STASIS #13

fragility

Apr 22, 2024

What’s up with all the fragile men? They crawl into the comment section of social media posts and spill their misogyny. I have the feeling they’ve grown in numbers. They immediately took over Threads, the new social media network by Instagram, and made me leave after just a week. In hindsight, that’s a good thing.

On TikTok and Instagram, they search for posts of female skaters, guitarists, drummers, deejays, and everything creative and start to ridicule the result. The word vegan also has a triggering effect. Fragile men eat meat. Lots of meat. Meat flakes rule the socials.

Female producers and actors also threaten fragile men. In 2017, Kelly Marie Tran, cast as Rose Tico in a Star Wars movie, got a lot of negative, sexist and racist feedback. Later, similar attacks followed on female roles in Captain Marvel, She-Hulk and The Little Mermaid. The announcement last year that Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obald-Chinoy will direct a new Star Wars movie fueled a lot of toxic reactions from the fanbase. Political commentator Matt Walsh shared a video of Obald-Chinoy stating that she likes to make men uncomfortable with her documentaries, framing it as if she wants to do that with the Star Wars movie she’s directing. It made politician Ted Cruz reshare the video. Sad how disinformation and fragility go hand in hand.

Recently, fragile men targeted True Detective: Night Country. The fourth instalment of the series is produced by the Mexican writer and director Issa López. She did an amazing job mimicking the original first season and adding her unique flavour to the series.

With leading roles for Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, Night Country rivals the first season, but it is mostly López smart script that shines. With indirect references to masterpieces like Alien, The Shinning and The Thing, and a marvellous plot (masculine strategic thinking versus intuitive female power). Hordes of fragile men didn’t agree and hijacked review websites like Rotten Tomatoes to bring the average score of the season down to 58%.

It is easy to dismiss fragile men as, eh, fragile and irrational beings who aren’t capable of embracing their positive masculinity. The truth is more complicated (sociologically speaking). Values are important building blocks of one’s identity. Shifting societal values can lead to less stable identities or identities that need to be (re)constructed again. That’s difficult, and people need time to adjust, especially when those values are at the core of their identity. In their recent studies into incel culture, researchers Alessia Tranchese and Lisa Sugiura spot an interesting trend of embracing victimhood amongst vulnerable men. Earlier this year, Haniyatuz Zaidah Salma and Eva Leiliyanti researched toxic masculinity on TikTok and X. They concluded that recent actions by women taking back the social media space with humorist posts and memes that mock what in society is seen as typical male and female behaviour (math girl and math boys) is on the rise. Could this even isolate fragile men more?

Meanwhile, fragile men have become a dominant group in comment sections. Sikkom, local news from the city of Groningen, issued a ‘There is a new vegan place in Groningen’ bingo game as a reaction to the immense hate they got by writing an article about a new vegan restaurant in the city. Editor Willem Groeneveld writes in an editorial that Sikkom often features new restaurants, mostly meat-based, and there are never whinny reactions by vegans claiming that they will eat an extra cucumber in the evening to compensate for the meat. Writing about a vegan place opens the box of Pandora.

In a recent episode of the critical Dutch podcast Open Geesten, host Michiel Lieuwma and guest Bart Drenth argue that the bad revenues of the recent Star Wars movies and, more in general, the financial situation of Disney are related to the wokeness of the film directors and organisation. Fans don’t want a Star Wars with female lead roles, they claim, because it is not in line with the Star Wars universe. It’s a sentimental dialogue of two men coping with a changing value system. Making up facts is one of the coping tools they use: all recent Star Wars movies made a huge profit, and Disney’s revenues grew last year compared to 2022.

Last week, Lieuwma started a critical discussion about the quality of Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department and the music of Swift in general. In one of his stories on Instagram, he describes the lyrics of the song ‘Anti-Hero’ as poorly written, also adding that an anti-hero always is male.

Why would Lieuwma do such a thing? Why so defensive? Why so fragile? I guess I just have to ask, but weigh my words carefully to not offend him.

