Issue 1 Fall 2022

ISSUE ONE COVER ART

Front Cover: Eliza Youngman

Back Cover: Dasha Klein

ALTERNATIVE STUDENT NEWSPAPER

Saffron Forsberg and Teagan Hughes Co-Editors-in-Chief

Reggie Goudeau Features Editor

Fionna Farrell

Opinions Editor

Raghav Raj Arts and Culture Editor

Isabel Hardwig Bad Habits Editor

Skye Jalal, Zach Terrillion, Catie Kline, Anna Holshouser-Belden and Max Miller Staff Writers

Julian Crosetto Layout Editor

Olive Polken Art Director

Frances McDowell and Molly Chapin Production Assistants

If you’re reading this, you’re holding a copy of The Grape – a labor-of-love for baby-journalists and music dweebs and impassioned activists and every other so-and-so who has graced this funny little campus for going on 24 years now. We’re Oberlin’s alternative student newspaper. And we’re so happy to be here.

And we think you’re in good hands. We, Teagan and Saffron, are so passionate about this thing. We love The Grape so damn much and we think it shows. During our years with The Grape, we’ve written many articles exploring many topics. The Grape is such a beautiful, humble, entirely student-led endeavor where young writers can try on new, more confident voices. You can truly write about anything and that can feel, well, empowering! Is that corny? Maybe. But it feels true. We EICs have sometimes (often) felt alienated at this strange little bubble of elite academia. Teagan’s from Appalachian Ohio – a rare Ohioan at Oberlin, we know! – and Saffron’s from working-class Texas. We’re small-town editors of sorts and we share a passion for socioeconomic and regional justice – we’ve bonded over a mutual interest in giving those points-of-view a voice. It feels special that we’re here writing you this editor’s note. We cherish the goofy, clunky Grape and all those who have written and created for it over the years, especially those who needed a place to feel heard. It’s endlessly rewarding to carry on such a tradition…even if it’s starting to induce stress dreams.

Our wonderful staff & our lovely contributors have put together an amazing first issue of the semester (a massive thank you to them for all of their hard work!), and we sincerely hope you enjoy it. As always, if you would like to contribute to The Grape (in the form of writing or visual art!), our contributors’ meetings are open to all! You can follow us on Insta gram or Twitter @TheOberlinGrape for more info. If you’d like to join our mailing list (or if you have any general questions or comments!), you can shoot us an email at thegrape@oberlin.edu.

We dearly appreciate everyone who reads The Grape. We hope you have a wonderful Fall Break, and a wonderful se mester overall.

All the best, Saffron & Teagan, Editors-in-Chief of The Grape

Rhiannon Giddens (OC ‘00) Graces Finney Chapel with Franceso Turrisi

Saffron Forsberg Editor-In-Chief

Despite the heft of her accolades, Rhi annon Giddens still worries you may flee during the show’s intermission. The famed Oberlin Conservatory alum played a rare noontime show at Finney Chapel, a full house, last Monday as part of Oberlin’s 142nd Artist Recital Series. It would’ve been its 144th if not for the pandemic. Alongside her longtime collaborator Fran cesco Turrisi – “meeting him was the best thing that has happened to me in the last five years” she admits – Giddens led a twoand-a-half-hour show, lulling her audience of alumni, students, faculty, and loyal fans to a trance with an expansive host of songs: early Creole folk numbers, rich jazz and blues tunes, ballet suites, chest-clutching Shakespearian opera, and Italian love songs… with particular nods to Alice Ge rard and Paul Simon and Ethel Waters.

Giddens is humble and sweet about her striking talent and vision. Her stage pres ence is profoundly bodily, deep red hair gathered into a knot on the base of her head, shoulder length earrings brushing her face as she drifts across genres and con tinents, shrugging on and off a slight banjo. It’s a reproduction from 1858 – something akin to the Afro-Caribbean instruments played by early African American musicians before their subsequent adoption by white minstrel performers. “All those Black banjo players, we erase them when we cut that [history] out,” she tells her rapt audience. “We don’t like to talk about [minstrelsy] but it’s there…most popular form of enter tainment for 80 years. It’s in our cartoons.” Authentic instrumentation and an atten tion to its contextual groundwork are just a few aspects of Giddens’ commitment to the historical upkeep of folk tradition.

This commitment to folk tradition –especially that of Black, Southern perform

ers – is fascinating considering her musi cal origins. Giddens studied Italian opera at Oberlin. You can hear it in the diligent conservatory-cleanness that lies behind the Creole spirit of her sound. “When I was last on this stage, I was just a singer,” she says, referring to her 5th-year senior recital.

“Well not ‘just’...we’re musicians too!” Gid dens now plays the banjo, fiddle, and, her favorite, the viola. Beside her, Turrisi pulls warmly at an accordion. “I went home [to North Carolina] and retrained on banjo,” she explains. “I couldn’t get into the banjo until I got into the world the banjo comes from…which is a world of slavery and vio lence.”

Throughout her recital, Giddens speaks on underscoring “what we don’t talk about” in her music. How can music be an activist gesture? In what ways is it limited as such?

“It’s great to have that [activist] sentiment; where do you take it after the concert? … What are we doing in our own lives, in our own communities?” Before singing her own rendition of “Build a House,” one of the earliest known “slave songs” of the early 1600s, she tells her audience: “whenever I have a chance to highlight the nameless, I try to do it. … It’s not even just having a seat at the table; it’s changing the table.”

At the show’s conclusion – the shortest nearly-three-hours of my life – Giddens steps from the mic and clasps her hands together. You can feel everyone leaning over in their Finney pews. What else could she possibly have up her sleeve? “I’m go ing to sing a song from my senior recital,” she says. We laugh knowingly. It’s a sparse operatic piece from Porgy and Bess – the breathtaking “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”. A gift.

Illustration by Saffron Forsberg

For Edmonia: Visiting Artist yétúndé

ọlágbajú Comes to Oberlin

Skye Jalal Staff Writer

At Oberlin, it can be easy to forget just how old these buildings are. This past week, yétúndé ọlágbajú visited the campus as a part of the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s visiting art ist program. Their stay here entailed two studio workshops, a performa tive lecture delivered at the museum, and the creation of a collaborative artwork now housed in the Edmo nia Lewis Center on South Campus. Olágbajú is a multidisciplinary artist from Oakland, California. Their work deals with themes of ancestry, labor, and healing. It is described as “rooted in the need to understand history, the people that made it, the myths and realities surrounding them, and how their own identity is implicated in history’s timeline — past, present, and future.”

All of the work ọlágbajú did at Oberlin was in honor of Mary Edmo

nia “Wildfire” Lewis, a prominent Black and Native American sculptor of the late 19th century and former Oberlin student. Edmonia Lewis at tended Oberlin College beginning in 1859 and lived on the second floor of Keep Cottage. In 1862, Lewis was accused of poisoning her two white roommates’ wine. She was attacked and brutalized by a white mob over the incident in the backyard of Keep Cottage before her case went to trial. Represented by another Oberlin alum, John Mercer Langston, Lewis was eventually acquitted of all charges re lating to the alleged poisoning. How ever, Lewis was later accused of steal ing supplies from the art department and was barred by the administra tion under Marianne Dascomb from enrolling in her final semester. After Oberlin, Lewis received the support of abolitionists to continue her artistic

Print by yétúndé ọlágbajú Visiting Artist

practice in Boston, before moving to London, then Florence, and eventu ally establishing a sculpture studio in Rome. Edmonia Lewis received great critical acclaim for her work in marble sculpture, becoming the first professional Afro-Indigenous sculptor and one of the only female sculptors practicing in Rome at the time.

Yétúndé ọlágbajú became acquaint ed with Edmonia Lewis several years ago when encountering an image of Lewis on their Instagram feed. Olág bajú quickly realized certain physi cal similarities the two shared, and in further research, would recognize similarities in their geography and life experiences. While in residence with This Will Take Time In 2020, this kinship with Edmonia Lewis eventu ally culminated in the “For Edmonia”

project: a cultivation of different writings, artworks, and even a library program in honor of Lewis. Included was the limited edition release of a print, one of which was acquired by the AMAM in 2021.

