What do Bridgerton, Star Wars, the term Goblin Mode and the Barbie movie all have in common? That's right, they're part of the discourse, the constant, constant online discourse. There are also all episode topics from my new favorite show, Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist. If you like Culture Study, you have to check out this bi-weekly show hosted by two queer Canadian academics who love to get to the
bottom of why certain things become popular and what that popularity tells us about society. Each episode they tackle a piece of pop culture, whether that's a book, movie, meme or song, and ask why this and why now. And guess what? I was on a recent episode about Adelizure and let me tell you, these hosts, they do their research. We talked about post-World War II manufacturing, second wave feminism, the neoliberal collapse of work and leisure, the rise of chipwits,
the sons of pieces operating on land and others. So we'll have a cool conversation with the finally I was gobsmacked by the degree of grief the people in the class felt. It was like, can I even be a fan of her anymore? And I had only heard of Maddie Hilly occasionally like, I've listened to a couple songs by the 1975. That was where I wasn't in my Maddie Hilly knowledge as well. Yeah. Like everyone who's been to a brewery on one of the coasts. Yes. You know.
I immediately started looking into it. And I found it to be so illuminating because this was one of the first times I'd encountered completely sincere celebrity outrage that I had no pre-existing take on. This is the Cultural Study Podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. I'm Margaret H. Willison. And I am a podcaster, a culture writer, and I work as faculty for the company Not Sorry Productions.
I think both of our past being very online for the last decade plus makes it so that we're very familiar with like the contours of this outrage. But this I think felt slightly different. It felt like a culmination in some ways and we're going to get into all of that. But I think we should also talk about the fact that like, being mad at celebrities is not new. Right? And we're not going to talk today about people who have committed crimes. Right?
When I talk about being mad at people who are sexual abusers, we're not talking about being mad at Harvey Weinstein. We're talking more about anger at people's decisions that are usually somewhat low-stakes or people's affiliations with other people who seem not on brand, right? And that can even mean like things like they have not been as thoughtful in the way that they've talked about other people, right? Right. There's just a lot here.
And a lot of it too is like having big feelings about people who you don't personally know and how that can sometimes be framed as outrageous, over... People show like... Yeah, like feminized emotions, all these sorts of things. And so we're going to try to situate some of these feelings, I think. That's the goal. Big feelings about celebrities. This is normal. This is totally normal. And we just want to go in some of the crannies of it. I'm excited.
The common refrain that you often see online is that like people with large platforms, those celebrities, people with a lot of people watching them have a responsibility to use those platforms for quote unquote, good. And I think we saw this around Black Lives Matter. We saw this around how people are talking about how you should use your platform for Israel and Palestine. We saw this around like anti-Trumpness, like all sorts of things.
And what is your thinking right now about what a celebrity owes? Other people owes its fans, but also just owes the public. I think what a celebrity owes the public is a coherent personal understanding of how they want to interact with politics. That is really as much as we can demand of them. They should know what they're doing and they should understand why they're doing it. And that can be being Olivia Rodrigo.
She has very deliberately decided to make abortion access a crucial issue in her current stadium tour. So she is giving out birth control and other materials related to that at all of her shows. That's like an overtly political thing that we don't normally let pop stars do. We're normally like sick with singing. But right now in this moment, it's really well received because it's reflective of the relationship that she has with her audience. And it's reflective of how she wants to be in culture.
She wants to be somebody with a point of view. She wants to be somebody pushing conversations forward. On the flip side, you have Taylor Swift. If Taylor Swift did that at this stage in her career, a lot of times people will be like, why doesn't Taylor Swift do things like this with her platform? And I guess I would point to the fact that like, she is a blonde, thin woman, publicly dating an NFL tight end. And like, I can't imagine a scenario where that would have been a controversial pairing.
But because of how much scrutiny is already on her, because of how many people are already invested in her narrative, it's like, well, this is obviously a CIA stunt. You know, this is like Joe Biden has orchestrated this to win the 2024 election. So there's more complexity to that than we imagine. And Olivia Rodrigo at the outset of her career can establish some particular rules of engagement. Taylor Swift is renegotiating 20 years of engagement she's already established.
And that's a much, much more challenging task. And I would say the same is true of Beyonce. Yeah, that's interesting. I think one thing historically that we, and you mentioned this, is that there has been this expectation that performers should stay in their lane and subcapacity, right? Like singers should sing and movie stars should be beautiful and act in movies. And I think that that expectation has mostly been levied on white performers.
