Munia

The goal of fascist sports ideology is to convert the average spectator into a jingoist. According to J. A. Hobson, the sports spectator resembles a jingoist in the sense that both groups submit to “vacant gratifications of detachment”. Only the jingoist is more “venal and extreme”, who despite remaining “unpurged by any personal effort, risk, or sacrifice”, “gloats over the perils, pain, and slaughter of fellow-men whom he does not know”. Of course, I am not accusing every person who watches or enjoys sports of being warmongers. But with the usage of sports as a tool for propaganda and the nationalist euphoria it induces in people, the line between the two roles grows thinner in desperate times.

What makes Fleabag special is that her hyper-s*xuality is something we see quite openly. She is not trying to steer clear of that as many female artists try to do because it might cheapen their work or get them sl*t-shamed. Waller-Bridge’s protagonist “stoops” to that level and lives there. Even the name of the protagonist, which is never revealed, is similar to p*rnography where women are “barely-l*gal teen”, “busty m*lf”, and many other things, but rarely a person with a name.

The issue with Tate is not just women's discomfort with misogyny (although, that should be enough), but that he uses social media platforms to groom, prey on, and traffic women and children. Contrary to popular belief, his victims are not the young men who follow him, but the women who absorb all the hate and cruelty. It is not a coincidence that social media platforms started removing Tate from their sites as soon as he was criminally charged. They foresaw the repercussions of hosting an alleged sex-trafficker and allowing him to use their resources for targeting women and children. But that does not absolve them. Tate's popularity and power is a result of the mainstream media and social media platforms prioritizing profit and overlooking morality. If he was not featured on Big Brother UK despite the allegations against him, he would not be able to build an online presence over that popularity. If the UK police treated the cases against him seriously, he would not have been able to move to Romania and expand his trafficking business. If platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook flagged him for his bigotry sooner, he would not have been able to sell courses about sex-trafficking women. Those sites can at least claim that the outcomes were unanticipated, but Substack does not have that excuse. The things he does, says, is charged with and went to jail for are a Google search away. Their inaction resembles deliberate complicity.

I began the research of this piece on a hunch that Epstein's connection to pornography was not limited to his viewership. I started by looking into the coverage from established news outlets, but they did not offer anything convincing. The ones that mentioned p*rn*graphy were TMZ’s piece on Epstein's p*rn collection, and The New York Times piece about Maria Farmer, a former employee of Epstein who informed the F.B.I. about Epstein's collection of CSAMs in 1996, and did not get acknowledged by the agency until a decade later. The only other relevant piece was a feature written by Helen Rumbelow in The Times where she noted that the misogyny of Epstein and his famous friends was driven by p*rn*graphic lexicon. This left me thinking that my intuition may have been wrong, because if the experienced and well-equipped journalists from established news sources had nothing more concrete to report, then it would be impossible to find anything more by myself. But after scouring through the files for days, I found substantial confirmation that my instinct was right.

Which reminded me of these horse memes.

So I had to turn it into one. Enjoy!

For what it’s worth, I understand and agree with most of the criticisms against her. Now the question arises: why do I claim to defend her? I am not excited about it any more than her critics are excited about bashing her to the ground (if anything, they seem more enthusiastic about that than I have been about reading anything from kaur in a while). I also think she has done a bad job of developing as an artist. But my hands were forced by a specific type of critics.