Olágbajú’s work in the Allen deals deeply with the concept of positives and negatives. The piece is a color screen print of a paper collage com posed of images of Edmonia Lewis’s work and Lewis herself. The work’s central figure is the silhouette of a bust resembling Lewis, shaped out of cropped and layered images of her marble works. Much of the bust’s facial area is bare; a hole is left, ex posing the black paper underneath. To the right of the central figure is a photo of Lewis herself, with an ir regular shape giving the effect that it was ripped out of something larger. In the lower section of the artwork, are two square-shaped images of marble detailing. It can be assumed that these are cropped images of Lewis’s work, yet their dismember ment makes it unclear to which pieces they belong. The question of memory, and the combination of fact and myth that comprises it, is prevalent in this work. The collage is an honoring of both Edmonia Lewis as she was and of her modern understanding, recre ated through her artwork and history. ọlágbajú acknowledges the gap be tween those two entities. The collage centers not the image of Edmonia Lewis but a muddled reconstruction of her with something missing in the middle. It establishes the difference between who Edmonia Lewis was and who we know her to be, and upholds both truths as essential in creating her legacy.

Olágbajú’s time with the Oberlin community began Wednesday with two cyanotype printing workshops. When workshop attendees arrived, ọlágbajú had arranged an array of positive and negative images of Ed monia Lewis, her work, and memo rial candles and flowers printed onto transparency paper. Groups worked to cut out the images and layer them into collages on pretreated cyanotype fabric. Some people chose to only trim away the excess material around the images, some cut out specific

parts or objects from the images, and some cut out their own shapes with hearts, stars, and abstract lines. After arranging the collages, the groups put the fabric under UV light, causing the exposed part of the printed transparency to turn the fabric blue and the unexposed to remain white, recreating the images on the fabric. Olágbajú spoke about enjoying printmaking and collage since both practices resemble Lewis’s work in marble. Counterintuitively, printmaking and collage are in ways more akin to marble than even other forms of sculpture. Unlike working with clay, when you cut or carve some thing away, you can’t put it back. You have to be able to envision something and cut it out from its excess. Printmaking, like marble sculpture, isn’t decided by what you create but by what you take away.

On Thursday, ọlágbajú delivered a lecture at the King Sculpture Court of the AMAM. To begin, they asked the audience, “Who do you bring with you?” The question is a call to consider the multiple lives, ancestral or living, that comprise every individual identity. It re surfaced again at the end of the lecture when ọlágbajú asked the audience to open envelopes left on each seat. Inside were a pencil, a slip of paper, and a bead. Olág bajú asked us to write down who we envisioned “bringing” with us and a word or phrase to express an intention towards that pres ence. The audience then gathered outside in a circle on the north lawn of the AMAM, and ọlágbajú guided us to speak that word or intention into our beads. Olágbajú then came around and strung each bead in our hands to the next as we spoke our intention to the group. The string spread out wide across the entire expanse of the lawn, connecting us all from a distance. Then, ọlágbajú came and collected the string from our hands, allow ing the beads to fall on each other. The beads that once stretched almost the length of the building then only rested upon a couple of short feet of string. Olágbajú called us to consider how this practice is symbolic of how even though we may have come into the space from wildly different backgrounds, much of our intentions are rooted in the same place.

During their studio hours, ọlágbajú was sewing the rectangles of fabric printed during the work

shops into a quilt as a group of students sat around them string ing more beads. I spoke with them about how the discussion of Lew is’s legacy has been difficult for me to process. On the one hand, I have an urge to scream her name from every rooftop on this cam pus to make everyone reckon with the trauma she experienced here. On the other hand, I have this question of how much her name is even ours to speak about. Just as ọlágbajú’s piece in the Allen conveys, I also can feel the parts of Edmonia Lewis’s legacy that have been lost and rearranged. Much of the discussion on this campus cen ters around rectifying the blatant injustices she faced here, but what about how she took her coffee?

What type of music did she like? What used to make her smile?

There are so many things about her that we don’t know. After al ready being held critically respon sible for the sins of this campus, why must her name also be held responsible for its redemption?

What can be added back, when so much has been taken away?

The statement about inten tion on the AMAM lawn was very poignant for me because the entire time I had been wondering how many of those same white hands beading the strand would have mo bilized to protect Edmonia Lewis a century ago. The Allen Museum has a single work of Lewis’s, a marble bust of James Peck Thom as. I can’t decide whether or not I feel it belongs there, less than half a mile down the street from the backyard where she was almost beaten to death.

