Thousands of Crickets Disrupt Anti-Trans Conference & the Long History of Buggy Activism

Photo by Ivan Ivanovič on Unsplash

On Friday, October 11, 2024, members from the UK Trans Kids Deserve Better group went to a conference hosted by the anti-trans LGB Alliance. The activists ensured that a speech by noted anti-trans activist Jamie Reed was literally met with crickets. They released thousands of crickets they were carrying on them, disrupting the conference’s speeches for the rest of the day.

The protestors were then escorted off the premises, and the LGB Alliance’s plans were not only disrupted (momentarily) but also mocked and decried in the press. “…An anti-trans “advocacy” group known as LGB Alliance reportedly had its annual conference interrupted by thousands of unexpected guests,” mocks the outlet Them. “On Friday, a group of youth activists released over 6,000 crickets,” notes Mira Lazine in LGBTQ Nation.

I wanted to highlight this and other recent buggy activism, first and foremost, because I think it’s pretty funny. There is a certain catharsis that comes with seeing hateful people, who often go about their lives facing no consequences, having to run away from insects.

Yet, I also want to focus on this event because it is a long-standing tactic that has recently picked up steam.

Crickets and other bugs

There is a rich tradition of activists using insects to mock awful people. Earlier this year, pro-Palestinian activists released bugs, such as maggots, mealworms, and crickets, on the conference room table of the Watergate Hotel, where then-Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was set to stay during his July visit to Washington, DC.

Several years ago, protestors released hundreds of Madagascar hissing cockroaches in an Albany courtroom to disrupt an arraignment hearing of tenant rights activists.

Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, Byron Burger allegedly used staffing meetings to assist in immigration sting operations. As a result, dozens of employees were deported. In protest of these deportations, activists released over ten thousand insects at one of Byron Burger’s locations.

We can go back all the way to the organizing of Black militants during the 1960s. The Albany-based group “The Brothers” once used cockroaches as a vital aspect of its campaign to protest the city’s slumlords. They dumped them on the stage of then-Mayor Erastus Corning as part of a pressure campaign for better conditions.

Bugs show up again and again in the activist scene.

This tactic has been used so often because, one, it’s cheap. Bugs are everywhere and technically free. The Brothers found cockroaches from apartment buildings and collected them in jars. Today, you don’t even have to do that type of grunt work. You can buy creepy crawlers like crickets, cockroaches, mealworms, and more on sites such as Amazon.

Bugs are also easy to transport. In that earlier example, the Albany tenant-rights protestors ferried the Madagascar hissing cockroaches in Tupperware containers with lettuce. The Trans Kids Deserve Better activists had them on their person at a conference, and I can verify when combing through the products on Amazon, that these insects arrive in small to medium-sized packaging.

It is a low-cost, low-effort action made even easier by the Internet.

Finally, releasing insects makes a statement. People in the US generally hate bugs, and they have all sorts of negative connotations, some of which tie directly into the activism these organizers are doing. The Brother’s militants in Albany collected cockroaches from rundown apartment buildings, turning them into a rather direct statement on the slums this group was protesting.

A buggy conclusion

When Trans Kids Deserve Better activists disrupted Jamie Reed’s anti-trans speech earlier this month, they were part of a long history of activists using insects to fight for social justice. Sometimes, these critters are used to protest the inhumane environments people are living in. Other times, as with this instance, they were used to mock an unjust proceeding or event.

With bugs so easy to buy online, it’s an action that is becoming increasingly easier to do. A 1000 crickets is less than $30 on the Internet right now, and with that comes one helluva a temptation.

Hey Execs, Fan Service Doesn’t (Automatically) Lead To High Returns

Image; Ubisoft

I had a thought recently while playing Star Wars: Outlaws (2024)— the open-world game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by the much-maligned Ubisoft. My player character was walking along the snowy mountaintop city of Kijimi, and she glitched into the space below the floor. She couldn’t get out, and at that moment, I thought: “How can a game this gorgeous play this badly?”

I had purchased Outlaws because I wanted to comment on it for this blog, but most gamers understandably didn’t give it that chance. The game only made one million sales in its first month. These lackluster results were hardly surprising if you were aware of the publisher’s deteriorating reputation among the gaming community and Ubisoft (at the time) deciding not to publish games on Steam, which couldn’t have helped its sales.

Yet Ubisoft seemed surprised by these results, writing in a financial statement that its sales numbers were well below expectations. It seems to me that this publisher expected that the Star Wars Intellectual Property (IP), by itself, would lead to a million-plus sales in the game’s first week, regardless of the overall playability and reception of the game.

In the current pop culture landscape, this seems to be the standard approach for a lot of media. There is this expectation that specific IP when paired with a heaping of “fan service” (i.e., crafting narratives to appease existing consumers), will guarantee a certain amount in sales.

However, in the current marketplace, where we are over-saturated with nerdy media, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Disney’s Fan Service

Let’s zoom in for a moment on Star Wars. It’s easy to see this problem not just with Outlaws but with most recent Star Wars media. These are products that rely almost exclusively on fanservice, where in some cases, such as Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) or Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka (2023), the entire premise is built around a favorite character.

In many circumstances, these shows heavily spotlight moments that only fans of the existing media will understand. The Book Of Boba Fett (2021–2022) had entire scenes, such as Fett’s duel with Cad Bane, that would only make sense if you had watched the Clone Wars (2008–2014, 2020) cartoon. Ahsoka was effectively a sequel to the animated kid’s cartoon Rebels (2014–2018, 2020), which I saw and I still had trouble following the live-action show.

In fact, the current Creative Officer of Lucasfilm, Dave Filoni, who originally cut his creative teeth on Clone Wars, is said to be directing a movie that ties together all the disparate elements of the new Star Wars properties into one “cohesive” narrative.

That interconnectivity appears to be the content strategy for Disney’s Star Wars — and most likely the Mickey Mouse company more broadly — and I am not convinced it’s working. While these shows have generally received much attention in the zeitgeist — sometimes even critically when it comes to Andor (2022-present) and The Mandalorian (2019-present) — their overall profitability has been less certain.

A common issue I (and many others) have with streaming platforms or “steamers” is that viewership information is often not easily accessible, even to showrunners, so it’s difficult to know how much value is actually being generated — i.e., how many subscriptions these shows bring in. Reporting will claim (usually via third-party monitoring) that a show on Disney+ is highly viewed, but we have no way to confirm that.

Meanwhile, the Disney+ app — i.e., where these shows, as well as the likes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and others, are hosted — has hardly been profitable in the long term. Disney+, and the company more broadly, was in the hole by billions just last year. The company recently had to make drastic cost-cutting measures to get back into the black, and reining in Disney+ was a massive part of that equation. As Caroline Reid wrote in Forbes in April of 2024:

“In order to pacify disgruntled stockholders, Disney had to cut $7.5 billion of costs, including a lot of the exclusive streaming content it had commissioned. Despite this, Disney+ has burned up more than $11.4 billion of operating losses since it was launched and isn’t forecast to even make a profit until the end of the year..”

There were a lot of factors that contributed to that significant loss. The COVID pandemic, for one, led to a sudden surge and drop in subscriptions across the board and a shuttering of Disney parks.

However, one of the main factors was just the arrogance of senior leadership, thinking it could supplant existing competitor Netflix if it doubled down with its existing IP and outspent them. As Caroline Reid quipped in that same Forbes article: “Disney acted like it too was in this dominant position right off the bat.”

It spent a large amount of money on exclusive streaming content without mitigating the risks that come with that spending, and then when the rug was pulled out from under it, felt the ramifications.

Beyond Disney

Yet I want to be clear that this assumption many studio executives make that specific fan-favorite IP will generate a crazy return if they only pour enough money into it is not only coming from Disney but most of the major media conglomerates.

Take the example of Sony’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). It took in north of $200 million. This was roughly the same as its predecessor, Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), which eeked out a little more than 2.5% times its production budget — the industry standard for whether a film flops or bombs in the box office.

However, Frozen Empire was considered a flop because the company invested significantly more money in the title (around $100 million, as opposed to $75 million), meaning it would have to make a minimum of $250 million, or $50 million more than the first title did, to be considered successful. The distributor, Sony, specifically hoped that the increased budget, coupled with fan service that integrated the sequel with the older Ghostbusters IP, such as actors from the original film, would generate this return. In the words of Ryan Scott in Slash Film: “[Frozen Empire] was bigger and featured more nostalgic imagery to try and hook audiences.”

Yet those nostalgia hooks did not generate higher returns because that strategy does not work in our current media landscape. I would not use that assumption to greenlight an increased budget for a sequel or spinoff.

Warner Brothers' film Joker: Folie à Deux is another example of this. The original Joker, with a budget of around $55 million, was a runaway hit in 2019, meeting a worldwide box office return of over $1 billion. From a financial standpoint, it makes sense that a company would see that overwhelming return on investment and try to replicate that lightning-in-the-bottle success.

However, there was no game plan for the sequel. Director Todd Phillips had pitched Joker as a standalone story. So you had this very obvious problem of a series that earned acclaim for its story (it won two Oscars) struggling to deliver on its core selling point. To me, that kind of hurdle would justify a conservative budget. I might bump it to $65 million and push Phillips to focus more on the story. Instead, the studio gave the film a budget of $200 million, requiring it to make a minimum of $500 million to be considered a “success.”

Why would you make such a gamble when the whole point of the original’s success was that it was cheap to make?

And yet, that appears to be the strategy. Many media executives seem to be working on the assumption that a well-known IP, factored in with a consistent amount of fan service, will generate a guaranteed amount in returns, but if that strategy ever worked, it doesn’t now.

We have reached a point in the media ecosystem where so many existing properties are being retold and rebooted that it is difficult to imagine a nerdy IP just having automatic success in the box office or streaming landscape.

A cinematic conclusion

In general, when I complain about media being narratively bad, I often hear the argument that capitalism isn’t driven by art for art’s sake. “It’s important,” such critics say, “that these products make money first and foremost.”

If this analysis has shown anything, however, it’s that the people treating “art as a business” aren’t even good at it on those terms. Many firms appear to be overspending on popular IP to compete in a crowded marketplace, leading to a roulette wheel-like attitude regarding spending. They are betting all-in on a particular IP because they think it has a built-in type of financial return, and that’s faulty reasoning. The financial success of a piece of “content” has much more to do with marketing, narrative cohesion, and an intersection of other factors than just the popularity of a particular IP.

Sometimes, those are theoretically within a firm’s control and can be mitigated for (or not). For example, I loved the indie horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein (2024), but it did horribly despite its high audience favorables. Its failure has much more to do with its scaled-down marketing budget, critics hating it, its Superbowl Sunday weekend release date, and its limited theater release overall. It’s possible to overcome such hurdles through better scheduling and marketing, but there were probably other projects that Focus Features thought were worthier of its budget, making Lisa Frankenstein more of a calculated failure. Focus Features lost $2-3 million on the picture, which is small in movie terms.

Other times, though, success is not even in a firm’s control. The recent box office bomb Furiosa (2024) was well received by critics and audiences alike but only took in $173 million worldwide despite needing to earn over $400 million to be considered a success. The reasons for its failure have more to do with general consumer trends than anything specific about the film itself. As Jonathan H. Kantor speculates in Looper:

“Furiosa” flat-out bombed at the box office, possibly due to the recasting of the lead, the often poor performance of prequels, or the near decade that passed between the release of “Fury Road” and “Furiosa.”

The passage of time and widespread consumer conceptions about prequels are two factors that, from a marketing perspective, take a lot of work to control. And even then, sometimes, your audience still doesn’t see your film. It’s baffling that firms spend so much on these individual investments when the odds of success are approaching a flip of the coin.

Is that what good investing is?

I know many media executives have crafted formulas that predict that X IP with Y fan integration will generate Z revenue, but these formulas are nothing more than highly elaborate vibes. Studios would not be so easily overspending on projects if they had cracked the code on consumer preferences.

Human consumption is far less predictable than that — at least, this fan seems to think so.

Divorce Saves Lives (Men’s Most of All)

Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash

“One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace … is the idea that, like, ‘Well, okay, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”

- JD Vance, 2021

For a long time, women who could marry had little agency within this institution. Our identities were, legally speaking, merged with our husbands, who had the ability to make financial decisions in exchange for the theoretical obligation to protect us (see coverture law). A married woman had no right to manage her assets and property, and, depending on the time period and her citizenship status, there were vast limitations on earning a wage.

No-fault divorce (i.e. being able to end a marriage without having to prove that one party did anything wrong) did not start to get implemented until the 1960s. The women who had the economic privilege to push for a divorce before this time had to legally prove that their husbands were committing adultery, being abusive, or some other legal offense. This requirement was a hurdle that was both traumatizing and difficult to do, in effect barring many women from being able to separate legally.

Some may think that all my fellow women and femmes accepted that state of affairs. Oppressors always want to believe that their victims simply accept unjust hierarchies as passive objects, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Oppression can turn one into a being of vengeance, where the oppressed seek to make those who hurt them suffer.

In fact, one of the time-honored pastimes of women trapped in terrible marriages is simply to kill their husbands.

Women killing their husbands

The murder of terrible husbands is nothing new. There is a stereotype that poison is a woman’s weapon, one ridiculed as weak and cowardly. And while I think that is a mischaracterization — planning a murder of someone who has more power than you in society is incredibly gutsy — it’s a stereotype that has roots in truth.

Many women did use poison.

Take the almost mythical poison Aqua Tofana, which was allegedly used in 17th-century Italy to kill men. It was associated with an underground professional poisoner, Guilia Tofana, who sold the poison to dissatisfied women, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of men in the process (note: Margaret Killjoy has a fantastic podcast summarizing her efforts).

The actual Aqua Tofana concoction is believed to be either arsenic, lead, belladonna, or some combination. It was sold in a cosmetic bottle that could be easily disguised as part of a woman’s toiletries. It was allegedly orderless and tasteless, so women could slip it into their husband or male guardian’s food or drink and then pass off the ensuing symptoms as an unrelated illness of the time.

Arsenic, in particular, was used throughout Europe in the 19th century because it was widely accessible and cheap. In Britain, it was found in everything from wallpaper to rat poison. As Dr. James C. Whorton said in an interview with the History News Network: “…[arsenic] was democratized. Everybody could afford it and there was no control of the sale of it.”

This greater accessibility meant that murders with arsenic unsurprisingly increased. And since women under patriarchy do not have the same entitlements to violence as men, such poisonings became linked in the popular imagination with women. High-profile poisoning cases, such as that of alleged murderer Sarah Chesham, were sensationalized in the press, even though the majority of spousal homicides were still caused by men. As Dr. Whorton continues in that interview:

“Once it became evident that arsenic poisoning was increasing in the 1840s and there were cases of women being arrested and convicted, there was a hysterical overreaction and fear that virtually every woman in the country [of Britain] was trying to find a way to knock off her husband or kids.”

This fear of women using arsenic to murder their husbands, male guardians, and children was such a concern that in 1851, the House of Lords attempted to amend the Sale of Arsenic Regulation Act so that it would forbid women from being able to purchase it legally.

While the Arsenic Scare of the 19th century would die down due to a variety of factors (i.e., better detection, new moral panics emerging, and the rights of women improving, etc.), these old reasons for murder have not gone away. Whether we are talking about Yvonne Godwin, slipping rat poison into her abusive husband’s cake in 2008, or Rebecca Payne slipping sleeping pills into her husband’s favorite cookies in 2023, women still try to kill their husbands because the legal right to divorce does not prevent (some) women from being trapped in abusive and financially restrictive relationships.

Women strike back at their husbands all the time, and the nature of poisonings makes it challenging to know the full scope of these events. Many poisons are slow-acting and difficult to detect without knowing what to test for, and since the law tends to strictly punish women who kill their abusers, there is not exactly an incentive to come clean about it.

You kill your abuser and then let the world think he died of a heart attack, a stroke, or some other natural misfortune.

A deadly conclusion

Now, I don’t want to make it seem like all women killers across history are saints. Women, like men, are people, and some of us can suck. Just this year, Kouri Richins stood trial for allegedly poisoning her husband and then using his death to write a children’s book about processing her grief.

Historically, not all the women who used Aqua Tofana and arsenic were doing so for benign reasons. Some wanted to get an inheritance or estate, and due to the paternalistic nature of the legal system, a man was standing in the way. Others didn’t want the responsibility of motherhood (maybe never did), and so they saw no alternative but to murder their entire family — their children included.

