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	Open in app or online TikTok self-diagnoses and the last true romantics. thought digest, 10.29.2022 Katherine Dee Oct 29   ▷  Listen Save   I’ve been busy!  In the last few months, I’ve spoken at Urbit Assembly, sleuthed around the National Conservatism Conference, visited Colombia, visited the Netherlands, appeared on Tucker Carlson, embarked on my first investigative reporting piece about something that’s not internet culture (Big Pharma), kickstarted a second one (also about healthcare), made several good faith efforts to become a Blue Check(™), wrote, finished, and submitted a book proposal, planned a wedding, re-booted The Computer Room and found the best co-host anyone could ask for… and that’s to say nothing of all the interpersonal drama I’ve caused on purpose, the articles I’ve written, the podcasts I’ve appeared on, and the AMVs I’ve binge watched for several weeks in a row while putting off deadlines.  From The Carousel Oh, and I’ll be speaking at the Zephyr Institute in Palo Alto alongside Alexei Grinbaum and Jean-Pierre Dupuy in a couple of weeks. That’s kind of fucked up. Or maybe it’s not. It’s surreal, though. Anyway, all this to say, Twitter really owes me that blue check.  Here’s what else has been on my mind:  Animesexuality. In the past month, I’ve become fascinated by men who are genuinely attracted to anime. Until recently, I had never thought much about it, and when I did, I wrote it off as a sublimation of pedophilia. A little bit of hentai in one’s porn diet is one thing, an affection for what I can’t seem to stop calling “anime biddies” is another, entirely.  Found-object from my friend’s Twitter likes. There was something inherently threatening about it, so I demonized it without considering its contours. I’m not talking about lolicon (here’s a safe-for-work link to click if you don’t know what that is) here either, but the romanticization of anime women more generally. I didn’t like it. It freaked me out. But I’m not so sure about my initial assumptions anymore, and writing it off as a pathology was lazy.  You know, I often get upset with people for assuming that I hold the same beliefs about sex as many of the writers I promote, or movements that I try to document. I’m always arguing that I’m writing about the conversation about the conversation. Media about media. I’m a sociologist; a media theorist; anything but someone who promotes an actual position. But the truth is my critics are right–I was tacitly promoting them. Not tacitly, actually. I just was.  There was something about that worldview that felt comforting and stable. I’m not confident that more structure is the way forward anymore: that’s the cope of the Digital Age. More rigidity. Something tells me that’s why the Very Online tends to eventually veer towards authoritarianism. The mind craves it in a world with so much chaos and information.  What’s the answer here? I don’t know. But “RETVRN” can’t happen in a world where the curtain never closes on digital connectivity, at least, not without serious tech regulation.  To the topic of men who love animated women, though… I’d be interested in reading what other people have written about it, but my sense is there are three primary expressions:  One manifestation, probably the one most of us are immediately familiar with, is as a collector or consumer. I’m not too interested in this, and I’m sure people have written about it before more articulately than I can. Still, I’d be remiss not to mention it. I suspect this is pure masturbation, whereas I don’t think the others are. I think for other people it’s much more complicated.  I suspect for some people, maybe most, an attraction to anime women is almost completely divorced from real-world sexuality. It’s a separate headspace–I think of this form of detachment as almost trance-like. I know I myself experience it sometimes; it’s also what I’ve been trying to articulate with respect to why school shooters are able to commit such atrocities. You leave yourself, for better and for worse.  The attraction you experience in this state is cerebral, even if physical arousal happens. The anime woman exists in another dimension. Another similarity I see is how, as a teen, I was able to “be attracted” to fictional characters. I did feel real pangs of longing, but where did those come from? What was I longing for? Clearly, something, and it was real. It was just not the type of real most people are able to recognize and talk about.   Like so many things in this realm, we don’t have the language to describe these types of relationships, as age-old as they are. Surely, the internet-addled or anime-addled aren’t the first to find their own Beatrices within the caverns of their minds.  A related phenomenon is how easy it is to fall in love with someone over text. MTV’s Catfish is built on this premise. Love letters are built on this premise. But what are you falling in love with, really? It can be indistinguishable from physically-inspired love. But you’re more in love with your engagement with the text than the text itself. There’s a story I once read that I return to often. A couple falls in love in a chatroom, or maybe it was a MUD. They meet, there’s no chemistry. They return and re-read their chatlogs. They’d imagined the chemistry, even in the text. The connection, like the connection users imagined with ELIZA, was invented. But it was no less real.  For other people, I think it’s more that anime women represent an ideal. It is true romanticism. As my friend Catherine put it, “It’s very romantic to have such an idealized concept of beauty that you reject women.”  On Twitter, I received this response to my initial question about it, which also rings true: Mike Lindell Groyper @Groyper_mike @default_friend Modern women are unattractive, immature but not innocent, unpleasant - to the point that the ideal does not produce “images” but rather the “image” is the ideal. It’s not that the animeposters aren’t truly attracted to women, they are just purists. 4:24 PM ∙ Oct 25, 2022 14Likes1Retweet Perhaps what I’m and what Catherine and Mike Lindell Groyper are gesturing towards is a sort of divine or artistic inspiration.  Maybe our new world makes us all artists. There’s a lot to think about here.  TikTok self-diagnosis. Today, The New York Times published an article titled, “Teens Turn to TikTok in Search of a Mental Health Diagnosis.” Before even reading the article, my eyes rolled back so far into my head that they got stuck, and I had to go to urgent care. Self-diagnosis as a form of meaning-making and digital community, like everything else, has a long history. And I don’t mean surfing WebMD, or the various digital Munchausen’s sideshow attractions, either. Default Wisdom "Multiple Personality Disorder or DID Seems Prevalent Online." Read more 5 months ago · 33 likes · 6 comments · Katherine Dee Without getting into the shit that was happening on Usenet, just think of recent history. On LiveJournal, people needed to justify their angst-ridden confessionals, and suddenly everyone was a depressive. Ditto for MySpace, as it allowed that same impulse to be aestheticized. And then came Tumblr, with its tagging culture, and the possibilities exploded. (It’s worth noting here that, arguably, thousands of under-socialized men are operating under the assumption they’re autistic thanks to Twitter.) Everything that alarms us about TikTok alarms us about the Internet, period.  Early 2000s eating disorder-core. I’ve always wondered to what extent things like this had to do with the alarmism around pro-anorexia: Hunter 👻🦇 @poshspicelatte There’s a book begging to be written about mid-2000s eating-disordercore. Why was everything like that? 3:58 PM ∙ Oct 26, 2022 119,854Likes7,901Retweets But I’ll leave that for another day.  Some housekeeping:  Mary Harrington is on Substack now! Consider checking her stuff out here. Really, try to make it out to this Zephyr Institute event. It’s on November 6th. I may also do a Bay Area meet-up that weekend if there’s enough interest. Our next book club pick is My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh. The discussion date is TBD but likely in late November.  The Computer Room is back. I will continue to release interviews behind a paywall as often as possible, and new free episodes will be out bi-weekly. My new co-host is @poetrygrifter–feels good to have a co-pilot again. Listen to our latest episode here. What do you think of the new Substack theme? I feel compelled to change it more often than necessary. I didn’t love the pastel yellow. Recent pieces from me: Interview with a Sissy #1  She, Robot: An Interview with Danisha Carter  Witchcraft is not Gen Z’s new religion  That’s all I’ve got for now. See you all soon. You’re a free subscriber to Default Wisdom. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid   Like Comment Share   © 2022 Default Friend 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe