Meme Report 11/5+11/12
OH We're Libbing Out
GOOD MORNING FROM ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S NEW YORK!!!! Greatest city in the world!!! Now that he’s mayor-elect, the real fun begins. It feels good to be on the winning side. Ideas to monitor are Dark Woke, Rama Duwaji Jackie Kennedy Arc, and the Islamic Caliphate of New York. All fun and games that will be tested as we leave the afterglow of the election.
My favorite part of all of this was on Instagram. It was fun to see my friends and fellow New Yorkers (and jealous Angelenos) post the announcement on Instagram. What I really love is the minutiae of presenting your politics on Instagram. Your friends know your politics already, so all of it is staged for the benefit of people you hate and resent. None of it is genuine. Most of the time, this is pretty straightforward. One can take their stand easily and signal exactly what they mean. Of course, when we all agree that this is awesome, it’s harder to signal what kind of awesome you think it is.
Some people chose to repost an announcement from the AP (need to be first/neutral), some the New York Times (Even if they did take every opportunity to say a bad thing about Zohran, it’s still the grey lady). Others went with the Working Families Party official announcement (the most leftist among us). I, of course, went with Vogue because if you can’t be first, you might as well be classy. It’s better to go for the full joke in my opinion than to undercut yourself and post the announcement from The Cut, which signals the same thing (old-fashioned feminist who elevates women’s magazines) but lacks the commitment of getting one’s news from a fashion magazine. I’m also one of those post-ironic fans of the New York Post. I love their house style and their commitment to insanity. If you’re going to read a right-wing rag, you might as well read the one with real creatives crafting headlines. So of course, I had to post that one as well. Everyone else was scrambling to post something different. They just needed a picture of Zohran that others hadn’t seen before, with a font that was unfamiliar. I say this so you can remember it the next time something good happens. Decide on an Instagram publication of choice. Daily Mail would be a fun one. New York Magazine is a good standby. Vogue and The New York Post are mine. Get your own.
Libbing Out
We need to do a quick pulse check on who is and is not allowed to lib out and what exactly that means. I saw certain people libbing out last week who, let’s be honest, have been libbing out the whole time. I also don’t think that celebrating the win of the first declared socialist candidate for Mayor of New York City counts as libbing out. Libbing out requires a certain amount of acquiescence to party line liberals, rather than them coming to our side. If Hakeem Jeffries is not on your side, is it really libbing out? Perhaps for the radical anarchists among us, voting at all is libbing out, but for the lifelong Democrats, celebrating a Zohran win is not libbing out. That’s why Zohran is the future of the party, we’re all libbing out together. But then that defeats the purpose of libbing out. So we need a new word for it.
Halloween
Nobody cares about Halloween anymore, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still have an opinion. I would say it was an off year, which it always is when Halloween is on a Friday. Ever since the great Halloween panic of 2019 (I believe I wore 42 costumes that year), we’ve been confused about when to do Halloween. It’s not Friendsgiving, which can happen anytime between November 1st and 30th (December if you’re nasty). It’s one weekend, we just all have to collectively pick the weekend. This year, we fucked it up even though it should have been easy. Next year, it actually is easy.
The most annoying part of Halloween is that for the week, social media becomes an onslaught of costumes. Some are good. Some are just ok. Everyone wants to be original and have the most esoteric yet recognizable costume, which, of course, means some people have the exact same idea. My favorite in this genre were: the friend AI subway ads (saw two of these on twitter, one IRL), sailor in a big green coat (This one is my favorite because it’s the laziest while also being the most relevant to that week, The Ken Bone costume of Today), and Carrie in the BDSM episode of SATC (lazy, easiest to put together, sexy but not really). Congrats to everyone, and I’ll see you next year.
It’s Embarrassing to Have a Boyfriend
Youuuuuuu guysssssss. I hate turning into my middle school self that thinks girls are dumb and care about stupid shit, but you guys are being dumb and caring about stupid shit again. It’s hard to see women I had no opinion of before seriously consider whether it’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend. The women aspiring to be the Carrie Bradshaw of Substack seriously engage with the idea “it’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend” is disqualifying all of them from the race. No response to this article is good or makes me reconsider anything. It was designed to make you crazy, and it worked. It’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend in the same way it’s embarrassing to wear a seatbelt. It’s always cooler to not make the safe or expected choice. The Sex and the City girls were cooler than their friends who got married at 29 and moved to Connecticut. But you don’t really want to be cool. You want a boyfriend.
TikTok
I don’t care about the Lady calling churches asking for formula for a fake crying baby. It’s too many layers removed from the actual problem and is instead a fake problem that leads people to fight about the merits of evangelical Christianity in America, of which there are none. It also hasn’t come across my For You page organically, which means it is not For Me.
Going Weather With It
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This isn’t a meme, but I like to highlight innovative thinkers as TikTok feels truly bereft of great minds as of late. I make small talk what feels like constantly, and while I am naturally charming and a good conversationalist, I can always get better. People who are good at small talk are good because they do it all the time. It’s as much a skill as anything else. When you practice a skill, you start to become invested not only in how to do it but how people talk about it. “Going Weather with it” was always an option, but it’s a classic for a reason. I didn’t do my mandated 8 hours of local small talk with my coworkers for a couple days this week, and as a result, I had no idea what the weather was going to be. I need to go weather with it to keep myself up on what’s happening around me. I hope this comes into the common parlance for those of us in the industry (professional socializers). It will also be helpful language for the color commentary when I launch the socialization Olympics that I’ve been trying to get off the ground for years. Small Talk will be like our gymnastics, but we’ll have other events like talking to dads, seeing how many gay guys you can get to follow you on Instagram, and trying to be polite when you’re hungry.
Resse
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There was another big election this week. The Netherlands elected Rob Jetten, the first openly gay something (I thought prime minister, but I actually don’t understand Europe enough to say). Good for them. I was already familiar with Rob Jetten, not because I have any particular interest in Dutch politics, but because in 2021, people made fan edits of him and his colleague because they thought they were in love. The edits are really moving, and it makes me sad that American politicians aren’t chic, young, or hot enough that we could pull this off in our country, even in fiction.
Boythrob
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For too long, we assumed that TikTok gimmicks need to be simple. Pitches we’ve seen before and failed come up year after year, thinking that this time it will work. Boythrob is different. Yes, they’re a boy band, which has been done, but there’s something about their matching pink knock-off Juicy Couture track suits that tells you these guys are different. And they are. Most videos have 3 of the boys present with each other and on screen before, a 4th boy, Darshan, appears. Darshan has to appear in digital overlays and be edited in because he needs a Visa to come to the United States and be with the members of Boythrob. And on top of all that, the boythrob boys really can sing. We follow Boythrob because we want to see what happens with Darshan and their careers in general. There’s narrative interest here. I want Darshan to get a Visa because I don’t believe in borders, but also because I want boythrob to be in person together. I want to see how this story unfolds.
the first gay something - this
Just have to say, your post mayoral election repost analysis is some of the best work that I have read in a long time. And thanks for giving no mind to that annoying tiktok calling churches thing bc chatter about it has been everywhere and I seriously don’t care and am so sick of it. I feel that as a society we’ve moved past the need for this smirky kind of gotcha! liberalism and the discourse it brings.