CULTURE CREEP

Critical reflection from deep in the trenches of pop culture.

The touch points for Bolin’s essay collection are not the usual suspects of recent pop culture analysis—neither billboard stars nor social media tropes of the 2020s are under the microscope here. Instead, she looks slightly backward, to the steady diet of MTV video countdowns, reality television, glossy magazines, and meandering trips to the mall, that shaped—and still hold a strong, nostalgic grip on—millennial women. In a style shared by many of her contemporaries, Bolin self-consciously burrows into and through her own restlessness, disappointment, and wary curiosity to form a reflective analysis of topics from fitness trackers to Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. For those not fluent in her cultural material, the author’s personal investment bolsters the sincerity of her inquiry and the applicability of her hypothesis. The predicament into which corporate executives have pushed us, Bolin suggests, is as problematic as a cult, and our wistful loyalty to the individuals and narratives they have sold draws women into their own oppression. Bolin is determined to exhume what makes these cultural influences both so compelling and so problematic, and her exhaustive probing sometimes becomes fumbling or overdrawn. But, repeatedly, she stops just short of full-blown rant to press quote-worthy, crystalline passages of chilling clarity into the reader’s palm about how the ambitions of patriarchy and capitalism dovetail and how their impact has watered down the promises of feminism for a generation. (Essays on the NXIVM cult and on the teen magazine industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s are particularly, disturbingly excellent.) If power comes from clear-eyed, uncompromising knowledge, Bolin’s text is a tool for the takedown of more current trends of consumerism, oppression, and the new technology that fuels them.

A ferocious defense of a generation of women against the forces that made them.