How does this campus initi ate the process of atonement for someone who is no longer alive to accept its forgiveness? Experienc ing ọlágbajú’s work, in its deliber ate, respectful, and intentional exploration of honor and memorywas the first time I began to feel that there may be a way to. It is a process that was already initiated by black faculty who have kept Lewis’s legacy alive on this campus for decades, and continued by the black students who championed the reinstatement of the Edmonia Lewis Center in 2021. Whether that process will be continued by the rest of the Oberlin community, or whether those who strung beads in Lewis’s name will also protect the black women on this campus who are still alive, is yet to be known.

Print by yétúndé ọlágbajú Visiting Artist

Joining the Global Conversation: Oberlin Partners with UNITAR

Fionna Farrell Opinions Editor

In late September, Oberlin announced that it would be joining forces with UNITAR (UN Institute for Training and Research) and GFPA (Global Foundation for the Perform ing Arts) in an exciting, wide-ranging new partnership. As per the GFPA website, these partnerships’ main goal is to “expand interna tional student access to world-class academic and musical instruction.” Although the part nerships include a cohort of other highereducation institutions across the country, the Oberlin partnership is the only one focused entirely on undergraduate studies, ostensibly allowing students worldwide to attend the institution.

It’s clear that Oberlin staff have huge visions for the potential outcomes of this partnership, in the future both near and far. As Conserva tory Dean William Quillen told the Review, “Really, the goal is a much broader institu tional partnership that is not only relegated to specific courses or specific seminars or sorts of things, but really a much, much, much big ger, longer, lasting institutional partnership.” Besides allowing students in UN member countries to attend Oberlin, other goals for the partnership include initiating a summer English immersion program and working with the UN on joint practice initiatives, such as performance and research opportunities—the first of which will be kicking off in December at Carnegie Hall, where Oberlin’s orchestra and choir will perform in front of the U.N. General Assembly.

Although its impact might not be visible in the next few months, this partnership repre sents an important path forward within Ober lin’s progressive history. For an institution that has been a bastion of liberalism since the 19th century, it is more critical now than ever that Oberlin takes steps to participate in this global conversation and initiative. In the com ing months, we’ll be able to see just what this looks like for a school of Oberlin’s size and stature. Other schools across the country that participate in similar programs include Lehigh University, the University of Washington, De paul University and Northeastern University— universities, not colleges, which are tenfold Oberlin’s size.

UNITAR ambassador Marco Suazo had this to say of Oberlin in particular, though: “We have found a partner with a history of produc

ing graduates dedicated to serving the world.” President Ambar echoes this sentiment, stating “The principles behind this collabora tion are consistent with Oberlin’s heritage and goals for the future.” In the past, Oberlin has been a leading progressive voice on the domestic front; in 2004, we were named one of the “dozen Distinctive Destinations” na tionwide. But what does Oberlin’s initiative look like on a global scale? Thus far, our work around the world has been mostly relegated to environmental issues, such as, in 2010,

when Oberlin became one of eighteen cities across the globe to sign the Clinton Climate Initiative. Moreover, over the past few years, Oberlin Conservatory Global has also offered virtual classes to music students of various levels across the world. But it’s more long last ing, intersectional initiatives like the UNITAR partnership that will help cement together our myriad goals and dedications, hopefully per petuating our historical legacy for the better.

Ilustration by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

Dirty Blonde; or, The Late-Stage Hollywood Biopic

Zach Terrillion Staff Writer

CW: Brief mentions of assault, sexual con tent, EDs, mental struggles, misogyny, and abortion

1 hour and 45 minutes into Blonde, Netflix’s new 2 hour and 46 minute fictionalized biogra phy of Marilyn Monroe, I hit a revelation. It was like the giant STOP sign that, quite subtly, en courages Monroe in the film to not get rid of her baby. A flip of the brain. A deus ex machina. A rage-quit. In the scene, Marilyn stumbles upon the typewriter of her then-husband, playwright Arthur Miller. On the typewriter is a page of dialogue recounting a conversation between the two. In it, she asks her husband to never write about her. He asks, “why?” She says, “it’s what people do. Sometimes. Writers.”

In this scene, she is reprimanding the media system. The one that picks and prods apart her every joy and pain. That casts her out into the predatory court of public opinion. It’s a violation she’s aware of and wants to stop. Supposedly, the movie wants it to stop too. The issue, I real ized, is that director Andrew Dominik is pulling the very act Marilyn fears. He does “what people do.” Exploit.

