#anne helen petersen

[jacobwren]

"The desire for the cool job that you're passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon - and, as we'll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the "honor" of performing it. The rhetoric of "Do you what you love, and you'll never work another day in your life" is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of "passion," we're prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives." - Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

[luxe-pauvre]

When I first posted about this article last week, my friend Ryanne — a brilliant sociologist — left a comment that’s stuck with me. “What I think is most insidious about this content is not that most of us are gonna feel compelled to be “trad wives,” she said, “but that feeds that inkling that we should always be doing something more for someone else.” And that’s where all of this content intersects, whether it’s coming from stay-at-home-girlfriends or #tradwives, whether it’s consumed by secular heathens or the already converted. To embody ideal femininity is to serve others at all times, of course — but it is also to aspire to self-annihilation. The absence of desire, the absence of needs, the absence of resistance as you hollow out the self and replace it with the desires and needs of others.

Anne Helen Petersen, #TradWife Life as Self-Annihilation

[exhaled-spirals]

« It’s very lovely that Dálen [inventor of the AGA stove] decided to find a way to relieve housewives and housekeepers from the burden of fire keeping. Yet when men see women performing the intense labor of care work, they often seem to think they’re seeing a problem that needs solving. The problem is “care work is labor intensive,” and their solution is often, “Here is an invention that will make it more efficient for women to do care work.” The inventions are nice, but care work is always labor intensive and rarely efficient, even with a radiant heat stove. You know what would help women more than any invention? A critical mass of men willing to do care work. »

— Anne Helen Petersen, in her Culture Study substack

[moontyger]

Eight years ago, in the blurry early morning hours after Trump won the election, I wrote a piece: This is How Much America Hates Women. It had been the chorus of my thoughts as I watched the results come in: that millions of Americans would rather vote for a chaos muppet in a suit than a capable woman.

In the years since, there have been times where I’ve thought the headline was too bombastic, too overblown, too in line with the caricature of a Resistance Lib. The reality was that millions of Americans did vote for a capable woman — just not enough of them in the handful of states that get to decide the future of our country. Two years after Trump won, we voted in a wave of progressive women, and two years after that, pushed Trump out of office. The tide, I dreamed, was turning — however slowly.

Last night’s election sure did clarify things, didn’t it. Political historian Nicole Hemmer describes elections as “an ongoing conversation about who we are as a country and who we’re going to be.” And the takeaway from that conversation is that we’d still rather have a chaos muppet with a non-existent platform, fascistic dreams, and a vibes-based ideological compass in office than a competent woman, particularly a competent Black woman.

But that’s just the most basic part of the conversation. Listen closely and you’ll understand that we don’t care about women’s bodily autonomy — in fact, we think control of women’s bodies should rest in the hands of the state, and that state should be run by men. We think women’s lives are, ultimately, disposable. We belong subjugated and controlled. Men think this, but women think this too.

This is the adult conversation our children are observing. This is what they will understand about their childhoods: a period when their country clarified whose lives mattered and where power should rest. These truths will be codified in court rulings and legislation that will endure for decades. They will be there in the room every time a woman dies a preventable death or is arrested for crossing state lines to save her own life. This generation will internalize what we have come to understand: that women are worth less. Behave accordingly.

[jojoware]

Tom Cruise doesn’t like women. Neither does Miles Teller. Channing Tatum likes women. So does Ryan Gosling. Brad Pitt used to like women but doesn’t anymore. Leonardo Di Caprio only likes them occasionally. Bradley Cooper doesn’t, George Clooney does. Matt Damon doesn’t, Ben Affleck only does in that one scene in the J.Lo documentary. Marlon Brando didn’t, Montgomery Clift did. Paul Newman didn’t onscreen but did IRL. Cary Grant did, John Wayne definitely, definitely didn’t. Will Smith pretends like he doesn’t but I’m not convinced. Mark Wahlberg absolutely does not, but Daniel Day-Lewis does. So does Paul Mescal.  -- A Unified Theory of Glen Powell by Anne Helen Petersen

[aquietglow]

I was charmed by this look at why he's become an internet boyfriend recently.

[skiagrafia]

It’s all very paradoxical: that the ability to constantly communicate has made us bad communicators, that instant access to all forms of entertainment would leave us with so few touchstones, that surveilling kids doesn’t necessarily make them safer, that the absence of limitations also often means the absence of creativity — and that the particular form of abundance we’ve fetishized can feel so sad, so unspeakably sterile.

—Anne Helen Petersen, The Sterile World of Infinite Choice

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

By Anne Helen Petersen.

Design by Ben Denzer.

[thoughtportal]

How did the information superhighway get so gridlocked? Guest Anne Helen Petersen tells Sarah the story of how email took over the world and our working lives, and what it would mean for us to get a little of our lost time back. Plus, a Kurt Loder cameo. Here’s where to find Anne:

Twitter

Substack

[aimmyarrowshigh]

We are weary, and defeated, and furious. We need a fucking moment to mourn. But then — we have to fight. We have to fight even when we’re losing. We have to fight for a future we may never see. We have to protect each other, even when it comes at great personal cost. We have to fight because the alternative is unimaginable. They feed on our exhaustion. They expect our capitulation. They rely on us behaving like them: willing to ignore or cause others’ suffering to preserve our own power. They hate us, and they think we will learn to hate ourselves, too. But they also underestimate us. We are stubborn and unruly, annoying and persistent, bitter and terrified. And unlike them, we are not animated by fear or cruelty. We are audacious in our faith that a better world is possible. That faith is not rational, and the last eight years has consistently rattled it. But it endures, as it has endured for hundreds of years. We must not be the ones to lose it.

Anne Helen Petersen

[m-a-salter]

this is not a post about peter capaldi

It is a post about Tabitha Carvan's book, This Is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch, which I recently devoured. It is a sneakily profound book about patriarchal society's double standards around pleasure and enthusiasm, and if you have ever worried about whether your interest in [insert pop-culture enthusiasm here] was weird/pathological/in-any-way-problematic, I urge you to read this book.

I have never felt more seen and understood; in some of the quotes below I have made some minor substitutions such that the sentences are now 100% about me:

“I wanted to keep looking at [Peter Capaldi]! —but I also wanted to avoid ending up at a Not-Traditionally-Good-Looking-Yet-Extremely-Attractive-Celebrities Anonymous meeting, sitting next to some Steve Buscemi fan, having to declare I was an addict.”

“My friends and family often send me mentions of [Peter Capaldi] they've found online, thinking—ludicrously—that I wouldn't have seen them already.”

“…[R]evisit the memory of what it was like for you when you first found fanfiction. A little while ago, I saw a news story about a woman living in a New York apartment who discovered an entire other, hidden apartment behind her bathroom mirror, and isn't that just what it's like? A completely new thing you never knew about, which was there the whole time. And then all of a sudden, you have so much more space to move around in than you ever realized.”

“Coming out as a [Capaldian] is easy. Since the inside of me is almost entirely [Peter Capaldi], it's simply a matter of drip-feeding it to the outside. I start by casually dropping [Peter Capaldi] into conversation, at a rate of one mention per every five hundred times I think of him. Then I reply to people's text messages with [Peter Capaldi] GIFs, deploying a mere fraction of the images of him saved on my phone."

“And I know self-declaration is a far cry from self-determination, but at least it's a step up from self-care, the substitute aspiration we've been sold. That was the conclusion reached by the writer Anne Helen Petersen too. After researching her book on burnout, she reported that ‘skincare routines, pedicures, sweet treats, elaborate vacations, even massages—none of it feels as good as actually figuring out something you like to do, and then doing it as if no one was watching, and no one ever will, and it will never, ever find a place on your résumé.’”

“...[S]omething trivial, like a crush on a celebrity, can have unexpected, maybe profound, consequences, not in spite of being trivial but because it is. Because it's fun, because it doesn't matter, because it's purely for you, because it feels stupidly good. Because the joy of it expands. It seeps into other parts of your life, transforming it, and you, in ways that do matter—a lot.”

[taylortruther]

There’s a culture critic named Anne Helen Petersen who studies pop culture. She literally discussed why everyone’s obsessed with Travis and Taylor on her podcast this week (Culture Study Podcast) and they do bring up the traditional dating norms in heterosexual relationships and you’re totally right.

They also kinda touched on Taylor being 34 and not married and what that means about all of this which I thought was interesting. I’m still listening to the podcast (it’s over an hour long lol)

but Taylor having such a feminine job (popstar!!) with Travis being a legit football player is definitely factoring in. It’s like the beckhams

fjdaskl it's so fun that you are explaining ahp to me because i am like her #1 stan i feel. i love her. and yes, i do think she had some good insights into the relationship, but she hasn't gone quite deep enough but i expect the podcast - and future studies - will go further into it. i think she's extremely insightful about these types of things and how they reflect the current culture.

agree that there is a lot of layers to their gender roles coming in: their physical appearances, their jobs, what they represent as icons/what their "roles" are according to society (taylor being like... uber-girl, travis being an uber-boy, in a very all-american high school prom king and queen way), the archetypes, and so on.

i think a lot about how some reporter pointed out - talking about lavender haze, i believe - that many people view women as girls until they get married and have kids. and taylor, being legally single and child-free, challenges that belief regularly because she is so powerful, so successful, and so honest about her life.

like, i do think it's kind of awesome to see a 34-year-old woman be single and child-free while thriving. we don't see that enough and it has real consequences for people. expecting women to only be happy with a man and child puts pressure on them to find a partner, stick with a shitty relationship, not be their full authentic selves on their own, not make their own money, etc. - and it also makes the fact that women are underpaid, vulnerable to financial and other kinds of abuse, etc. less pressing to society because, frankly, those things benefit men and their power retention.

[noodledesk]

We ask women to self-annihilate in subtler ways. In sexual experiences, for instance, those who are socialized as girls learn young that our desires and discomforts– from the pain we feel in sex, to learning to push through gagging while giving head, to having sex taken from us—that’s all meant to be secondary to the pleasure we give male figures in our lives. And then if we become mothers, we find, well, here we are again: the kids come first, the husband comes first, subsume your body and hang in there. Today, we are also inundated with all this parenting advice, which is mostly built on the largely unquestioned supremacy of attachment theory— that, too, tells us to speak this way, contort our bodies that way, feel another way, lest we will traumatize our kids forever. 

Amanda Montei, “American Motherhood Felt Like That: Like a Plan Devised by Men” - Interview with Anne Helen Petersen from Culture Study

[frances-baby-houseman]

Anne Helen Petersen is doing Bama Rush Tok commentary on her instagram stories, and I am doing Anne Helen commentary in dms of her stories to all of my friends.