital our images are made to carry.

Our mental sketch of an "incel" as a pasty, Cheeto-dusted basement dweller is a form of intellectual laziness, and it completely ignores the growing cohort of young men of color drawn into misogynistic content. Not only is it inaccurate, but it also reveals that many progressives discussing the issue don’t understand men, Black people, or the socio-economic realities that make this content so appealing to young men.

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A recent tweet thread I came across about Andrew Tate’s viewership inspired me to write about something I’ve known for quite some time: men of color are overrepresented in the “manosphere” as both content creators and community members.

Make no mistake—the manosphere, Andrew Tate, Fresh & Fit, etc., aren’t the cause of young men’s misogyny. They’re con men, offering the laziest and most straightforward solution (externalized shame) to a generation of emasculated young men. Postmodern liberals are partly to blame for this, having ignored working-class labor instability for decades.

The popularity of this content online is merely a symptom of young men’s feelings of emasculation, resulting from the upheaval caused by our societal shift to a knowledge-based economy. If you understand the broader Black community, rather than the intelligentsia that make up the public intellectuals of the left, it’s easy to see why this content resonates with so many.

Men of all backgrounds join the “manosphere” because they feel emasculated. Young Black men are among the most emasculated groups in the country.

Just as mass industrialization brought abundance, transitioning society from agricultural models involved significant socio-economic growing pains. The working-class instability caused by rapid deindustrialization beginning in the 1970s had a profound impact on male labor forces. This, coupled with:

• Women’s newfound freedoms resulting from cultural shifts enabled by birth control, abortion, and household automation

• Crack and opioid epidemic (men are 2x as likely to suffer from substance addiction as women)

• Mass incarceration

...has contributed to a rise in fatherless homes.

Young men today have even fewer traditional avenues for establishing a masculine identity. This identity typically includes financial stability, social respect, and romantic partnership—yet these feel increasingly out of reach. Instead of addressing why, the postmodern response has been to attempt altering cultural expectations and biological realities—an incredibly arrogant and nearly impossible feat.

The economically driven, cynical “solutions” offered by our post-postmodern, dopamine-addicted society are microdoses of traditional masculine achievements, cheap highs like pornography and video games. En masse, we’ve tried these two models for decades. Now, young men are eager for something new. And right-wing reactionary ideologies, offering both an explanation (displaced blame) and a sense of community, are ready to provide it.

(Employment share in manufacturing, males, All men vs Black men 25-55)

The economic trajectory of Black Americans from slavery through the Civil Rights era illustrates how industrial opportunity created pathways to economic dignity. But deindustrialization hit Black communities first and hardest. The manufacturing jobs that once provided stable incomes without requiring higher education vanished, leaving urban centers economically hollowed out.

This economic collapse combined with the devastating impacts of the crack epidemic and mass incarceration policies that disproportionately impacted Black men(and their sons). By the 1990s, expressions of Black masculinity in popular culture increasingly reflected these pressures.

Much of NWA’s music, and many popular rap lyrics, could have been pulled straight from a manosphere video or incel forum. While popular culture hypersexualizes Black masculinity, economic structures simultaneously undermine Black male autonomy, a contradiction that creates profound identity dissonance.

This disaffection among Black men served as an early indicator of the broader post-industrial masculine identity crisis now affecting white communities as well.

If you’ve had the displeasure of watching manosphere content, you’ll quickly notice something distinct about the Black manosphere segments: their grievances are often racially targeted toward Black women. Although they echo the same talking points as the broader incel, manosphere, and redpill communities, they usually preface them with a caveat—framing the issue as specific to Black women rather than women in general.

In communities of fatherless young men, it makes sense that the maternal figure—present and familiar—is more often blamed than the absent or inconsistent father, their same-sex parent. Black women are also the closest figures in their lives, and those who adopt a victim identity often direct blame toward those closest to them.