The goal isn’t to say that women are all angels but rather to matter-of-factly point out what inevitably happens when you make divorce harder to do than murder: men get killed.

There has been a lot of talk recently about repealing no-fault divorce. And I look at the men arguing for this fate and wonder if they are aware of the horrors in front of them. Women are not passive objects that will accept the stripping away of our rights. With the right prompting, we can be vengeful ghosts — bent on destroying those in our way.

The men looking to test that wraith should be very afraid.

Let’s Talk About the ‘Uglies’ Messy Trans Subtext

Image; Davis Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Industry Entertainment, Wonderland Sound and Vision, Netflix

The Uglies is the first book in a dystopian young adult series about a society governed by strict beauty norms. I came to it as an adult, which might surprise you since it’s geared toward teenage girls. I picked up my copy of Uglies in 2015 and tore through all four of its main books, and controversially liked Extras the best.

I bring this all up not to brag but to tell you that, from the perspective of a reader, I am familiar with this series. I was excited about Uglies coming to Netflix. And I was equally excited when trans actress Laverne Cox was cast as the villainous Dr. Cable, the antagonist of the series holding up this society’s dystopian beauty norms.

I am going to be doing a trans reading of this film because, well, I want to, and also, I think Cox’s casting adds something interesting to a film whose plotline is about children getting surgeries to conform to societal beauty norms— a theme that is pretty messy.

Trans beauty

For those who don’t know, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series takes place in a post-fossil-fuel and post-capitalist world where our current civilization has fallen due to our society’s unsustainability finally catching up with us. A virus destroyed all of our fossil fuel, most of our tech stopped working, and we are now referred to as the Rusties after all of our rusting and rotting shit.

In the place of this dysfunction, a new society has emerged — a collection of city-states that have tried to remove all divisions between people by making everyone pretty. As the narrator, who is also our lead, monologues in the beginning:

People’s differences continued to create classes, clans, and countries, which prevented them from their shared humanity.

So, they came up with a radical solution: the transformation. Everyone, on their 16th birthday, undergoes a life-changing operation to become their most perfect self. And when everyone is perfect, conflict melts away. Everyone is healthy, happy, Pretty.

Almost everyone gets surgery at 16 by a set of trained doctors to make them “scientifically” pretty, and it’s here we meet our protagonist, Tally Youngblood (Joey King), a titular “ugly,” who is on the verge of her sixteenth birthday.

If you are very clever, you’ll have noticed right away that by creating a split between “pretties” and “uglies,” this society, like so many before it, has created a caste system. Instead of being divided by wealth, its leaders rule through a combination of physical traits and what role they happen to possess in society — with doctors on the Committee for Morphological Standards being on top.

And who maintains this dystopian, shame-ridden society guided by the principles of eugenics?

Well, it’s Laverne Cox’s Dr. Cable, of course. We first meet her in a stunning dress, monologuing to Tally’s class via giant hologram about the importance of getting the pretty surgery:

For those of you turning 16 today, you are truly on the cusp of a metamorphosis. That change starts with one elegant procedure that will make you perfect, both inside and out. You’ll be beautiful and free from hatred and discrimination based on the way that you look.

And, like, to me, these words can be interpreted as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for transitioning. There is a big goal for some — though certainly not all trans people — to “pass.” For you to undergo such a transformation that society cannot tell the difference between you and a person that has a gender that matches their assigned sex at birth.

If only I get this right set of elective procedures, the logic goes, then I’ll be a “real” man or woman or what have you, and as Cable says, you’ll “be free from […] discrimination based on the way that you look.”

As the film progresses, we learn that Dr. Cable does not tolerate dissent: she forces Tally on a quest to find a mysterious sanctuary called “The Smoke,” which is filled with runaways who do not want the operation. She is quite literally a trans person hunting down children so they forcibly undergo elective surgeries.

There is a chilling scene where Dr. Cable, due to Tally’s unwitting help, finds The Smoke, and she brags about forcing a bunch of children and adults to get elective surgeries. “In fact, all of your procedures have been scheduled,” she maliciously cackles to a crowd of horrified onlookers.

It’s a comment that struck me because I (a trans person) am painfully aware that that is how a lot of conservatives see transgender people currently — villains who are forcing people, mainly children, to transition into something they “don’t want.” As Trump erroneously said this year: “Can you imagine your child goes to school and they don’t even call you, and they change the sex of your child?”

The trans subtext in this film is messy, and it’s further complicated by how this film conveys rural-urban relations.

The environment & shit

In the books, the city-states are 100% totalitarian. Residents are constantly monitored, scary hovercrafts monitor the perimeter, and their schools are using indoctrination to pressure children into having a surgery that we learn later in the book (and movie) will impair them cognitively.

Yet, importantly, they are not lying about the city’s environmentalism in the books. Their governments seem to care deeply about sustainability, so much so that many of the luxuries of the pretty part of town are biodegradable. The Smoke is seen as a threat partially for its potential impact on the environment, as it will encourage people to move outside of cities (and for populations to expand).

The best example of this concern has to do with the White Tiger Orchid. It’s a product of Rusty society in the books. A plant whose growth was bioengineered to be so effective that it’s now invasively taking over the surrounding landscape, leeching so many nutrients out of the soil that it desertifies everything it touches.

In the books, Tally meets a group of city-run rangers who are eternally charged with the task of control-burning the periphery of the Orchid’s range so they do not take over the world. As one ranger tells Tally in the books:

About three hundred years ago, some Rusty figured a way to engineer the species to adapt to wider conditions. She messed with the genes to make them propagate more easily….One of the most beautiful plants in the world. But too successful. They turned into the ultimate weed. What we call a monoculture. They crowd out every other species.

…the orchids eventually die out, victims of their own success, leaving a wasteland behind. Biological zero. We rangers try to keep them from spreading. We’ve tried poison, engineered diseases, predators…but fire is the only thing that really works.

In the movies, however, the city’s environmentalism is a lie.

The flowers were engineered as an unsustainable energy source, with desertification being a planned feature of this plant to keep dissidents inside the cities. As the Smoke native David (Keith Powers) lectures:

Those orchids are toxic. They pull all the nutrients from the soil
and destroy everything in their path…Those flowers are turning the planet
into a wasteland. Killing everything. Forcing everyone to live in the city.

This sets up an interesting dichotomy between the totalitarian, urban landscapes of the cities and the more egalitarian, environmental community of the Smoke. As David monologues in another scene: “The city is not going to stop. Because The Smoke is a threat to everything they stand for… Where we believe in preserving what’s natural, they believe in manipulation.”

When you pair this anti-urban outlook, which in a US context is traditionally associated with conservatism, and you add it to everything else we have been discussing, it can leave an awkward taste in your mouth. The evil city dwellers are trying to force children to have surgeries, and they are destroying rural safe havens to do so.

It’s just a weird subtext to process in 2024 America.

An ugly conclusion

I want to emphasize that I don’t think this film actively endorses this subtext. There was no attempt by director Joseph McGinty Nichol to make an anti-trans movie, especially considering the casting of Laverne Cox as the villain, which I think was a bold and commendable choice. It’s more of a problem of this film just playing things so safe (i.e., conservatively) that its message ends up being dull enough for you to project any subtext onto it that you wish.

The film doesn’t bother to speak about LGBT identity one way or another. We do not see queer representation in Pretty Town or The Smoke, which would have definitely sharpened what it was trying to say here. The narrative also softens its perspective on things such as race. The books had everyone who underwent the surgery adopt a standardized olive skin tone. While in the film, the evil standard of pretty is quite inclusive, racially and ethnically speaking.

And that’s a shame because I see what this film could have been. There could have been something exciting said about how beauty norms often coincide with white supremacist, cisgendered, and heteronormative values that this film just sidesteps.

In the end, it ends up saying even less than the 2005 book version did, and that conservatism leaves an ugly taste in my mouth.

People Telling You, “It Was Different Back Then” Are Not Talking About the Past

Image; Photo by Ron Dauphin on Unsplash

There’s a familiar rebuttal that happens whenever talking about the problematic attitudes of the past: “Things were different then. We all know it wasn’t right, and didn’t agree with it, but we need to move on to a better future.” (note: that’s a word-for-word comment from an article about Songs of the South).

Proponents of this mindset argue that we need to recognize that the values of the past were different from today, and therefore, we shouldn’t judge such people by more modern standards.

We can talk in circles about the accuracy of this statement — and we will — and yet I also want to focus on how these counters are not really about the past at all. I assert that many of these people are using such statements as deflections to reinforce the unfairness of the status quo.

Let’s talk about the people back then

The conversation over the “things were different back then” debate usually begins and ends with its veracity. People will argue this point, and then you will engage in the long and drawn-out process of pointing out the various points in history where people didn’t align with the dominant hierarchy’s beliefs.

My favorite example of this is the debate about slavery in ancient Greece. The historical record is pretty consistent that slavery was ubiquitous across the Greek city-states. This does not mean that slavery was accepted everywhere in the world. Even the nearby Achaemenid Empire, aka the Persian Empire, had banned some (though not all instances) of it. Still, it is true that whether traveling to the democratic Athens or the authoritarian Sparta, enslaved people were a common sight.

We don’t have much evidence in the surviving record that there were many anti-slavery victories during this time — i.e., the number of slave revolts during Greek antiquity we have proof of are few and far between— but we do have evidence that some people were definitely against slavery. And we know this because a famous conservative wrote against the anti-slavery viewpoint. You may have heard of him. His name was Aristotle. As he laments in his work Politics:

“For some thinkers hold the function of the master to be a definite science, and moreover think that household management, mastership, statesmanship and monarchy are the same thing…

…others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.”

That latter point sounds like the modern position on slavery, only spoken about thousands of years ago.

Ironically, our most substantial evidence for anti-slavery sentiment in Ancient Greece is Aristotle’s passing efforts to discredit it. We might not even have this much evidence if this work had not survived the ravages of time. It’s hard to ascertain the scope of these activities, and we might never know for sure.

People will argue that such uncertainty proves that these viewpoints were the minority, and you can certainly assert that, but it also proves that despite an overwhelmingly hostile environment where scholars were claiming that slavery was a “science,” some people could see through their indoctrination and resist it. There were those who hated slavery and shockingly (or not so shockingly if you have any understanding of history) appeared to have had “modern” sensibilities “back then.”

In fact, history is littered with counterexamples of people who have surprisingly contemporary values and then do something about it, such as John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Huey P. Newton’s founding and organizing with the Black Panthers, or the radical “terrorism” of British suffragettes such as Christabel Pankhurst.

People resist bad things all the time, even when they are unpopular, even when they are killed for doing so.

The “things were different back then” line ignores these contributions and asks us to retell a monolithic version of history that lacks such nuances — one where history’s messy complications don’t have to be wrestled with. And left unstated, where we only focus on the “winners” of history and never its dissidents.

And to me, that viewpoint says more about how people want us to treat the present than the past.

It’s about the present, too

This argument being applied to the past (e.g., that things were different back then) is a roundabout way of saying that we shouldn’t judge a status quo by our own ethics, and it’s a criticism that applies to the present as well.

If people are merely a product of their supremacist conditioning, then they do not need to be held accountable for the bad things that they do. They are simply doing the behaviors that they were taught to do.

It is what it is.

We also have injustices that many of us are trained from an early age to accept (or, at the very least, tolerate). Our supply chains rely on the violent exploitation of the Global South. From the horrifying extraction of cobalt in the Congo to the “sweatshops” assembling the “stuff” of modern-day economies, slavery and other forms of worker exploitation are a surprisingly common occurrence in our society.

And yet, we largely do not hold the people responsible for these conditions to account. Companies such as Apple and Tesla (which rely on materials such as cobalt for their many battery-driven products) are purchasing labor from firms that then contract other firms that use slavery, and there is no accountability there.

Just this year, a US Court of Appeals ruled that this degree of separation was enough to ensure that large tech companies were not legally liable for these abuses. As the court judges ruled:

“…there is no shared enterprise between the Companies and the suppliers who facilitate forced labor. The Tech Companies own no interest in their suppliers. Nor do the Tech Companies share in the suppliers’ profits and risks. Although a formal business relationship is not necessary to be a participant in a venture, something more than engaging in an ordinary buyer-seller transaction is required to establish “participation” in an unlawful venture.”

The logic here is that the “traditional” buyer-seller relationship is outside the scope of such scrutiny.

Companies like Apple may benefit from slavery, but they cannot be held responsible for it because they are not directly facilitating that enterprise. Apple merely profits from the materials enslaved people mine. Apple only established such a significant demand for said materials that it will ensure their continued mining by enslaved persons in the future.

The logic of the marketplace allows that kind of behavior because those are the values of our time, and if your ethics disagree with that — well, tough shit.

A different conclusion

I don’t believe the future will look kindly on this market-based reasoning for allowing slavery in the twenty-first century any more than we think that the philosophies of Greek antiquity successfully justified it back then. It sure will make those doing awful things feel better about the atrocities they are committing in the moment, though.

“It was different back then” is an argument that is more about assuaging the moral righteousness of those living in the here and now than it really is about the past.

Aristotle is dead. The slave traffickers of ancient Greece are all dead. It’s of no consequence to those corpses whether we speak ill of them or not. But for the people who do the same shit as them — those profiting from the exploitation of their fellow humans — they care how we talk about those who commit awful deeds.

They care because such talk would allow for calls for accountability, restitution, and redistribution. If people are responsible for the bad things they do in the moment. If your conditioning is not a justification for them but merely a pretext, then the wealth and privileges accrued from doing those bad things can and should be taken away.

And that conclusion has profound implications for how we structure our society: not just in the past but in the present.

Alien Romulus Explains Why Corporate Solutions Often Lack Sense

Image; 20th Century Studios

Fede Álvarez’s latest outing, Alien Romulus (2024), falls somewhere between a prequel and a sequel. Set in between Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), it tells the story of indentured servant Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) who goes on an off-book scavenging mission with some peers to get the parts necessary to flee her corporate colony (and effective prison).

On the titular Romulus station, she runs across the alien we have all come to know and love (from afar) — the shiny, black-tailed alien sometimes referred to as a xenomorph. It starts picking off Rain’s crew one by one as she enters a race for survival against a creature her captor, Weyland-Yutani, will do anything to acquire.

There has been a lot of discussion about this movie, particularly its usage of AI, animatronics, and a reference performance to recreate the dead actor Ian Holm, which some critics believed was exploitative.

We will sidestep that conversation and instead focus on what this text says about corporate solutions — mainly that they would rather risk tearing everything down than threatening the status quo.

Hell is made in a corporate boardroom

Life on Jackson’s Star, the Weyland-Yutani corporate colony our protagonist Rain has been stranded on since childhood, is hell. The sky is perpetually dark, crime appears rampant, and all the workers are surrounded by heavy industry with no apparent attempts to mitigate it. We see our lead walk past noxious fumes being burned up in some industrial process, and no one bats an eye.

Rain, we learn, is never leaving this planet “legitimately.” Early on, she attempts to buy a ticket off-world as she has met her corporate-assigned quota — one that took her years to fulfill — and should be free to go now, but the Weyland-Yutani bureaucracy has no interest in letting that happen.

We see a chilling scene where the administrative assistant at the travel office extends the number of days she owes to the company by years. “Unfortunately,” the assistant says with faux concern, “the quotas have been raised to 24,000 hours, so you will be released from contract in another five to six years.”

I understand why Rain goes on a deadly scavenging mission to escape Jackson’s Star — I probably would, too.

The logic I have trouble understanding, or more like stomaching, is that of this corporation’s solution. Weyland-Yutani also understands that life in its colonies is suboptimal, if only for the reduced lifespan of its workers. As the android Andy (David Jonsson), whose primary directive at this time is to aid the company, laments to his companions:

“Our colonies are dying: Unbearable temperatures, Novel diseases every cycle, and toxic mine fumes. It’s all one unforeseen tragedy after another.”

This framing, though, is a lie. It’s not all one “unforeseen” tragedy after another. Weyland-Yutani placed inhabitants, through coercion and force, into those terrible conditions. It enslaved people and then did not provide them with the resources they needed to survive long-term, only a marginal amount capable of yielding a profit.

Weyland-Yutani’s negligence is the reason why its workers are dying in the first place.

