How Tumblr Memes Became Political Ideas: Katherine Dee decodes the manosphere, Tumblr feminism, anime activism, and more

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Katherine Dee.

The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.

Katherine Dee is a writer, cultural commentator, and a phenomenally astute observer of online culture. If you want to understand the rise of the “tradcels,” the “girl boss” trope (and subsequent backlash), and how identity concepts like “otherkin” become connected to social justice politics, Katherine is the one to explain it.

In this conversation, she talks with Meghan about how ideas on places like Tumblr found their way into our political discourse, academia, and even the retail space and they had a profound impact on young people’s psychological development, especially when it comes to dating and relationships.

Katherine herself was so indoctrinated by online manosphere content and it’s the scarcity complex it engendered that she ended up marrying someone she met online after knowing him in person for three days. She also discusses why Taylor Swift is just the latest example of a powerful woman reframed as a sad cat lady, why the beauty standards of the 1990s were so destructive, and why New York City arts and media circles are incubators are terrible places to meet heterosexual men. (But very good places to be one.)

GUEST BIO

Katherine Dee is an internet culture blogger. Everything else is secondary. You can find her at default.blog.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Who didn't have a friend who like, you know, was a mermaid, right?
0:07.0	It's like you grow out of it.
0:08.3	And like I remember like being on the playground and like this girl is like,
0:12.9	yeah, I have like magical powers.
0:14.7	Like I can control water.
0:16.2	And you just, that's just how kids are.
0:17.8	But when it's translated to text on the internet and also adults can get
0:21.4	involved, and then there's like a subcultural element to it, and then eventually it becomes
0:25.8	commercialized so you could buy products that are, you know, validating this. It kind of changes
0:31.8	the game. Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dom. If you listen to this podcast
0:39.9	enough, you probably know that I am always trying to connect the dots between real life,
0:46.3	such as it is, and certain kinds of social media phenomena, whether it's memes or viral posts
0:52.3	or ideas about social norms that seemingly take hold out of
0:56.3	nowhere. For instance, a few weeks ago, I had the author, therapist, and relationship expert
1:01.6	Lori Gottlieb on. And I asked her, among lots of other things, about the emergence of dating
1:09.1	advice coming from a contingent, not only of manosphere types,
1:14.4	but even like super smart, sort of anti-woke, but not necessarily conservative types online.
1:22.6	I'm talking about the sort of people who are worried about the way that the dating and mating scene is seems so irrevocably broken,
1:31.8	people not finding partners, people not having enough kids, you know, waiting too long to settle down,
1:37.8	that kind of thing. Anyway, my point is that while we had an amazing conversation,
1:42.7	Lori actually was not entirely familiar with what I was
1:46.0	referring to in that particular case, which shows you how siloed we've all become. That's why I am so
	...

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