These surface-level differences mask a shared underlying psychology: displaced rage at perceived emasculation, channeled toward women instead of the economic systems that constrain male opportunity.

With this hostility comes a rising rate of femicide that disproportionately impacts Black women. Yet it enjoys relative immunity from criticism, both from leftist activists and even Black progressives who fall into the trap of prioritizing racial solidarity over confronting internal, sex-based oppression.

When we promote the (inaccurate) image of an incel as a young, white, crusty male, we inadvertently ignore the growing prevalence of young Black men in misogynistic spaces and the violence their feelings of emasculation can enable. We also do a disservice to these young men by overlooking the dire conditions that shape their lives.

The overrepresentation of men of color in these spaces should prompt a deeper examination of how economic precarity, not just cultural messaging, fuels misogynistic ideologies.

For Black women, this conversation cannot remain an academic exercise; it must be a practical one. The violence enabled by these ideologies doesn't just happen on message boards. It manifests in real-world relationships, workplaces, and public spaces. Confronting incel culture means acknowledging its complex, intersectional reality, not simplifying it into a purely white phenomenon. It also challenges progressives to move beyond a zero-sum view of suffering.

Thomas Friedman may have been too early to tell, but the Earth is Superflat.

We’re about a decade past the height of the Brony phenomenon—a subculture in which young Western boys and men rejected masculinity in favor of My Little Pony. At the time, it was dismissed as internet cringe content fodder, but in hindsight, it offered a more telling look into our collective, prolonged adolescence.

Takahashi Murakami’s art has been popular in the West for a while—but it feels like his vision of a traumatized society turning to cuteness to assuage anxiety is only beginning to be realized outside of Japan.

Japan has been a great predictor of what life may look like in a post-scarce post-industrialized world. Ten years ago, we were bombarded with articles from publications like the BBC about Japan’s “disaster level” fertility rates. Britain and much of the rest of the post-industrialized world have fallen to similar numbers.

From the Vatican’s unveiling of their official anime mascot to the US military’s anime recruitment videos, it’s clear that in our socially balkanized, frenetic reality, we’ve stopped caring about conflicts in Eurasia or wars in Eastasia.

Instead, we’ve succumbed to a super flat, hedonistic existence.

Would you pay $200 to experience life as a Japanese high school student in an authentic school?

A few years ago, I went with a friend to a bar in Shibuya. As soon as we entered a man in a track suit and a whistle, came out to yell at my friend. “Hey! You know you’re not supposed to wear your shoes indoors.” He spoke to us as children because he was playing the role of teacher and this was a bar where you pretended to be in school again. Oddities included an announcement system embedded into the wall and being interrupted mid-meal to take a pop quiz.

It was a fun, cheesy experience but not something I’d go out of my way to experience again. An alternative to a normal izakaya and not much more.

I was surprised, however, to see that there is now an upmarket experience being tailored to foreign people to pretend to be Japanese school students. You’ll don an authentic Japanese high school uniform, take actual school classes and clean up with your class. Just like in your favorite anime. All for the eye-watering price of 30,000 JPY.

Long time Twitter friend of mine Rara, posted about “Kimino High School”. I poked around their website and it seems to be a new service offered by a Japanese camping company. To be fair the “school packages” are marketed towards both Japanese and Western but the fact that this even exists at all is very incredibly strange to me.

When I was about 19, I took part in a group funded by the Abe Administration’s tourism board that held research sessions on foreigners interested in Japanese pop culture. At one of these sessions a girl proposed the idea of a white glove service for foreigners to experience Japanese culture. Fantasy baseball camp for weaboos. “We could even have someone escort them to an office on the crowded morning train, they could experience senpai/kouhai office dynamics…” At the time I thought the idea was neat but also didn’t believe people would pay for these services.

What does it mean that adults are willing to pay more than the average Japanese daily wage to pretend to be in high school again?