The company’s solution is not to improve its worker’s environments — environments it has built and therefore is responsible for— but to use the “perfect” DNA of the Xenomorph to make humans more “adaptable.” As the Android Rook (Daniel Betts) — the character that is the source of the Ian Holms controversy — monologues:

“Mankind was never truly suited for space colonization. They are simply too fragile. They are too weak. The work of this station aimed to change that. The perfect organism — that’s how we should refer to human beings…So I took [the xenomorphs] gift…This is a much needed and overdue upgrade for humanity.”

The only problem with implementing this plan is that the creepy crawling Xenomorph is “just so darn” destructive. It has destroyed every facility it’s been studied in, including the abandoned facilities of Romulus and Remes, where our protagonist Rain just so happens to be scavenging in.

There is no doubt what it would do if it ever were able to land on a more populated area (see Aliens), and early trials of a xenomorph-human hybrid are terrifying. Late into the movie, the viewer is shown an example of one — a flesh-pink-shaped xenomorph with a disturbing face that peaks into the uncanny valley. It’s so far removed from its humanity that it drains its mother dry.

This is a bad plan — and the movie does not pretend otherwise (Weyland-Yutani’s android Rook is a secondary antagonist) — but it is one rooted in economic incentives, we understand. If the company can get this plan to work — and that’s a big if — Weyland-Yutani can solve its problems by sacrificing none of its power.

And that doesn’t feel very far removed from the economic incentives of our present reality at all.

A metaphor for our climate

There is something oddly prescient about this movie’s critique of a corporation engaging in a self-destructive solution rather than letting go of control.

I am going to go on a bit of a tangent, but I promise it will connect back to the movie Alien: Romulus. You can argue that this movie is making a rather direct metaphor about our current environmental crisis. We likewise exist at a time when economic incentives have degraded our environment, and it’s not something that just happened but is the result of negligence from corporate and governmental actors.

Similar to Weyland-Yutani’s gene-editing plan, the answers constantly marketed to us to solve the climate crisis are either a continuation of the problem (see “natural gas,” i.e., methane) or are so far removed from reality that they could be catastrophic if ever actually implemented en masse.

Perhaps the most alarming example of the latter is geoengineering or the large-scale manipulation of Earth’s environment. Geoengineering is controversial, to say the least, and it’s hardly a thought exercise. It’s in many ways something we as a species already have a lot of experience with, as we are currently running a giant, catastrophic geoengineering experiment that we informally call climate change.

For some, this ubiquity makes it the desired solution to fight climate change — to fight fire with fire. Experiments are being run, and companies are being founded based on the premise that we will soon be able to “hack” the Earth into compliance. The start-up Make Sunsets, for example, has raised millions to release balloons with aerosols into the atmosphere to alter the climate.

The ball on this is very much rolling.

If you can’t tell, I am firmly in the “anti-geoengineering Earth to fight climate change” camp — though not against researching it on a small scale.

If the climate crisis has taught us anything, it’s that our planet’s climate is such a complicated system that we cannot possibly model it with certainty. We must assume that any significant change will have unintended knock-on effects that can spiral out of control. As Renée Cho summarizes the standard objections to Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a subset of solar geoengineering, in an article in Columbia’s Climate School magazine:

“Those against advancing SAI research are worried about its potential and uncertain impacts on the climate and ecosystems that modeling has revealed. Studies show that SAI could weaken the stratospheric ozone layer, alter precipitation patterns and affect agriculture, ecosystem services, marine life and air quality. Moreover, the impacts and risks would vary by how and where it is deployed, the climate, ecosystems and the population. Apart from deployment variations, small changes in other variables, such as the size of the aerosol droplets, their chemical reactivity and the speed of their reactions with ozone can also produce different results.”

While there are many different types of geoengineering, not just SAI — e.g., Marine cloud brightening, Cirrus cloud thinning, Sunshades, etc. — the fundamental problem is the same: there are a lot of variables that are difficult to account for at such a large scale when the more straightforward (and less risky answer) would be to implement the technology and social tools we do have now to reduce our emissions.

To me, geoengineering has the same ideological roots as Weyland-Yutani’s Xenomorph gene-editing solution to space colonization. They are both solutions that do not attempt to solve systemic problems — i.e., the financial incentives that allow companies to degrade the environment (and hurt the people) around them.

Instead, they are ultimately rooted in a type of wish fulfillment, the idea that everything can continue more or less the same with one or two tweaks.

A horrifying conclusion

Alien: Romulus recontextualizes why Weyland-Yutani wants the Xenomorph so badly in a way that resonates with many modern-day viewers. It’s not merely seen as a weapon anymore — we are past the Cold War metaphors of the 70s and 80s — but also as a cost-saving measure.

A method for Weyland-Yutani to “solve” its environmental problems while not deviating from corporate imagination.

That is a sound critique of modern-day corporate America — a series of institutions that would rather a plan be projected to turn a profit than for it actually to work. For people to propose solutions that do not ask capitalists to reduce profits (or lose power) and, hopefully, cut those pesky labor costs.

Whether on Earth or in the void of space, it’s a logic that currently seems inescapable — and I am glad to see it scrutinized on the Silver Screen.

The Appropriation of ‘Queerbaiting’: Where Do We Go From Here?

Image; Bridget Laudien

The discourse around “queerbaiting” (i.e., whether a work is using a queer “aesthetic” to attract queer fans without ever intending to validate such identities ) has been going through a bit of a moment over the past couple of years. If you go online, you will see many commentators telling their viewers or readers that the usage of this term has gone too far.

“The Problem With the Internet’s Obsession With Queerbaiting,” goes the title of a Them article by James Factora.

“Taking media out of context is in bad ‘taste,’” argues the Lanthorn Editorial Board.

There is a building consensus among social critics that we shouldn’t use this phrase anymore, and I wanted to talk about how we have arrived at this point and what it means for our language more broadly.

A brief queer history

Traditionally, queerbaiting has been a marketing tactic. It had to do with the creators and marketers of a text providing cues that are familiar to queer viewers but can be missed by everyone else.

A classic example is Teen Wolf characters Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) and Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien), who had a “frenemies” dynamic that was read by many fans as homoerotic. As I write in a past piece:

“This tension was something that the marketing team of the series definitely leaned into. In one promo for the Teen Choice Awards, Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien are on a boat, seductively wrapped around each other. ‘We are on a ship, pun intended,’ Dylan O’Brien says, referencing the fan culture word shipping, which is about fans pairing two characters together romantically.”

It may seem silly now, but people were genuinely mad at this (see Jaquelin Elliott’s essay Becoming The Monster: Queer Monstrosity and the Reclamation of the Werewolf in Slash Fandom for more details).

Queerbaiting, it’s important to remember, came during a context before the normalization of queer representation in media. In the 90s and 2000s, it was still rare to see queer characters on screen. Advocacy groups spent a lot of time unpacking the lack of LGBTQIA+ representation, with the nonprofit GLAAD tracking representation in television since 1996.

As this discourse navigated to online fandom communities in the 2010s, there was a heated debate on when mainstream properties such as Disney would introduce their “first” queer character.

It was noted by many that the company was not afraid to use queerbaiting in its marketing, releasing promotional material about upcoming queer representation, only for said representation to be small and easily edited out of foreign releases (see LeFou in the Beauty And The Beast reboot, Oaken from Frozen, etc.)

That was the conversation for years.

Yet things have improved (at least regarding representation), partly because that advocacy worked and society changed. There is an increase in queer representation in media — for some demographics.

Disney has many queer characters now (Ethan Clade in Strange World, Greg from the short Out, Phastos from Eternals, etc.). Some of the most popular shows on Netflix are packed with LGBTQ+ characters (e.g., Sex Education, Kaos, Heartstoppers, etc.). The latest Star Wars game, Outlaws, has an entire subplot where you can rescue a man’s boyfriend.

That “first” boundary has been crossed so often that it’s no longer noteworthy.

The urgency for queerbaiting has dissipated because, for some queer fans — especially more privileged, whiter, more male ones — you can just let the marketplace decide now. If Disney or whoever doesn’t want queer characters, you can go to the hundreds of alternatives that are out there. The term, therefore, has little utility (for some).

And in the meantime, it has been appropriated to let people online actually do a lot of harm to queer and non-queer creators alike.

The appropriation of the term

Again, originally queerbaiting was about the content of the media being discussed and how that content was then marketed. The Teen Wolf example was less about whether actors Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien were gay in real life and more about how their characters were being sold to the fandom of the show.

However, parallel to the debates for representation, in the 2010s was also an effort to make sure that queer actors actually played queer characters. It was not uncommon to see debates over whether it was appropriate for straight actors to star in such roles.

This was done in response to the fact that straight and cisgendered actors often played the few queer roles that existed at the time, as Tom Hanks famously did in his role as a gay lawyer in Philadelphia or Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Dont Cry. Some in the community were upset that those facing systemic discrimination for being openly queer were denied such roles, while non-queer actors were receiving accolades for pretending to be such identities.

Over time, such allegations were lumped in with the term queerbaiting. As a pejorative, it came to describe people “pretending” to be queer for fame and attention.

An early example often cited is the Russian duo t.A.T.u. and their 2002 sapphic song All The Things She Said, which drew heavily on a star-crossed lovers schtick. We have since learned that this same-sex branding was a marketing gimmick by their producer, Ivan Shapovalov.

Yet queerbaiting has been thrown around to describe celebrities from Nick Jonas to James Franco, who have had multiple pieces speculating on their sexualities. As S.E. Smith writes, inappropriately, in my opinion, of James Franco in the Daily Dot:

“Franco has trafficked on this kind of ambiguity throughout his career — both in his personal and professional life. He wants people to ask these questions and wants to be targeted directly with them so he can be evasive in interviews…His work straddles that sweet divide of possibly maybe being queer enough to be embraced by the queer community (and lauded by “progressive” straights), but not being so queer as to offend the homophobes. He dangles the prize in front of his followers, and they’re left forever chasing the brass ring, not realizing that he’s made his actual sexuality almost beside the point.”

We are seeing real-life people now being called out for “acting gay” or “trans” under the banner of queerbaiting. Arguably the term has now been weaponized to justify real-life harassment and outing campaigns for actors that garner a queer “aesthetic” (whatever the hell that means) or even play queer characters without being “out.”

An infamous example happened to Kit Connor, who played Nick Nelson in Heartstoppers (2022-present), despite the text being decidedly queer. Kit Connor reported being harassed online for his alleged “queerbaiting” and ultimately felt forced to come out as bisexual, tweeting: “I’m bi, congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye.”

Some have argued that because of this appropriation, the term is not useful anymore. As Sarah Z argues in I Was Wrong About Queerbaiting:

“The more I think about the concept of queerbaiting, the more I genuinely think we should just retire it…When we’ve reached the point that the term has come to encapsulate 500 things — real people being closeted, real people being bisexual, censored gay relationships in TV, ships people like that aren’t canon, the actual use of queerness as a marketing tactic with the intent to deceive a queer audience, etc. — I think the term has ceased to be useful.”

It’s similar to the argument that happens whenever any word is appropriated. Woke was originally a word Black people used for being aware of systemic racism and other injustices and has since come to be appropriated by conservatives to mean anything they don’t like.

The same thing happened with triggered, where trolls tried to rebrand “trigger warnings” as leftist nonsense. Whenever a reactionary force captures a word — and those arguing that everyone must publicly identify as queer are doing so for attention can be labeled as such — there is this tendency to want to abandon the word altogether.

Bad people are using it to say bad things — ergo, it’s gross.

And that’s where we are with the word queerbaiting — do we try to preserve the original meaning, or do we let this discourse go?

A baiting conclusion

Language, of course, evolves, and if queerbaiting exclusively becomes about forming “investigations” into whether someone is “actually” queer or not, then I have little interest in that iteration of the term.

People should be allowed to be open about their sexual orientations and gender identities as much or as little as they wish. Straight people should be able to kiss the same sex without it “meaning” anything. Cisgender men should be allowed to wear dresses and still be cis.

Yet, shying away from such terms just because the conversations around them get messy is something I am wary about. As terms become more popular, they inevitably get appropriated. We can see the same thing with a lot of therapy-speak, such as “gaslighting,” “lovebombing,” or even “narcissism.” People without knowledge of what these words mean misapply them, leading to a water-downing of the original meaning.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need words for these things, even if new words have to take their place or greater education is required to reinforce the original meaning.

The original term queerbaiting is still useful. There are parts of the LGBTQIA2+ alphabet that do not have much representation in media, especially for those living in countries where such representation is legislatively discriminated against or illegal.

Capitalist firms are motivated to attract as many audiences as possible. And when one of those audiences cannot be recognized — either legally or because they are taboo — then it makes a cold kind of sense that companies will do the minimum possible to maintain that audience without alienating their more conservative viewers.

It’s helpful to call that marketing out because it’s useful to describe the hurtful dynamics around us — to say that we are not crazy. That queerbaiting has happened to our community and that it continues to happen.

What we choose to call that process in the future is up to us.

Netflix’s ‘Kaos’ Takes the Misogyny out of Greek Myths

Image; Netflix

Picture this: You are watching a movie, reading a book, or consuming a piece of media that does not sit right with you. Perhaps you don’t like the Happily Ever After (or lack thereof) established for a side character or how the women characters on the show are treated, and you tell yourself: ‘I wish it had gone this way instead.’

This impulse is front and center with Charlie Covell’s latest outing on Netflix, Kaos (2024-present), a show that brings Greek mythology to the 20th century. We see some of our oldest stories told in a more modern framing: Zeus in a tracksuit, an underworld run like the TSA, and, for our purpose today, a retelling of old tales with modern, feminist sensibilities.

Recontextualizing Medusa

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a bit of a feminist recontextualization of Greek myths, which originally, due to the misogyny of Greek society, were quite sexist.

As a classic example, take the character Medusa — the only Gorgon born a mortal and, consequently, not naturally “monstrous.” She was considered so beautiful that Posedein, the God of the Sea, lusted after her beauty, having sex with her in the temple of Athena. Depending on the version of the tale, the consent of this interaction can be quite dubious by modern standards. As Emily Wenstrom writes in Book Riot:

“…depending on which [version] you pick up, either Medusa seduced Poseidon or he was smitten with her and took her. In other words, the mythology of Medusa holds within it a classic he said/she said story of rape and victim blaming.”

And this interaction is not the end of the story. Athena is so enraged by this violation of her temple grounds that she punishes Medusa (not Posiden, whose too big to fail) for being “boastful.” The goddess transforms Medusa into a creature with snakes on her head and a face so “hideous” that it petrifies all those who look at her.

Dated is probably too charitable to describe this story. A woman suffering a violent transformation because of a God raping her does not sit well with a lot of modern viewers because it flies in the face of everything we think about modern notions of consent.

And so, in recent years, Medusa has been depicted as more of a tragic figure who was wronged by the Gods. An early example is the 2010 book Retelling: Set in Stone by author R.C. Berry, where Medusa is portrayed as a naive teen caught in the crossfire of the gods and becomes emotionally hardened as a result.

The Charmed reboot (2022) has an entire episode where the character Medusa is redeemed (see Switches & Stones). She is summoned accidentally by a sister in a college sorority who we learn has been slut shamed by her peers. Medusa is there to bring justice and starts petrifying the complicit sorority and fraternity members. The protagonists, the Charmed Ones, do not slay her for this but instead validate the Gorgon’s story. The Charmed sister, Macy (Madeleine Mantock), saying:

“I see you. And I'm not going to turn away. You were cursed to cover up the crime of a powerful man. So that no one would ever see your pain. But I see it and I am so sorry. Know that you are not to blame.”

In the Disney+ show Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2023-present), the main character’s mother explicitly tells her son not to view Medusa in an entirely negative light: “Not everyone who looks like a hero is a hero, and not everyone who looks like a monster is a monster” she lectures about the mythological figure.

Kaos expands upon this tradition by showing us a Medusa who is not merely a victim of the Gods — although she certainly is — but someone who wants her revenge. She is a burnt-out worker trying to keep the cogs of the Underworld running, and secretly, she is a radical working with heretics who want to bring down the Gods.

We have a character rather than an object, and she is not the only example of this on the show.

Retelling Orpheus and Eurydice

We see a similar recontextualization in Kaos with its retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, which is my favorite adaptation of the entire show.

For those unaware, the core of this story has traditionally been about a woman, the titular Eurydice, dying tragically, and then her lover Orpheus trying to return her to the land of the living. Orpheus walks to hell and back for the sake of his love, but it’s not a happy ending. The God of the Underworld, Hades, only lets Orpheus leave with Eurydice if he promises not to look back at her while they make their journey.

It’s a challenge he fails, forcing Eurydice to return to the Underworld alone.

One of the bigger feminist critiques of this myth is that Eurydice has little agency (i.e., she doesn’t make decisions) in the story. She is an object for Orpheus to pursue and learn from.

And so more modern texts have been trying to change that so Eurydice is not as passive in their stories. The musical Hadestown (2006), for example, focuses just as much on developing Eurydice as Orpheus. We come to know her as someone molded by the harsh realities of a world where Fall and Spring do not come (see Any Way the Wind Blows).

Even her death is reframed not as an event that happens to her, usually via a snake bite, but something she chooses to do due to the harsh conditions of the season. She is out gathering food, lost in a storm, separated from Orpheus, and on the verge of death. She is tired, and when Hades gives her a way out — death via a snake bite — she takes it.

The story portrays Orpheus as neglectful. He was held up in his home, working on his music to make the Gods return Spring and Fall, and he left the work of surviving all to Eurydice. She arguably died because he didn’t help her, and the text lets the viewer know it. When Orpheus asks Hermes, the Messengers of the Gods, where Eurydice is, he mocks Orpheus, singing:

“Brother, what do you care? You’ll find another muse somewhere.”

We see a familiar beat in the video game Hades (2020), which takes place after the couple’s failed journey to the Underworld. Now, both of them are dead, and Eurydice is angry with Orpheus for failing to save her. She instructs your player to tell Orpheus she’s doing fine without him when you first bring the subject up.

Kaos takes a similar approach to these other texts, but it’s by far the most direct of these recontextualizations I have seen. Orpheus is not a villain, but he’s not a hero either. He is the reason why Eurydice does not reincarnate, as he refuses to place her coin — the payment she needs to pass on — on her casket.

His attachment to her is so toxic that Eurydice falls out of love with him well before she ever arrives in the Underworld. She is suffocated by his need, something we see metaphorically represented in the song Eurydice, where he sings possessive lyrics such as “Is it a little too much. Breathin’ the air from your lungs?”

He didn’t neglect to put the coin on her grave to save her, but because, selfishly, he couldn’t let her go.

When they finally reconnect — and I am going to avoid the more plot elements — she is grateful for his rescue, but she does not become the reward for his efforts. They still break up, and in a twist, I found to be frankly brilliant, Orpheus cannot look at Eurydice, not because of a grand bargain with the God Hades, but because he is hurt by their breakup.

He cannot bring himself to look at her because of her decision, which has an entirely different focus from the original myth.

A mythical conclusion

Greek myths have been the subject of feminist reinvention for decades, and Kaos is no different. We focused briefly on how it ties into a feminist reimagining of the myths of Medusa as well as Orpheus and Eurydice, but we could have also expanded our focus to the story of Ariadne, the Furys, Hades and Persephone, and many more.

There’s a lot here that I encourage you to check out. Kaos is a show that effortlessly interweaves many different stories together in a way that doesn’t feel clunky and updates them to reflect modern sensibilities.

And I’m thankful for that. Because while the ancient Greeks told sexist stories, it’s refreshing to see them remixed into something a little easier to swallow.

What The Salem Witch Trials Can Teach Us About Climate Change

Image; Takver from Australia

Imagine your community is suffering economic hardships, primarily the result of negligence from elites. They have gotten you into several ill-timed wars and have mismanaged the economy.

Worse, an ecological disaster has exacerbated these problems, and many are going hungry as a result.

These crises — again, the development of your elite’s incompetence — cause an influx of immigrants to “pour” into your surrounding community. And suddenly, tensions that were never great to begin with get a whole lot more tumultuous. Leaders can’t seem to agree on anything, and the political apparatus grinds to a halt.

It’s in this moment, when everything is going to shit that some elites start to convince long-term inhabitants to feel that the problem is a marginalized other. A group that is seemingly weak but all-powerful at the same time and must be stopped at any cost.

It might sound like I am talking about the political dysfunction of the current era and the various moral panics against immigrants, queer people, and people of color, but everything I have said can also describe the moral panic that led to the Salem Witch Trials.

A history that sadly is all too relevant in the modern era.

The chaos before the panic

The Salem Witch Trials (1692–93 CE) are one of American history’s most infamous moral panics. By its end, hundreds of people were accused — and 19 were hanged, one pressed by rocks, and at least four died while imprisoned — for the supposed crime of practicing witchcraft and being in league with the devil.

Books have been written about the ups and downs of these trials — and truthfully, there were many contributing factors: petty small-town politics, a narcissistic grifter caught in the middle of a budget debate, a financial crisis, and even climate change (I encourage people to check out the podcast Remarkable Providences if you want to listen to a good recap).

Yet, from my perspective, we have to center these trials on the horrors of colonial life. Early colonists endured many hardships, including harsh weather, smallpox, and, most unmistakably, war. In particular, King William’s War (1688–1697 CE)— sometimes referred to as the First French and Indian War — was a costly military conflict between the British colonists and France’s indigenous allies that not only took place during the trials but also in Southern New England and Maine, very close to Salem’s borders.

Over decades, thousands died in these conflicts, and, more to the point, many of those who lived through them found themselves moving away — some to the Salem region. As Rosie Lesso writes in The Collector:

“Refugees fled from the worst affected areas in New York, Quebec and Nova Scotia into wider communities including Salem. This influx of new people put the small village of Salem under immense strain as the fight for limited resources turned bitter.”

It cannot be understated how the trauma of this war — one the English colonists were at the time losing — would impact the psychology of many of the trial’s participants (and victims). In Susan Balée’s review of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, she writes:

“A modern reader can’t help but think that posttraumatic stress syndrome must have been rampant in towns like Salem, where the survivors of shattered families and communities came to rest and recover. Emotionally, the Bay Colonists must all have been on edge, their knowledge of an ongoing war always on the borders of their consciousness, just as it was on the borders of their settlements.”

Add to this that the region was engulfed in an ice age (i.e., “the little ice age”) that led to crop failures and food shortages and that the racism of colonists had them associate indigenous Americans with the devil, and you might understand (though certainly not condone) the mania that followed.

The war — which was partly kicked off by English Governor Andros’s decision to raid a New France Trading House in Maine — had a destabilizing effect on the entire New England region. Governor Andros was soon removed in 1689 (two years before the trials) due to his incompetence as well as British politics beyond the scope of this article (see the Glorious Revolution), and that left a power vacuum. The Colony Charter was suspended, and it took an entire year — the year the trials occurred — to establish a court rooted in actual laws.

In the meantime, a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer was established, and unlike the more legally grounded court that would be created a year later, this one admitted “spectral evidence” — i.e., the dreams and visions that were the primary evidence for these “trials.”

Some argue the Salem Witch trials were an inversion of traditional power dynamics because women and girls — i.e., people low on the Puritanical hierarchy — were deciding the lives of their fellow citizens, and some powerful men were caught in the crossfire. But overwhelmingly, many of the trial’s victims were at the bottom of that hierarchy, too. About two-thirds of the executed were women. The median age was 59, and several were impoverished, flaunted puritanical norms by having pre-martial sex, or were on the wrong side of petty town politics.

It’s a critique confusing someone’s ability to gain individual power through “reinforcing the system” with “breaking said system.”

The people who ultimately made the decisions to execute their fellow citizens for frankly bullshit reasons were not the accusers but those men on the Court of Oyer and Terminer — many of whom were responsible for the same bad military decisions made during the war. As Balée continues to summarize:

“Norton concludes that because the colony’s leaders were the same men who presided over the witchcraft trials, ‘they attempted to shift the responsibility for their own inadequate defense of the frontier to the demons of the invisible world, and as a result they presided over the deaths of many innocent people.’”

Their citizens were suffering, and rather than focus on the poor leadership that contributed to this state of affairs; they chose to point the finger at an ethereal enemy far removed from the hellish reality they were responsible for.

What does any of this have to do with climate change?

We exist in an entirely distinct political context from 17th-century America (obviously), but there are similarities. We are likewise in the midst of a financial crisis, political dysfunction is our norm, and a series of bad governance decisions (in our case, surrounding climate change and military interventions) has led to a substantial amount of migration.

We don’t often label the hundreds of thousands of people who have moved from desertifying parts of Latin America, the Hurricane-pounded Gulf Coast, or the wild-fire-prone West Coast as “climate change refugees,” but that’s what they effectively are — people who have been forced to move because of the climate.

An often-cited example comes from the city of Paradise, California, where the infamous Camp Fire in 2018 burned the town to the ground, forcing many of its residents to flee to nearby Chico. As Scott Wilson wrote in the New York Times in August of 2019:

“[Chico], the city of 93,000 people grew to 112,000, a 20 percent population spike, in a matter of hours. The vast majority of the Paradise displaced are still here.”

This type of displacement is happening in cities and towns across America. There have been a lot of estimates on how many people will have to move because of climate change — over 1 billion by 2050, according to one estimate — with tens of millions already moving around the world every year. Thousands of people were displaced inside the United States alone in 2023, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

Climate change is forcing millions to move, and just like in Salem, we are seeing a sadly predictable cycle where “moral entrepreneurs” (i.e., elites scapegoating the marginalized to maintain the moral order) redirect frustration over the status quo toward vulnerable people such as migrants.

Returning to the example of Chico, the migration had the immediate consequence of flipping the 5–2 left-wing majority in the city council to a 4–3 right-wing majority in 2020. That conservative majority was used to begin increasing the eviction of homeless residents, many former occupants of Paradise (i.e., climate change refugees). This included the 2022 clearing of the Comanche Creek Greenway encampment, which at the time was the largest encampment of unhoused people in the town (roughly 102 people).

This was a decision that many townsfolk were happy with, as anti-homelessness sentiment was and continues to be quite common. As one resident at the encampment remarked a year before the clearing:

“People are always talking bad about us and I’m just like, ‘They don’t even try to understand or they just think that we’re incapable and like disgusting.’”

This situation has not improved since the Supreme Court overturned a lower court restriction on camping bans. These sweeps will most likely increase, not only in California but throughout the US.

We are seeing a pattern across the country where the specter of “lawlessness” is used to demonize migrants, the homeless, and other marginalized identities — themselves often victims of climate change — who are then scapegoated as the source of all of society’s woes. To the point where a presidential nominee for the 2024 election cycle, Donald Trump, incoherently (and falsely) ranted at a debate about immigrants eating dogs and other pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

These kinds of statements are all over conservative media (and even in some right-leaning liberal circles), and they remind me of the accusers at Salem. They feel like visions, imaginary happenings of wrongdoings that moral entrepreneurs can point to as justification for why a certain population must be eliminated. Swap out satan for migrants, and it’s hard to see the difference.

And just like in Salem, this rhetoric is a misdirection to cover up political incompetence. A rise in crime does not correlate with increasing or decreasing police budgets in a given area. Increasing deportations and homeless sweeps do not stop migration that results from financial and climate-based precarity.

The climate is degrading due to negligent policy choices (see Our Leaders’ Solution To Climate Change Is To Pretend Like They Have Solved The Problem) that militarization fails to address, but while removing such scapegoats does nothing to improve our society, to some, it sure feels like it does.

And feelings are what moral panics are all about.

A moral conclusion

I am sure some residents in Salem briefly felt more secure, thinking the devil was being uprooted from their community. Dogmatism is a helluva a drug.

But, like any moral panic, the root cause of their problems was not being addressed. The political incompetence of their leaders had made their community less safe, and rather than address the impacts of a looming war and food shortages, their leaders pushed their community to look inward at an unseen enemy, sacrificing innocent people in the process to keep the narrative alive.

Likewise, it’s worrying that our leaders are primarily concerned with militarizing our cities, towns, and borders — using the specter of law and order to do so— and not doing a damn thing to address the root causes of migration and homelessness.

Instead of solving these problems, the solution seems to be to whip up a panic about them — and that’s something not very different from Salem at all.

Why Do We Love Witches Like Esther Finch From ‘Dead Boy Detectives’?

Credit: Netflix

There was just something about the witch Esther Finch (Jenn Lyon) when she strolled onto the screen with her epic black cane and fabulous vocal fry. She just looked cool, literally described by one of the leads as “a sexy witch who smokes a lot. But in a cool way.”

Esther is a witch who steals children, and she is evil for it, but she also just comes off as the kind of person you want to party with. “Hi, I’m Esther,” she says nonchalantly, releasing a puff of smoke from her cigarette as she introduces herself to one of our leads. She is indifferent and confident all at once, and the viewer cannot help but revel in her awfulness.

Esther is a camp villain that I consider to be an instant classic. And while I do love her entire vibe, it’s worth reflecting on why we love villainous witches like Esther Finch and the not-so-great history behind that obsession.

Something Witchy

Esther is not the first fabulously evil witch out there. I always think of the sea witch Ursula (Pat Carroll) from The Little Mermaid (1989), the main antagonist of the movie, who convinces our lead, Ariel (Jodi Benson), to give up her voice for the chance to walk on land. She is 100% evil, and yet when she sings her musical number Poor Unfortunate Souls, upselling the naive princess on how she’s actually “good,” viewers like me cannot help but be won over by her confidence (at least a little bit).

Maybe your mind goes to the original Hocus Pocus (1993), where the villainous Sanderson sisters — who are also trying to steal children — say fabulous lines that I still repeat to this day. Perhaps you are a fan of The Witch (Krysten Ritter:) in Nightbooks (2021) or the dozens of other adaptations of Hansel & Gretel.

Esther is introduced in the show quite early. She comes across our dead boys Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) — the ghost protagonists of the series — on their first case of the pilot. They are tracking down a missing girl and learn that she is being held captive by our witch Esther, who feeds little children to her snake as part of a cruel bargain to remain eternally young and beautiful. “I’m done stealing children under the cloak of night,” she laments in one scene on the ‘unfairness’ of her position. “I wanna take them in broad daylight whenever I want. Is that too much?”

The boys stop her from feeding the child to her snake, and this angers Esther so much that she whips up an elaborate method of killing our leads. “A revenge starter kit,” she says gleefully to the owner of a magical antique store, setting the stage for a season of dark shenanigans.

Yet her awfulness is not just celebrated but deconstructed. We learn that she had an abusive husband who cheated on her. And so she prayed to Lilith, the Goddess of witches, to give her immortality. This deal, however, did not give Esther eternal beauty, and her vanity (not her past) leads her to hurt tons of other women (and girls) in the process.

Esther ultimately suffers as a result of this selfishness. Lilith is convinced by the magic user Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson) to take back her immortality, pleading to Lilith: “You’re supposed to be the Goddess of wronged women, right? This witch, she took your gift, and then she killed hundreds of little girls to stay young! Who gets justice for them?”

And Lilith listens. She comes to Esther’s house and drags her to hell.

We see this sense of cosmic justice in a lot of media when it comes to our fabulous witches. Ursula may sing one of the best songs in the Disney Canon, but she is still speared by the bow of a ship. The witches in Hocus Pocus explode. The witch in Hansel & Gretel is burned alive in an oven.

This sense of punishment is partially a holdover from the moralism of the Hays Code and Television Code (and arguably Christianity more broadly), which required that media never reward villainous behavior. That message still lingers today, decades after both codes were repealed. When awful people are the villains in a narrative, viewers generally expect them to receive some kind of comeuppance.

That’s probably a fine standard if your villain’s motivations satisfy contemporary notions of unethicalness. I’m not losing sleep over Ursla, the slave trafficker, or Esther, the child murderer, getting an unhappy ending.

Yet, it bears emphasizing why certain archetypes are often villainous. A lot of these fabulous witches are coded as evil because of our history. I have talked about it before, but our demonization of witches is the result of the deadly moral panics in Europe and the Americas. Witches were purposefully associated with Satan and became societal folk devils. It’s those purges that are why we now so often associate witchcraft with evil today. As I write in The Problematic Christian Propaganda in Disney’s ‘Hocus Pocus’:

“From the 14th to 17th century, it’s estimated that somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 “witches” were killed (though some older estimates place this far higher), and overwhelmingly these victims were women. Some theorize that these purges were because witchcraft competed with Christianity’s role in explaining the world. Others claim that it was a way for the Catholic Church to compete with its emerging protestant competitors (i.e., we kill your witches better than the other guy).

There are many competing theories, but regardless of the overall justification, assuming a singular one even exists at all, Christian officials took advantage of gender inequities to kill tens of thousands or possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. It’s important to note that these practices have still not technically died. Thanks to imperialism, Christianity was spread all over the world, and witch hunts have been reported in places as far-ranging as Papua New Guinea and Sub-Sahara Africa.”

In other words, we associate witches with evil for a reason.

A witchy conclusion

Maybe that’s why I can’t help but love Esther and Ursula and the thousands of fabulous witches out there on the silver screen and page. They are awful as much because of what they represent as for their evil deeds.

The Dead Boy Detectives plays with this expectation as Lilith is the Goddess of wronged women. The narrative is much more about helping other women (and punishing those who wrong them) than it is a demonization of witches specifically. The character who ultimately defeats Esther, Crystal Palace, is a powerful magic in her own right, and that is a beautiful message to end on.

It’s not evil for women to practice magic — it’s how they wield it.

Netflix’s ‘The Decameron’: An Eat The Rich Satire

Image; John William Waterhouse (1849–1917)

Spoilers for Netflix’s The Decameron

The Decameron is an old collection of stories dating back to the 1300s. Written by Giovanni Boccaccio in Medieval Italy, it follows a tale-within-a-tale structure similar to texts like One Thousand and One Nights. Ten young nobles hiding out in a villa in the countryside from the plague in Florence tell each other stories — many based on pre-existing folklore and myths — to pass the time.

The Decameron, published in a more accessible Tuscan vernacular opposed to Latin, was well-received by the public for its cutting and lewd commentary on everything from female sexuality to the clergy. The latter topic was not appreciated by the Vatican, which attempted to ban this text in the ensuing centuries.

And so showrunner Kathleen Jordan is drawing from this rich history in her loose adaptation, also titled The Decameron. She tells an equally lewd dark comedy that cuts the tale-within-a-tale structure to focus solely on the drama of the nobles and servants at the Villa.

In doing so, she inverts the upstairs-downstairs dynamic seen in shows such as Downton Abbey (2010–2015) and instead brings these two classes directly into conflict.

They all fall down

The show’s setting is similar to its written counterpart. The Black Death has swept through the city of Florence, where our leads are from, and they have fled to the Villa Santa to escape it. The plague has acted as a great leveler (killing nobles and common folk alike), which means that the “normal” social order is on the brink of collapse — at least temporarily.

When our leads travel to Villa Santa, the nobles do not bring an entourage of staff and family members because most have died.

Instead, they opt to mostly travel in noble-servant pairs. Each pair represents something illuminating about class dynamics: mainly how to bridge the class divide, how to ignore it, and what happens when resentments boil over too high.

For the noble Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin) and his doctor Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel), their relationship is literally toxic. Tindaro is an annoying pedantic blowhard who bloviates about the Roman Empire and the duplicitousness of women. He is also a hypochondriac. So, to keep the gold flowing and Tindaro manageable, Dioneo, who I would charitably call a f@ckboy, poisons Tindaro in a Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP) kind of situation.

As the social order in the Villa breaks down, however, Dioneo increasingly does not care about even the pretense of tending to his master. When a new faction takes over the Villa and offers Dioneo the right to stay (but not his master, Tindaro), he gladly takes it. Dioneo had no emotional investment in Tindaro, and the moment their financial investment dissolves, they have nothing.

While Tindaro outlasts Dioneo (more out of coincidence than anything else), he doesn’t survive the series. He ultimately sacrifices himself for the peasants of the Villa, particularly so his “love interest,” Stratilia (Leila Farzad), and her child (Aston Wray) can survive an impending invasion.

Whereas in a different text, such a sacrifice would earn Tindaro confessions of love and admiration from Stratilia, she offers no such genuine confessions, taking his money, offering false praises, and fleeing the Villa.

A similar fate befalls noble Panfilo (Karan Gill), who decides to end his life after his wife, Neifile (Lou Gala), succumbs to the plague. I appreciated Panfilo’s relationship with his wife, which deserves an article in its own right, but for our purposes, it should be noted that he is yet another noble who dies in the text. He tenderly holds his wife’s body as a shield against the invaders, telling his enemies it has the plague, and that gives everyone else enough time to flee.

Never letting go

Now, a fallen noble who doesn’t get a hero’s death is the spoiled Pampinea (Zosia Mamet), who came to Villa Santa hoping to secure a marriage from the late Visconte Leonardo. Her relationship with her servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) ends in delicious tragedy as the latter comes to terms with just how cruel Pampinea is.

At first, Misia cares deeply for her master, professing her devotion to her.

Yet Pampinea is a conniving, mentally abusive person who shows utter disregard for Misia. She pushes her servant to do utterly irreprehensible things, such as killing a fellow noble so Pampinea can maintain the illusion of control over the Villa. Misia’s feelings don’t matter to Pampinea, and she makes it quite clear that she will never release Misia from this toxic cycle, saying:

“The way you love me, you love me no matter what I do. It's the greatest gift I've ever known…I will never let you go.”

Shortly after this statement, Misia does the only thing a person backed into a corner by someone with an unequal power dynamic can truly do: she kills Pampinea. Specifically, she traps Pampinea in a barrel and lights it on fire.

From my perspective, Pampinea’s death reads as justice, representing what the outcome is for the upper classes when resentment is never given room to breathe.

Letting go

The only noble protagonist who survives the series is Filomena (Jessica Plummer), alongside her servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds). This is mainly because Filomena can set her privilege aside.

When we first see Filomena on her way to Villa Santa, we observe an extraordinarily cruel person — so cruel, in fact, that she is unwilling to let her servant Licisca give some bread to a dying man. Filomena and Licisca start to fight physically. Licisca loses it, pushing Filomena off a bridge in, if not an act of self-defense, at the very least, something most viewers can identify with.

Many of us have wanted to push our abusive bosses off a bridge.

This inciting incident allows Licisca to go to the Villa pretending to be Filomena, literally inverting the class dynamics of this pairing. Licisca, playing Filomena, comes to realize how arbitrary the social rules governing the classes are, lamenting: “Why can’t we [live freely]? Men do. They get on just fine behaving like animals.”

The “real” Filomena inevitably makes her way to the Villa, haggard and bruised from her long travels. However, she is not perceived as a noblewoman by the people of the Villa but as a servant. Filomena is forced to pretend to be Licisca — to take on the role she so callously abused when her position was reversed.

There is one funny scene where Filomena pleads to Pampinea to accept her. “I spoke the truth,” she begs. “I was not a servant until the day I arrived at Villa Santa…So I ask you, as a friend and a fellow noblewoman, to help me break Licisca’s spell.” Pampinea ignores her pleas because she feels awkward about the situation.

It’s not important to her whether Filomena is actually a servant or a noble— merely that someone is playing the role.

Filomena learns to set her ego aside, albeit under the constant threat of death. She opens up to Licisca until there are no secrets between them, leading to reconciliation. It takes a lot to reach that point, and Filomena has to lose everything to do so, but she does get there.

Happily ever after-ish

The Decameron is a show about peasants and nobles clashing during the breakdown of this medieval society’s social order.

One by one, most of our noble leads die, and the one who remains learns to be a little less rigid in her thinking. The series ends with Filomena and the other servants sitting in a glade, happily entertaining each other with stories and fake food, replicating the original Decameron, sans the nobles. There is no hierarchy left between them — at least in that moment.

This story of plague, class differences, and debauchery ends on a very hopeful note — one I found refreshing in our uncertain world, with class dynamics only slightly removed from our medieval ancestors of yore.

Americans Have Been Panicking About Queer People Since Before America Existed

Brooks, Elbridge Streeter, 1846–1902

As a trans person, I have watched in horror as the latest “groomer” panic has enfolded. I have observed moral entrepreneurs such as Matt Walsh and Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik whip up a frenzy against queer people based on lies about my community, alleging that we are all child predators.

I have spent a lot of time refuting these allegations over the last few years. And as I have learned more and more about history, it’s become abundantly clear that this is not a unique moment— neither in queer history nor the history of moral panics more broadly.

In fact, the seed for this latest panic is rooted in a type of thinking that existed even before the United States did as a concept.

“Before” Queerness

The definition of a moral panic is debated in the literature, as many phrases tend to be. Scholar Chas Critcher has argued that a moral panic is a term that should be exclusively reserved by elites who reinforce the status quo or, more specifically, “dominant regulatory practices.” Elites do this by scapegoating outsiders and otherized groups as “folk devils” who personify all that is wrong with society.

How long have we been turning queer people into folk devils?

The traditional answer is the tail end of the 19th century. There is a familiar story told in academic circles that before the advent of modern biology and psychology, homosexual acts were lumped into the conversation surrounding sodomy (or “buggery”) laws, which banned “nonprocreative sex” such as bestiality, anal sex between men and women, and for our purposes, sex between men and between women (although the later was rarely acknowledged in these early laws).

The enforcement of these laws in the early American period was allegedly rare and fell harder on bestiality than between the sexes. As Margot Canaday writes in her book review of William Eskridge’s Dishonorable Passions:

Punishment–which included death–was draconian, but the laws were very rarely enforced. Historians know of less than ten executions for sodomy throughout the seventeenth century. Of those few, almost all involved assault or sex with animals. These laws were not directed in any particular way toward homosexuality. Indeed, they couldn’t be–the idea that there was a type of person who was a homosexual didn’t even emerge until the late nineteenth century, a result of urbanization, industrialization and the development of medical/sexological discourse.

And so if the concept of homosexuality, transness, and queerness doesn’t exist, can you even have a panic around it?

Yet this narrative is harder to square away the moment you expand your analysis to non-white people and non-cis-gendered people. Before colonialism and the (cultural) genocides that followed, Indigenous Americans had a diverse array of gender presentations. And from what I can tell, same-sex relationships were often normalized, too. Though, it’s important to note that they did not operate under the same Western framework of queerness.

This fluidity with sex and gender was a reality settlers hated. As Pierre Liette writes bigotedly in 1702 of Two-Spirit people amongst the Indigenous Miami in modern-day Illinois:

The sin of sodomy prevails more among them than in any other nation…There are men who are bred for [the purpose of sleeping with other men] from their childhood. When they are seen frequently picking up the spade, the spindle, the axe, but making no use of the bow and arrows, as all the other small boys do, they are girt with a piece of leather or cloth which envelops them from the belt to the knees, a thing all the women wear. Their hair is allowed to grow and is fastened behind the head. They also wear a little skin like a shoulder strap passing under the arm on one side and tied over the shoulder on the other. They are tattooed on their cheeks like the women and also on the breast and the arms, and they imitate their accent, which is different from that of the men. They omit nothing that can make them like the women. There are men sufficiently embruted to have dealings with them on the same footing.

This settler-colonial hatred of this tribe’s acceptance of two-spirit folks didn’t stop merely with disgust. All throughout this period, colonists and missionaries were trying to destroy this fluidity and impose a rigid binary onto the indigenous people of the Americas. In the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, recapping one of the more heinous examples of anti-queerness in Canada in her book, As We Have Always Done:

Joseph-François Lafitau was a French Jesuit missionary and ethnologist working in Rotinonhseshá:ka territory in the early part of the 1700s. In his major and often cited work published in Paris in 1724…Lafitau ‘congratulates’ missionaries for ‘suppressing’ Indigenous queer relationships. He describes the missionaries’ success in prompting many queer Indigenous people and their relations to see their identity as ‘shameful.’ He was pleased to report that after seventy-five years of missionary work, people once ‘regarded as extraordinary men,’ had now, ‘come to be looked on, even by the Indians, with scorn.’

If moral panics are framed as turning a particular group of people into folk devils so elites can uphold the moral order, then anti-queer moral panics were a foundational part of the cultural genocides against Indigenous people in the Americas.

And as we shall soon see, it doesn’t seem as though such panics started and ended with Indigenous Americans.

The Case of Thomas(ine) Hall

Gender norms were strictly enforced in the colonies, with there being rigid domains for men and women. Indentured servant Thomas(ine) Hall is often cited as an example of a possible intersex person in the early colonial period whose “confusing” gender presentation (i.e., transitioning back and forth between male and female identities) became a scandal among their community for “flaunting” traditional gender roles.

Part of the complication was that their owner, John Tyos, was planning to sell Thomas(ine)’s contract to community member John Atkins, and their gender would have had a huge impact on the work they could do and their overall price.

Furthermore, the specter of buggery laws played directly into this panic when it was rumored that Thomas(ine) may have had sex with a maid. If they were a man, legally speaking, then they would be charged with fornication (i.e., premarital sex), but not as women, as sex between women was then not recognized by the state of Virginia’s buggery laws.

Three women inspected Thomas(ine) and determined they were a male, but their owner, John Tyos, disagreed — potentially to avoid the scandal of a fornication trial. The matter became increasingly more hostile, with much of the community coming to weigh in on the issue of their gender. Thomas(ine) was inspected during their sleep, in the middle of the road, and even had a documented instance of (at least one) hate crime for “pretending” to be a woman.

Ultimately, the issue was litigated by the Quarter Court in Virginia in 1629, ruling them to be “both and neither” binary gender. Thomas(ine) was legally required to wear clothing that had elements of both sexes, which was undoubtedly meant to shame them for their behavior. They dropped out of the historical record immediately after, so we do not know how they (or their community) reacted to this punishment.

It’s important to note that if Thomas(ine) had been convicted for their unconfirmed “dalliance” with a maid, it would not have been considered sodomy or buggery but fornication, i.e., premarital sex. It’s only because of their unapologetic nature that we have such an example of colonial queerness in the first place. As historian Richard Godbeer writes of identifying queer relationships in such trials, “We rarely glimpse in the surviving court records any feelings that defendants may have had for one another.”

Even when we do have a historical record, we often have to further parse the flawed assumptions of the colonizer historian documenting it. Plenty of queer people are persecuted and then forgotten, their deaths filed away under something else — if they are filed away at all.

Yet as we see with the Thomas(ine) case, panics over queer sexuality and gender did indeed happen in colonial America.

A panicky conclusion

I have focused on the period before the formation of the United States because it says something important about the present moment.

Anti-queerness was here in the beginning, and it never went away.

As history progressed, my fellow queer people would come to be victims of a vicious healthcare system that would castrate and lobotomize them. They would be lynched and demonized so severely that being open about their identities would get them fired, evicted, or worse.

Yet, this current trans panic we are experiencing has its roots in the settler-colonialism foundational to this country’s development. Our nation’s hatred of queer people was an outgrowth of the gender binary and heterosexism that was (and continues to be) rigidly enforced by both those on the periphery of the colonial project (i.e., Indigenous people) and those inside of it.

This history does not justify people’s hatred of queer people but rather is my attempt to contextualize just how intertwined anti-queerness is with settler-colonialism — and it’s both that we need to eradicate.

‘Delicious in Dungeon’ Is the Gayest Ungay Show I Have Ever Seen

Image; Studio Trigger

If you haven’t seen the fantasy dungeon crawler and cooking show Delicious in Dungeon (2024-present) or Danjon Meshi, based on Ryoko Kui’s manga of the same name, I highly recommend it.

Adapted by Studio Trigger, the fantastic minds behind Little Witch Academia (2017) and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), the story follows a group of adventurers descending to the lowest levels of a dungeon to rescue a fallen party member in the thrall of a mad mage. The show has a fascinating mystery for those who like such intrigue, and it also has good writing and incredible humor.

Anything that brings emotional weight to whether a meal uses Griffin or Hippogriff meat is solid writing in my book.

The energy is also very queer. There is a tenderness to how these characters interact that is so unlike a lot of action and adventure media, and that frankly speaks to how a lot of heterosexual characters lack the emotional connection and empathy so crucial to much of queer media.

The gay women

For me, this show just instantly gave off queer energy. I would see a frame of characters Marcille Donato (Emily Rudd/Sayaka Senbongi) and Falin Touden (Lisa Reimold/Saori Hayami) blushing in a bathtub or an introductory scene of all our leads cuddling next to one another and immediately “get” queer vibes.

Image; Studio Trigger

I am not the only one who thinks this way. The queer fandom surrounding this show is honestly intense, and a quick internet search will reveal tons of queer fan art, merch, memes, and fan videos. As The Geeky Waffle writer Hope Mullinax wrote over discovering one favorite scene in the Marcille-Falon fandom:

“As a queer woman myself, I found it relatable to a character I didn’t even know. It was that one moment that made me go, ‘Okay, I’m going to watch this show.’”

One thing you will notice is how unexploitative Delicious in Dungeon feels. The female characters are depicted to be more than just objects for a male power fantasy. Returning to the bath scene we mentioned earlier, what is so refreshing is the lack of exploitation. As Jade King writes in their article for The Gamer:

“The bath scene is a common occurrence in anime and manga, often used to band all the female characters together in a steamy room filled with convenient angles designed to show off boobs and butts. It has been a staple for decades, so when Dungeon Meshi puts two of its most beloved characters in a room together, your average joe could be blamed for expecting the same to happen here. But it doesn’t, instead subverting our expectations by putting a deliberate focus on the words and body language of Marcille and Falin as they celebrate a chance to spend more of their lives together, relieved they’ve both survived.”

In essence, the narrative treats its women characters as people, not objects to be ogled over.

The portrayal of women in Delicious in Dungeon contrasts with a lot of anime, particularly Shonen (e.g., Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, etc.) or the even more mature Seinen anime (e.g., Ghost in the Shell, Parasyte, etc.), where a lot of the women in them are framed exploitatively. Women characters will have frequent boob and ass shots, and pervert characters like Sanji from One Piece will be around to harass one or all of them.

Even in Shoujo anime, which is theoretically geared toward young girls, issues of representation are not uncommon. The writer Kadesh Lauridsen had this to say about the femme classic Sailor Moon (1995–2000), which is often heralded for its positive representation:

“While the female representation in Sailor Moon reaches beyond expectations by empowering feminine traits instead of belittling them, this representation is immediately taken away once you realize that the young female protagonists are being exploited sexually. This demonstrates that even when a show has an extremely powerful example of female representation it still has some underlying tones of satisfying its limited male audience.”

For a lot of anime, there is a constant balancing act between empowering female characters and also satisfying the men in the room.

The men

Anime men are often stereotyped as tough. Shonen anime has many oblivious airheads ready to willpower through a situation with eternal optimism (think Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece). Seinen characters often hold a “realistic” pessimism or misanthropy that is portrayed as reserved or cool. Isekai characters (e.g., a genre for characters who are transported to another world) are frequently overpowered to the point of Godhood (see Overlord).

In the words of Myan Mercado in a CBR article on anime stereotypes:

“It’s a rule of thumb that the hero will be the strongest or smartest character in their anime and defeat any antagonist that directly challenges them. They might struggle at first or they might not make the best choices, but they’re the protagonist for a reason. Victory is essentially guaranteed thanks to the ridiculous power scaling trope.”

Of course, these are merely trends, not absolute facts.

This is also not an anime-specific problem. While the tropes surrounding masculinity and femininity in media will vary by medium and culture, it is not uncommon in America for many male protagonists to be overly confident and skilled: that is the template for most action thrillers. James Bond, Jason Bourne, and more are often depicted as reserved and “cool.”

The men in Delicious in Dungeon do not meet this standard mold for action and adventure heroes. The fighter character Laios (Damien Haas/Kentarō Kumagai), arguably the lead, is the opposite of “cool.” His special interest in “cooking monsters” has him so oblivious to situations that he can unknowingly self-sabotage his goals.

There is one painful scene in the episode Harpy/Chimera where Laios learns that someone he thought was his friend has hated him the entirety of their friendship because of the warrior’s inability to pick up on “obvious” social cues.

Laios is not oblivious to the point of being toxic, however. He learns to apologize when he does something wrong and to communicate his feelings, which feels novel for a lot of anime. He is not the only one, either. From the dwarf Senshi (SungWon Cho/Hiroshi Naka) coming to respect the rogue Chilchuck’s (Casey Mongillo/Asuna Tomari) skillsets to the mage Marcille Donato learning to accept that her booksmarts aren’t everything, many episode arcs are about these characters realizing that some assumption they had about their companions is wrong and then apologizing for it.

And that’s what makes this show refreshing. It’s not a role reversal in which the men in the show are subordinate to its female characters, but a world where all genders are treated with a basic level of empathy—a bar that sadly is so far removed from how gender norms are typically depicted in media.

Hence its allegedly queer vibe.

A hungry conclusion

Delicious in Dungeon has the sensibility of a queer show without any openly queer romantic, sexual, or asexual text to support that assumption. While that might change if the text becomes less ambiguous, right now, I think this vibe speaks more to the norms of heterosexual and cisgender characters in film and television being usually so unappealing that some queer people lump the opposite of that binary in with queerness.

Yet queer people do not have a monopoly on emotional intelligence, and Delicious in Dungeon is not the only media that has broken ground on having emotionally well-rounded anime characters. I am a personal fan of Seirei no Moribito (2007) — the story of a woman bodyguard in feudal Japan protecting a prince — but a lot of women writers have been adding to the genre in noteworthy ways for years.

Unless Studio Trigger makes any last-minute surprises in its later seasons (much to Marcille and Falin stan’s glee), it will most likely remain textually “unqueer,” and that’s okay. I am thrilled, more and more, that we are getting examples of men and women being portrayed in emotionally complex ways that are not exploitative or unkind.

It makes such stories utterly delicious in my book.

Amazon’s Anti-Corporate Messaging In ‘The Boys’ Is F@cking Weird

Image; Amazon Prime Video

Amazon’s The Boy’s (2019–2025) has always been a delicious satire. The first season began by introducing viewers to a world where a superhero corporation named Vought International had huge sway over the US government. The company’s superheroes, which served as a de facto private military, were able to kill innocent civilians with relative impunity.

In fact, the superhero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) having killed protagonist Hughie Campbell’s (Jack Quaid) girlfriend was the inciting incident for our lead’s journey to take down Vought and its fascistic mascot Homelander (Antony Starr).

As the seasons progressed, Vought took over more and more of the US government until, in the latest season, it all but performed an open coup. Homelander, as the head of one of the most powerful corporations on the planet, now has direct sway over the current president, and he is more than prepared to remake America in his image.

As the credits rolled, I had one burning question about this show’s brilliant anti-corporate messaging: who the f@ck does Amazon think it’s kidding?

This show is not a fan of Corporate America

Many critics have been rather quick to point out how The Boys this season parodied the American right’s move toward fascism — much to many real-life far-right commentators’ triggered outrage.

Yet Vought’s monopolistic and corrupt nature is also a running theme on the show—perhaps one of “thee” most prominent themes. In the first season, Vought executive Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) uses Baltimore’s political need for a superhero to extract millions of dollars. “We both know your city needs a hero,” Stillwell pitches to the mayor—a hustle that she is running across the entire country.

From the get-go, it’s evident that Vought’s heroes are simply a product—and not even a very “good” one at that. “Supes” only give Americans the illusion of safety, but these superheroes spend more time filming movies, talk shows and staged “saves” than they do actually helping society. The first season has the hero Starlight (Erin Elair Moriarty) disappointed that Vought has surveillance information better than the US government, and they use it selectively to enact saves that film better on camera. As one guy from Crime Analytics gloats:

“Where and when to find the bad guys. That's what my department does. We vet leads, crunch satellite data, COMP-STAT. Better intel than the police.”

By the time we get to the latest season, the mask has all but slipped, as we are repeatedly shown how much this company hates workers. In one example, our heroes—the black ops group “the boys,” not the supes of Vought—are hiding in a former Vought packaging plant, and it is filled with anti-worker messaging. Supes like Black Noir are juxtaposed with quotes such as “Unions can’t. We can.” or “Every Mother ‘Vought’ To Know…Nothing but the best for my family.”

It’s not subtle.

Vought is a hydra that has stakes in entertainment, pharmaceuticals, the military, and even the press, and it uses that power to routinely dump on the working class. As the coup is nearly coming to fruition in season four, the company puts out a Christmas propaganda video that doesn’t just critique “woke” gay people and other marginalized groups but also those with class consciousness, such as “socialists.”

The show is much more a critique of how corporate America can perpetuate fascism than just one deconstructing fascism alone. Homelander efficiently uses Vought’s resources to take over the US government, and that would not have been possible if the company’s naked pursuit of profit had not already eroded our democratic principles.

Everything Vought can do, Amazon can do better

It’s tough to swallow The Boy’s anti-corporate message alongside the fact that Amazon is, in many ways, a company just as terrible as Vought.

It has also engaged in anti-worker practices such as exploitation and union-busting, with reports as recent as this year of the company engaging in an array of tactics to stop a historic vote in Coventry, UK (e.g., anti-union seminars, hiring surges to dilute the vote, putting up posters with QR codes that, when scanned, sent out automatic emails that canceled the users’ union membership, etc.).

This behavior has been going on for years. I remember driving up to a Fulfillment Center in Baltimore back in 2018 to go on a “tour”—the ones the company had arranged after negative coverage of workers peeing in bottles—and the statements I collected from workers, “off the record,” were horrifying (see Amazon Warehouses: Perfecting The American Plantation). Workers described the company as being so intense that it “[worked] the sweat out of [them].” As one former worker commented on that article:

“On my first day at Amazon in West Columbia my feet were swollen and very painful…The job is painful. [After awhile] I couldn’t even bend over anymore to pick up totes and items that fell off the shelf. Standing up for 10+ hours is extremely difficult.”

The workers I talked to were afraid to organize because they felt like they had few options or that the company would retaliate if they did, but don’t take my word for it; there is a well-documented history of the company “suddenly” starting to terminate employees for minor offenses right after they “just so happen to start union organizing.” The American Prospect has an excellent piece describing how Amazon offloads the management of many of its workers to third-party firms, whose contract it simply terminates if and when workers there ever manage to organize.

And Amazon’s effects are far more wide-reaching than merely being shitty to its workers. Like Vought, the company is also gobbling up a lot of media properties. The most talked about is The Washington Post, which is owned by Nash Holdings and, ultimately, Amazon Chairman and Founder Jeff Bezos. An ownership decision that has undoubtedly shaped the ideological tendencies of that paper. As Robert W. McChesney told Dan Froomkin in the Columbia Journalism Review of Bezos’ stewardship:

“The values of the owner tend to be communicated subtly. [Those who don’t pick up the signals] get weeded out along the way.”

Yet the most significant avenue of media domination is its control of cloud services (AWS). Many providers, even market competitors such as Netflix and Disney+, require AWS on the backend to run their businesses. This fact gives the company a lot of leverage over the overall architecture of the web.

As a result, many media channels are now hosted directly on the Amazon Prime Platform. We are not just talking about entertainment properties such as Crunchyroll or Hallmark, but also the many news programs under Paramount+ (e.g., CBS Evening News and Specials), Discovery+, PBS, and more. This influence on that media is less direct — from what we currently know, Amazon is not censoring Paramount+ overtly — but this concentration does set the stage for a dizzying amount of media being directly managed by the company.

Lastly, the real-life parallels of the far-right, fascistic politicians so deeply criticized on The Boys are ones the company directly supports. Amazon donates to both major political parties every election season, receiving a grade of F on the American Democracy Score Card (via Accountable.US) for backing politicians who directly undermine our democracy, including ones who have supported regressive voting laws, opposed the January 6th investigation, and more.

Furthermore, it doesn’t just pay those politicians to maintain good relations. Amazon has one of the most aggressive lobbying arms in the United States. Most famously, it killed or undermined privacy protections in states nationwide and stopped anti-trust laws from advancing. Author Dana Mattioli has described the company’s culture as so toxic that even some bankers and CEOs of other companies (off the record) have expressed concern about their behavior.

And this is simply the stuff we are aware of. An entertaining part of The Boy’s is to see the “palace intrigue” of what executives at Vought are saying and doing behind the scenes. There are undoubtedly actions happening right now at Amazon we will not learn about until decades after the fact, if ever.

Sans the superheroes, Amazon is Vought. If it could create a Homelander to rule over the world, it would.

A super conclusion

It’s very frustrating to absorb a message about how corporate America can abet fascism and not feel nauseated by the hypocrisy of Amazon, one such fascist corporation, delivering that message. One that was more than willing to place product placements for Amazon packaging and its show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, inside that alleged critique (see episode Life Among Septics).

Amazon is not the first company to coopt radical messaging for profit. I wrote a piece about Netflix, one of the biggest profiteers of exploitative crime documentaries, producing a critique of that genre while having no intention of changing its behavior (see Can Netflix Critique Itself?). This type of thing happens all the time. The Lego Movie (2014) was about overconsumption despite advertising Legos. The Barbie Movie (2023) is a feminist critique that just so happens to serve as a two-hour+ product placement for a pretty regressive product.

It’s not unusual for a company to finance a work that critiques a problem it helped cause.

I like The Boys. It’s going to be up there in my end-of-the-year rankings. I just hope that as we enjoy this anti-fascist and anti-corporate work, we do not lose sight of the problems coming from its very troublesome messenger.

I Get Why Adults Like the Kids Show ‘Bluey’ Now

Image; KONTRA.PKC

The first time I knew I would love the children’s animated cartoon Bluey (2018-present) was watching the season one episode, Hospital. The two anthropomorphic dogs, Bingo and the titular Bluey, were play-acting as a doctor and nurse with their father, who was pretending to be a patient needing care. What followed was a heartwrenching episode of Bluey pretending to be an insensitive doctor who does not care about the emotional needs of her patient and Bingo playing a nurse who was fighting for said patient's care.

It is an episode that works on many levels. For children, it’s a lesson in empathy that teaches them that they are not meant to be callous to other people’s wants and needs.

For adults, and really anyone who has had to navigate the painful realities of the modern medical system, it mirrors the cold indifference patients receive when interacting with many medical professionals. Throughout the episode, Bluey says the line “I’m very busy,” undoubtedly mimicking what he has heard a “real” doctor say.

Right then and there, age difference or not, I knew Bluey was a good show—one that appealed to adults while simultaneously not dismissing the children in its audience.

Parents love it

It’s not rare for adults to like shows meant for younger audiences—Adventure Time (2010–2018), Steven Universe (2013–2019), She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018–2020), Owl House (2020–2023), Centaur World (2021), and more all had sizeable adult audiences during their run times.

Yet, these shows usually target a tween or teenager demographic that can cover more adult themes and/or have unique worlds set apart from our reality.

Adventure Time was set in a fantastical world that satirized traditional fantasy and science fiction tropes—something such fans loved—and also dealt with heavy existential themes as the series progressed.

Steven Universe and Owl House not only include interpersonal conflicts that younger viewers can relate to but have characters fighting against authoritarian or fascist leaders (themes that might resonate with adult audiences).

Bluey is a show for preschoolers about preschoolers. Bluey and Bingo are not chosen heroes from a far-off land endowed with magical or supernatural gifts. The show is the opposite of a power fantasy. They are normal people — at least as normal as anthropomorphic dogs can be, anyway.

And so, why do adults love it so much?

There are many reasons. The most talked about is that it validates the experiences of parents. Caretakers Bandit (David McCormack) and Chilli (Melanie Zanetti) are people (or dogs) who are routinely overcome by the emotional realities of being parents to Bluey and Bingo, and that’s something that many parents can undoubtedly relate to. As Bluey creator Joe Brumm told The Wrap earlier this year:

“Kids love it because it’s silly and it reminds them of themselves — whereas I think it makes parents get emotional because having kids is emotional and it’s just a mirror to you. You’re not crying because of Bandit’s love for his kid, you’re crying because of how much you love your kid and he just reminds you of that.”

As that article documents, many parents were emotionally moved by the episode Sleepytime, where Bingo is trying to have a “big girl sleep” and not go into her parent’s bed. We, as viewers, watch her traverse through a dreamscape of the solar system, subconsciously processing her feelings of growing up, ending with the voice of her mother, Chilli, remarking that no matter how far they grow apart, she will always love her.

It’s a statement that brought many parents to tears.

Yet it also brought me to tears, and I am not a parent. What is the appeal for me and the many other childless adults I have talked to and read about who love this show?

Childless adults love it, too

I think it has to do with the fact that the show is teaching not only its children viewers to approach the world with compassion, creativity, and empathy but also its adult viewers.

Take the episode Daddy Dropoff, where Bandit rushes to get his children to school. His morning is overcome with setbacks, but he never stops playing with his children. Bandit and his wife Chilli value fostering a sense of creativity and imagination among their children above all else, and in this episode, the viewer realizes that play is not just for his kids but for him, too. When Bluey asks why her father played a game with Bingo, even though it made them all late, Bandit responds: “That it wouldn’t be as fun.”

It’s so rare to see a show acknowledge that adults are also people who need connection and play — a point made several times throughout the series (see also Stumpfest). Bandit and Chilli are not just adults moralizing to their children about blindly following their rules.

They treat their children as people who they want to understand them.

As such, that same empathy is lent to the adults in the series, too. The show recognizes that adults are not alien entities from their children but also people who need to practice empathy and compassion. From Nana Heeler (Chris Brumm) learning to be more confident (see episode Granny Mobile) to Chilli learning to relax (see episode Relax), there are entire episodes where the main lesson being learned is for the adults.

In the episode Squash, Bluey and Bingo pretend to control their father, Bandit, and his brother, Uncle Stripe Heeler (Dan Brumm), during a squash match. Bandit has an unhealthy relationship with his brother when it comes to play. Whenever he wins, he brags that “Big brothers always beat little brothers,” and that mentality starts to rub off on Bluey when she interacts with her younger sister, saying, “Big sisters always beat little sisters.”

Bandit realizes that he is wrong after his brother wins a match—thanks to motivation from Bingo—forcing him to admit that little brothers can beat bigger brothers.

If there is an unusual element of escapism to Bluey, it is that, unlike our world, the show is set on an Earth where all our characters are emotionally intelligent and solve their problems through kindness and communication. Bluey has earned a lot of adult fans from all sorts of communities, ranging from queer fans to neurodiverse ones, for how it makes these communities feel safe. As someone posted on the Autism subreddit: “I recommend all people on the spectrum [watch] Bluey.”

A Blue conclusion

On a meta-level, the show’s thesis is that we need to interact with one another empathetically. There is a scene in the episode Promises where Bluey wonders why she has to keep her promises, and her mother, Chilli, makes it clear that trust is what binds our society together. “The whole point of promises is to build trust. If there’s no trust, none of this,” she says, gesturing to all of society, “is possible…No libraries, no roads, no power lines.”

The idea that we all have to look after one another is a simple message, but one that is frankly not said enough in a world of Chosen One narratives and atomization. It resonates with many adults who look at the chaos of our society and wish our problem solvers looked a little more like Chilli and Bandit.

Our Search for Aliens Is All Vibes-Based

Image; Kevin Gill from Los Angeles, CA, United States

The modern hunt for extraterrestrials was partially inspired by aliens rumored to crash land in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, but the speculation of their existence dates back far earlier. The Greek philosopher Epicurus not only thought other worlds beyond ours existed but speculated that “other breeds of men” might dwell there.

While such speculations have made for excellent science fiction, we simply do not have much evidence either way. Some scientists claim it's only a matter of time, but others are less certain. The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been going on for decades, and no “smoking gun” has appeared to confirm such beings' existence.

The most famous “tool” used by the SETI community to discuss the statistical likelihood of advanced extraterrestrial life is the Drake Equation, a mathematical formula said to map this out (more on this later).

And like many aspects of the SETI community, it does not appear to be very scientific at all, but entirely based on vibes.

The Drake Equation is nonsense

The Drake Equation is named after scientist Frank Drake, who, in 1961, wrote down an equation that could estimate the number of communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.

This equation reads as follows:

N = R (the rate of star formation in the galaxy) * fp (the fraction of stars with planets or systems) * ne (the average number of habitable planets per star) * fl (the fraction of habitable planets where life arises)* fi (the fraction of habitable planets where intelligent life arises) * fc (the fraction of civilizations that exhibit a detectable technosignature) * L (the length of time these civilizations tend to emit such signatures)

The SETI community, which is made up of a number of organizations and institutions, has used the Drake Equation, particularly its assumption that there will be some form of “technosignature,” to run experiments to search for such life. These have ranged from experiments on wavelengths to radio to visible light to much more. The Drake Equation is seen by some portions of the scientific community as a legitimate framework (though not an actual equation) for such inquiries. As controversial science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson remarked in an interview over ten years ago on why some find it convincing:

“…even if you take pessimistic numbers [from the Drake equation], you get a huge number of planets with technology left over in the galaxy because you start with such a large number to begin with.”

And yet this certainty is a lie.

We are working off a data point of one and have no way to presently affirm the many potential manifestations life can and cannot appear. There might be a dizzying area of factors (not all of them necessarily required) that could prevent or hinder “intelligent” life from forming. In the words of physicist Tom Hartsfield in his essay Why the Drake Equation Is Useless, which calls into question each metric cited above:

“The worst thing about the Drake equation is that it gives us a false idea of grasping the problem we are trying to solve. A mathematical equation connotes some scientific study or understanding of a subject. But this is misleading: SETI is simply NOT a scientific endeavor. It’s entirely a leap of faith, albeit a leap that uses tools devised by science. It’s like searching for paranormal activity with an electronic sound recorder.”

There is not a single figure in the Drake Equation that we know with great certainty. The first two—the rate of star formation and the fraction of stars with planets—are vastly limited by our ability to observe the known universe. We can see more exoplanets and stars than we used to, making an educated estimate possible, but there are still profound limitations, as even a sun-sized star might be too difficult to detect from afar with current technology.

The other figures in this equation are not guessable. What counts as a technosignature? How do you define intelligence? What makes an environment habitable for not just the life on Earth but across the universe? These are questions we cannot even begin to answer because our knowledge is just too limited. This is something Neil deGrasse Tyson (who was accused of sexual harassment back in 2018) alludes to in that initial interview, saying:

“Those [figures] are completely unknown and you can just express your bias in what those fractions are.”

Our biases not only reflect how we can estimate these figures, but if we believe they are a useful framework in the first place. Frank Drake was using figures that, at the time, he considered useful topics of inquiry but have since been criticized, even by supporters, for needing an overhaul.

Take the example of star formation. It changes over time, and varies depending on the star type, making it not the best figure to even use for SETI. The ubiquity of planets likewise calls into question the need to factor in the number of stars that have a planet or system orbiting them.

It’s possible that as we learn more about the universe, we will not just refine these parameters but discard most of them entirely.

The Drake Equation is one of those premises that makes for great science fiction—and the ubiquity of intelligent life in the universe is one of my favorite tropes in film and television—but it’s only a story we tell ourselves, a vibe, using a scientific veneer.

An unscientific conclusion

Now, you may still believe aliens are out there, and I am not here to challenge that belief. I am merely here to underscore the reality that, given our present understanding of the cosmos, it is one not based on certainty but on faith.

A vibe.

Maybe the moment I publish this article, aliens will descend from the sky, affirming everything the SETI community suspects about extraterrestrial life. Feel free to make fun of me if that happens — I will also find it funny.

Yet maybe that will never happen.

As one character remarks in my favorite fiction podcast, Unwell, which is just as solid “evidence” as anything else:

“It doesn’t sound like math. It sounds like hope with the lightest dusting of math flavoring. The equation is not an equation at all…It’s not rational analysis, it’s a short story. A misleadingly named thought experiment.”

The Frustrating Science Surrounding Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’

Image; BLB, The Three Body Universe, T-Street, Plan B Entertainment, Primitive Streak, & Netflix

(Note: spoilers for the 3 Body Problem.)

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem (2024-present) is based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (2008–2010) by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, about the Earth responding to an alien invasion en route at a distance approximately 400 years away. The show carries through many (though not all) of the book’s themes, depicting how societies respond to rapid technological and social transitions.

Much ink has been spilled about its critique of the Chinese Communist Party, with the inciting incident for the invasion being tied to a struggle student session where the character Ye Wenjie (played by Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng) witnesses the death of her father for teaching the “imperialist” Albert Einstein. It’s this tragedy that prompts her to contact aliens, creating a moving commentary about how trauma can lead people to support misanthropic positions.

I want to focus on the text’s more “scientific” elements—i.e., the fictional theorems, equations, and paradoxes that make the logic of its world work. The 3 Body Problem is a fun thought experiment that uses the veneer of science to tell a particular story.

In fact, Liu Cixin’s “Dark Forest Hypothesis” — a subset of the “Fermi Paradox” (more on this later) — falls in line with a long list of fictional theorems and hypotheses that aren’t scientific at all.

Any sufficiently advanced technology…

The 3 Body Problem does base a lot of its story on actual science. The most obvious is its namesake, which describes a system with three different bodies that all exhibit gravitational force on one another. This makes such systems notoriously unstable, as is the case with our main antagonist’s home system, which is subjected to unpredictable gravitational forces.

However, the 3 Body Problem series also relies on fictitious equations, theorems, and hypotheses to build its world. The most obvious of them is Clarke’s Third Law (i.e., “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) or its derivative, Shermer’s Last Law (i.e., “any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God”), as the alien San-Ti are treated as God-like entities by their human worshippers. As one human devotee named Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) says in season one:

“Unlike the mythical Gods our species has conjured up, our Lord [i.e. the San-Ti] truly watches over us.”

Shermer’s law is front and center here as these humans see this advanced technology and, in their ignorance, deify the San-Ti for being “better” than them.

For a series that prides itself on grounding its sci-fi technology on actual science, that is quite a departure from how humans have reacted to technological differences before this moment. In their criticism of Clarke’s Third Law in Gizmodo, Esther Inglis-Arkell uses the example of television. Most people do not understand the science that is fundamental to how a television works, and even if they do, few can build one, but that ignorance does not cause us to think of TVs as magic. In Inglis-Arkells words:

“…no matter what wonders scientists produce in a lab, from an electronic limb that amputees move using their thoughts to animal-less meat, we don’t point at them and shout, “Sorcerers!” We have no idea how it’s done but we sense that, given time and teaching, we could do it, too. Even the most extraordinary feats, which we are entirely ignorant about, we write off as science and technology.”

Furthermore, I would argue that there is a supremacist mentality underbidding our love for these laws in popular culture, as it assumes that people will encounter something they do not understand and react to it with fear, awe, and worship. As Inglis-Arkell goes on to argue:

“There have been plenty of crossovers between different cultures before now, and although people have been fooled briefly by technology, they generally [have caught] on pretty quickly.”

In truth, Clarke’s and Shermer’s laws rely on the old racist trope of militarily advanced people coming to a new land and being treated as Gods by those they violently conquered, as the Spanish are famously claimed to have been treated by the Aztecs.

Yet the idea that Cortés and other conquering Spaniards were worshiped as Gods was an ahistorical myth used to convert indigenous people to Christianity (as well as to retrospectively justify the invasion). The reality is more complicated. The Aztecs were an imperialist empire in their own right, and several polities sided with the Spanish expedition because they wanted a regime change, not out of a sense of worship.

In the show, many people supporting the alien San-Ti are nihilists who believe humanity is not worth saving. And so you can argue that some of them are more misanthropic than devout, but true believers are common among their ranks. “…you call them my superiors, but they’re your superiors too,” monologues one assassin with a zealotry that could rival any real religion. “… I’ve gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord.”

It’s this sense of devotion that I find strange. The West did not merely drop their ships on foreign shores and win through awe. There was no natural deification from the natives. It took in-person missionaries, violent conquest, and the destructive crackdown on native languages and practices to force cultures all over the world to adopt Western Imperialist values. Because of distance, the San-Ti are limited in the tactics they can use. Violence is possible but curtailed to covert actions.

Somehow, we have this entire religious movement prop up based on a largely ahistorical phenomenon. We have no evidence that people would worship technological superiors because they haven’t really in the past. It makes for good fiction (and that’s fine), but it’s not aligned with our current understanding of the social sciences and a storytelling beat that’s arguably rooted in racist tropes.

And that’s before even getting into one of the show’s other “scientific” foundations—the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox and The Dark Forest

Another unscientific concept often framed scientifically, both in this narrative and outside of it, is the Fermi Paradox, or the idea that some factor or confluence of factors is limiting the development of advanced extraterrestrial life. This concept is accredited to scientist Enrico Fermi, despite little evidence that he proposed it. It appears to conflate a future author’s response to an inquiry Fermi famously made on a lunch break.

The Fermi Paradox has profoundly impacted science fiction (and real science research), and it’s arguably a core element of this entire show. Not only do we see a character reference it directly by reading Michael Bodin’s Fermi’s Paradox: Cosmology and Life, but the plot rests on this “paradox’s” existence.

In the 3 Body Problem, the Fermi Paradox is not only real but the result of interstellar aliens. The reason why the universe seems so devoid of life is that the moment a species reveals itself, another will come to conquer or destroy it to prevent being surpassed by it in the future. As written in the English translation of the 3 Body Problem’s sequel, The Dark Forest:

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.”

This creates an incentive to destroy any life you come across in the universe, even innocent, fragile life, for the fear that given enough time, they might surpass you and come to pose a significant threat.

This is a fine premise for a book or show (media does not have to have realistic logic), but it’s not scientific. We have no idea how the mechanics of interstellar space travel would work in reality. Nor do we know how the many iterations of sentient life would behave or even really have a good conception of consciousness or intelligence. In the words of Robert H. Gray in a piece ultimately sympathetic to the search for extraterrestrial life:

“As for the paradox, there is none…There is no logical contradiction between the statement “E.T. might exist elsewhere” and the statement “E.T. is not here” because nobody knows that travel between the stars is possible in the first place.”

Furthermore, it should be noted that much of the discussion around this trope is arguably rooted in the same flawed cultural assumptions as Clarke’s Third Law and Shermer’s Law. The Dark Forest Hypothesis, at its core, assumes that alien life will embody the same imperialism of Earth to expand across the stars. Stories of non-human interstellar expansion use a data point of one—i.e., Earth, particularly the recent history of colonial expansion—and assume there will be a natural propensity for all intelligent life not only to expand but to react to difference with fear.

Yet the idea that even a single other species, let alone the vast majority of species, would react to different intelligent life so vastly far apart from them in space with genocide is something we have no way of validating.

It’s also one that is not backed up by current history and anthropology. Not even on Earth has every civilization reacted to cultural differences with an exterminationist response. Genocides and war do happen, but they are currently framed in negative terms, and we have plenty of examples of cross-cultural cooperation.

The Dark Forest Hypothesis is a fun fictional framing — but that’s all it is — and one that draws on our flawed cultural assumptions. It extrapolates the current philosophies of imperialism, colonialism, and supremacy — ones that are not even consistent across the planet, let alone all of human history — and generalizes them to explain life we have not even met yet (assuming it exists in the first place).

A spaced-out conclusion

Again, science fiction does not need to be realistic. Many times, writers use the flavor of science to tell a particular cultural narrative. Whether the story is about FTL, time travel, or space aliens, things like the Fermi paradox, wormholes, and nanobots are great ways to make those narrative points.

The 3 Body Problem is one of these stories, drawing heavily on pseudo-scientific social theories that reflect modern cultural assumptions more than innate aspects of the universe. It uses the veneer of science—as all good science fiction tends to do—to flesh out the perceived authenticity of a story.

Yet that does not mean these story tropes (and again, that is what the Fermi Paradox and Clarke’s Law are) are not the product of harmful biases. In the same way that the ancient aliens myth reflects a deep-seated racism that tries to downplay the accomplishments of Browner people (i.e., ancient aliens are always coming to Eygpt and Polynesia, rarely Rome), the Dark Forest Hypothesis takes the imperialism of the current era, and makes it “natural.”

If we do not make this fact explicit, the cultural assumptions embedded in works like the 3 Body Problem—i.e., that aliens might be as brutish, expansionist, and cruel as the current empires of the modern era — will be ones we do not think to question.

And if humanity is ever to reach for the stars, that would create one scary universe.

Men Have Become So Much Worse Now That I’ve Transitioned

Photo by Vinicius “amnx” Amano on Unsplash

One of the things that anti-trans people tell me over and over again is that I am not a woman. That because of my chromosomes or genitalia or some erroneous evolutionary biology, my feelings and experiences should be discredited.

And yet, I have lived as a femme person for years. I am gendered correctly by strangers. I get read as a woman at restaurants, and banks, and on dating apps. In truth, I have received few complaints about my womanhood from the people around me.

And most prevalently, I am treated by men like a femme. I am catcalled and harassed. I am degraded and humiliated, just like the countless other women around me.

It’s different now

Since I’ve transitioned, men have terrified me. This past year, a man has followed me on their motorbike, asking for my number. A man has trailed me outside a cafe door, asking what my plans are for the rest of the day. A man has struck a conversation with me in the middle of dinner at a restaurant, inappropriately touching my thigh.

Men weren’t great before my transition, either. I had experienced harassment in predominantly gay spaces (see The Case for Queer People to Talk About Sexual Violence), but not at this ubiquity. Men will message me on social media apps, and they will bring a level of obsession to their comments that was not as prevalent before my transition.