At first glance, Blonde is one of many new models on a conveyor belt of biopics. It comes out only a few months after this summer’s Elvis. We’ve got one on Queen, Elton John, Tammy Faye, and another for Whitney Houston this December. The 2-hour job that puts a famous actor in thick make-up and assembles some clips for the Oscars ceremony. Some are pretty good. Some are god-awful. And then there’s Marilyn.

The drama’s reception has been polarizing, to say the least. In a state of production hell since 2019, it premiered this year at the Venice Film Festival to a 14-minute standing ovation. Reception by the general public has not been as warm, with the film receiving a brutal 2.1/5 rat ing on Letterboxd, a worse rating than Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (and honestly good for The Room). Much publicity about the biopic’s NC-17 rating has been raised, the first and likely last given to a Netflix film. It has been condemned by feminist critics for its graphic depictions of assault and violence against women, part of a clear “male gaze” towards a feminine icon. The

Illustration by Olive Polken Art Director

graphic sequences depicting Marilyn’s abor tions were also condemned by organizations like Planned Parenthood for pushing an anti-choice narrative.

It’s just so much. This hype, good or bad, has attached a meaning to the film beyond its bloat ed runtime. I admit I walked into it with some bias. I’d scrolled through the online draggings. I read the cringe-inducing interview with Andrew Dominik, who claimed the classic film Gentle men Prefer Blondes was about “well-dressed whores.” To review it, I’d still need some jour nalistic integrity. It’s worth mentioning Dominik’s film isn’t technically a biography but rather an adaptation of a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. About 90 percent of what happens in this movie didn’t happen in real life, a lot even for the average “Hollywood ized” story.

When viewed with an open mind, the movie still sucks. However, I’ll politely make some time for the good. Ana de Armas proves her crit ics wrong by giving the best possible performance with what she’s given. The resem blance is uncanny when she reenacts Marilyn’s most fa mous snapshots. Her childlike innocence gives way to lighting bolts of fury and the most upsetting breakdowns you can imagine.

The filmmaking itself makes some bold choices that somehow worked for me. The polyamorous re lationship Marilyn shares with two men is elevated by some neat warping that I can only describe as a spicy funhouse mirror. A lengthy sex scene of Marilyn and her boyfriends is bookmarked by their naked bodies lying on top of Niagra Falls (no, seri ously). The sound design is precise, with the chaos and paranoia of Marilyn’s celeb rity channeled into her fan’s piercing screams and the cameras’ harsh snaps.

Ok. Now for why this movie doesn’t work. The whole time I watched it, I could only think of a similar film. 2021’s take on Princess Di ana, Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart. Both movies center on pop culture icons and are more impressionistic, taking more interest in the psychology of the leads than providing a Wikipedia summary of their lives. They also both star Stan Twitter girl crushes. Neither Blonde nor Spencer shy away from the darker aspects of the lead’s life. Marilyn con stantly deals with disgusting studio moguls, domestic violence, and mental illness. K-Stew’s Diana must deal with eating disorders, mental struggles, and being married to Prince (King?) Charles.

Both films feature scenes that are hard to digest, showing the living hell that these young women lived. What makes these scenes work in Spencer is their balance with happier mo ments. For every surreal and horrific encounter between Diana and the royals, we also get a sweeter interaction with her young sons. Lar raín’s film makes room for joy. For tragedy to be

tragedy, you need to have some comedy too. You must develop nuanced characters- build them up, tear them down later, and perhaps build them up again. That is how real life works. It has its ups and downs.

Blonde completely fails at this balance. There are very few scenes where Marilyn is truly happy. For the ones where she is, Dominik is sure to swiftly slide in a new slice of trauma porn for his audience to eat and then spit out. She suffers and suffers, with the movie ending in her drawn-out death. There is little mention of her positive and healthy relationships. Her sense of humor. Her activism. Dominik clearly wanted a raw profile of

temporary, is free from her toxic environment. Happiness itself is rebellion. Diana’s fighting back. Her talking about personal loves for cake and musicals shows who she is beyond what she suffers. A “psychological profile” needs to have these dimensions. Blonde doesn’t. There are no deeper ambitions for Dominik’s Marilyn than the hope of resolving her father issues. To no longer call every man in her life “daddy” (yes, this is an actual plot point).