So much can be said about this in the context of the commodification of Japanese youth culture, escapism, Japan’s soft power as a cultural export, kidults… Will we see more of this in the experience economy?

What do you think?

In the 1990s, the era of 'weather girls' began to wane. They were soon followed by car show models and booth babes. Our culture moved beyond women presenters emphasizing their charisma and beauty. To promote social progress, television stations began to hire professional meteorologists. A field that boasts demographics of 75% male.

According to Aaron Celaya & Nick Yeung in "Human Psychology & Intelligent Machines" (2019), the true challenge in integrating AI into society won't be the technical aspect. The crux will be cultivating trust between humans and machines. In order for collaboration to have efficiently, the trust and the trustee must be able to work together harmoniously. This challenge is exemplified by their research. It indicates that humans, given a choice, favor slight inaccuracy from other humans rather than accuracy from non-human agents(AI).

Accuracy does matter, especially for something like the weather. We’re just biased against machines giving us information.

When AI gets better at telling the weather or making medical reports, what values do human professionals have?

This brings us to a pivotal question: Will AI bring back weather girls? Rather than just weather girls, will human-machine teaming allow for an array of careers to be born out of human charisma?

Will we have gimmick magician doctors? Or super model lawyers? If machines do the heavy lifting, will the value of human charisma go up?

Then what happens to the uncharismatic? People who aren’t beautiful or personable enough to connect with others?

While it remains a debate whether machines can ever emulate human beauty or charisma, one thing is certain: human appeal and emotional connections hold value. Amidst concerns over AI-induced labor shortages, there might be a silver lining. Maybe we’ll have weather girls again.

The year is 2045. "Baby Cafes" have become all the rage. For $50 an hour, patrons enjoy unlimited tea, confections, and the heartwarming sensation of motherhood. This cost is twice the minimum wage. The clientele primarily consists of professional women aged twenty-five to fifty-five, who are childless due to economic circumstances.

Happy, upbeat music plays over the speakers. The walls are adorned with incubators facing the street, drawing the adoration of passersby. These onlookers are often captivated by the sight of premature, ill, and newborn babes who aren't yet ready to be on the cafe floor.

For an additional fee, patrons can sing lullabies, read children's stories, or take a baby for an attended stroll in a pram. Day-to-day annoyances like changing diapers and breastfeeding are managed by the employees.

Artificial wombs are a luxury only the wealthy can afford. The cafe depends on donations from the state's foster care system and baby farms. The latter is the preferred source. These farms enforce drug-free policies and provide regulated prenatal assistance. Not to mention, they offer labor opportunities for young migrant women. Economic migration is at an all-time high.

With widely accessible gene editing, babies from baby farms are of superior stock than those donated by the government. It is said that the women have daily Mozart listening sessions and weekly massages. It’s a great opportunity for them. Housing, US citizenship and a bit of cash. Choosing babies from these farms is a sustainable and ethical choice.

Although baby cafes are a huge portion of the farms’ revenue, this option is popular among those who can afford to raise a child but still value the natural aspect. For both parties affordability of quality children is certainly a factor.

The cafe itself promotes adoption. Around three, the children get to be a bit too much to handle. While many patrons choose to pay extra for reading and playtime with the babies, very few can afford to adopt.

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Today marks the first day of Pride, which is celebrated every June in the US. Activision-Blizzard Games, the publisher of Overwatch, stands accused of engaging in Rainbow Capitalism. Last month, it was revealed that the company was being sued by the US government for allegedly incentivizing private eSports clubs to cap the income earned by its players. This accusation follows a lengthy series of controversies. Just last year, Blizzard was obliged to pay a hefty $35 million to employees who alleged sexual harassment. The company has also faced accusations of union-busting, workplace sexism, and generally poor business practices.

The manner in which Blizzard's PR team has addressed this controversy is intriguing. In early April, on the very day news broke of the company's government lawsuit, information about a new pansexual, genderqueer character of color was leaked. This timing was considered by many to be more than just a coincidence.

