Scrawled in Wax

Fine. Since I’ve already had people arrive looking for this, I’ll post about it.  “Skinny Girls Big Sandwiches” is – wait for it – a blog that has pictures of skinny girls eating big sandwiches [via]. I love sandwiches and girls, so… great, right? But here’s the thing. Spend enough time around contemporary feminist theory and contemporary feminists – which, even if I didn’t want to, would be unavoidable in grad school – and this is the sort of thing that’s supposed to make you shake your head. SGBS both does and does not. This has me feeling confused.

I initially liked it. It just seemed fun to me. Like I said, I really love sandwiches. Still, when you think about it, the ‘inverse’ of this blog – if you’ll excuse the expression, fat girls eating big sandwiches – would have never made Buzzfeed. Or, conversely, it would have, but in classic Buzzfeed style, it would be vaguely mocked but also kinda’ encouraged. Because it’s only cute and fun when it lines up with an accepted ideology of the day: in this case, health. Or, more to the point, the public performance of health by displaying a particular body type. Skinny girls eating big sandwiches is fine because it’s a ‘fun transgression of that rule – “awesome, another blog about indulgent eating!” – but in a way that still displays the accepted expression of health: thinness. It’s okay because it both breaks the rules as it enforces them. This is the Tumblr-ised version of a ‘hot chick in a mechanic’s uniform’.

So it’s neat and it’s cute and we’re not allowed to condemn it because that would be taking it too seriously and if there’s one you cannot be in bloggy web culture, it’s serious. Unless, of course, you’re talking about any of the following things: copyright; DRM; Apple; the free market; capitalism; a fetish for the physical object. Anything that remotely smacks of identity politics or the grey, nuanced areas of racism, sexism, homophobia etc – these are things that in the two-coasts, Buzzfeed world are off limits.

*sigh* I dunno. I feel somehow that I just can’t be bothered to be offended or outraged (or whatever) by something this small anymore. I’m also not convinced that things like these produce sexism or body images issues as much as they reflect them. You can’t say that about Gossip Girl or the women’s magazine industry – there’s a symbiotic relationship at work there – but I think you can about this. Why? To get there, the readership has already made up its mind.

But I suppose it does make me wonder what the cumulative effect of all this resigned, post-ironic fun is: of whether it amounts to a politics, of somehow becoming a cumulative expression of a vaguely nihilistic version of humanism: “politics is just so 20th century, man; everyone is free to make up their own mind; you can’t judge anything; nobody meant it seriously”. Or, like the Tumblr-sphere itself, is it just an unending rush of stuff where you learn to take the good with the bad because the politics are so enmeshed and encoded into everything (they’re everywhere), that they’re already implied (and this is where you get a sorta’ legitimate ‘the blogosphere/digg-o-sphere’ is left-leaning argument).

Bah, I dunno folks. I think it’s just that, as I get older, I’m getting tired of crying ‘racism’ because I’m just so damned privileged. The last time I experience direct racism was four years ago, on a street in Ireland, and it was minor. It’s making me care less and less about being political about anything because it’s no longer as personal as it used to be. With the threat of racism in my life slowly fading, so are my politics. So I’m losing my perspective here. Should this make me angry? Or should this, like so much online, just be more water under the bridge?