It's like whiteness should not be political, which, you know, that's statement in and of itself. Whereas performers of color, there's always been an expectation that like you're, in part because like you're very presence, your popularity is political that there is a false. Yeah, it's understood to be political.
Yes, there is an expectation that you should also like, if you don't speak out, if you are a person of color, then like somehow you aren't using your platform and in the way that is expected. And I think like what we now expect of Taylor Swift is also what is a cultural expectation of white women more generally, which is like, you can't be complacent. Like it's not enough.
And the thing that people will point to the most specifically with Taylor Swift, and this came up a lot with Matt Healy because he'd made controversial comments around queerness and about queer people. And they were like, well, she has declared herself to be a queer ally and she has used queer coded imagery and all of her work. Therefore, she is profiting off her queer fans.
And like, therefore, like she can't profit off of them and then like make her concert not a safe space by possibly dating someone who said some stuff we don't like. Right. Well, I think that like some of this connects to to larger star theory, which is essentially that like a star needs to have a coherent image, right?
And when something happens, when they date someone, when they say something, when they're caught doing something that does not fit within that coherent image, that is when it becomes scandalous. So we can look at her connection to Matt Healy as scandalous because of exactly what you were laying out.
Whereas like Olivia Rodrigo, maybe there would be some scandal if she hadn't done the work both in the lyrics to her songs and in other parts of her image to separate herself from this image as a child star. Yeah. Like Brittany, for instance, like did not necessarily do that work, right? Like there are other stars who have not successfully made that transition.
Whereas I think Olivia Rodrigo and her team have very successfully allowed her to transition into an adult with a point of view and a feminist and reproducting rights-minded point of view. And that's not to say that she doesn't get any pushback. Yeah. That's gotten significant pushback from conservatives, but that doesn't disrupt her star image, that augment it. So let's get to listen to our questions because this will give us an opportunity to talk about Matt Healy even more.
This is from Z. Whenever Matt Healy is back in the news for whatever he has done this time, there's a ton of conversation on social media about his famous friends like Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers and how disappointed people are that they're friends. Where does this expectation that famous people should not be friends with controversial people come from? Is this a shift in general approaches to friendships or do we have different expectations of famous people?
Okay. So this is an opportunity for us to outline what makes Matt Healy not a great person. I don't even know how to say that. Really? Right. This is the thing. Yeah. Like Matt Healy, a complex factor in understanding Taylor Swift's star image. Right. And then I also am like wary of saying, oh, like he's complex when he said shitty things. Right. Does saying shitty things make you a shitty person? Sometimes I don't know. Like, this is where I, I mean, this is why we're doing this episode.
So let's talk about the things that he has said that star shitty. It was an array of things. Yeah. There was appearing on a podcast and telling a story about masturbating to like really racist pornography. There was being on a podcast and laughing along good naturedly while the host and his friend made a lot of really disgusting comments about the rapper A.S.
And then there was just a general trollishness to how he interacted with the expectation that he should perform progressive, woke, exact political beliefs that everybody who listens to him wanted to have. That at every moment he had to be performing this version of himself.
And I would say if you want to do a deep dive on Maddie Healy's whole deal, Gia Tolentino had a New Yorker profile of him that came out around this time that is incredibly illuminating and like gives you a sense of his whole thing. But the part that that doesn't encompass is I think the number one thing Maddie Healy did that was so bad is go from existing at one level of fame to just to get a completely different level of fame.
Well, and I even think about this like for all celebrities, the amount of access that we have not only to the things that they are like directly putting out via Twitter and other forms of social media, but also like the amount of talking that they're doing on podcast, the amount of like the lack of management. Right. There is just so much available discourse for fans. Yeah, heritably.
I'm thinking about like Marilyn Monroe, early 1950s, one of the most famous people in the world, the amount of access that you had to her in interviews was so little, so curated. And this includes like photography, the only photos that you would see except for naked photos that were taken when she was trying to make rent. And that were published in March go without her. That was sort of what the night against her once she was sufficiently famous.
Yes. There were other like any photos that you'd see in like life magazine like this was pre-pop or hot sea. We have to remember that too. We didn't even have a word for it yet. And then all of these interviews sanctioned and controlled by her studio and she couldn't say things like out of turn. Like there what Maddie Healy was able to do in public was able to say in public what is unimaginable. Yeah.
Like 70 years ago, right? So there's just so much more information and that does not excuse anything but that just allow us to contextualize just how much information we have. It particularly doesn't excuse anything when you have the most convenient counter example in the world, which is like Travis Kelsey has a very popular podcast and he had that podcast for years before he ever got together with Taylor Swift. Right.
And when they first got together and I heard about that podcast I was like, Oh, okay. Oh no. I mean, she minus 30 seconds until everybody's melting down about this but people have combed the transcripts. I have no doubt of it. And the most terrible thing we found is that he made really adorably dumb tweets when he was in college. So it is absolutely possible to exist in this media environment and still just be fundamentally decent. And Maddie Healy didn't succeed at that.
Those tweets are such a great example of like, there's this understanding that like if you can get into like the pre celebrity person, right? Like they're real essence that will tell you like what is actually at the heart of the person before all of the like celebrity smoothing. Right. And like I don't necessarily think that's true. That's a story that we tell ourselves. But at the same time, like there is the proof of Travis Kelsey's essence is just like looking at squirrels, right?
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think we both agree that authenticity is a fake concept invented by middle-aged white men to inflate the value of vintage concert t-shirts. But operating in a world where people care about it still. That the heart of this question that we have to talk a little bit about friendship and association.
And I think that this, I'm going to draw a tenuous connection here to political polarization because I think that there historically, you could be friends with various people of various political persuasions. And the differences in your politics would not be that stark. Right. The exception to that I would say was like in classic Hollywood, if you were associating with someone who is associated with like the Hollywood ten or the Red Square.
Otherwise it's like, oh yeah, of course, these various stars who have like some of whom are pretty, probably pretty racist in some of whom are not like everyone was consorting with everyone else in ways that weren't viewed as problematic. And part of what the Red Square and Hollywood was so powerful is because it was a complete reversal on what the understanding was. I mean up until World War II, being a socialist was like absolutely fine, kind of patriotic, totally chill.
And then suddenly our relationship with the Soviets shifted and it was like, oh, all of you guys who like went to one luncheon, you're in trouble now. You've had any of everybody else who is at that luncheon. Are you two friendly with unions? Yeah. And I think too, like even when you think about, I don't know if stars in the 1980s, like if you look at press photographs, like the people who are like, oh, here's me with Ronald Reagan, right?
Right. Jane Fonda with Ronald Reagan or something like, I actually don't know if that picture exists. That might be a bridge too far, but Jane Fonda is a chameleon, right? Like she has been friends with me. Jane Fonda's a wild outlier. Yes. In that respect. She is a figure who's always insistently politicized her star image even when she received massive, massive blowback in punishment for it.
And so I think that like what we've come to understand now, and I think this has become more acute post-Trumpism, is that like if you are friends with someone who voted for Trump or conversely, if you are friends with someone who voted for Biden, that you can't be friends with that person. Yeah. That is a betrayal of your politics. And not to another conversation to have, but that's part of why people are angry, I think.
Yeah, but there was definitely the question where it's like, have all friendships changed that way. And it's like kind of, like Taylor's just going to have it worse than we are. But like we are all scrutinized in this way, just the same. I remember when Sidney Swini was just on the upswing with fame, and like people realize that her family might be conservative. And like suddenly it was like, well wait, then what is Sidney Swini conservative?
And now the conservatives are kind of like, well, yeah, she is. And she's also conventionally femininally hot. So like she's our girlie now. Listen, she grew up in Spokane, Washington, which is two hours from where I grew up, which is where the good mall was. And it would be so important. It is hard to grow up in that area. And not be concerned that any Trump voters in your family. Yes. 100%. And you are not responsible for your family's voting history.
Like, right, friends are different than family in this capacity. But yeah, I mean, this is a hard one. Well, I think it is also just so complicated. The thing I would always come back to with this is that like, especially the outset of Taylor Swiss relationship with MediHealy, like she has known him for 10 years, right? Like, they've been in each other's orbit and they've been friends for that long.
And so what I would say to my students is I was like, can you entertain the possibility that she actually knows him better than you do? Right. She doesn't seem great, but there's all this contextual reason why he may be performing shittiness. And if you read about him, that's very in line with him. And then there's also just like context collapse, which is as soon as he went into that stratosphere, it's like he was doing a Nazi salute at concerts.
And it's like he was doing the Nazi salute to indicate that he thought Kanye West and Donald Trump were fascists. He was not doing it to express his allegiance with him. It's like, well, what is he doing the Nazi salute for at all? The mere fact that he feels comfortable doing it is sus. And what I think this is is we have the allegiance to the stars that we love and we know they're imperfect.
But one of the ways you purify yourself, one of the ways you identify, I love Taylor Swift, but I'm still a good person is by scrutinizing satellite figures of Taylor Swift that you don't have that degree of investment in. And just being like, you know, I'm a good Taylor Swift fan because I'm going to make 16 posts about how problematic Maddie Hilly is.
And that is how I am going to show that even though I still admire this complex, complicated and imperfect star, I am not imperfect in the same ways she is. I am not failing to show up in the ways I know she is because I can say this guy who I didn't ever care about before is like absolutely terrible. It is a very convincing theory to me. Like, it's not wrong, right? It's like, it's a way that we process our fandom.
I know what I did not want to be or you know what nobody wants to be on the internet? The person being like, well, yeah, he did a Nazi salute, but like, not that kind of Nazi salute. I don't want to be so in this episode, like, trying to like, I am not a defender of Maddie Hilly, or of like, conservative, from Spokane, Washington. I'm sorry. I feel like I'm defending them. Exactly, exactly. And I think it is this really tricky thing.
And this is something that our company works with more generally. But it's basically like we have moved so much of our identity and so much to our value definition and so much of like the meaning making of our life has moved into fandom of various kinds. And then you have that incredibly complicated moment where it's like, well, yeah, my entire political consciousness is influenced by Harry Potter. And now, Jacob Rowling is like aggressively transphobic.
And it's like, well, does that mean my politics have been transphobic this whole time? Like, it's not even go back and undo your cultural attachments. So something that we work on at my company and that I think about a lot independent of it is just like, what is the non-toxic way to love your problematic faith? Like what do you do with the fact that like, okay, you've given Taylor Swift this position of incredible importance in your life.
And she is like the number one greenhouse gas producing pop star private jets. How do you solve that dilemma? How do you indicate? Like I love her, but this is bad. I found myself in one of the culture study threads the other day like again, defending private jets. And I'm like, what? What is wrong with me? But I was like, yeah, she, Taylor Swift needs private jets. She's like, oh, dude, you know, like that, that's messed up. But that's where we find ourselves.
It's messed up, but it's not, it's not untrue. It's like she lives an incredibly unsafe life. And like I can actually, I can slice it real fine. You know, initially when the guy who tracked all the celebrity jets was like tweeting out her location, they were like, this is an invasion of her privacy. You are making her vulnerable to stalkers. This is unacceptable. And he was like, oh, okay, great. I'll delay the notifications by 24 hours. And I was like, great, great work. You solved it.
And they were like, no, we're still suing you. And I was like, no, you're not suing because of safety. You're suing because of image management. Right, right. And like if you're going to use your private jet, we get to look and see how you're using your private jet. But I do think that we all also need like a responsible insane way to cope with that information. And I don't think we have one right now. Okay, this is great.
This is a good segue to our next question, which is, it's to this idea of like what's too much, what's not enough, all that's right. So this is from Stephanie. I think I realized that celebrity outrage had gone too far when my friends had she didn't like a certain actor anymore, but she couldn't remember what he had done. She just knew she shouldn't like him. I have also felt this way and it's exhausting.
But I also find it annoying when someone has no idea what's going on and plays Kanye in a yoga class. The same week he said some vile stuff. Do you think there's a happy medium between being engaged and being clueless and or not caring? Is it always essentially about picking your battles? I feel like last week I was talking about a star and someone said, isn't he canceled? Yeah. And we debated for like 10 minutes. I was like, I don't think he's canceled. I don't think so.
And that we had to like Google is someone canceled, right? Like that's such an umbrella understanding of us trying to fix bad good as if they're like roles in a melodrama to various actors. And it is rarely that complex. But that's us trying to seek moral clarity. I think particularly in a post-Me Touera moment. Yeah. Also, this was happening to some extent before. Do you have a celebrity that you feel this way about? You're like, oh, like is this person canceled? Like I can't remember.
I mean, I think Aziz Ansari is like the most complicated example of this because his quote unquote expose felt like the moment that the internet agreed me too had gone too far. But also his behavior is documented in the piece which was mostly being like very pushy about wanting to receive oral sex and like not skilled and not considerate and kind of cold. Wasn't great. And it wasn't aligned with his star image which was very consciously feminist.
And like feminist particularly around questions of casual dating because he had written his like online dating guidebook with some facial scientists. Right. So it is honestly something he should have been called out for. Probably not the way he was called out for it. But then it's like, well, because it came up from an inappropriate place, should we disregard it? Do I, as a feminist, do I just have to like hold a grudge against Aziz Ansari forever?
He's since done comedy that like addressed the allegations and like demonstrated that he reckoned with it. We haven't had any further allegations. And it's like, wait, but isn't that what he's supposed to do? Growth. Like isn't that the the gallant path, right? Yeah. Like Louis C. K's over here goofess. Right. Like would we rather them like double down on being an asshole and like become a hero of the right? Which is some of them have done, right? Would be very profitable.
Like Aziz Ansari, maybe his agent is like Aziz. Couldn't you have just done your heel turn? Seriously. You'd gotten what you could for Netflix. It's time for your Fox News era. They love, they love Indian conservatives. But yeah, so it's one of those things where it's like, we've been on a path to sort of reconciliation. We end up stuck where it's like, do I just have to feel chagrinned for liking this person for the rest of my life? Luckily, I'm not that attached to Aziz Ansari's work.
So it's more like a fascinating case study. I'm trying to think if I have any, like obviously I have problematic faves. Like I'm being in the world. You know, our previous conversation about J.K. Rowling is instructive here because I think and I know that like the work that your organization does is also thinking through this. Part of why, like fandom has in some ways taken this secular position of moral guidance, right?
Like it is a way that in the absence of faith traditions that are meaningful to us, that we come up with senses of how the world works. Yeah. Ways of making things legible. Yes. And then when something happens that questions that moral universe, right? Well, that unsettles it. Yes. The same way, like people have crises of faith all of the time. So it makes sense that we also would have crises of fandom. We just don't have any tools to deal with it. Yes, that's the thing.
Is that like if you are within the church or within a religious organization and you have a crisis of faith, like there are many different ways. Some of them I think like more welcoming and understanding than others to work with that crisis of faith. And maybe you end up leaving the faith. Maybe you don't, whatever it is. I don't think that we have established those mechanisms of care or self-care too when we're having these crises of faith within a fandom.
And I think that it is absolutely right that like fandom serves the same role that like faith communities did back when faith communities had more meaning to more Americans. Yeah. But what is different is that within a faith community the ways that community functioned as a community, right? And the way that it functioned as a way for making meaning from your life and understanding the world around you and building a moral consensus. Like those things were all defined.
And it is very accidental that fandom has become the place that we get this information from. And so we don't have these formalized paths defined. For like how do I take this feeling of community that I have and turn it into a community that actually functions in my life? Yeah. I put so much energy out to the things that I love and I do so much work both with like my time and my money and my energy to demonstrate the importance of this thing to me.
But do I know how to get some of that energy back from it? And faith traditions had a method for that. And so what our company does is we do apply faith tradition practices but to secular material. And the idea, I lead a lot of Jane Austen poker inches and the way I joke about it is it's like, well, I can often have a hard time taking my life seriously. But I've never had a hard time taking Jane Austen seriously. Like that's always come very naturally to me.
And when I am consciously putting my life in conversation with that, it can bring some of that seriousness back around to my life. It can dignify like the process of defining my own values. So I don't think I'm just naval gazing. It's like, no, like I'm studying literature and I'm understanding my feelings. And I understand one of those things is important. And that makes the other one important too.
Yeah. Thank you for explaining to what your company does because I think like even just the word company like doesn't it's not like organized organization. It's a better word, right? Yeah. I think organization is a great word. Yes. Hey, everyone. It's Ann. I wanted to catch you up on all the episodes we're working on so you have plenty of time to submit your questions. We're doing an episode on weird TikTok trends.
So if there's something that you keep seen on your for you page and you want an explainer, let us know. We're also looking for your questions and prompts for an episode about Ben Affleck with the great Jen Romolini who just wrote a fantastic book about ambition. And we also want to hear from you about your favorite and least favorite home renovation shows and what they signal about class. Our guest for that one is Jonathan Menevar and I am so excited. He's the host of Classy.
If any of these ideas spark something in you, submit your question at tinyurl.com slash culture study pod. And if none of them inspire you, head to the form anyways and tell us what you want to deep dive on. Again, that's tinyurl.com slash culture study pod. Okay, thanks and back to the show. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about working through that conflict in yourself. This question comes from Kylie.
In the vein of celebrity anger, my best friend is a die hard swifty who also seems to hate Taylor Swift. It's the wildest juxtaposition to me. She listens to her music frequently, tried maybe 10 times to get ares tickets, even waking up at like four in the morning wants to try and follows all the Taylor stuff online. And yet when she talks about her, it's almost with vitriol and constant criticism. Like she loves her but hates her as a public figure.
Some of the critique is super valid and I totally agree with it. But I'm curious what that is and if there are larger patterns of this. Is it internalized misogyny? A grudge over not being able to get tickets? Valid criticisms? It's interesting to see a super fan publicly hate this person whose art they truly deeply love. It's very conflicting feelings. I kind of want to interview this person. Because I wonder if it is. The Polish friend.
Like is it that this person is working through exactly what we are talking about? Like using their fandom of Taylor Swift to also reflect on what do I believe in my life? How do I think commerce should work? Right? Like how do I think? All of these different things should work. So that might be the case. Right? That they were doing some self interrogation. But part of me also thinks that maybe they're embarrassed.
Yeah. I mean it was very funny because the caller gave a list of a bunch of different things that it could be. And I was like, well I think the answer to this question is like, yes. Like yes it's frustration at how difficult it is to access Taylor Swift's art and like just she's so good at being a capitalist and you can just like feel all of that value being mined out of you. And you're like, oh. Right. I can't not buy this commemorative new vinyl.
But also I resent you for knowing how to make me buy it. And like is it internalized massage? She is like, oh isn't everything. And then like is it valid critique? Like absolutely of course it's valid critique. Right. Like am I also conscious of the ways that like I need to counter performance of fandom which might be like overly feminized with like a critique that kind of cool girl negates it. Right. Like exhausting. That's first of all that sounds exhausting to me. But yes.
Sure. I mean living in the world as a woman is exhausting. The first thing that I thought of when I read this question was James Baldwin said it's like, I love America more than any other country in the world and exactly for this reason I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. It's like you know put in Taylor Swift and pop star and like that's I feel like the sentiment.
It's like if you have dedicated all this time and energy to loving her there is this sense of like okay so she owes me to like not embarrass me in public. She owes me to like make her tickets harder to scalp. And I think unfortunately like that's not that's that's probably not a bargain that Taylor Swift has really made with you.
Yeah. No I love like this I feel like she owes me and this gets to the larger question that we're talking about for this episode which is like what does a celebrity owe you? And I think sometimes there's a position that a celebrity owes you nothing. And I don't think that's necessarily the case. Right. Like you have paid them attention. You have an adoration and dedication and money and often in many cases.
That does not mean that the relationship is purely transactional and that like everything that you give them in terms of attention they must give you in terms of like responding to that attention. But I don't think that it's an unfair expectation to say like I do reserve the right to criticize the people that I love. But what I think we have to undo is like the great evil of the early odds blogging era which is what I like to call search engine optimized outrage.
Right. Yeah. Like we had a lot of under employed academics who really wanted to talk about like intersectional feminism. But they couldn't just write about intersectional feminism. It had to be like Miley Cyrus at the BMA's colon like how she got intersectional feminism wrong. Or the Buzzfeed style of this was because like the people who were writing these were not people who were writing op eds like they were not right personal essays.
It was people who their responsibility was to look at Twitter and say blank blank blank celebrity did blank and people are mad or the internet is mad.
Yeah. This was one of the most frustrating things about going deep on Maddie Healy is the number of like responsible outlets that were not reporting context that were just reporting outrage and I was like literally I'm so sorry the cut like your job as journalists for New York magazine is to include the context and you're not you're just answering the search engine question of why should I hate Maddie Healy right right there like this is why people hate Maddie Healy right now.
And no further thought about the legitimacy of it. So because we've search engine optimize it it turns celebrity into this highly politicized space where like your fandom is a political action. And therefore you conducted with the same degree of rigor and intensity that James Baldwin conducted his relationship with the country of America. And that's a little this place.
Well, and this is this is interesting right because like the way that some of these larger stars position themselves or the the amount of importance that we have mapped onto them as celebrities both in our own lives but also societally right like the ideologies that they have come to represent are America right like Beyonce is America like she actually explicitly is like we're interrogating all these things about in this album about America right.
