#lili loofbourow

[lilacsupernova]

Years later I came across an article by the critic Lili Loofbourow introducing an expression that I thought uncannily captured some of my graduate school experience: "the male glance." Not to be confused with the male gaze, which objectifies women's bodies, the male glance does the opposite to women's creative work: it barely gives it a second look. Those under its spell decide after the cursory examination that the work in question isn't of much value. The male glance "looks, assumes, and moves on. It is, above all else, quick. Under its influence, we rejoice in our distant diagnostic speed ... it feeds an inchoate, almost erotic hunger to know without attending—to omnisciently not-attend, to reject without taking the trouble of analytical labor." It turns away without a care.

– Regan Penaluna (2023) How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philsophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind.

[blake-ritson-love]

The Gilded Age Season 2 premieres today (or tomorrow, depending where you're located) on HBO/Max and Sky. Although we haven't got a whole lot of promo material of Oscar, it's evident from the reviews that his storyline is expanding a lot this season.

"Fans of the Brook-Van Rhijns household will be pleased; they all get quite a bit more to do. Ada (Cynthia Nixon) and Oscar (Blake Ritson) are particular standouts" - Lili Loofbourow, The Washington Post

"Blake Ritson is given plenty to do as Baranski’s closeted gay son, which is a very complicated situation at that time. And he has a particularly shocking storyline this season, but not for the reasons that you might think, the show is very respectful to his situation. What his character does toward the end of this season… I thought that was what was happening and then the dramatic writing was so well done, and Ritson’s performance! … They just really made it compelling and brought it home, and I was like, that was juicy.“ - Beyond The Trailer

[radfemverity]

This is a brilliant analysis by Lili Loofbourow. These slides are snippets from her much longer article, that I made in order to condense the points into an Instagram post.

The final paragraph, which I couldn’t fit into the 10 slides, is especially noteworthy:

“I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short.

But those aren't actually the lessons society teaches — no, not even to "entitled" millennials. Remember: Sex is always a step behind social progress in other areas because of its intimacy. Talking details is hard, and it's good we're finally starting to. But next time we're inclined to wonder why a woman didn't immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.”

Not to be all sappy but it low-key fucked me up reading this because of how deeply it hits home, so if you have sexual trauma, content warning.

[scullysflannel]

do you know of any other critics who are (even slightly!) skeptical about succession? really interested to hear a variety of thoughts because i've mostly heard universal praise

they've all been sniped. no jk. they do exist! there were people who soured on season 3 because they thought the show felt stuck (like Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic and Cassie da Costa at Vanity Fair). I think being stuck is the whole point of Succession (because it's a comedy) but they're not turning that into anything dramatically satisfying. Lili Loofbourow's take on this in Slate is my favorite; it's a good look at how repetitiveness might be "the point" but it's still draining the show of any real stakes.

what I really want to read is a good article on what it means that this supposedly pointed eat-the-rich satire is so beloved by so many rich people. shouldn't it comfort them less? I liked this piece in Vanity Fair by Richard Lawson, whose review of Season 1 was also skeptical, but Succession isn't the focus of that piece. but I agree with the idea that nobody's succeeded at going for the kill. honestly, I think Succession is closer to getting it right than any other eat-the-rich satire airing right now. (it's no Veep though.) I loved this feature from Alison Herman at The Ringer about how the designers and cinematographers make wealth look miserable. 

but if the idea is "rich people are miserable," the pity kind of dulls the satire. but it's SO hard not to make that argument sound media illiterate!! this article in The Week is technically asking the question I want to read about (does Succession hate wealth as much as it wants you to think), but most of the argument boils down to "it's hard not to sympathize with characters as you watch them suffer." which is annoying because it treats audiences like they don't have brains and feels dangerously close to "Breaking Bad glorifies meth" levels of not getting it. of course saying wealth is a trap for the wealthy doesn’t cancel out their horribleness. but artistically, yeah, as some reviews have pointed out (like Mike Hale at the New York Times and Darren Franich at EW), Succession has had a hard time balancing mockery and sympathy. it feels like two shows in one, and it’s better at being the funny one.

anyway, this one isn't remotely negative, but I think it sums it up: here's Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture on why Succession is a great comedy.

[timesothercompany]

"There’s better performance art in almost any woman than there is in a thousand James Francos." - Lili Loofbourow

[shahananasrin-blog]

[ad_1] From visionary Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín (“Jackie”) comes a fantasy that portrays Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell), who died in 2006, as a 250-year-old vampire who has been around since the French Revolution.Where to watch: Sept. 15 on NetflixContributors: Travis M. Andrews, David Betancourt, Bethonie Butler, Omari Daniels, Fritz Hahn, Amy Hitt, Mark Jenkins, Lili Loofbourow, Olivia McCormack, Michael O’Sullivan, Pat Padua, Sonia Rao and Sophia S [ad_2]

[brotheralyosha]

The Herman Cain Award concept is simple and ugly. A single entry to the subreddit consists of anywhere between two and 16 screenshots of a social media profile (usually Facebook, with last names scrubbed out) belonging to someone who died after aggressively rejecting precautions that could have protected them and others. The idea is to track the individual’s journey from COVID theory, so to speak, to COVID practice: what a person posted or commented about masks or shots, or those who advocated for either before getting sick, and how they and their community narrated their disease once they were ill. As the forum has grown, entries have started following a fairly standard format: The first few screenshots typically feature the individual in question deploying a remarkably consistent set (there are 30 or so) of memes. Some vilify Dr. Anthony Fauci or champion the right to be unvaccinated. Others warn people they’re experimental rats or offer scripts that will properly punish wait staff for daring to inquire about vaccination status. Some deride masked liberals as “sheep” and the unvaccinated as proud free lions or refer to immigrants as vectors of disease or compare vaccination requirements to the Holocaust. Most of them treat the pandemic as a joke and frame ignoring it as brave or clever or both. The final few screenshots typically announce the disease, its progress, and the eventual death announcement, frequently followed by a GoFundMe for the family. If someone is merely hospitalized, the flair on that entry reads “Nominated.” When they die, it changes to “Awarded.”

It is cruel, a site for heartless and unrepentant schadenfreude. This is a place where deaths are celebrated, and it is not the only one. While endless ink has been spilled on the anger of Trump voters and Fox News viewers and QAnon adherents, there are other angers that haven’t been nearly as well explored. The exhaustion and fury doctors and nurses feel, for example, as they deal yet again with overwhelmed ICUs. Instead of being hailed as heroes, this time around they’re risking their lives to serve while walking through anti-vax protesters and being called murderers or worse by misled family members demanding or indeed suing for sick unvaccinated relatives on ventilators to be dosed with ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or vitamin C. There is the anger of family members of those without COVID who are dying or sicker than they should be because treatment was delayed or denied to them at dozens of hospitals that had no beds available. There’s the frustration of parents trying to keep their children safe, the constant, destabilizing calculations and adaptations people are forced into when (for instance) the governor of Texas prohibits schools from taking safety measures and then two teachers at a single school die, forcing closures once again. There’s the run-of-the-mill anger of those weary of living under pandemic conditions and demoralized—in the most literal sense—by the selfishness of their compatriots.

. . . .

I began reading because I wanted to understand how pro-social impulses could get coarsened to the point where advocates for lifesaving measures like vaccines—people who think of themselves as the good guys—are literally celebrating deaths. I’m no closer to understanding that, but something very strange did happen because I read these records: Despite reading loads of statistics and case histories and news articles about the pandemic, r/HermanCainAward became my most thorough source on what it’s like for a person to die from COVID. I understand the disease more deeply because I have read so many viciously curated “stories” in which ordinary people blathering about politics end up narrating their decline from it—with help from their families—as optimistically as they can. They are younger than COVID patients used to be. Trying to put a positive spin on things. Soliciting prayers. Generally avoiding conversions. They do not expect to die. It’s relentless reading. And it keeps ending up the same way. Only health care workers have seen this many people decline and die.

It has always been and remains a problem that COVID is functionally invisible to so many Americans. We already medicalize death more than most cultures, but the sensible restrictions on visitors to COVID wards have meant that the disease crippling hospitals across the country goes mostly unwitnessed. We all know getting on a ventilator is bad and having to go on an ECMO machine is worse, but most of us have not heard what lungs sound like when they have that by-now-classic “ground glass appearance” in scans. We have not watched people panicking and yanking tubes out because they can’t breathe. We have not seen patients swollen and full of air, unrecognizable. Or proned. Or having their last conversation before they go on the ventilator. You don’t see most of this stuff in these r/HermanCainAward screenshots, either, but you do see a lot you just wouldn’t otherwise. Specifically, you see the suffering. It’s filtered, of course, usually through collapsing defiance and positive thinking that fails. People post that they’re not feeling well when they’ve already become patients. They usually put it simply, with a request for prayers. The contrast to their grandstanding in prior posts acts as an intensifier; that they aren’t commenting on the very thing they’ve preached about so much comes to serve—cumulatively, as you read these—as evidence of just how awful they feel. The selfies can be brutal. The photographs family members post are worse because the patient is frequently unconscious, bloated, clearly in a bad way. Relatives’ updates tend to feature obsessive medical details like ventilator settings and oxygen saturations, and you learn to recognize the time course of the disease: When mentions of dialysis start up, you know, as a reader, that the prognosis is poor. The death announcement—once the requests for prayers and hopes for miracles are over—frequently reveals how much worse it really was than anyone let on: You find out the patient also had MRSA, or had developed an autoimmune disease, or had struggled with strokes and clots.

Jaded though they are, many r/HermanCainAward readers have experienced this much as I did: as a truly frightening look at what COVID can really be like. What hundreds of stories about deaths told through mean-spirited screenshots reveal is that the disease—when it gets bad—is worse than even the most pro-vax person really understood.

And that’s what sets r/HermanCainAward apart from the didactic pleasures of other schadenfreude-based forums like r/LeopardsAteMyFace: It’s more horrible than satisfying because the horror isn’t going to stop. These individual stories do not produce conversions. These aren’t situations where anti-vaxxers learn their lesson, get vaccinated, and save themselves. Sure, there’s the occasional “Redemption” tag, awarded when a patient or relative regrets opposing vaccination and urges their friends to do what they can to avoid a similar fate. But those are rare. What this massive record of human suffering really illustrates (in all its startling, repetitive sameness) is how seamlessly anti-vax communities reconcile themselves to the deaths their convictions will perpetuate. The posts about individual liberty and self-sufficiency devolve into abjectly dependent appeals: A call to “prayer warriors” is almost a required feature at this point in a r/HermanCainAward entry. When someone dies, the grief is gentle and generic: He was a good guy, he got his angel wings today, it was his time, God called him home. Their families frequently express gratitude to the medical staff who cared for their loved ones. It is resignation, and deeply sad. And yet: Chilled though I’ve been by how this subreddit can rejoice at a death, I’m somehow no less chilled by how easily the bereaved normalize their losses. A 35-year-old man with three young children and a free vaccine available should not be dead! There is astonishingly little recognition of this.

[dippyface]

literally

[themotherofrevelation]

We live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.

Lili Loofbourow

[toshootforthestars]

via Lili Loofbourow, posted Nov 2017:

The bumbler doesn't know things, even things about which he was directly informed. Jon Stewart was "stunned" by the Louis C.K. revelations, even though we watched someone ask him about them last year. Vice President Mike Pence maintains he had no idea former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was lobbying for a foreign power — despite the fact that Flynn himself informed the transition team back in January, and even though Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) had written Pence — who was head of the transition team — to that effect as far back as Nov. 18, 2016. Wait, what? said Pence in March. Surely not! Really?

There's a reason for this plague of know-nothings: The bumbler's perpetual amazement exonerates him. Incompetence is less damaging than malice. And men — particularly powerful men — use that loophole like corporations use off-shore accounts.

The bumbler takes one of our culture's most muscular myths — that men are clueless — and weaponizes it into an alibi.

Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler — the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth — is the best and hardest proof. Breaking that alibi means dissecting that myth. The line on men has been that they're the only gender qualified to hold important jobs and too incompetent to be responsible for their conduct. Men are great but transparent, the story goes: What you see is what you get. They lack guile.

The "privilege" argument holds that this is partly true because men have never needed to deceive.

This interesting Twitter thread by Holden Shearer: "One of the oldest canards in low-denominator comedy is that women are inscrutable and men can't understand them. There's a reason for this and it ain't funny," he writes.

The thread is right about the structural problems with lowbrow "women are so confusing!" comedy. "Women VERY frequently say one thing and mean another, display expressions or reactions that don't jibe with their feelings, and so on. But it's actually really easy to decode once you understand why it happens. It is survival behavior," Shearer writes.

But nested in that account is the assumption that the broad majority of men are not dissemblers. The majority are — you guessed it — bumblers!

If you've noticed a tendency to treat girls — like the 14-year-old whom now-Senate candidate Roy Moore allegedly picked up at her custody hearing — as knowing adults and men in their 30s — like Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and Donald Trump, Jr. — as erring youngsters, large sons and "coffee boys," this is why. Our culture makes that script available. It's why Sessions is so often referred to as an "elf" instead of a gifted manipulator...

It's counterintuitive, I know. For decades now, the very idea of a duplicitous, calculating man has been so exceptional as to be almost monstrous; this is the domain of cult leaders, of con artists, of evil men like the husband in Gaslight.

And while folks provisionally accept that there are men who "groom" children and "gaslight" women, the reluctance to attach that behavior to any real, flesh-and-blood man we know is extreme. Many people don't actually believe that normal men are capable of it.

[tomorrowusa]

The America Trump hearkens back to is racist, suburban, and—judging from recent exemplars—populated chiefly with soft, stout men with guns they don’t know how to hold and murderous trucks they only sort of know how to drive.

