the stylings of style makers go out of style

mistaking seeming for being amidst inability to self-image

step right up and bear witness to the most recent clownworld foray from the ever more out of touch bastions of woke:

in eerie echo of the calamities of nike and bud light, new york magazine is proud to present as spokes-icon for its first ever men’s style issue:

“a woman who cut her breasts off mansplaining to men about how to stylishly man.”

the face really says it all, no? i’ve seen more happiness on the visages of ISIS hostages.

i suspect that many are mistaking the genesis and durability of this trend and figuring that “it’s just desperate attempts to stir up controversy to get media focus. they do not care if it’s good attention or bad attention, they just want attention.” i do not think this is correct or, that if it is, it is only a partial explanation that emerges as a symptom of a greater syndrome:

echo chamber compression sickeness.

ECCS is a derangement disorder that comes from overlong inhabitation of ever shrinking echo chambers. as those determined to preserve their world view at all costs come increasingly into contact with a reality that fails to conform, their response is to shrink their world, excommunicate the disagreeable apostates and bearers of unwelcome news, and to compress and contract their social and preceptive spheres ever smaller until once more the idology within them becomes pure. it’s the sort of desperate love child of cognitive dissonance and “ignore and override.”

this issue is trebly dangerous when it occurs in confluence with delusions of being a style and culture maker or occupying some office of authority. part of the long march praxis of woke and post modern marxist institutional incursion was to find reputable institutions of power and to take them over, thereby acquiring their mantles of authority. it’s a fascinating causality error.

“nature” is a highly respected medical journal. people listen to the things it says. let’s take over its editorial board and then we can make sure that all the kinds of medicine that politics that we think are important will be respected and people will do what we say! they do this with companies, brands, political and justice institutions, universities, you name it. but it’s a classic first order thinker error made by people who live in a sort of cargo cult world.

they have mistaken seeming for being, the office for the holder, the chair for the one who sits in it. a disreputable person may acquire a reputable office as a university department head, but this does not for long confer the hard earned reputational value of the office to the new holder. instead, it rapidly degrades the office. the facade is not what supported the structure. but they do not know this because it is not how people like that think. it’s just like the DEI denizens who assume that getting a job for skin tone or performative gender now means that they are worthy of the job and worthy of respect. they presume it affords influence.

it turns the whole thing into a slash and burn agriculture version of reputational capture. the commanding heights start being demolished and stripped of command from the moment of occupation.

such occupying armies imagine ideas like:

“the last person who held this job was a style and culture maker, so if i hold the job, so too will i be!”

but it doesn’t work like that.

that is a luxury belief that not even the very richest can afford.

and that error, written over and over and compressed into the ever more alienated and absurdist echo chamber redoubts into which this increasingly out of step subculture has retreated in order to deny the emerging zeitgeist, is what i think is going on here.

their own one note flutes have deafened them to correction, their ECCS has deranged them, and they literally have no idea what they are doing or how they are coming off. they are defeated generals in a bunker moving around armies that no longer exist on a map that fails to conform to the terrain and assuming that the stars on their epaulets still signify control.

it’s an astonishing greek tragedy of hubris worship.

stay tuned, this show is about to really get good.

watching the self-anointed "guardians of style and taste" repeatedly blast themselves to ashes in the bug-zapper of reality is as hilarious as it is telling.

imagine what the editorial room that green lit "let's put a shirtless woman who had surgery to look like a man forward as our 'men’s style' icon" must look and sound like.

what hallucinatory nonsense must be bouncing around that echo chamber?

precisely what demographic of males do they presume to wants to hear ellen page tell them how to put on and take off clothes or aspires to "that classic page style"?

