MEN LOVE CHURCH BC THEY'RE FOLLOWERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Understanding why men and fathers love the church and why Gay Twitter may be one of the most important online culture centers.

Love what you’re reading? First off: thank you, slay. Second: someone else will love it too! Be sure to share the love 🥰

Lebanon fears Gaza-like carnage
Netanyahu tells UN: Israel seeks peace
This war hungry goon seriously held up visual cues to the UN, comparing his genocidal “mission” to a blessing. Disgusting.

The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
"the general cowardice of that media class"
“My god”
Related to the above: a must-read of the week, which explores Ta-Nehisi Coates’ burn-it-all-down return. The book is gonna hit.

Harris Holds Thin Lead Over Trump
Fam, we got another month of this.

Murder in U.S. Continues Steep Decline
Whose dad needs to see this?

Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and Big Tech
“Harper's has miraculously replied”
High-brow drama of the week is that Harper’s threw a punch at The Atlantic by declaring them a tech company. Why? Because the magazine is technically an Apple subsidiary with cozy ties to OpenAI. Yipes! I’ve read most of the story — It’s a long one. — but it’s a sharp indictment of our techno feudalism, which puts corporations like Google in the bullseye. A state of the techno-nightmare union.

Feds target those involved in Diddy 'freak offs'
Adams pleads not guilty to corruption
“Your policies are anti-Black!”
Naomi Campbell banned from charity
Diddy…Eric…Naomi…what an awful eclipse season, if you’ve been up to dirty shit! Please note that Sabrina Carpenter helped bring Eric down.

Can Nicotine Patches Treat Long Covid?
A friend was recently diagnosed with long Covid and mentioned this and…I had no idea! Not that this is a silver bullet but the connection is interesting. However, it does remind of the myth-based “Smokers don’t get as bad of Covid!” chatter in early 2020.

Abnormally warm water helped Helene intensify
"POV: you live in the south”
"POV: you mention the hurricane"
Hurricane Helene is one of the many entries into “How could this happen? *Does nothing*” extreme weather items, which is best exemplified by the memes about talking about hurricanes. To my Augusta people: I hope you are all good!!

California Sues Exxon Over Plastics Pollution
Will this actually do something? See also: California “banning” plastic bags again.

I often wonder if we’re the adults that our parents wanted us to become. This is not to say that our parents aren’t proud but that — despite our faults, our successes, our interests, our identities — we may not have become the adults that our parents dreamt us to be.

Parents can be overbearing, as we and our therapists all know. But we also know that much of this has to do with the pressure and a domineering attitude that is most often wielded by fathers. Édouard Louis’ 2022 book and portrait of his mother, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, had me thinking about that, as I’ve been sipping pages each night before bed. This section jumped out and, while the book is about the life of his mother, its parts as such that put her and the author in context. In this specific passage, his mother just learned she was pregnant with twins, which was devastating news given the family’s circumstances.

She came back from the appointment saying that she would get an abortion, that she and my father couldn't afford to raise two more children. He got upset, strangely—he who'd always been disgusted by religion, who'd always associated Religion with Power just as he connected School and the State—and said to my mother, You're crazy! We're not going to kill our children! Abortion is murder.

His father, a man who despised religion, used religion to keep his mother in place, to lock her into circumstance, to rescind autonomy. A chapter or two later, another fatherly passage emerged. The “you” is the author’s mother —

He always had a propensity for helping others, it's true, and you used to complain, you used to say to me that you didn't understand why my father was so mean to his own family yet so sweet and even generous to others, to strangers.

The best man in the world! A man of the community! Yet, within the walls of his family’s home, such puritanical kindness and love was rarely extended. Again: is this father the type of parent who would be proud of his son? Can a child of such a father ever truly be loved for who they are now? As Louis writes in the book of his aspirations and present life as an internationally renowned writer, “I wanted to use my new life as revenge against my childhood…I became a class defector out of revenge.”

