white woman is the white woman of the world
with at least one apology to john lennon maybe if i feel like it
The business of online is about turning reality into #content, and so the genre of nasty comments about Renee Good has slowly mutated into its own weird and self-enforcing world. In this world, gangs of deluded white wine moms—hopped up on SSRIs, Adderall, and birth control—have flooded the streets to remind men of school teachers they did not like. They flirt to kill and additionally flirt because they really just want to be dominated by a big burly man in ICE. They do this because they don’t have children (even though they’re wine moms). OK, sure, whatever.
Here’s the question I have: how much does it matter to all this feverish discourse that Renee Good was white?1 Because her—should we even call them “critics”?—her, let’s say, “detractors,” mention her race frequently, and that’s the part that is interesting to me. Why? Why hit that note over and over? Some people I know are pulling out their copies of Male Fantasies to explain what’s going on with the guys in the images above; I think that’s gilding the lily a bit. I would say, they think Renee Good being white makes her less credible in some way. Not to them, necessarily, but to other people. That is, the “white woman” thing is a way of sounding woke to the woke.
Or, to use an image I’ve used on here before:
It is analogous to times when somebody invokes “class” in a way detached from any understanding of class that touches the real world, as in this piece where undergoing $90,000 worth of plastic surgery is Of The People but washing your face daily is not. Yes—I say to the person who is starting to raise a hand—class is not entirely synonymous with money but we aren’t even really at that point in the conversation. It’s just a silly thing to say.2
What you can often get away, discursively, with by stapling “white” onto “woman,” is a way of saying somebody is an annoying out-of-touch bitch without actually saying that. If you said that you’d be way out of line, but you’re talking about Karen. Nobody really wants to go to bat for Karen. Through this one neat trick you can launder both racist and misogynist resentments by pretending you are really limiting your contempt to the definitely real figure of the middle class PMC white woman who presumably makes a lot of money doing a job you consider fake, has a medical diagnosis you consider fake, and does nothing with her life but consume things you consider stupid,3 all while getting lattes from her vaccinista tote bag chic baristas, until she decides to protest in order to fill the void that is her life. If she is not a childless cat lady, she is abandoning her children to annoy our boys in brown, instead of helping out at church.4
If this white woman were real, she would not deserve to be the object of anyone’s contempt either—but it’s not as if anybody who posts this kind of commentary on Renee Good would sing a different tune if she were not white. A term like AWFUL can function as it does because of the protective cover of “white.” However, as anybody who has a modicum of reasoning ability knows when they encounter it, “white” is not limiting whatever criticism is being put forward.
None of the above is a comment on the material status of real white women vis-a-vis other women. It does not mean White Women Most Oppressed Minority. It has to do with the rhetorical meaning of “white woman,” which is, to repeat myself: annoying out-of-touch bitch. And the guys I’ve screenshot are so out of line they’re approaching the line from the other side at this point, yes, but I think they are still deploying this strategy, albeit unsuccessfully. But they just mean women. That is what they mean.
The title of this post has been one I’ve vaguely meant to use in re: the long tail of the case of Justin Baldoni’s alleged attempt to ruin Blake Lively. You might have read that article in 2024 and assumed people, feeling weird about being manipulated, decided to leave this lawsuit alone in the future. You would be wrong! There are like… three, maybe four, separate subreddits mostly dedicated to supporting Baldoni. People play into these bot-driven smear campaigns because it is a way to indulge misogyny while feeling good about yourself.5 And look, do you want to spend your time defending a [net worth here] white lady who [problematic action] back in [some time around ten years ago] and who furthermore [is not particularly talented]? No, you don’t.
No piece of celebrity trashing really matters much, particularly now. But again, this strategy is, in my opinion anyway, about sounding woke to the woke, and I think looking at its use in this more minor and far less serious field clarifies that strategy. Faux woke was a calculated aspect of the Baldoni team’s use of PR: Lively was weaponizing feminism to bully an innocent guy who was the real feminist. So Baldoni’s supporters can and will invoke “white women’s tears” against a white woman accusing a white man of sexual harassment.6 Similarly, it’s easy to find posts saying if Renee Good had killed an ICE officer, people online would be cheering and laughing about it. That is probably true, but it did not happen. Nothing like it happened. Nothing like it has happened. It didn’t happen!
I think the good news here, and it does surprise me to feel like there’s good news, is that what I’d vaguely worried was true, which was that this sort of thing might leak in a meaningful way into the real world if somebody turned this kind of tactic on something that actually mattered, is not true. People are generally not taking this bait. It makes the types of guys screencapped above look unhinged and fixated on race, which they are. And they are mostly preaching to each other: ICE is unpopular. Sometimes, in the war of reality and content, reality wins the battle.
As is standard for political posts on here, I have switched off comments because I don’t really think I’m up to moderating them, but I try to be responsive to email.
Not in the sense of like… “🙃 so you care now huh 🙃.” That kind of point is always somewhat true and yet what people can manage not to care about is endless. I’ve seen so many of these come and go with no evidence that this was the one people cared about.
Not to pull my “I lived in the West Village” card but if you think that area is some haven of pampered faces untouched by the knife, think again.
perhaps she is writing wan little husks of romantasy autofiction
Though if she were helping out at church she’d be a church lady, i.e., an annoying holier-than-thou bitch.
This kind of thing—like the astroturfed “Taylor Swift Nazi merch” affair of a few months ago—is a form of ragebaiting that people who think they’re above ragebait fall for routinely. Anger and paranoia are both useful things to inculcate in people and nobody, including myself, is really so wise to that fact as to be immune. We’re going to keep being offered women like Blake Lively to hate. The reasons will be vague and have to do with things like a failure to read the room. And I don’t think the solution here is to refuse to say anything negative about a public woman ever. It is to keep your dislike contained to concrete things. You think Blake Lively is a bad actress. You think Blake Lively’s getting married at a plantation means she should not have a career. You think Blake Lively is bad because police found human remains and evidence of cannibalism in her LA home that she sold in 2013.
If there were a concrete accusation such as “Blake Lively threw hot coffee at the caterers,” that would be something to have an opinion about. But whether or not Blake Lively is a mean girl with a mean girl vibe is not relevant to you. You don’t know her. You aren’t going to hire her for a job. She is just a face and a voice. So if somebody says you should, for no clear reason, get mad at her, you should—decline. Anyway, does that actually matter w/r/t anything going on in Minnesota or the world of insane online commentary, no, it does not. It was what the old post was going to say though so down here it goes.
A lot of this played out on TikTok, but here’s one example from Reddit. I can’t use TikTok because my FYP is so cursed that even trying to fix it exposes me to levels of damage that I cannot sustain. It’s like: video of somebody getting shot, a video of somebody hitting their kids with the caption “gentle parenting doesn’t work,” video of somebody calling Taylor Swift a Nazi, video of weird AI abomination, video of somebody getting shot—