Indeed, some fans have observed that Overwatch tends to employ such tactics either to divert attention from ongoing legal issues or to capitalize on Pride month.

Generally, a major video game company embracing LGBTQ+ characters would be regarded as a sign of progress. Over the past two decades, the Gay rights movement in the US has gained substantial momentum, with same-sex marriage becoming legalized and public attitudes towards gay and queer individuals trending positively.

However, this progress has not been without scrutiny. Debates about the ethics of kink at Pride have taken center stage, and with the conservative pushback against these social changes, it's clear that there is still a long way to go.

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In recent years, one discussion has revolved around the use of Rainbow Capitalism. This refers to when large corporations cash in on Pride month by emblazoning their products with giant rainbows, without addressing LGBTQ+ issues during the rest of the year.

The latest controversy involving Activision-Blizzard perfectly illustrates my primary concern with Rainbow Capitalism and modern mainstream activist culture: it's largely about appearances.

A few months ago, I found Chris Hedges' 'Woke Imperialism' an engaging read. In this essay, Hedges argues that liberals have adopted identity politics, advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion as a response to the 2008 financial crisis. DEI initiatives and Rainbow Capitalist tactics do not offend Wall Street. They also enable companies like Blizzard to distract the public from their workers' labor conditions.

I believe that diversity is inherently beneficial. As many LGBTQ+ individuals have expressed, it's exciting to see Overwatch introduce this new character. Overall, we should all strive for a more inclusive society. The challenge lies in embracing an ideology that includes class consciousness. A new Black Little Mermaid is delightful, and I am genuinely thrilled about it. However, it isn't going to address the Black femicide crisis. Similarly, Overwatch introducing Lifeweaver is fantastic, but we should not allow companies to divert our attention from reality with 'woke' trinkets.

My years of exploration in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho made me aware of a reality – foreigners are only not allowed if the potential cost is more than the reward.

Let’s take the case of a soft-spoken Singaporean businessman with a nice watch, maybe can speak a little Japanese. Money is nothing to him since the Yen hasn’t seen growth in nearly three decades. He’s Asian, wealthy, mannered, and likely to not cause trouble. The women employed will probably have little issue with him. I have no doubt that out of the thousands of Girls’ Bars, Cabaret Clubs, Snack Pubs, and Escort services in Kabukicho that a few wouldn’t mind relieving him of his cash.

It becomes a bit hairy for a group of twenty-something army bros on a night out in Tokyo. You know the types, they call Japanese citizens “the locals” and wouldn’t know the difference between Hanguel and Hiragana? Yeah, they would have a tough time getting into Japanese-ran night establishments in Tokyo. Sure, they have more cash than they know how to deal with but the problems that they have the potential of causing–are not worth it. It’s far easier to say “Japanese Only”

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I hadn’t had much experience with Girls’ Bars. I’ve been to Male-staffed Host Clubs twice or thrice with a group of friends. My friends once threw a surprise 19th birthday party for me in Little Seoul at a cafe staffed by cute Korean guys. That was fun.

Yet before this night, I never sought the more popular, female equivalent.

The man staffing the information center sat us on a couch. Like everyone else, he wanted to know why a Black woman could speak Japanese. I typically opt for “I studied in Tokyo.” It’s a simple yet honest response that grants me a bit of cultural capital. Maybe I could be Michelle Obama’s grand-niece twice removed or something. The reality is: I took private Japanese lessons in Michigan since I was 11. I worked as an Idol in Tokyo since I was 18. The bulk of my Japanese ability comes from hustling sugar daddies and working as a hostess. Overall, I’m still not amazing at Japanese. Far more than enough to navigate Kabukicho.

“What’re you guys interested in? Wanna drink?” He had a huge smile on his face and his demeanor went from 0 to Japanese omotenashi as soon as he realized he could make money from us.

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