But then also Taylor Swift is Americana like there are these ways that critiquing them is in essence a way of critiquing society. But I absolutely agree with you that what happens is this like incredible disarticulation of that as a conversation right. And this is why like a couple of months ago I wrote about Taylor Swift and like being like the pressure to be a the nice girl right.
And like I had to put a paragraph at the top that said like I need to be very clear here that I like Taylor Swift and I think that it's important that we are able to also have a conversation about her. And that doesn't mean that I'm a bad feminist that doesn't mean that like I don't like her music or think like doesn't mean that I hate her which is oftentimes the new jerk response is like you just hate Taylor Swift or you're just jealous which is one
that I have gotten since I started writing about celebrity like the first piece I ever wrote that went viral on my old free WordPress blog was about Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson and the response was like you are just jealous because you want to be dating Robert Pattinson. And I was like I love case too. I love this relationship. I know.
This is this is one of my favorite things that I've sort of been able to define again through my work with not sorry is like we talk about like you treat things as sacred right. And like what does it mean to treat something as sacred. And I think when we ascribe so much importance to a person's work with fandom it is a form of treating something as sacred and what it reads to people as and what some stands understand it to be is like this is sacrosanct you can't criticize it right.
And what I say is that we are operating more in the academic tradition where it's like you show your devotion through the rigor of your engagement. I think Taylor Swift is incredibly important and that means I think she can withstand my critical case right. She's not diminished by it. She grows in stature because she is creating work that is worthy of being studied and engaged with this way. Absolutely.
And so this is a little bit what I feel like people need to do in terms of like how do you how do you resolve this problem is it's like okay you love Taylor Swift and you also observe that she has a lot of personal and political failings or contradictions right. Or contradictions yeah contradictions better word. What do you do with that. I think you reflect and you're like okay what is it in my value system that feels outraged by her actions right.
And you're like oh it's like you know she's a billionaire and I think that's morally corrupt and it's like okay well maybe do a mutual aid fundraiser right. I think we need to start looking at our relationship with celebrities not as a place where we do politics but as the space where we discern politics and then once you've used it as a tool of discernment you go and you do your politics somewhere else overall I think that is going to be a vastly more satisfying relationship with Taylor Swift.
And what your poor friend has right now. Okay really tired. So this is an elegant transition into talking about the only person that we got more submissions about than Matti Healy which is John Mulaney. Yeah. Let's talk about where we go from here with this one this is from Jesse. I know why I felt so betrayed when John Mulaney cheated on his wife but what do I do with that anger.
Like I'm still over here liking his ex wife's posts and solidarity and Mulaney's kid with his new partner is basically in preschool. I loved this question. Okay so can we let's do a little breakdown of what happened just for people who are utterly unfamiliar. We don't have to go deep but we can just we can get the basics. John Mulaney got famous as a comic and one of the kind of cornerstones of his comedy was that he was very clean cut and he had not always been.
He was open about having struggles with addiction before becoming famous but he was clean cut in his act and also in his act he was married to his terminology like a pushy Jewish woman and it was a life changing experience for him as an emotionally constipated Catholic
boy and like he did a lot of material about them that was very charming and they had a very adorable French bulldog that they owned together and that was very charming and their relationship happened in public and all of that was very charming and then very suddenly it's like he relapsed into addiction. He went into rehab.
He came out of rehab and he was getting divorced from the very adorable wife and having a relationship and a baby with Olivia Munn and that is after many many years of saying publicly like he didn't want to be a father with his previous partner and that was just like a real cocktail like this was the day that we all learned what parasocial relationships are. No, I remember that so vividly. I was like wow I didn't know so many people had a parasocial relationship with John William.
I really like oh hello his sketch. He's great with Nick Rawls like an incredibly it's like I love him. He came out for like 60 seconds of the Oscars and I was like oh damn it I still love John Mulaney. Special that was so good during the pandemic. So this question asker says I know why I'm so mad right. But I think that she's answering her own question like what do I do with that anger?
She's like oh I'm like I'm still liking all of his ex-wife stuff like yeah I mean the thing is actually you're still angry because you it's easy I think for a lot of people to identify with the ex-wife in this position. Yeah, Anna Marie Tendler who at the time of their relationship was primarily a makeup artist and since then she's like publish a memoir. She's done some really fascinating photography exhibits like she's gone on to really grow in her artistic work on her own time.
And it's easy just like that whole no matter even if you weren't that connected to John Mulaney. Her social relationship wasn't that strong that whole idea of like I was with a guy who said he didn't want a kid and then like he had basically a midlife crisis. And many different and now suddenly. And now he's like oh and and also Olivia Munn you know right I don't know much about Olivia Munn's star image other than part of it is classic Vixen. She also is sort of peak cool girl.
Right, because it wasn't just Vixen, she also came up through, like, I think Spike TV, where she was sort of like a booth babe who was allowed to make jokes. Yes, and then like the guys club of like funny women. Right, very much on their terms, just like the famous cool girl monologue indicates from Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. Like the cool girl always exists on men's terms, right?
It's embodying a male fantasy that is inherently threatening to women, because you're like, oh well, this is just telling them, this exists, right? Right. Yeah, that like there's always this option for you to go to. Right. And that's one of those things where it's like you may not even know these things about her, but like you probably read a tweet one time that was like Olivia Munn-Colin, how she illustrates like the cool girl.
Right. Right, right. So in your head, Olivia Munn lives in your head as a cool girl, right? So it's what this move represents. And so you have this anger over what this represents. And it feels like I think this question Oscar feels maybe impotent that like there's no, nothing to do with that anger, except press like on the X-Wife's post. But I think maybe that, like you said, like that that's part of the processing is saying like, what do I do with this anger?
I am supportive of this woman and who she is becoming. Yeah, I'm gonna look at her art exhibit. Yeah, I'm gonna see these photographs that she took. I'm gonna buy her memoir. And it's not just out of solidarity. It's like the reason it was such a betrayal is because Annemarie Tendler's identity informed your understanding of who John Molini was. Like she's not just identifiable as the one being left. She herself brought a value to the relationship.
And it's like basically saying, okay, well John Molini introduced me to this woman, but like I identify and I think that she is very cool. And so now I am just going to continue being a fan of her. Like that's a great way to deal with being her. Yeah, is give this woman your attention and let her see what she can do with it. And as it happens, she's done great stuff with it.
This is a fantastic place for us to stop, but we also have a really great ask and anything question that Melody emailed with this question last night. I was like, do you think that Margaret would answer this? I was like, I think she will. She definitely will. It's a question about the state of online dating in 2024. So if you want to hear that question and our advice, head over to culturestudypod.substac.com and become a paid subscriber.
Margaret, where can people find you other places on the internet? Like tell us about the pilgrimages that are not yet full, the where people can learn more about them. That would be great. Okay, so the number one place to sort of follow me is on my Instagram. I am there as Mrs. Friday next. From my company would be the next place to go. And so if you go to notsorryworks.com, you'll see information about classes I'm teaching.
Like I'm gonna have a listening party for the tortured poets department in May. So if you wanna come and talk while we listen to that album with a bunch of other people who care about Taylor Swift as passionately as you do, this is a great space for that. Similarly, I am running a Taylor Swift pilgrimage on Cape Cod, a focus on folklore and evermore. And that's gonna be in November. Melody may or may not be coming on that pilgrimage. I'll leave it up to Melody if she wants to identify herself.
That's true, I'm coming. Yeah. So that's like a double bonus. You get time with me and you get time with Melody. And I teach a bunch of other classes through them and lead other trips. My two main focuses at this moment in time are Jane Austin and Taylor Swift, but fittingly enough, I'm in the process of designing the curriculum for like how to online date sustainably class. So we didn't need to know that. No, you had no idea, but this is amazing. It was just you guys really was great timing.
So if anything I said on that seemed valuable, keep your eyes open. And then finally, I too have a sub-sack email much like Ann Helen Peterson does. Mine is two bossy dams, that's subsack.com. And that's another great place to keep track of my work. Amazing. Thank you so much. This has been an utter delight. Oh, I had so much fun. Thank you guys for having me. Thank you for listening to the Culture Study Podcast.
Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts because we have so many great episodes in the works. And I promise that you don't want to miss any of them. But to make these future episodes, we need subscribers. That's how we make money. That we are not beholden to any company that tells us what we can and cannot do an episode about. And in order for that to work, we have to get money from somewhere, right? And we have a couple of advertisements, but really we rely on subscribers.
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The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Peterson and Melody Raul. Our music is by Pondington Bear. And you can find me on Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson and Melody at Melody is 47 in the show at Culture Study Pod.