The portrayal of Monroe in Blonde reveals a deeper issue I have with biopics as a genre. They often say they hope to depict a celebrity’s life with empathy and nu ance. They are tributes to their craft and influence while also wanting to de-glamourize the facade. To show how “they re ally lived.” This is hypo critical. The creators are already buying into the facade by making a movie about these people. Creat ing yet another image for the world to digest. Blonde does this as well. The movie’s tagline, “Loved by all. Seen by none,” implies it wants to show Marilyn as Marilyn, or perhaps by her birth name Norma Jeane. It doesn’t. It buys right into her mythology by giving a constantly traumatized, constantly brutalized, and constantly victimized pic ture of the woman. One for the public to gawk at. She’s not allowed to grow beyond this picture like Stewart’s Diana. She’s trapped in a box, a box of horrors and celebrity.

Illustration by Olive Polken Art Director

the star, but that profile needed to have more layers. It’s way too simple to say someone was just miserable all their life, especially when most of it was made up here for shock value. Suffering doesn’t always mean depth.

By focusing just on Marilyn’s struggle, Blonde also strips its star of all agency and control over her story. Marilyn becomes a star to find her birth father- a sup posed Hollywood actor who’ll return one day, in his words, “to claim her.” Her entire “character” depends on the approval of a man who is revealed to not even exist, a made-up story from her disturbed mother. Marilyn’s fixation makes her submissive and hysterical. She’s the modern version of the “woman in the attic.”

She lacks autonomy and goes insane like the lead of a dollar-store Almódovar movie. She has few chances to stand up against the forces that oppress her, and when she does, she’s simply screaming and crying rather than asserting. These one-note reactions also limit Ana de Armas’ performance. The actress eats, but she is given very little on her plate.

Again, Diana in Spencer endures oppression but has the opportunity to oppose that oppression and show agency. She insults her trash husband. She takes her kids away from their father for a meal at KFC. She is given a moment of happiness where she, however

Spencer is my favorite biopic because it manages to break out of the genre’s box. It develops Diana as a character even more than as a persona. The ex ploration of her trauma is present, but it serves as a means of deconstructing the meaning of celebri ty itself. The film argues by the end that despite all that Diana suffers, she is still “the people’s princess.” The world still loved her when no one else would. She is an icon larger than the op pression she faced. Within this strength lies the complexity of celebrity. It’s trauma, passion, privilege, but also maybe an opportunity. An opportunity to control one’s narrative, one the biopic rarely grants. Spencer is a de-glamorizing film because it takes Diana on her own terms. She was a woman above all else, and that wom anhood fuels her celebrity, one also filled with nuance. Blonde and many biopics like it don’t even know what nuance means.

Overall, Blonde is exploitative, miserable, and frankly messy. It tries to be this art house char acter story but never captures Marilyn’s charac ter. She deserved better. Ana de Armas deserved better. And honestly, the nearly 3 hours I spent watching it deserved better. It is the biopic box at its worst. Like Monroe says, I guess it’s just “what people do.” Quite too often for my com fort.

Ethel Cain, Persona Theater, and the Tragic Allure of White Working-Class Femininity

Saffron Forsberg Editor-In-Chief

She may not like me saying so, but it seems Ethel Cain may be the Southern Baptist equivalent to Lana Del Rey’s rose-adorned, Californiabrand Catholicism. Ethel Cain is the stage name of 24-year-old Hayden Silas Anhedönia. If you’ve heard of her, you’ve probably heard quite a lot; she’s the next big thing in sullen indie dream pop. In 2020, she released her first official EP, Inbred. In 2022, her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter. There are many differences, of course, between Ethel Cain and Lana Del Rey, the biggest of which being (at least relative) sincerity; Ethel Cain is actually a preacher’s daughter from the rural South. She’s still based in small-town Tennessee. Despite what Emily St. James wrote for Vox, that “the story within the album [Preacher’s Daughter] is a heavily fictionalized depiction of the world in which Cain was raised” offering the “rich characterization of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or the works of Flannery O’Connor”, too much of Cain’s projected identity checks out to claim any true fabrication. Ethel Cain knows what she’s talking about. She has her finger pressed to something honest and acute. The same cannot always be said of Lana Del Rey. And it shows in the conceptual quality of her work.

There, too, is the nature of Cain and Del Rey’s particular brands of femi ninity: Cain is an out trans woman for whom femininity is something articu lated with freshness and complexity in her work. In her lyricism, religion looms with the harrowing frankness of someone who has encountered it in all its beauty and pain – “these crosses all over my body remind me of who I used to be” – The same cannot be said of Lana Del Rey. And again, it shows.