They will tell me they are driving 75 miles to see me. That I’m hotter than their wives. That I need to commit to a relationship with them before ever meeting.

Women used to tell me how bad men were to them, and I nodded, but I’m not sure I emotionally “got it.” I didn’t understand the entitlement.

Since transitioning, I have been shocked by the constant nagging and harassment men do when they don’t get their way. I wouldn’t respond in time to a comment and get called an “ugly bitch.” I would pick up my phone and find men angry that I didn’t reply to them, sometimes within seconds of their messaging.

I was not treated this way before.

Granted, I wasn’t treated well as an effeminate gay man, but there was a level of respect that has just vanished from many (though not all of) the men around me. I am treated like a nonperson more. Men don’t include me as much. They hear me less, and I find it can take several tries to impart what I am trying to say to some.

Unless, of course, I offer up my body, and then their fixations become so intense I worry sometimes what will happen if I say no. I have done it several times, and it’s completely different from when I was a man. I could tell men no during sex, and they mostly listened, but now it’s often a negotiation. I tell men no, and they try to argue. They make little promises they do not intend to keep and must be reminded of my humanity before agreeing to stop.

“You respect my choices, don’t you,” I’ve asked.

That usually works, though sometimes more begging is required. I need to make them realize they aren’t bad people, and that work makes me wonder if their goodness is just a story they tell themselves.

My sisters and friends tell me that eventually, I won’t have this problem as I will become invisible instead. I will go unheard and unseen in my old age as I find a secluded place on the margins. And that would be almost okay if I did not need the tools and resources men control to exist there, too. I fear I’ll still be begging for resources as a secluded spinster in the woods.

I never got why women put up with terrible men. “Leave his ass,” was the first thing I would say as a man. Because there are half-decent men out there, but as a woman, I know that half-decent men don’t run the world. There aren’t even that many of them.

I get it now. I cannot hide away because the margins are not a sanctuary but a tightrope — one too many women fall off of.

A gendered conclusion

It makes me so angry when anti-trans advocates call my feminity into question and tell me my gender isn’t valid because I experience sexism. I experience misogyny. If women have a shared trauma over men — so much so that many would rather come across a random bear in the woods than a random man — then it is a trauma I share.

I get the mistreatment of women so much more than I ever did as a man because I directly experience it. I have the before and after receipts to prove it.

I wish I didn’t have to to prove my femininity.

Conservatives Aren’t The Only Ones Who Are Classist

Image; Coastal Elite from Halifax, Canada; modified using Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I remember heading to an orchestra musical performance for the Star Wars film A New Hope (1977). I am not the most cultured regarding “fine art,” but this event hit that perfect intersection of being both nerdy and music that I know. I was genuinely excited to watch a movie I love while listening to its score, enhanced by a real-life orchestra.

My family and I were riding on a free bus, which the theater center provides for those coming from downtown who do not want to worry about the venue’s limited parking. It was an unusual bus experience for someone who rides the bus frequently because everyone was decked out in their finest suits and dresses. There was this one woman, probably in her mid-50s, who was dressed in a sparkly white dress. She had an anti-Trump pin on and smiled at me. We struck up a very amiable conversation.

I must have been reading Rich because she cracked a joke that she felt was appropriate among people in her class. We were talking about how nice the bus was, and she said something like, “I never take the bus. You never know what kinds of people will be on it.” I frowned in that natural way one does when a joke doesn’t land, and our conversation died down from there.

Yet the comment stuck with me because here was a woman who considered herself a liberal, a progressive even, and she held an utter contempt for people who regularly take the bus — people she considers poor— and it’s a reaction I sadly see all too often among the Left.

Disdain for the rural poor

You could write a book on the classist character of the Republican Party. From the limiting of collective bargaining rights to a fierce attempt to block a raise in the federal minimum wage, it’s clear that many Republican powerbrokers hold utter contempt for the working class. We should call this nonsense out.

And yet, you can write an equally long book about upper-crust liberals being condescending to the “conservative” poor they think are beneath them. One common classist element I see on the Left is the utter contempt many liberals have for conservative-led states.

We see this a lot on social media whenever a disaster strikes a “red state,” and some liberal account will blame everyone who lives there. “I’m not a religious person,” goes one X user, “but from now on, any red state that gets hit by a natural disaster, I’m saying it’s God’s way of punishing them for their wicked ways.”

It’s clear that some of this resentment is coming from a classist association some liberals have with the “hicks” in red states, weaponizing the same rhetoric typically used by conservatives to deny poor people state benefits. “From farm subsidies to social security to Medicare to literally dozens of other examples, the typical red state citizen wouldn’t make it without handouts,” mocks one commenter. “Biden’s policies work for the poorest, least educated, unhealthiest states too. You’re welcome, Red States,” condescends another.

It’s a common sentiment spoken in liberal circles all over the country that liberals are better informed about the “facts.” Liberals think rural Americans, who they automatically associate with conservatism, don’t understand the suffering caused by the Republican Party. Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas?— whose argument is that conservatives use cultural issues to redirect working-class resentments toward “liberal elites”— has been the defacto question on the liberal establishment’s mind for the last couple of decades.

Why aren’t conservatives adopting policies that, from the liberal perspective, are ultimately for their benefit?

This perspective verges on being infantilizing as it treats such voters as merely ignorant rather than worthy political opponents (or, in the case of liberals in such states, those suffering under regressive voting laws). Many “blue state” liberals develop a disdain for their supposedly ignorant peers. When people in these rural areas don’t do “what’s right for them,” then it creates the reaction we saw above, where such places (and people) are seen as deserving of that misfortune.

And a lot of people in rural areas certainly feel that condescension. In the words of one Redditor on this sense of resentment:

“I feel a lot of city liberals fetishize minorities and keep us around as friends almost like accessories to show how woke they are. I’m about as left as they get, but damn I’d much rather hang out with a group of Hicks. At least they’re genuine.”

Again, classism does not begin and end with the Republican Party. There are a lot of liberals who hold contempt for the “flyover states” they monolithically paint with a broad brush.

Knowing better

This classism can also manifest in one particular cultural indicator that liberals cling to without realizing that they are doing so. I am, of course, talking about education. I cannot tell you how many times liberals have told my debt-free self that I should go to graduate school or get a PhD because “I like learning.”

In truth, I want to do nothing less than go into debt my entire life for the prospect of a career I might not even land. Education is expensive in America—in part due to neoliberal actors stripping away funding—and it’s often quite classist in its own right. Higher education is jokingly (and sometimes seriously) referred to in feudal terms. As Tilman Reitz writes in the peer-reviewed High Education journal:

“…the US academic system is now a vital part of a capitalism with strong neo-feudal traits: a rent-seeking economy, a caste-like reproduction of social status, a para-statist power elite with alliances between the relative political, academic and corporate centres, and a post-democratic public sphere based on the representation of institutional prestige.”

In other words, education is integrated within our capitalist system and replicates many of its same problems.

Yet, in conversations I have in real life and online, education is repeatedly depicted as the solution for our political dysfunction, ignoring how capitalist actors have often co-opted it. According to some, we advance our goals not by securing a political majority and building alternative power structures but by ensuring everyone gets properly educated. In the words of Brian Karem in Salon:

“The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try. We lack education.”

Karem is making the case that the American public’s support of Donald Trump and modern conservatism is rooted in our terrible education system.

This perspective is partly based on data showing that more education correlates with increasing liberalization, a correlation we still do not fully understand. It may be partly affected by polarization, increasing gender equity, and liberal family structures’ being more likely to send their children to university than the act of education itself.

Yet even if we fully understood this correlation (or lack thereof), it’s condescending to assume that your “side” is natural and right and that the moment someone receives “the facts,” they will agree with you.

That’s not how learning works.

There is no guarantee that someone will adopt “the correct information”—however nebulously that is defined—as a result of mere exposure to it. Congress is quite well-educated, and many of its educated elite are Republicans. Senator Ted Cruz went to Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Republican Senators Daniel S. Sullivan, Michael D. Crapo, and Tom Cotton also went to Harvard. This education did nothing to liberalize their perspectives. Far more complex factors affect someone’s political alignment than just education.

Furthermore, liberalism, while an umbrella term emphasizing individual rights and equality of opportunity within a capitalist system, has a variety of competing perspectives (see classical liberalism, neoliberalism, Social Liberalism, etc.). And that’s before even getting into the democratic socialist, communist, and anarchist philosophies that are on the Left but reject liberalism entirely. These philosophies are competing with one another, and education will not automatically lead a person to one over the other.

Yet, if you falsely believe that learning will lead someone to your side, that can create a toxic type of condescension. As Emmett Rensin critiques in Vox, this smugness has become a defining aspect of American liberalism:

“The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing. Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you’re actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn’t know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.”

It’s this smugness that critics like myself claim is partially rooted in classism.

A conservative conclusion

The point of this piece is not to “dunk on liberals” for being better or worse than any other perspective. I want to reiterate that I don’t think the powerbrokers of the Republican party are any better (they are usually much worse). Many elite conservatives are classist in very tangible ways that deserve the utmost scrutiny.

Instead, it’s about how much of the Democratic Party’s current political strategy is rooted in paternalism. Voters are depicted as people who simply do not understand all the good politicians are doing—a demographic that needs to be marketed to rather than people with unique experiences and needs that our leaders can learn from.

And this problem doesn’t just apply to conservatives. If you think you are “right” and the other side lacks proper “education,” then you will most likely be just as paternalistic to factions inside your coalition as outside of it. We can see this in the current faultline between social democrat and progressive factions of the Democratic Party’s coalition with more neoliberal actors.

What’s the matter with Kansas can very quickly become what’s the matter with progressives and leftists? A question that winnows your coalition down until nothing is left.

Skylanders Academy: The Comedy Bible For Understanding Conservative Humor

Image; TeamTO (animation); Activision Blizzard Studios

There is this joke that conservatives aren’t funny. It’s an American meme perpetuated by everyone from YouTubers to emerging scientific research. Conservatives are often so focused on “owning the libs” that they don’t bother to see if their jokes actually land.

We could point to a lot of conservative media to highlight this trend of “punching down” for cheap laughs. The Daily Wire media organization has put a lot of energy in the last few years into creating comedies such as Lady Ballers (2023) and The New Norm (2024) that pretty exclusively have humor maligning identities they disagree with.

Yet today, I want to choose a more off-the-beaten-path example to highlight this tension: Skylanders Academy (2016–2018), a cartoon show about various mythical creatures saving a fictional world called the Skylands from the forces of evil. This derivative work has some of the most explicit conservative humor that I have seen in a modern kids’ show (that is not advertised as such), and I think that provides us a fascinating window into what conservative humor looks like.

Prison humor for kids

If you are a little skeptical that this children’s show has conservative messaging, take the season one episode titled, The Hole Truth, which is about the Skylander group volunteering as prison guards for a day. The entire episode hinges on the gimmick of the crew sending prisoners to “the hole,” aka solitary confinement, which in real life has been classified as torture.

“To the hole,” the Skylander guards say, almost gleefully.

For context, that would be like a kid’s show having a running bit in an episode where, as temporary torturers for the CIA, the main characters are waterboarding prisoners for fun. The whole point of the joke is for the characters to “punch down” at others they have a power differential with — in this case, guards vs prisoners.

The good guys are punishing the bad guys; cue laugh track.

This episode also has a spoof on the classic “don’t drop the soap” prison joke, which is traditionally all about how men are so unsafe from their fellow prisoners that the moment they bend over to pick up dropped soap in the shower, they will be sexually violated. It revolves around “weak” men getting their comeuppance when they show vulnerability (see also the “I wouldn’t do well in prison” joke).

“Don’t drop the soap” is the type of joke where the punchline is rarely said explicitly, mentioned more as a line of humorous caution. In the case of this episode, it is subverted to remove the allusion of rape entirely. “Because prison soap is expensive,” one of the inmates chimes in, with a plausible enough explanation for the kids watching at home while their parents can still “get” the more mature context.

These homophobic jokes are “funny” to many conservatives as a way to revel in the sense of perceived superiority, one of the earliest theorized sources of humor according to philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Note: not every advocate of the superiority theory believes all humor comes from this element (see weak claims). I contend that an important element of conservative humor revolves around reinforcing hierarchy. The humor comes from mocking people and groups that are perceived to be at the bottom of the supremacist hierarchy, in this case, homosexuality.

As another example, a very common joke in conservative circles is the “I identify as an attack helicopter” spoof and its many variants. The whole point is to parody gender identity. If someone can identify as the gender they weren’t assigned at birth, why not an inanimate object or animal? To many conservatives, that position is just as inherently ridiculous.

And listen, the “identify with X” joke can be funny when done empathetically. Hannah Gadsby did a pretty funny “I identify as tired” bit in her standup special Nanette (2017), but often, American conservatives do not ensure that the material connects. The utterance of the insult is seen as enough to get a chuckle, and so when your audience doesn’t agree with that sentiment, it often creates a disconnect.

Hence, the meme that conservative humor isn’t funny. When you aren’t operating under that same framework of superiority, it just doesn’t land.

Fantasy cops

This sense of hierarchy is built into Skylanders Academy’s foundation. The show arguably falls within the genre of “copaganda” (i.e., shows that promote pro-police sentiments). The Skylanders operate as police officers for the fictional Skylands, and our protagonists often punish offenders for robbing banks, not paying a subscription fee, and other forms of property theft. They are shown to work not only with the prison system but also with this society’s court system.

Furthermore, unlike the complexities underbidding the causes of crime in the real world (i.e., poverty, housing, etc.), the Skylands are governed by a binary. Good guys have a certain amount of light inside them, and bad guys have darkness.

For example, in one episode called Who’s Your Daddy?, the character Jet-Vac (Greg Ellis) is alarmed to learn that his new child is acting quite mischievously. Jet-Vac worries that he is raising a bad kid. He then discovers that there was a mix up with his egg, and he had picked up the egg of a Greeble, a species predisposed to evil.

The dichotomy of good and bad is clear and simple.

A lot of the humor in this show revolves around those “evil” characters suffering. For example, Kaos (Richard Steven Horvitz) is the main antagonist in the series, and the running joke is that he is an incompetent “mama’s boy.” He lives at home in his mother’s former outhouse. In essence, he is what conservative influencers would classify as not a “real man” and, therefore, a ripe target for superiority-based humor.

There is even a point in the episode Space Invaders where he is compared to a “beta.” This comes from an outdated classification system derived from an old study of wolves in captivity by researcher David Mech, in which wolves were believed to have a hierarchy of alphas at the top and betas below them. This study does not resemble wolf packs in the wild, and Mech has done a lot of work to try to set the record straight, even taking out of print one of his old books from the 1970s.

But still, moral entrepreneurs continue to apply this erroneous framework to humans, claiming that human males could be alphas, betas, or lowly omegas. The alpha-beta rhetoric is so prevalent that we are seeing it in this children’s show. Kaos is very briefly able to become an “alpha” through your normal cartoon shenanigans, only for his fortunes to reverse by the end of the episode.

His “beta-ness” ultimately sabotages his goals.

Another dynamic is Kaos’s relationship with his “servant” Glumshanks (Norm MacDonald), a troll who is referred to as his slave on at least one occasion. Glumshanks has an adversarial relationship with Kaos, who tortures him regularly, both on and offscreen.

Once again, the humor comes from a lowly person being punished.

A conservative conclusion

Now some may dismiss my criticisms by saying that Skylanders Academy is just a kid’s show. A common stereotype is that these kinds of shows are not meant to be serious, and so they should not be criticized.

Yet artists who make children and young adult work do imbue serious themes within them (see Bridge to Terabithia, Matilda, and even Bluey), and their audience, while still learning, usually has a lot more comprehension than many adults tend to give them credit for. Kids are not “unintelligent,” and there are plenty of kids’ shows that respect their audience and advance complex themes.

When I watch Skylanders Academy, I see a lot of conservative humor based on supremacist thinking. The good guys exist in a world where morality is clear-cut, and the villainous characters always get their comeuppance. The humor comes in the reinforcement of this dichotomy.

This is a useful framework for understanding how conservative humor works, as it is based on a very rigid hierarchy. Conservatives are not funny to those on the left because many of us (though not all) possess a different intellectual framework that is usually more conscientious of power dynamics. We do not exist in the same political bubble where we find beating up on our subordinates to be funny.

As the left and the right become increasingly detached from one another, not even a laugh may be able to bring us together.