Cultural Collages: A Study of Media & Identity

Welcome to another exciting installment of my ongoing existential crisis! *releases confetti and balloons* To set the mood, please imagine me just ranting incessantly to myself in an empty lecture hall, perhaps overlooking a river or some other picturesque scene of your choice. ^^

I've touched on this idea before, but history is basically a massive game of telephone spanning thousands of years, yeah? Each subsequent generation, or otherwise link in the chain, takes the knowledge they've inherited from their predecessors and reinterprets it through a filter of their own tastes and biases. It is from a desperate mishmash of these scraps, modified beyond recognition through the ages, that we try to find "ourselves" and where we fit into society, as a whole. The most notable way people do this is through art, which is then itself passed down to the next generation to be reworked and restyled to help them understand themselves.

Specifically, this is an investigation of the origins of some popular themes you see in lesbian (and lesbian-adjacent) culture and how they have manifested themselves and changed shape through history. This is kind of a very specific and personal essay, actually, but perhaps other people will relate and get something from it, as well? Also, as a disclaimer, I've kinda irrecoverably rotted my brain from literally over a decade of being addicted to Tumblr, and that has, unfortunately and undeniably, had an major impact on how I perceive myself and the rest of the world. With that in mind, here are the main topics we'll be looking at:

Other things may come up along the way, also – namely, tangential comparisons between historical phenomena and the modern day or popular modern misconceptions, etc. Again, this is basically an attempt to "untangle the webs of history," at least a little bit, in hopes of better understanding those who came before us and how we got to where we are today.


But first, a little rant on the idea of "identity," itself! In Oscar Wilde's 1889 essay, "The Decay of Lying," the character Vivian explains how reality is rather boring and how, underneath it all, people are fundamentally the same with the only significant differences between us coming from the various "masks" we wear and the narratives we come up with for ourselves and the people around us.

Personally, as you may have guessed from reading literally anything else on this site, I'm particularly interested in peeking under these façades and the underlying frameworks that hold up society and whatnot… but, also, I think this interest has kind of led me down into a bottomless nihilist spiral. So, I suppose Vivian, in his distaste for cold, boring reality, may have a point: perhaps there is a human need to interject some sort of whimsy into our lives, to approach the world as if we're actors in a stage play or something?

But, still, when you look at how this idea has been adapted into the modern day, I can’t help but cringe from disgust, not even necessarily due to some dislike of acting, but strictly because it doesn't even seem like people are having fun doing this – it all just feels so serious and consumeristic! For example, on social media, there's a growing obsession with "aesthetics." As Vogue writer Sarah Spelling explains, your "aesthetic" is basically described as a highly idealized, homogenous version of your so-called "inner world," which plays a role in "shaping your identity" – or, at least, how you outwardly express it. Later, she summarizes it as being "like choosing a movie in which to inhabit."

Sure, that sounds fun and whimsical on the surface and everything, but she then goes on to talk about how your aesthetic is pretty much like a "personal brand," which even average, independent citizens are pressured to develop on social media, flattening them down from being a full, dynamic human being into a one dimensional, easily marketable object. Now, self-objectification is by no means a new concept in feminist thought, but the way that this is all described so neutrally (or even positively!) in Spelling's article feels so dystopian to me! How can you even say the words "personal brand" without physically vomiting?!

You also see a similar idea a lot in artist communities online, where people worry about finding their "style" and how to appeal more to "the Algorithm" to get fame and followers. This ultimately results in them pigeonholing themselves into a specific niche and being to scared to ever experiment with their art, leading them down a path of burnout and eventually losing interest in art, altogether. Rather than focusing on personal expression and the joy of creating art, your focus shifts to anxiety over how the outside world experiences you, as a product.

This modern exponential alienation from the self can especially be seen with the growing idea that "you are just a brain piloting a meatsuit" or "your hardware is separate from your software" or whatever cutesy variant thereof that you might prefer to describe mind-body dualism. Like I said earlier, this sort of language just serves to disconnect you from yourself – you no longer see yourself as a composite, full human being, but rather some sort of object with interchangeable parts, like a customizable character à la The Sims or a Picrew. But, beyond that, it also leads to the desire to make "your outsides match what's inside," whatever that may mean…

In a now deleted article written by Substack author Fairypage (who now goes by Fairyland), she criticized what she termed the "new dualism," comparing it to Sexual Inversion Theory from the early twentieth century, and talked about how this mindset especially flourishes in our modern, highly consumerist lives. The article itself is no longer accessible and I can't find a working link of it on the Way Back Machine either, but here's a surviving quote, saved on a post where Fairypage advertised the article:

This extreme consumerism is readily apparent throughout Spelling's article. From the very first lines, we see Spelling grapple with that discomfort of being unable to tie all of her interests and interior design choices into one neat, prepackaged identity, like social media tells her everyone should have:

On occasion, I’ll take a look in my closet, my apartment, and my social media accounts and wonder, what does all this add up to?Is there any throughline between the Bed Bath and Beyond beige plates, the Hermès champignons scarf I tracked down on eBay, the nun-shaped candle on my desk, and the crispy oven mitt printed with a 1950s housewife saying “I’ve got a knife”? Is there any visual connection between the table I found on Facebook marketplace and the IKEA Billy bookshelves present in many millennial households? (Mine are painted in Benjamin Moore’s Alligator Alley green). What I’m asking in these moments is, in internet parlance, what is my aesthetic? I’m wondering if I have successfully arranged my life to adhere to some cohesive vision. If I look too long, anxiety sets in. Maybe the answer is no?