"ooh, we're edgy, this will get us noticed" only works if the kind of edgy you're aspiring to is seen as cool.

this ain't that. it's passe, outre, lame, and cringe all smashed together in some sort of centrifuge until it reaches criticality.

i suspect that hollywood and actors and politicians (often basically the same thing) suffer from this more readily than most precisely because by inclination and talent they reside within worlds of appearances, of pretending to be that which they are not, of inhabiting imagined roles that they present to others as real.

they are used to thinking in terms of using surface to occlude that which is underneath and in presenting fabulism as reality and for the highest praise to be “your role was convincing.”

i cannot help but wonder if trans has been such a draw for them for exactly this reason: it’s the ultimate test of character acting, the ultimate adopted seeming in opposition to being, the greatest challenge for the powers of mimicry.

add to that the flavor of political activism and a chance to act morally superior and it becomes behavioral heroin, a feeder bar impossible to refrain from hammering upon. the sheer sudden occurrence of this and its concentrated nature in “the theater kids” smacks not of biology but rather of social contagion and fashion.

they want this because it confers intentional importance and relevance, sure, and many simply presume it to be this:

but i think that while, yes, it does include at least an aspect this, it runs deeper and the whole of the matter includes this inability to seperate seeming from being or clothes from emperor.

actress camryn manheim says she is upset her son didn’t turn out to be LGBTQI+ after she dressed him up in drag as a kid.

”i always wanted a gay son… i have photographs of my son in high heels, in full drag, he knows every word to every musical…”

here we see the “superficial manifestation presumed to drive the reality underneath”: if he sings show tunes in high heels, he’ll be gay, right? aren’t those the markers? isn’t that the performance?

but that’s not even the really dark part.

what got me was the line about “i wanna be the picket sign holding mom who would beat the shit out of somebody for her kid.”

that’s her role, the one she covets. that’s her performance. that’s the delightful frisson of being beastly to others and calling it justice and big love empathy. it’s membership. it’s affiliation. it’s being in the in group of the intersectionally privileged. the kid is the golden ticket, an extra in the role of a lifetime for her if he would just do the right thing and be drag queen gay.

obviously, the grotesquerie of this becomes acute and the conclusions obvious. “my three year old son told me he was not a boy.” yeah, right. before or after he told you he was a dinosaur?

but this is the one where they lean in.

i honestly doubt they can tell seeming from being and even if they could, they want to power and prestige of group membership and their own role as moralist and trend setter too much to care. “trans-parent/trans-champion” is the theater kid role of a lifetime.

or, it was. perceptions are changing and i think this is why these groups are going so wild. it’s wiping out the status they thought their positions guaranteed.

out in reality, the view on this topic has shifted or, perhaps more likely, the view that was always there has been allowed to surface. you can now make the vegan cat comparison and no winged cancel culture monkeys come for you. woke only survives when uncriticized. it dies once you can mock it. being marginal is going back to being low status. enough people played these games and decided they did not like them.

the contagion is winding down and it’s accelerating most among the young. this is a sign of collapse.

this whole identarian ideology has once more become low status. marginal, ugly, intersectionally awkward, and demanding are all out.

the zeitgeist has shifted.

but those who sought to lead it, who occupied positions of cultural impact as style makers and as trend setters and who drove us off on this mr toad’s wild ride excursion into the wokester wilderness, they are trapped.

there is no climb down from the perches upon which they have installed themselves and frankly, a fair few people bear them more than a little animosity for that which as been so avidly shoved down our collective throats like pate geese lo these many years.

the pandemic of social contagion is ending.

and the style people are cooked.

and their position of one of zugzwang.

and the more this reality intrudes, the more strident and fulsome will become their performances.

the only other move is to admit that you are not really a style maker at all.

they can rarify their echo chambers to head popping levels of ECCS and continue to congratulate one another for it, but outside the bubble, demanding that politics be accepted as culture is dead.

this is the lysenko science cult of fashion. it cannot survive display.

this is the end for the movement.

the movemwent does not know this because it cannot know this.

it cannot know this because anyone who, at this late juncture, still has not managed to see the writing upon the society wall has been selected and selected and selected again for inability to see it.

once an elite becomes sufficiently insular and divorced from any mainstream influence, it essentially devolves to self parody.

they really have no idea that a shirtless woman with her breasts cut off is not going to work as an icon of male style. they really think this is going to slay.

they will burn what is left of their dying their brands to the waterline while literally having no idea that they are setting themselves on fire.

embrace this.

nothing we could ever do to them or say about them would harm their credibility more than they will harm it themselves. just give them a soapbox and hand them a megaphone and watch free speech become the cure for stupid speech.

lean in.

for does not the master tell us: