show me something real

ass with some stretch marks

There’s a guy who keeps keeps going viral on Twitter. He was arrested for throwing out six Israel flag yard signs, and now he is pretending to be in jail. The bit is so pathetic and narcissistic and borderline anti-Semitic that it enrages me. No matter how you feel about Luigi Mangione, at least that guy is for real.

I am so fucking tired of bits and pranks. Dan Hentschel and Ken Klippenstein. I am sick of artifice. Pretending that Barack Obama bops his head to a song about Billie Eilish eating pussy. AI-generated rage bait on TikTok. You’ve seen it. You know what I’m talking about. I hate how, when I go to Dunkin’, I can’t order from a person; I have to press buttons on a screen. Little delivery robots roll around Westwood, carrying snacks and speaking my sacred tongue. I can never be sure if my students’ writing is their own. I’ve given up trying to figure it out.

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Ariana Grande is the sixth-most-followed person on Instagram, yet we are to pretend that her obvious anorexia is not a matter of public concern. From Glamour, earlier this month:

Grande also appears to reference some recent “concerns” about her weight online, where TikTok conspiracy theorists claim she’s unhealthily thin. “There’s a comfortability that we shouldn’t have, at all, commenting on others’ looks, appearance, what they think is going on ‘behind the scenes’ or health or how they present themselves, from what you’re wearing to your body to your face to your everything,” Grande continues. “There’s a comfortability people have commenting on that that I think is really dangerous, and I think it’s dangerous for all parties involved.”

Am I a conspiracy theorist if I say that you should not be able to count the notches on someone’s sternum? And that it is harmful for one of the world’s biggest pop stars to model excessive thinness to the legions of young girls who adore her?

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So here is my mood board, or whatever you want to call it.

Kendrick, 2017: “I’m so fucking sick and tired of the Photoshop. Show me something natural like afro on Richard Pryor. Show me something natural like ass with some stretch marks.”

Erstwhile sex symbol Jamie Lee Curtis, about Everything Everywhere All at Once:

In the world, there is an industry — a billion-dollar, trillion-dollar industry — about hiding things. Concealers. Body-shapers. Fillers. Procedures. Clothing. Hair accessories. Hair products. Everything to conceal the reality of who we are. And my instruction to everybody was: I want there to be no concealing of anything. I've been sucking my stomach in since I was 11, when you start being conscious of boys and bodies, and the jeans are super tight. I very specifically decided to relinquish and release every muscle I had that I used to clench to hide the reality. That was my goal. I have never felt more free creatively and physically…

And here she is in season two, episode six of The Bear, beautiful wrinkles and all:

A celebration of Margaret Qualley and her real teeth. Her hitchhiking scene with Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood deadass inspired me to stop shaving my armpits.

A tumblr post that won’t embed: “physically cannot wait to be a middle-aged woman, they truly are the coolest people among us omg.” Click for pictures of the type of gorgeous, fashionable woman I’d love to be someday.

Adrianne Lenker:

I’m afraid of getting older, that’s what I learned to say. Society has given me the words to think that way. The message spins and spirals: Don’t get saggy, don’t get gray. But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder. My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too, they wrinkle like the river, they sweeten like the dew, and as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple-blue, how can beauty that is living be anything but true? So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair, let me dance in front of people without a care.