The Bluestocking, vol 307
the fashion equivalent of an out-of-office reply
Happy Friday!
No intro this week as I’m getting over Covid #3. Bleurgh.
Helen
The Most Consequential First Lady (The Atlantic)
If Jill Biden has undermined the idea that presidential spouses can’t work, then Melania Trump disproved the idea that a wholesome family life, complete with a beaming, compliant spouse by your side, was a prerequisite for electoral success in America. (In the Republican primaries, Ron DeSantis had a political family straight out of central casting—photogenic wife, three adorable kids—and he didn’t even make it to New Hampshire.)
Throughout Trump’s presidency, Rogers records, “observers had questions about whether Melania was willfully sabotaging her husband with her contrary comments and body language in public.” That theory seems like a stretch, but I can see how it arose: Anything less than devoted, self-sacrificing support in a first lady is unusual. And after several years of seemingly phoning it in, Melania gratefully exited the stage entirely. When she left the White House in January 2021, she got on Air Force One in a black suit, carrying a Birkin bag, and got off the plane in sunglasses, a kaftan, and flats. “It was the fashion equivalent of an out-of-office reply,” Rogers writes.
I reviewed Katie Rogers’s book on Jill Biden and the modern first lady, and revealed my grudging admiration for the ruthless mercenary approach of Melania Trump.
13 Observations on Ritual (The Honest Broker, Substack)
The smartphone cannot be a ritualistic object. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book The Disappearance of Rituals, points out that the smartphone embodies restlessness. “It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life,” he explains. “The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing.”
So we shouldn’t be surprised when people get upset at smartphone use in ritualistic settings—concert halls, movie theaters, shrines, etc. They instinctively feel that the phone is the enemy of ritual.
I can imagine a situation in which locking up your phone in a box before an event becomes part of the ritual. But the opposite could never happen—turning on the phone would be the worst possible way to initiate a ritual experience.
This is one of the smartest takes I’ve read on why phones are so amazingly convenient yet so many people feel they make them unhappy. Rituals require closure. Scrolling never ends.
The Need For Chaos Voters (The Atlantic)
Deep stories are important, because they allow groups who might violently disagree about politics to understand the psychological origins of their disagreement. As I spoke with Petersen about the need for chaos, another allegorical scene came to mind—a kind of deep story of the chaos voter.
You are a middle-aged man playing a game; it could be checkers or chess. You are used to winning. But you’ve lost several times in a row, and all to the same people. Now you’re losing again, and it doesn’t feel right. You haven’t made one wrong move. Something must be wrong. Something must be rigged. They must be cheating. In a rage, you turn the whole table upside down, and the pieces scatter and shatter. Why do this? Breaking the game makes things worse for everyone. But this isn’t about making things better. It’s about feeling a sense of agency and control. It’s about not feeling like a loser. One could call it chaos. But at least it’s the chaos you chose.
My colleague Derek Thompson on the voters who, like the Joker, “just want to watch the world burn.”
What is interesting is that this analysis doesn’t just apply to classic Trumpy voters (i.e. non-college-educated white men), but minorities, too: “White men in the conspiracy-theory study were the most sensitive to perceived challenges to status, Petersen told me. But the researchers wrote that the need for chaos was ‘highest among racial groups facing historical injustice—in particular, Black males’.”
Derek traces the BLM riots of 2020 to a similar chaotic desire to tear the system down because it’s beyond saving.
Quick Links
“Simpson was also slightly suspicious of [Elizabeth] Hoover on account of the volume of beadwork and Native American signifiers that she was known to wear. (Hoover insists that this is exaggerated, but others described her in a similar fashion. “It looked like an Etsy shop exploded on her,” Simpson said.)” An American academic called Elizabeth Hoover, who has taught at Brown and Berkeley, is facing serious questions over her alleged Native American identity. As regular readers of this newsletter will say: another one??? Unsurprisingly, if you award status and benefits based solely on ticking a box, quite a lot of people will tick that box. (New Yorker)
And lo, there was another another one: Tanzanian-Indian twins who passed for Inuit in Canada—although this is more obviously a grift, rather than someone searching for what they see as a more authentic identity. What’s also bleakly funny is that this article also has a long list of “pretendians” and it’s a completely different list to the list of pretendians in the New Yorker. (Toronto Life)
“‘I really don’t want my child exploited on the internet,’ said Kaelyn, a mother in Melbourne, Australia. ‘But she’s been doing this so long now… Her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?’”One of the great questions of Lolita is “wtf was Lolita’s mum thinking”. Well, this New York Times investigation found lots of modern mums selling pictures of their tweens to gross men, so whatever it was, it’s not rare.
“She ended up as this shrewd, sober, meticulous thinker not through an education in the best schools and universities that her highly educated, middle class family sent her to, nope. She did it herself.” Gia Milinovich has written a very touching essay about the new book by our mutual friend Tracy King, Learning To Think. Tracy’s life story is wild—her father was murdered, she was exorcised, she later learned that much of her idea of her father’s death was wrong—but what shines through is that Tracy is a truly strong person, a survivor. You can buy the book here. This is my blurb: “What would you do if you began to suspect the events of your childhood didn't happen as you remembered them? In this evocative memoir, Tracy King confronts the stories we all tell ourselves in order to live.”
“Mick studied her and grinned at Charlie and Keith. ‘Oh, yes. I like her. Looks about fifteen.’” This 1971 Atlantic piece about the Rolling Stones on tour shows you what male rock stars used to get away with.
See you next time!
The phone as anti-ritual is fascinating. The only method I read about that could possibly be an antidote to doomscrolling is having not phone free *time*, but phone free *space* in the house. So, if you are not 'allowed' to take your phone into the kitchen, and you have to leave it outside - that's a kind of ritual I think! The idea of also having room-specific screens also seems more ritualistic. You would probably still have the same amount of screen time, but it would seem more deliberate and intentional to say 'now I will pursue my bathroom tiktok. Now time for my garden tiktok'. etc, starting and ending each stage with a physical movement (putting down one phone, taking up another). Still quite disturbing but with a charming aspect imo.
Sorry to hear about Covid With A Vengeance - get well soon!
I was going to say that Melania was an amateur compared to Dagmar Havlova, who filmed a nude scene while First Lady of the Czech Republic, but I checked and it turns out that movie was released five years before she married Vaclav Havel. Still, badass. I'd say it was very Bohemian of them, but it also turns out that she was born in Moravia rather than Bohemia.