Lili Loofbourow at Slate. 

Donald Trump’s concept of the suburbs is at least 40, perhaps 50 years out of date.

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

The Old Boy’s defining characteristic may just be that he wants. It’s not clear what he wants, and in the end, it doesn’t much matter. His drive lacks focus and can’t be satisfied, but it can’t be stopped by things like ethics or law or introspection. And he’s terribly scared of losing. The Old Boy regards all of life as a strategic contest to be won. “Puerility makes everything into a game, even things that are not games, even things that must not be games. Puerility is detailed, nitpicky, often rulebound, but always in the service of play,” Natalia Cecire argued in one of several essays on the role of a certain kind of boyishness in American life. This is what “scoring” means, of course, and that logic seeps into how men like these think of everything, from business deals to electoral fraud to abuse to murder. [...] To the extent that the Old Boy is effective (outside of inherited wealth and its associated power), it’s because he sees nothing besides his own game. [...] This is the kind of Trump story we read all the time, but (if you’re like me) you’re still not great at dealing with it. It stuns you at a core register that’s hard to nail down or even access, because it’s still feels axiomatic that the president is supposed to care about more than just himself. When he doesn’t, when he acts like the weird thing would be caring about the long-term effects of his policies on the people he governs, it’s tough to react because you don’t even know at what point to start explaining why that’s a problem. Communication requires a shared frame of reference, but it’s not clear whether any premises of governance are held in common. Trump is a public servant, but there is no public interest in his framework; there’s only Trump. This was the year we saw exactly how the Old Boys dismiss high-stakes favor exchanges as silly male play. The nexus these Old Boys form isn’t just class- or age- or power-based, and the alliances being revealed don’t reduce to simple profit seeking. It’s profit-plus. It’s the timeworn social code of the Old Boys’ network, in part. But it’s also the thrill of feeding appetites that can’t actually be satisfied, of gloating, of winning the game.  And the dangerous thing is that they never feel like they’ve won. Hence their ill-temper, and their astonished outrage when asked to account for their actions. The Old Boy is in a double bind of his own devising. His loyalty to his own greed means he can never, by definition, be satiated. If you notice Old Boys getting more abusive, or flailing more desperately, this is why: The philosophical endpoint of a junkie’s increasing resistance is panic that satisfaction will never come. All the money and power in the world won’t get the Old Boy what he wants because what he wants isn’t a thing but the dopamine rush of victory (and nothing wears off more quickly). What he wants isn’t anything in particular; it’s just more.

Lili Loofbourow, The Year of the Old Boy

[elanormcinerney]

Alice Notley | Testament: 2005 | Songs and Stories of the Ghouls

Lili Loofbourow | The Male Glance

Joyce Maynard | To Die For

Lili Loofbourow | The Male Glance

Joyce Maynard | To Die For

Lili Loofbourow | The Male Glance

Introduction by Emily Wilson | Homer | The Odyssey

Lili Loofbourow | The Male Glance

Lisa Robertson | Cinema of the Present

Lili Loofbourow | The Male Glance

[morecoffee]

I am sad, above all, because the damage being done now no longer feels like it can be stemmed—let alone reversed—with a single election. This will last decades. The downturns my generation has already weathered—the 2008 crisis that hinged on obscure derivatives traded by a privileged few, robbing wealth from millions—were only the beginning. Education is now a luxury. Pensions barely exist. Health care is under threat. Retirement is, to those my age, a cruel joke. We’ve been waiting. For recovery, for relief, for some semblance of an American dream we can access.

It is clear, now, that there was nothing to wait for. In the time we’ve been waiting, the rich have only gotten richer and angrier and whiter, but it will never be enough for them.

-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone"

[desroubins]

The word hypocrisy bobs up in these discussions, but the issue—as many have pointed out—is not hypocrisy, because those who are failing us do not aspire to intellectual or moral consistency in the first place. There is no negotiating with, or appeasing, or even engaging a party that feels no responsibility to the truth. Lying is more than “uncivil.” It corrodes relationships and trust, and the damage it does it permanent. I know it’s fashionable these days to wear one’s cynicism on one’s sleeve: We predict every promise will be broken because expecting honesty is laughably naïve. This makes reality easier to live with and joke about. But it’s a symptom of national rot. Being lied to, constantly, is not the price of being governed. That we have naturalized this—that we expect nothing less, in fact—shows how far we’ve already gone down a bad, bad road. This was already an unhealthy country in many ways. But at least lies were still resented. Now they are celebrated.

Lili Loofbourow

[brightkinds]

Women are supposed to perform comfort and pleasure they do not feel under conditions that make genuine comfort almost impossible.

Lili Loofbourow, The Female Price of Male Pleasure | The Week