CORRECTION: In this week’s Sunday Edition I misspelled Vernonator6497 “several times” (as one reader put it.) I apologize to my readers and Vernonator himself. I will do better in the future.
Useless Sex Scenes
Sometimes discourse is so common it becomes a meme and this is one of those times. Every so often we fight about Sex scenes in media and their function. This discourse is the most recent round of discourse started and continued by the people we call “puriteens”. Teenagers so obsessed with being “good” and morally righteous that they forget no one in the real world has a spotless moral system and in adult life we often make allowances for “bad” behavior out of love and logistics. Those who are not necessarily teenagers anymore still hold onto these beliefs and are becoming stunted adults who fight on the internet about their right to infantilize themselves and others.
This discourse really drives me crazy because I have a BFA in screenwriting and I was a peer educator with planned parenthood in high school. I can speak to both aspects of why the puriteens relationship to sex in media is… problematic to say the least. The more pressing of the two is the constant declarations that things like sex and drugs are not appropriate for their age group, which is often 16+ (most books they read in english class will include at least a passing reference to one or both). Everyone worth listening to knows education is the way to safer, healthier sex and it bothers me that people who think of themselves as progressive forward thinkers believe that we will get there without ever discussing it in any capacity. Sure movies and TV shows aren’t purely educational but they give you a better picture of life and how it all happens than the anatomically correct diagrams in health class. No one benefits from a prudish culture that refuses to engage with sex in all its forms, from the clinical to the fun. I’ll save you my thousand word dissertation on this from a screenwriting perspective but movies should be fun and if you don’t want sex scenes in movies you can either fast forward or watch media for children.
PBJ and Milk
This was so crazy to me. Some guy painted an oil painting of Peanut Butter and Jelly with a jar of milk next to it and multiple people had an incredibly negative reaction to it. What’s crazy is I see both sides. The painting is pretty good and I like it enough. I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches but I had enough bad ones in my childhood made on sourdough with natural organic peanut butter to know that sandwich would be dry as hell. I agree with the people in the quote tweets calling the whole exercise cringe but I did not see it from just the original tweet of the painting. Several of my fellow gen-z cohorts saw the painting and immediately knew the kind of millennial (and gen x) cringe of “yum yum!” that would ensue. You never know what will cause a generational divide but here we are. I hope there’s more of these. We know about Buzzfeed and adulting and love for The Office, but there’s a thousand more innocuous tells that give us young people the ick. I have my list but I organically want to know everyone else's. Innocent unsuspecting Millennials don’t need to know of our plans. They should always be on their toes.
TikTok
~Awakenings Section~
Recently a meme has popped up to talk about situations in childhood that lead us to where we are now. There is no coherent name for this meme nor a good way to describe it, so I gave it one. They all begin the same way, with generic “bouncing along” music. It’s probably from something but nothing I’m familiar with. While the music is playing, the author describes a scenario they remember or behavior they exhibited in text that is superimposed over them. Then smash cut to a song that is in some way connected to this experience. Sometimes the song explicitly states what the aforementioned text led to or signified, and sometimes it’s more vague. Here are three examples and my thoughts on three of them.
This one is, as far as I know, the original. It scratches the ever present tiktok itch of finding new symptoms of autism and also lets people look back fondly on something they either thought was normal or knew the whole time was a little odd. I would say this one is the most fun of the three I am familiar with. The sound is Cupcakke singing “every kid with autism”. It’s some easy light-hearted autism content from autistic people, which people always want more of. The first iteration is the most simple and because of that, the best. It is not trying to say anything larger than “I did this a lot as a child and now I have autism.”
This one is a little less fun but still can be fun. The example I cited was one of the more fun ones. The ones where people look back and think it should have been obvious that they were gay a lot earlier are always fun for me. Of course, because the sound is mostly populated by lesbians it does take a turn for the sad and saccharine quite a bit. It’s hit or miss. The song here is not as explicit as saying “every kid with autism” but they play Rain on Me by Lady Gaga which is the next best thing to literally saying the words “I am gay now”.
This one is not fun at all! It is women saying when they realized they hated men and boy howdy it’s a doozy. Besides the obvious subject matter being rough, this one also has the worst sound associated with it. First of all, it’s too quiet. Second, it just discordant sounds. We can’t get a more explicit sound about man hating? There’s not a better song where the words “I hate men” are said in some capacity? We can’t have a little fun with it? The one good thing about this variation is that it does give us the name as this sound is explicitly titled “Misandrist awakening” so at least they labeled it. Otherwise it would be impossible to know what this sound is supposed to signify.
If you have an addition to the awakenings canon, please send it my way and I will review it!
We did this already. Like a year ago. We do this one literally all the time. It’s fine. I just hate when a sound that is almost a constant feature of the TikTok landscape gets popular. To me, it is like knocking down a load bearing wall. We need “Bitch I’m Back Out My Coma” to get us through both feast and famine, content wise. When we make sounds and memes like this our favorite and give them a moment, we lose the structure of TikTok. We must constantly rebuild, as our ceiling keeps sinking. I’ll always remember you “Bitch I’m Back Out My Coma” and hope the sound can return to its previous fixture in three months when the moment passes. We’ll need it.
Listen when they’re right, they’re right. I do look like a yassified version of my dad and so do most other eldest daughters. However this adds to the propaganda campaign Eldest Daughters™ have been running for a couple of years now and it’s getting annoying. We get it, you have a martyr complex. More than being slightly annoying, this will not end well if they keep it up. They will do to you what they did to introverts. You won’t even be able to say “As an Oldest daughter” without being laughed off the internet. Enjoy it while it lasts, which won’t be long.
The first clue that their time of reckoning is upon us. Younger siblings are taking to the internet and telling us all the worst things their oldest sisters ever did to them, but in a fun way. It mostly involves make believe games and lies. I don’t have siblings so I don’t really have a dog in this fight but I think both groups are probably right. Younger siblings, your older sister was getting the weakness out of you. By the time you got to second grade, she had made you able to play house with the best of them. You now valued your position as “Mom” or “sister” because for so long you had been “Dog” or “Mailman”. Older sisters, again, time to rethink your self image of a benevolent mother figure. I would describe your position in the lives of your younger siblings as more similar to a nun or warden.
Meme Report 5/25
Okay, so I'm totally giving away my age here, but why are people getting heated about a PB & J painting?
no worries luv <3