These words vibrated off the page, as it felt like a Millennial mission statement, less the language of defecting and revenge but that many of us — like our parents before us, like the entire history of children becoming adults before us — were raised to fit in spaces just larger than our parents, to stand on their shoulders, to look out, to see further than they could. Yet, somehow, if we get there and have grown too much, if we figured out ways to no longer stand on them as we climb, becoming too different, then we have somehow failed. Too culturally divorced from their contexts, we’re forced to “choose” new families whom we cobble together with peers who feel similarly, as we all fill the spaces left blank by our blood. This is adulthood, the is the timeless tragedy of aging: we just like to give these things new names, we love to novelize that which we’re experiencing, to claim it as a first despite every generation feeling this in some form. “Kid moves to the big city” is a trope for a reason.

A difference here is that, like Louis, our parents aren’t like the parents in generations before: the moms are listening and learning. To start, a story of the decade is that young women continue to lean more progressive, by a gap as wide as 40% identifying as liberal to men’s 25%. Mothers of all ages have become a battlefield, thanks to groups like Moms for Liberty, but the group  are leaning more left, which dovetails into the occasional viral moment of a mother speaking real truths to these times. Zooming out, it’s not just young women: older women are moving left too. “A widening of the ideological gaps between men and women over time has been due to women becoming more liberal at a faster rate than men, rather than women and men moving in different ideological directions,” Gallup explained in February.

Why does this matter? Going back to Louis’ father: it’s religion, whether or not a man is practicing at the moment or not. What we’re seeing now, in real time, that men are the ones who are most likely to keep religion alive, preventing the collapse of bygone ideologies: “For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers,” The New York Times wrote this week, which is framed around Gen Z men leading a charge back to religion. “They’re just more likely to embrace a religion that says they are superior, smarter, stronger, and more important than their female counterpart,” Lindsay (aka Bama Blue Dot) observed on TikTok. “These young men are flocking to an institution notorious for treating women poorly.”

There’s a lot of truth to that statement, given the draw of red pills and Proud Boys, who promise to restore male power. A male spiritual psychosis is emerging, as they cling to “brotherly” institutions that enable behaviors and mindsets that have always rewarded them. This isn’t in any way surprising, no, but what is surprising is that this is the message that is being faxed out from the top, from a certain set of other deities that are divorced from religion: billionaires. From Elon Musk’s encouraging you to create progeny to Mark Zuckerberg’s building a better future free of regrets, these men fancy themselves lords above, watching out for you and I — but we know how this will turn out, as men simp for greater (“greater”) men who they will never rise to be peer to, all of whom will ruin the planet and our lives in a fool’s pursuits. And, just like the lord above, these greater (“greater”) men are watching all of us, keeping all of us in locked in place. Don’t believe me: just ask the FTC (or read that giant Harper’s story). In my own life, I’ve watched many a man — including my own father and a handful of friends — go from dragged-along-to-church to now actively participating in near clergical roles, to parroting the brain rot runoff that drips from the baptismal fonts of both pastors and billionaires alike. Even if my own father is pursuing a right-wing piety while others pursue nine figures, there’s still a throughline: to be religious, to be a man, is to be in a system of nodding and smiling without question as you step on others in ascension, to find salvation for the spiritual and economic poverty that ails you. Like the military, like the priesthood, like whatever brotherhood Diddy was running, religion can be both a shield for turning the nose up on others as structures are erected to secure the power to murder, rape, and destroy. Manifest destiny.

Will this yield all female churches? Probably not, but I do think anti-capitalism lies in the hands of women, people of color, queer persons, and all the non-normative persons who will eventually become the majority: this is what comes with being non-normative. Even something as simple as Sally Rooney speaking ill of novelty and growth is a dog whistle: why must we be fruitful and multiply? Why fill the earth? Why subdue everything around us? These questions are what run through the mind, that we stand on systems that we shouldn’t carry with us forward. “Your kids are leaving the church because you trained them well enough to develop a sense of truth and justice,” Rhett of Rhett & Link said recently. Moreover, young adults aren’t having kids just because of financial reasons: it’s also because of these systems, because we don’t want to repeat the mortal or venial sins of the patriarchy that exist in our culture — and in our homes.

This brings us back to Louis’ text. It’s not out of revenge that we become not-our-parent’s-children: it is specifically because of them, because of the world that they created for us, a maleconomic system that we have recognized will be the death of us.

People Are Surprised By Most Popular Podcasts
"i understand why the election is close"
Hawk Tuah memes are over. This list will burn a part of your spirit.

Lady Gaga plants lipstick smile on 'Mona Lisa'
Quand Lady Gaga redessine le sourire de La Joconde
Gaga released some sort of mid “skee bop a doo wop” ass album but the real story is how the French are wondering who let Gaga in the Lourve, allowing her to draw on the Mona Lisa.

VICE Magazine Is Coming Back
re: last week’s talk about going back to basics, this too signals a scaling back of the internet and embracing tradition. I feel like the vibe shift is finally coming! (See also: this Psycho video.)

“the Bridgerton Ball SCAM”
The other drama of the week was the Detroit Bridgerton experience, which included a pole dancer (whom The Cut interviewed).

“every conservative argues”
“Are his parents not embarrassed?”
“20 seconds into my Jubilee debate”
“My conspiracy theory”
We need to talk about Jubilee, as the channel is cranking out hits like the Charlie Kirk creep smile. But the real question is: what’s all this leading to? The backstory of the company is interesting in that it captures a very 2010s Millennial new media gesture of creating a nonprofit (or “social change,” non-profit adjacent company) that ultimately pivoted to both profit and video. See also: ATTN: and GOOD. Free idea,

Taylor Lorenz

: is there a bigger story here to be written about this trend? Or is it as simple as that? It does feel like a very Millennial sign of the times.

"i'm tired of pretending taste"
”We are losing the feeling of joy”
These two TikTok theses about everything from aesthetics to over-consumption are of-a-kind. Cue Max Berlinger and I’s fashion chat!

A Thread about the fashion fan to business analyst pipeline
Building on last week’s Office Siren piece, make sure to peep

Georgia Graham

’s piece on the aesthetic (and her interview with the Dara Allen).

The Pop Stars Who Flamed Out in 2024
Everyone study this as, in a landscape of fans-as-haters, a piece like this pierced through the cultural curtain to actually offer insightful critique instead of rambling.

Sophie, The Album Left Behind, Is Complete.
A lot of Sophie chatter this week, given her posthumous album’s drop. It’s fine! Neither good nor bad but just is: a facsimile to another world where she dominated the pop landscape, less of an experimental pushing forward of what music could become. To me, her final hurrah will always be her HEAV3N set. (In any event, “Exhilarate” is 100% a Rihanna demo.)

Dermatology
This is maybe for me and three other readers but Rrose and Polygonia released a surprise album last week that is a woobly delight. Fascinating techno created by two artists volleying sketches back and forth. What a collaboration!

There is a unique feeling in the queer community (specifically the gay community), that you could be in any city in the world and, somehow, you find a degree of separation not only to the gay ecosystem but your gay ecosystem. A random person knowing a good friend of yours, you and someone sharing the same guy NYC dude in your dating history, you both attending the second night of the Monster’s Ball tour in San Diego: these sorts of things. There aren’t a lot of gay people in the world, which this phenomenon always emphasizes.

Consider then how something like Twitter and TikTok evolve this idea of queer people inhabiting the same cultural, non-geographically tied village. While there are every-so-often whole-internet group chats like Trump’s assassination, Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr.’s affair, and the Eric Adams indictment — all of which is undoubtedly mirrored in spaces like Black Twitter and Sports Twitter — Gay Twitter (which includes but isn’t limited to the likes of gay men but by can mean the greater queer community, each of whom have their own Twitters) produces supersized niche storylines multiple times a week: laying pipe at the Sweat tour; Lana is dating WHO??; “had to gut that bitch”; David Muir debate simping; “how old do I look?”; Joaquin Phoenix looks like THAT??; “31 is nasty”; the Clairo shade twink falling through the skylight; Chappell Roan did WHAT? WHAT?? WHAT??? Mind you, these were just the storylines of the past month.

While such group chatter is the thesis of all social media conversation, Gay Twitter evolved this into a unique expression of communication-cum-gossip that fuses sexual energy, camp theatrics, and small town busy-bodying. This all coalesced in summer 2021, when a very localized event (a boat party in Brooklyn) became an international queer item of interest thanks to a lil gay ✨je ne sais quoi✨, a la: the demon twink. This was a singular experience for gay people online, something that these days would be a passing something, but our starved pandemic brains were craving for more, which turned local gossip into a ground zero coming together of gay minds to laugh, cry, and figure out who the demon was. The chatter was so loud that The New York Times covered it.

Gay Twitter is akin to an international group chat where people share everything from outlandish antics from a local party all the way to hole pics: the duality of men. The dynamic mirrors that of the many gay group chats I’m in and have been in, where inside jokes and memes fly in the same breath as deeply specific psycho-sexual pining (which is all multipled and informed by other cultures, people’s backgrounds, and dashes of appropriation). This is all important context because in many ways the 2020s has been shaped by the hands of the queer brain rot born of Gay Twitter, which comingles with the various other Twitter and TikTok communities: yassification; Christian girl autumn; Beyoncé’s 2022 summer renaissance; words like flop and bald, motherplanes and cuntquakes; Pope Francis’ gay slurs; the French pole vaulter with the big bulge; Pop Crave (and Poo Crave) appealing to gay stan sensibilities; modern drag culture at large; brat summer before the phenomena of brat summer. This lands us at a very obvious place, where Gay Twitter’s rainbow fingerprints are everywhere: the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, where coconut trees and flops have been flying for years, all to offer her a runway to the White House (or, at least, larger cultural relevance).

Gay Twitter, like all Twitter and social media circles, is a hotbed of culture, proof that the social media machine still works — and works well (that is, until a brand ruins it). I cannot imagine that this will ever “change,” really, as this type of queer communication happens with or without Twitter: sans a speaker to further broadcast our mania, we would find a way as culture has long been shaped by queer gestures and tastes. Whether via classic or new media, the contemporary arts or classic forms of creation, queer people find a way to talk and to get people to listen. Such is life as the furiously texting, undeniably horny constant court jesters of humanity.

“Mama the past behind you”
“mama a world”
“mama prosperity”
“You mattress. I chair.”
"Bette Davis Eyes"
"Today is your day"
See the above essay but ironic hopecore and the memes-to-existentialism pipeline are so now.

“love her”
"the actors in a haunted house"
I stand with the girl who ruined the Apple dance. I will take drunk mess over pick me any day. (Also: stop trying to make Addison Rae happen!! Exhausted by this tour.)

"Charli xcx & Troye Sivan on SNL"
Despite this making me physically sick, I am legally obligated to share the spiritually cokeless SNL “brat” sketch which — to quote Bowen Yang, who played Charli and Moo Deng and JD Vance, which really captures the hollowed soul of this Boomer “institution” — is a masterclass in “working through cringe, climbing a cringe mountain.” (Maya Rudlph as Kamala was fine too.)

"i hate myself why did i do this ew"
Anyway, stream “Gangnam Club Classics.”

"obsessed w facebook"
RIP Maggie Smith.

"Not to be a hater"
A very good take on a very bad mustache.

“the björk frat”
More good drama of the week.

“Six people in this class”
Why is this me @ all of culture?

“love to compare printers”
“A second German political party”
This week in the AI slopification of everything, from Google’s search to political campaigns.

“babies in strollers”
Alt caption: Europeans on the metro.

“Thought this was Patti Harrison”
“Happy for them but”
Literally know nothing about John Mulaney or Olivia Munn but I do like these posts. 

"Embarrassing for no reason"
pov you gotta #2 at your big boy job

And, finally, how I feel after writing about these subjects every week.

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