These toxic reactions to female creators remind me of Baby Man, a fictional character made up by one of my art school students, Mara van Kasteren. Baby Man wears a suit and tie and appears all grown-up, except for his behavior and facial expressions. Baby Man is mostly crying without having a clue why. She is working on a comic featuring Baby Man that will be published in our school’s magazine.

Luckily a printed magazine doesn’t have a comment section.

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SHORTS

Emptiness from the city of Groningen

One of the most exciting records of this year dropped last month. After a promising EP in 2019, this debut album was released on Peter Dorothy’s Strap Originals record label. What stands out is the raw energy and the restrained chaos. As if Real Farmer could breach an imaginary boundary every second and fall into chaos. Reminds me of the vibe in the late punk and early postpunk at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. Sometimes Real Farmer sounds like Warsaw (early Joy Division), but the influences of the B52s are there. The super edgy punk song ‘Waiting For’ is like fIREHOSE and Minutemen meet halfway: perfect melodic bass, catchy vocals, cool tempo changes and this typical empty feeling of joy present during the whole song. Best punk song I have heard in years. The tagline ‘Maximum living on a minimum wage’ is golden.

Compare What’s There by Real Farmer is released on Strap Originals.

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Melancholy

One of the comments on Claire Rousay’s new album comes from Bandcamp user CHOSEN: “Almost as if the sunbathed, American skate punk-rock I listened to during my teenage years had grown up on its own, maturing new hopes and values.” Sentiment has this melancholic feeling of skating on a hot summer night while the sun is going down: nothing to worry about, living in the moment, this naive idea that nothing will ever change. Sadness and melancholy are often used to describe the music by Winnipeg-born and now Los Angeles-based musician Claire Rousay. She is influenced by musique concrète and uses field recordings in her ambient soundscapes.

Layers of field recordings and delicate guitar, violin, and cello melodies construct the soft tones. The vocals, heavily processed with a vocoder, give the song an extra melancholic twist. They are mature and still full of hope.

Sentiment by Claire Rousay is released on Thrill Jockey Records.

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Collapse

When O Yuki Conjugate (OYC) released their classic album Equator in 1994 on the Staalplaat record label, the ambient pioneers already released six albums with experimental music that explored the interplay between ambient, industrial, dark wave and beat-driven electronic music. On their 1994 album, everything came together.

OYC is still active, with co-founder Roger Horberry as a stable factor. To celebrate the 30th birthday of Equator, Horberry invited Dan Mudford, Joe Lamb and Malcolm McGeorge to his studio to create a successor. New Meridian brings you right back to the middle of the 1990s. All the typical OYC are present: the thick, suffocating bass lines, slow, almost slowed-down beats and the exciting mixture of melodies mingling with each other.

This is a soundtrack of a world that is on the brink of collapse and embraces its downfall. New Meridian sounds like 2024.

New Meridian by Open Yellow Circle is self-released.

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Hard to describe

The Unmaster (2019) is probably one of the best hip-hop albums of the last decade. It’s experimental, blurs the boundaries between different genres and has this raw energy typical for UK rap and grime. Bristol-based singer, producer and MC Dizraeli is a brilliant songwriter and rapper. Earlier this year, he released The Kid EP with four experimental hip-hop tracks that make you thirsty for more. Still, his new album, Joy Machine, differs from what you would expect. Trying to describe the album as a blend of jazz, funk, hip-hop, grime, and postpunk sounds accurate but doesn’t properly catch the mood of this exceptional album. Joy Machine is dark, light, uplifting, depressing, open, experimental, funky, deep and shallow at the same time. Carried by dark and disturbing vocals by Dizraeli himself. What an album.

Joy Machine by Dizraeli is released on Def Pressé.

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HYPERSPEED

To keep track of interesting pop culture, I started a :padlet. Updated weekly. https://padlet.com/theoploeg/stasis-479aiazww8y184km

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Near perfect electronic music set by Objekt (what a cool haircut) at Lot Radio.

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One of the most impressive exhibitions I’ve seen in quite a while: What Freedom Is To Me by Isaac Julian in Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht. https://www.bonnefanten.nl/nl/tentoonstellingen/isaac-julien-what-freedom-is-to-me