Song and Dance

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Author

Aaron Weber
January 28, 2024

Before we start: I’ve moved this newsletter over to Behiiv. This is an interesting platform, and the fact that it’s designed for scale amuses me. It’s free up to 2,500 subscribers; I have 65, and I think I know all of you in person. Anyway, if you like this newsletter, please share it with a friend. If you collectively have more than 2,500 friends you can convince to subscribe, something interesting may happen. On to the song and dance!

Today’s song is Some Sunsick Day by Morgan Delt. It’s sort of an abstract nihilistic fantasy with psychedelic guitar vibes.

After the blast levels our town
We can relax and watch it come down

To go with the song, check out this Financial Times story about an emerging global gender divide in politics (alternate link for the paywalled). The upshot: on average, young men are dramatically more conservative than young women. The FT has plenty of charts showing, for example, that British men under 30 are almost as opposed to immigration as their fathers, while British women the same age are more liberal than their mothers. Or that nearly half of young German men voted for the far-right AfD party, while only 16% of young women did.

As though to underscore the point, this was the top reply to the journalist posting about his article on Twitter:

As with so much else in pop culture and trends these days, Korea appears to be in the vanguard; a major issue in the 2022 elections there was whether to dismantle the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Writing in The Dial, Yung In Chae & Spencer Lee-Lenfield explain the moment and its terminology:

In Korean, the term for “single” or “unmarried” is mihon. Hon means “marriage”; the prefix mi- means “not yet.” Put together, the word implies that marriage is a natural stage in any given person’s life. Over the last eight years, feminists in Korea have increasingly pushed back against this idea. One result has been the emergence of a new term: bihon, or “not married:” a single life by choice and forever.

The Atlantic went in depth on the Korean gender crisis last March (no-paywall link here), emphasizing the fear and fury of the separatist “4B” movement that rejects dating, sex, children, and marriage with men:

One woman, a 4B adherent, said she jokes with her friends that the solution to South Korea’s problems is for the whole country to simply disappear. Thanos, the villain in The Avengers who eliminates half the Earth’s population with a snap of his fingers, didn’t do anything wrong, she told me. Meera Choi, the doctoral student researching gender inequality and fertility, told me she’s heard other Korean feminists make the exact same joke about Thanos. Underneath the joke, I sensed a hopelessness that bordered on nihilism.

After we start over again
We'll start to feel safe in our skin
Maybe we'll be wrinkled and grey

Further Reading

In Defector, The Future Of E-Commerce Is A Product Whose Name Is A Boilerplate AI-Generated Apology: an exploration of the enshittification of e-commerce, AI, lazy content generation, and more.

In Scope of Work, Tallow to Margarine, a remarkably interesting discussion of industrial fat science.

In Newsweek, I Miscarried in Texas. My Doctors Put Abortion Law First, a first-person account of the pointless torture that Texas puts women through.

Joy