Tinder and One Direction: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Highlights from seven days of reading about entertainment

Eat, Pray, Post
Navneet Alang | The New Republic
“When ... global culture flows in mostly one direction—the fact that it is in English and borrows its style from Brooklyn and L.A.-based blogs—we have a larger problem: Virality starts to look like soft cultural imperialism. It’s an assertion of Western values, neatly packaged as 7 GIFs You Won’t Believe.”

Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse
Nancy Jo Salas | Vanity Fair
“As the polar ice caps melt and the earth churns through the Sixth Extinction, another unprecedented phenomenon is taking place, in the realm of sex. Hookup culture, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship.”

Miles Teller Is Young, Talented, and Doesn’t Give a Rat’s Ass What You Think
Anna Peele | Esquire
“The waitress delivers the entrées, scallops for him and pork belly for you. The pork looks great and you offer him some. ‘I’ll take a little bit,’ he says, sawing at it. Then: ‘I can’t cut this.’ You have to cut his meat for him, a man who 10 minutes earlier showed you an iPhone photo of his back muscles to prove how strong he is.”

One Direction Are Our Manic Pixie Boy Band
Lindsay Zoladz | Vulture
“They’re a boy band perfectly compatible with the coming era of the strong woman. They worship her even more than she worships them. Four humble, immaculately coiffed servants bowing to millions and millions of queens.”

Death of a Mockingbird
Elaine Showalter | Literary Review
“Scout is no longer a six-year-old tomboy, furious that she cannot do everything Jem does, but an adult very uncomfortable with the imprisoning feminine role.”

Alternatives to Alternatives: The Black Grrrls Riot Ignored
Gabby Bess | Broadly
“The Riot Grrrl box may have been decidedly off-limits in the eyes of Brown and other black women who couldn’t see themselves in the movement, but as Davis points out, these women shirked boxes, created their own wave, and reclaimed rock for black women. After all, rock music is black music.”

Gwen Stefani, Nicki Minaj, Jennifer Garner, and the Dilemma of the Powerful Woman
Molly Lambert | Grantland
“Tabloids help keep women in a permanent state of fear—that women, even powerful women, need to make themselves subservient to their male partners in some way and that even if you do that, it’s no guarantee the male won’t roam and seek out somebody younger and hotter. It’s misogyny, but it’s also misandry—making all men out to be insecure assholes who can’t help but be emasculated by women’s success.”

Op-Ed: I’m Breaking up With Drake
Meaghan Garvey | Pitchfork
“Drake is the chilling logical extreme of the beta male’s triumph over the last decade: the ultimate evolution of the nerd turned jock, forever working every angle of his underdog status that may or may not have ever been merited but certainly isn’t anymore.”