Like, she obviously isn't having fun here, she isn't playing pretend – she's looking at boring, mundane reality, and trying desperately to spin it into something ~ more ~. But that's just not how life works: why does any of this matter so much? Does the design on your napkins really say anything about who you are? Are you no longer yourself if you wear a different style of clothing than usual? Do you really think it's possible to learn everything you need to know about someone from a mere glance? Do you as a person only exist skin deep? Is that really a goal you want to aspire to??


Also, since this series of essays is concerned with various "identities" and "aesthetics" that have meant a lot to me along the way, I figured it would probably be helpful to provide a brief personal bio so you can better understand where I'm coming from in all of this…

I joined Tumblr back in the day (2013) because I was a lonely outcast in real life, who was made fun of at school for liking anime (among other things). I imagine that that was basically other people's motivation for joining Tumblr, as well, considering that was the first time I really found a "community" of apparently like-minded individuals. Beyond just fandom, roleplaying, cosplaying, writing fanfics, etc, I really have to admit that, while the way Tumblr treated gay people back then wasn't perfect by any means, those posts with like a million notes saying "reblog if you support gay people" were genuinely very comforting to thirteen-year-old me… But there's a lot of additional baggage that comes with this.

Even if (or perhaps especially if) you try to replace reality with fiction, you still desperately want to find and be able to describe your "identity," just like Spelling describes in her article. And as I looked at myself from the outside and the media I was absorbed in, I saw myself reflected much more in men than women. A lot of this basically just amounted to simply preferring the practicality and aesthetics of my male classmates' clothes over more "feminine" styles, or an attempt to dissociate myself from internalized misogynistic stereotypes… From a feminist perspective, there are many confounding reasons, ranging from how female characters are often either written shallowly or outright missing from stories, or needlessly subjected to violent / sexual abuse, or how their narratives and character arcs seem to always center heterosexual romance and eventually having children, etc. And just how women in general and their interests are looked down on by society. (And other reasons that are a bit too personal to talk about, honestly…)

But, beyond all that, beyond all the logical, feminist arguments I could make, perhaps one of the biggest reasons that I found myself projecting onto the male protagonist was because of his attraction to the leading lady. For example, I was obsessed with Fire Emblem: Awakening when I was younger, and from my second playthrough on (I've done several), I played as male!Robin so I'd be able to marry Cherche. And similarly, when reading classic novels, which we'll be talking about more in the following chapters, I'd imagine myself in "masculine" roles romantically. It got to the point where I remember texting back and forth with a girl I had a crush on in middle school and feeling so happy, thinking about how it was like I was ~ her boyfriend ~. And later on, I'd fantasize about being my favorite character's ~ knight ~…

Even on Tumblr, a site with a majority female userbase and a site that claimed to "love the gays more than the gays love the gays," there was woefully little discussion of women who loved women. Or, at least, I wasn't seeing it: I had so thoroughly distanced myself from ~ womanhood ~ and all of the (or, rather, what I thought were) intrinsic stereotypes and sexualization it entails that I'd completely dismissed that as an option. There's no way I could be a lesbian – these dreams about kissing girls could mean anything, just ask Google! And, furthermore, I'm not even a woman!! A lot of people I was following at the time seemed to be having similar 'revelations'… This started in middle school and extended up into college.

What got me out of it? Honestly, I took a Russian Lit course with an amazing professor that made me completely rethink how I looked at the world. I let go of my "whatever floats your boat" attitude I had in my youth and started asking questions and reading old books, newsletters, etc that helped show that I wasn't alone in my feelings, that other women in other parts of the world and even in different centuries have felt the same ways I do…

But, to be honest, I just don't know. Like I said earlier, taking a Nihilist approach to life – saying that there's no narrative, no greater meaning to life, we're just simple carbon-based lifeforms on a rock we're slowly killing in the middle of cold, heartless space, etc etc – has just been so depressing, y'know? But, in the modern day, the only other option seems to be equally soulless consumerism and self-objectification… I don't have any answers. All I can do is present and discuss what I've observed from various books, poems, paintings, social media posts, etc – my little cobbled together collage of artistic fragments, past and present – and desperately try to make sense of it all…