Teen Mags, Dead Girls, Cults, and Calorie Tracking
The Peculiar Legacy of '90s/2000s Culture
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Remember this interview from January on American Bulk? I said: just trust me, this shit is good — and a lot of you did. So here’s another interview about an essay collection that does so much, and so skillfully, that I struggle for the words to convince you to keep reading — but if you do, I know that Alice Bolin’s words, about her new book Culture Creep, will convince you. This is the good shit. This is the stuff that allows us to do the never-ending and yet endlessly essential work of unpacking the ideas that infused our lives in the ‘90s and 2000s.
Maybe you’re the same age as me and Alice, and maybe you, too, grew up in a place that felt pop-culture-less — or maybe you’re older, or younger, or spent your formative years in very different contexts. Nevertheless: all of this was (and is) in the water. And it’s not a coincidence that this book comes out just weeks after Sophie Gilbert’s look at the feminism of the ‘90s and 2000s (which I interviewed her about on the Culture Study Podcast). We’re making sense of the relatively recent past in the way that twenty years’ distance allows us — and Alice’s collection is particularly skilled at identifying the ideological rot that inflicted the core of so much of 2000s feminism. It’s cathartic, traumatic, infuriating, and nostalgic, all at once.
This sort of reckoning is so weird!!! But also essential — particularly if we want to move forward. So just trust me again, and I’ll see you in the comments.
You can follow Alice Bolin on Instagram here and buy Culture Creep here.
The essay on teen magazines feels like the beating heart of the book, and I think there are a lot of readers here who will remember the feeling of being at once addicted to and repulsed by these magazines; they were bibles but slightly nauseating ones. I found so much joy reading the essay, in part because we grew up 30 minutes from one another in Idaho, in very similar contexts.
And while there are few joys as intense as someone mentioning your long-gone childhood grocery store (Tidyman’s!!!) the bit that really struck me was your description of our area of the world as not culture-less, but pop culture-less. No pop stars came our way, the top 40 station “seemed to lag mysteriously behind MTV,” the music stores had gone out of business leaving only badly stocked Hastings and Wal-Marts in their place, the movie theater played a blockbuster and a kid’s movie and maybe, MAYBE something like The Talented Mr. Ripley. No wonder we clung to our teen magazines (purchased at Tidyman’s).
You do this beautifully in the chapter, but I’d love for readers to hear more of how you think teen magazines fill this sort of hole — and the somewhat insidious effects of it. (I often explain that there were just so few ways to be where we grew up; I wonder if replacing the static messaging of the magazines with the wide world of the internet has changed the potential repertoire. I fear not.)
I had a friend who grew up with me in Idaho who told me he would read The New Yorker as a pretentious teenager and circle the events he would go to, were he in the city and not 2,000 miles way in a rural college town. This really hit at something for me about the stranded feeling I had as a kid. There were so many things that were discussed in teen shows or movies, which generally revolved around the Eastern Seaboard and California, that I could not situate within this isolated world where I (we) lived. I remember asking if an unincorporated farm community of less than one hundred people ten minutes outside of town might count as a “suburb.” I didn’t even know what a freeway was until I was probably 18. I looked it up on Google: “What is a freeway?” [AHP note: I learned to drive at 14 and was very skilled at passing on single-lane roads but didn’t drive on a freeway until I was 20]
Magazines felt like a crucial way to fill this gap, to make me feel like I wasn’t living on some other planet. And they filled actual gaps in for me when some pop cultural artifact was out of my reach. Basic cable where I lived didn’t carry the WB, the crucial Y2K hub for teen soap operas like Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so I couldn’t keep up with them consistently and would have to catch reruns when they would air irregularly on UPN. [AHP note: I felt this absence so keenly and feel like no one gets it — some places just didn’t get the WB! Literally nothing you could do about it!]
I read in magazines about these shows’ stars and got caught up on the drama that had happened on episodes I had missed. I suppose this was information I couldn’t really use at all except to feel like I was part of this broader teen zeitgeist that was taking over America in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s and seemed to threaten to leave me behind.
I see now that this was exactly how magazines were designed to make me feel: like a savvy, popular, normal teen (even as a ten year old), which is all any kid wants to feel. Teen magazines were explicitly instructional, providing endless advice columns, sheets of beauty tips, quizzes to determine if your crush likes you back, even features pages on consent and birth control. For someone who felt like an outsider, shut out from knowledge that it seems like other people are born with (and maybe that’s all of us), having a guidebook to teenage life delivered to my doorstep every month was an alluring prospect.
I’m not saying they served no purpose or that what I learned from them was all bad. But this set up a dynamic of dependence where my magazine advisors wielded a lot of control over what I believed about the world, and my and other readers’ trust was exploited to advertise nearly endless products to us, positioned as the solutions to our teenage angst.
Looking back, it’s amazing how unbothered I was by this onslaught of marketing, being both naive to how calculated it was and innocently satisfied by the vicarious retail therapy magazines offered. As a little kid I would spend hours looking at the piles of catalogues in my grandma’s kitchen, examining the pictures of everything from plasma lamps in Sharper Image to quilted Chanel bags in Neiman Marcus.
At that time I could not differentiate between magazines and catalogues and thought the two words could be used interchangeably. I had clearly intuited something with this conflation, and the unity between the two has only become more complete, with much of the entertainment social media content provides being more like a catalogue than a magazine, complete with clickable links to purchase. Teen magazines were clearly grooming us to be, as the classic Juicy Couture slogan went, “Nice Girls Who Like Stuff.”
“True crime watchers will have noticed a thematic creep in the genre’s subject matter in recent years,” you write on the first page of your new book. “Dead girls are out. Cults are in.”
Your first book was Dead Girls. This current book, Culture Creep, focuses on the fever dream of the last, oh, eight years? I think it’s a good starting point to hear you talk more about how you see that transition — from dead girls to cults — structuring larger shifts in pop culture as a whole.
I think in some ways this transition from more of a fetishistic obsession with dead women to stories of creepy cults is a positive thing. I see it as a harbinger of more systems thinking and even — could it be? — class consciousness, as people think not only about the havoc that individual sociopaths can wreak on a family, a town, or a region but the ways that organizations can take on lives of their own, becoming machines that victimize people even as those same people are deputized to victimize others.
This trend seems like a direct result of a lot of people reexamining their childhoods, particularly in the wake of the Christian conservatism that was so ascendant from the ‘80s to the ‘00s (and has reached what I can only hope is its height today) and seeing the ways that they were indoctrinated into groups that they didn’t understand and wouldn’t otherwise have chosen to join.
Of course, cult stories very often do revolve around an individual sociopath, the famous “charismatic leader” archetype. This is where I think the true crime transition was fairly smooth from serial killers to cult leaders. This fascination makes a lot of sense to me in an age when demagogues in politics and business have reshaped the world around them, amassing more individual power than any humans have ever had in a remarkably short amount of time.
People want to understand what causes us to follow leaders, even to the death. They are dismayed by how extreme political movements, hate groups, and conspiracy theories that seem so irrational can transform people we love into strangers. And of course, there is a lot of fear of doomsday right now on every part of the political spectrum, which is eerily echoed in the beliefs of many cults. Extreme times draw us to extreme beliefs, whether we are subscribing to them or just watching as they spread.
I’m pretty obsessed with the ‘Enumerated Woman’ essay, in part because I’ve gone through so many of my own phases of tracking (and disavowing tracking) and buying the rhetoric about how the “quantified self” would allow us to have better knowledge about how our bodies work and deciding that’s manipulative bullshit and ultimately finding myself in this weird spot where I wear a watch that tracks a lot of stuff, and compete with my partner on nightly sleep scores, but ALSO think the sleep score is often bogus. A classic case of “you can think something is bullshit and still be obsessed with it.”
I’ve often thought of tracking as part of the larger compulsion to self-optimize but I hadn’t quite connected the dots to the compulsion for women without safety nets to seek this feeling of productivity and control.
As you write: “with no childcare or paid family leave, women are often stuck with part-time, freelance, under-the-table, or direct sales work. It is no wonder, then, that the Fitbit or the Apple Watch becomes a welcome productivity tool, a way to do more with less time and support, to hustle both literally and figuratively.”
I’d love to hear you talk a bit more about this connection between precarity (enforced through neoliberal policy) and tracking, just generally.
The most concrete connection between the two is the lack of affordable healthcare in this country. Self tracking is one solution that tech has come up with to this emergency, giving us a way to monitor health data ourselves rather than relying on professionals to do it. There are many problems with this solution, including that the data is of questionable accuracy and relevance to overall health; we also seem to ignore the question of whether tracking itself is a healthy habit, especially mentally. It’s indicative of most tech solutions, which tend to simulate individual empowerment, all the while enforcing more dependence on the tech itself.
Community advocacy groups like the Black Panthers historically responded to the lack of medical services with “self health” programs, with the Panthers setting up free clinics and programs to screen for sickle-cell anemia, in addition to starting the first free school breakfast programs in the country. Tracking feels like the opposite of these community solutions, casting each of us as an isolated, one-dimensional instance of “health.” Even more insidiously, it makes us believe that we only have ourselves to blame for our relative wellness, ignoring social determinants and factors beyond our control to emphasize optimizing performance. This is an ingenious ideological gambit to deflect governmental obligation to care for citizens’ health in the only wealthy country on earth without socialized medicine.
The other problem is that tracking data mostly revolves around fitness, a concept that is ineluctably associated with thinness and normative beauty standards. Sadly, these concerns are not irrelevant to (especially) women’s social status and security, since studies have shown that thin women earn more than heavier ones do, but I do think that we have been a bit too quick to accept this conflation of the pursuit of optimum fitness and actual health. This isn’t to say that getting more steps in isn’t good for overall well-being and longevity, though community solutions like public transit, sidewalks and trails, and less car-centered urban planning would go further than step trackers to encourage it.
For the most part, tracking feels like just another way to enable people to obsess over their bodies while disconnecting from their actual intuition. And this is nothing new — calorie counting and exercise tracking have always been dieting staples, with tracking providing more efficient ways to micromanage them and the alluring illusion of hard data. The seeming objectivity of these numbers is emotionally powerful, and for me personally it has been hard to get back in touch with my body’s signals even though I left tracking behind more five years ago.
This is an aspect of the tech dystopia so obvious that has been parodied on actual Black Mirror episodes, but it is disheartening to think that we are using this advanced technology to fulfill some 1980s dream of the perfect weight loss regime. And on a larger ideological level, it represents how much we are willing to cede to tech: the daily upkeep of our most basic bodily needs.
I’m going to ask for something big and tricky with this question but you are pretty much the only person in the world who could pull it off. In the final blockbuster essay of the book, you explore the legacy and twisted ideological logic of Playboy — and argue, quite convincingly, for its status as a cult. Elsewhere in the book, you off-handedly mention a religious organization (WE WON’T CALL IT A CULT!) that’s slowly taken over your town. (If you want to read more about what it looks like when a church that believes in theocratic national rule buys up your downtown and becomes the de facto pastor of the New Right, Politico just released a pretty stunning profile)
I know a lot about that organization, and I know you do too — and the ways it’s successfully preached indoctrination (and patriarchal control) as freedom. How are these two organizations operating similarly? How do they take advantage of cultural vacuums and manipulate others’ opposition into “persecution”?
I love this connection, especially because we could become distracted by their seemingly opposed cultural positioning. Hugh Hefner was once an enemy of the Christian right, and the particular church leader you’re talking about is so conservative that he advocates for making pornography illegal. Hefner had an impressive ability to always cast himself as the reasonable, progressive civil libertarian, making his feminist critics one one side and Christian conservatives on the other seem like hysterical scolds inciting a moral panic. Feminists had more substantive complaints than Republicans, criticizing not only the infantilization and exploitation of the nude models in his magazine, but the labor conditions at his Playboy Clubs and sexual harassment and abuse within the company. But Hefner was able to triangulate his opponents to such a degree that by the time the Reagan administration started their Commission on Pornography, many feminists were collaborating with them.
Hefner’s was a tactic I see abusive religious organizations using too, abstracting every complaint to the realm of the ideological: people who don’t like Playboy are just against pornography and therefore free speech; people who don’t like my church just resent Christianity and oppose freedom of religion. It distracts from the actual, concrete nature of the accusations, which for Playboy included absolute mountains of sexual abuse allegations towards Hefner and many others in his inner circle.
Hefner was also able to downplay these accusations (for decades!) because the women who were making them were models working for a notorious pornographic magazine. Many people still consider women in the sex industry as more or less “asking for it” when they are raped or abused, or they discount their stories as lies to cover for regret or embarrassment. The circumstances are different when a church group harbors abusers, although the more I think about it, the more similarities I see.
In fundamentalist organizations like the one in my hometown, the belief in patriarchy is so complete that women are considered the property of men, permanent children whose natural tendencies to be dishonest, vindictive, and overly emotional need to be curbed by their husbands and fathers. This is the ideal cover for abusive men (many of whom seek out these kinds of groups) who know that any women who they victimize will be taught to ignore their own intuition and gaslit and silenced if they do come forward. And sexual purity is a cudgel in both cases, with the fundamentalist catch-22 often being that if a woman is violated, she has also sinned and therefore lost some of her credibility to report it.
Ultimately I think you can trace the ideology of both Playboy and Christian Nationalism to the persistence of American patriarchy, with our national daddy issues going all the way back to our revered Founding Fathers. Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy (a bizarre 200-page manifesto arguing for uprooting of Puritan values to allow unfettered capitalism to flourish) lays out a vision for a secular theology of American life, where business titans would become the beloved saints of American capitalism.
Hefner bemoans the populist celebration of the common man during the Great Depression and says that instead we should praise “Uncommon Men” — which was, of course, how he saw himself. He believed he would be looked back on as an American hero, and this megalomania was the perfect basis for the organization he set up around himself, a compound where both men and women worshipped at his feet and came to him for favors and advice, where he had the last word on everything. His supposed progressivism means very little when juxtaposed with this inherently undemocratic belief in Uncommon Men, which happens to be the value that unites the entire American right at this moment.
It makes me think of the recent unholy crossover of the amoral misogynists and pickup artists of the manosphere and right-wing Christian influencers — they can all get behind the demagoguery, racism, sexism, and authoritarianism that MAGA stands for, united by the basic belief that some people (men) are worth more than others and that what this country needs is a strongman to lead it like a father leads his family. ●
You can follow Alice Bolin on Instagram here and buy Culture Creep here.
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