Primadonna Speaks

In which Primadonna’s resident Noticer (who happens to also be the reigning Senior Culture Editor) doles out opinions and observations about happenings in contemporary culture

Anyone who has spent more than seven minutes on any social media site knows that there is no shortage of people writing and talking about current cultural events and trends. Despite the strength of my ability to pretend, I can’t quite manage to delude myself into thinking I’ll be acting as any type of revolutionary in this realm. But regardless of that, I like talking about culture and I think a lot of the things that happen both online and in real life that may seem superficial can actually be very interesting from a sociological standpoint. And through the grace of the Primadonna Executives, I have been given the opportunity to do my favorite thing: overanalyze and talk into the void about things I’m noticing and thinking about. Maybe you’ll agree with me or maybe you won’t or maybe you won’t care at all. Either way, I’m happy to be here, and I hope you can take away something, no matter what is it, from this. 

This week’s listicle of Culture Things, for your consideration:

All cars (and maybe drivers?) are evil now:

Essayist P.E Moskowitz recently wrote about the increasingly awful experience of modern-day driving on their newsletter, Mental Hellth, and I’m so glad they did because this is something I think about a lot. I grew up in the American Southeast, where it was commonplace for teenage boys to modify their pickup trucks to the point of being almost undrivable on the roads. Purple LED lights under the suspension, raising the front tires much higher than the back, creating what we like to call the Carolina Squat (which is now illegal because of how dangerous it is), and, more recently, replacing standard headlights with ones that rival the lights in football stadiums. If you have never had the displeasure of facing down a car with ultra-LED-supreme-hybrid headlights at dusk on a dimly lit road, I’ll tell you a little bit about it. Most plainly, I can describe it as the closest to death I have ever felt; for fifteen to thirty seconds you are rendered almost completely blind, no gauge of the location of the road or other cars or even your car. It is absolutely petrifying and if I never have to experience it again, it will be too soon. While Moskowitz’s essay focuses on how driving itself is worse because, they argue, society is just generally worse, my thinking about this revolves more around the headlights. To me, the increasingly dangerous nature of these Mega Headlights is indicative of just how much American society, combined with ultra capitalism, has made us as a society generally uncaring for our neighbors. This isn’t new news, like at all, but the headlight epidemic is a glaringly (lol) obvious example. Nobody seems to mind how badly their high beams could be endangering other drivers on the road, so long as they can see better. In conclusion, I hate high beams, and I hate what it means for us as a whole.

Why are we still having Carrie Bradshaw discourse?

I’m no exception to the rite of passage as old as time: young woman with fashion-ish aspirations who moves to New York City and watches Sex and the City for the first time. I watched to about the halfway mark of season four of the original series and embarrassingly both seasons of the spinoff. My surprise is not at the fact that the show is still widely celebrated and that the 20-30 year old women of today are still drawn to it. It has everything: costuming consisting of archival designer pieces, a rotating cast of guys who were sexy in that aggressively 90s way, fun and strong female friendships, and most importantly a version of New York that seems both affordable and enjoyable to live in. As is the case with all long-popular media, people talk, discourses are had, all of those things are typical. When it comes to SATC, however, the most common discourse, that happens once a year like tax season, is the complexity of Carrie’s character. Is she a bad friend? Should the girls have dumped her? Should she have stayed with Aidan? Is she the ultimate complex female character? I have no real opinions about the first three, but to the last one I have to say I really don’t think so. I also don’t think her character is as complex as people on the internet like to act like it is. Sure, she was flaky, and self serving. Do I think that having a main female character who was openly and (generally) unapologetically selfish was the most feminist thing anyone has ever done on TV? No, but I’ll admit it was refreshing. People love to use Carrie’s on-again-off-again relationship with Mr. Big (a nickname I never quite grasped) as the primary basis for their discourse. Which I don’t entirely understand. She acted like a moron over a man who didn’t really like her. Myself and pretty much every other young woman I know have done the same, typically more than once. I’m not anti-Carrie or anti-SATC, I just don’t really get why we’ve all decided she is the joker of female characters in TV.

The JoJo Siwa situation:

Womp womp…another person online offering their two-cents about the current actions of the former Dance Moms victim turned Walmart toy isle darling turned singer/internet menace. I don’t have anything to say about the music or the outfits or the vocal fry thing, because I don’t really care. What I will talk about though, is why I feel a moderate amount of sympathy for JoJo. To start, she’s twenty years old. I was a moron when I was twenty years old, and you probably were, too. Granted, that was only two years ago and I’m definitely still a moron, but much more so when I was twenty. That’s an age where most everyone is stupid, it’s expected. However, most people don’t have the platform or resources that Siwa has, so most of us can be twenty year old morons in relative peace. I have been seeing a lot of people lamenting the ‘delusional’ nature of Siwa’s new persona and career moves. Which, sure, she’s not pioneering any type of new movement. However, it strikes me as mildly hypocritical that in a world where you can’t do ten seconds’ worth of a scroll without seeing the word delusional or delulu at least once, it is being weaponized and turned back on someone who, technically, is doing the exact same thing as everyone else. Why can you be a delulu girly but JoJo can’t? Plus, if the timeline of child entertainers turned edgy still rings true, she’ll be over this in like six to nine months, just mute her name on Twitter.

Do Not Disturb:

This isn’t so much as a cultural happening but more something I am deeply fond of that I want to defend here. For roughly the last year, my phone has operated exclusively on Do Not Disturb. I have two exceptions: texts from my immediate family, and call override. This stemmed from early teenagehood when I was terrified of my mom looking at my phone every time it made noise, and has transitioned to a disdain for the constant noise of notification. Not to imply that I’m in such high demand that my phone is constantly plagued with alerts, but I have group chats, I have friends I like to talk to. In addition to DND, I have had all notifications from all apps turned off for at least three years. I don’t need to know every time I get an email or an Instagram message or there’s a sale on train tickets, nobody needs to know that. This isn’t a Holier Than Thou thing, I swear, it’s mainly because I’m quick to overwhelm. But I also think we could all supremely benefit from silencing some notifications, we weren’t meant to spend our time being notified. 

Content Relationships:

I love when history repeats itself. More specifically, when history repeats itself so quickly and obviously. The Youtube channels where the stars were two normal people in a relationship didn’t die, they simply came back stronger as TikTok couple accounts. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sharing some elements of your relationship online, you’re in love and having a good time and that’s great! I do, however, find it a bit odd when people seem hellbent on advertising every single aspect of their relationship, like all the time. This increasing interest in selling your relationship to an anonymous audience fascinates me. I’m a naturally reserved person, and tend to keep cards close to chests and all that, but even beyond that this doesn’t really make sense to me. The act of letting people you’ll never meet feel like they know the intimate ins and outs of your romantic relationship is, I feel, indicative of the fact that the performance element of social media has irreparably damaged our psyches. If nothing can exist without being performed to an audience, then is anything sacred? Probably yes it is, but still, the epidemic of relationship content freaks me out. The size of the audience for it also surprises me, until I remember how badly people want idols, how badly they want semi-blank slates to project onto. I don’t know, I guess its similar to reality television, which I admittedly love. We’re a naturally voyeuristic species, we like to watch and be watched. Also, most of the time I just don’t really care about your boyfriend that much.