wild women don’t get the blues

me at the end of 2020:

Lyn telling off Juniper at the Queerceañera - Requested

Hello everyone! I am so very pleased to announce that we are now collecting funds for Dashcon 2021!

That’s right! Coming March 2021, we will be holding the second official Dashcon in Schaumburg Illinois, featuring panels such as:

Love Wins: Destiel is Canon

An Introduction to A/B/O

Activism and Kpop: How Fancams Fight Fascism

Bernie, AOC, and other Woke Baes: Why We Love Them, and What They Mean for Our Ships

a 72-hour Hamilton sing-a-long all weekend

and acting lessons with special guest Jensen Ackles!

Donate here to help make Dashcon the best it can be! 💜

like i really worry that our culture is commodifying trauma? a band i really like, led by a young woman about my age, they released a song in early 2015 that was quite clearly about sexual assault. and it was a great song, and it earned a very deserved warm reception, but interviewers would persistently ask the lead singer if it was “a personal account,” and she would always say that it was an observation on rape culture and leave it at that. and then about a year later she released a personal essay saying that, yes, it was about her own experience of sexual assault, and then there was another wave of secondary clickbait-y thinkpieces congratulating her for being so brave and so open.

so we have a great song addressing sexual assault, which can more than stand on its own as a piece of art. and we have a young woman who, after a year of getting the same question from reporters, says, “i was raped; the song is about me.” and then we have another wave of reporters coming in to write identical stories repeating her words, calling her brave, and collecting ad revenue.

and that’s what i mean: for every act of personal disclosure of trauma, there is this weird media apparatus that feeds on publicizing that trauma and collecting fat stacks of ad money. publications are taking what might be an empowering process for some people and they’re incentivizing and monetizing public trauma disclosure. it’s deeply fucked up.

and, of course, when i wrote this post, i was talking about the phenomenon of “publications that traffic in underpaying marginalized young people to describe their trauma in detail.” a lot of these publications no longer exist, and the personal essay boom is no longer in full swing. which, regrettably, means that marginalized young people are now just expected to publicly disclose their trauma on social media without any compensation whatsoever in the service of dedication to some amorphous “movement.”