But there are similarities that make one want to place Cain and Del Rey shoulder to shoulder. They’ve both donned heavy-handed stage names, exaggerated personas with an atten tion to a murky and old-fashioned femininity. Their voices are smokey, simultaneously breathy and thick-asmolasses. And they’ve cultivated a fan base of alternative-culture-identify ing, (often white) women who came of age on the internet. They attract these particular fans because of an exist ing phenomenon proliferated, in the last decade at least, by cult internet spaces. But I’ll speak on that later. Let’s turn now to Cain’s music. Plainly put, I want to like it more than I do. I want it to be everything

that I keep reading about in big music publications – “sublime” (NPR) melds of pop, rock, noise, country. I want her vocals to sound “remarkable” and “lurid” to me, as Pitchfork and Vox tell me they should. I want there to be a beautiful cohesion between her raw and boundary-pushing image and her just-ok, studio-clean, reverb pop –but it’s just not happening for me. Ad mittedly, I must agree with Pitchfork here: “There’s a disconnect between Cain’s provocative public image and the rigid composure of these songs.” Where is this beautiful anguish I keep hearing about?

I thought I wasn’t getting some thing until I suggested to a friend that we go to a show of hers in Detroit this past summer, as something to do. Ethel Cain’s Freezer Bride tour had inundated my Instagram feed by that point, and I thought seeing her live might finally get her under my skin. My friend told me they hadn’t sat down and really listened to Cain’s music, so they would and get back to me. Later that night, I found them leaning against my door frame, one earbud in, furrowed at the brow. “This is just…regular?” They said, “I’m confused. This is not what I was expecting based on what I keep seeing about her.” It was almost comforting to hear.

Because the thing is, it really feels as though I am supposed to enjoy Cain’s sound – there is a reason that I feel almost faulty at my lack of appreciation for the dour, gloomysweet tracks that make up Preacher’s Daughter. And beyond being a “mu sic geek” (groan) who is constantly searching for the newest genre to subject myself to, I grew up a white girl in the uber-Christian workingclass South. I’m a fool for her imag ery, for her questionable caucasian nostalgia, for her embrace of things my upper-class, not-Southern peers view as those belonging to hicks. I’m a fool for the New York Times excitedly deeming her “The Most Famous Girl at the Waffle House ‘’ in the headline for the expansive piece she’s covered in. Her music videos, too, in which she hobbles over black tar streets, smoking a cigarette in a bikini top and curlers, feet bare, crooning about her crush on a boy who brought a gun to school, works with his hands, and smells like Marlboro reds, calls to mind the older girls of my youth the way Justine Kurland’s “Girl Pictures” do.

But her music doesn’t do the things

that I want it to do – it’s mediocre: more reverby, thickly-produced dre ampop than anything else. And yeah, I do, admittedly, follow Ethel Cain and her journey through mainstream indie on multiple social media plat forms, but mostly because I find her industry-smart and frankly, ador able with her lank Manson Girl hair and face tattoos, and not because I’m listening to her music. I like her; she’s very likable. But is her music any thing special? Not really, not yet.

Perhaps I am unfazed, too, because I came-of-age not only on Tumblr, but perpendicular to a crevice of Tum blr that’s been curating something reminiscent of what Cain is personify ing since around 2012. This part of Tumblr goes by many names and is, in broadest terms, associated with “aesthetic blogging”, though instead of art-directing a portfolio of tabiboot-clad, Beatnik-invoking French girls, as many other aesthetic blogs of the era were doing, this part of Tum blr sought to express a dark, frail, fucked-up sort of girlhood and wom anhood – that relegated to abandoned houses containing mold-drooped ceil ings, cracked dolls, and scarred knees.

The images posted here, depend ing on the blogs one encountered, sometimes lapsed into abject gore and body horror – bloodied baby teeth and two-headed lambs – as well as the romanticization of eating disor ders, suicide and (arguably) child sex ual abuse. Mostly though, users toyed with the tired irony of everything sugary about idealized girlhood made dirty and blood-matted. It’s a rosarytoting, Courtney Love-ian, Eugenidestoothed realm of bloodied lace and serrated Hello Kitty. It is a part of the internet in which Americana is shown tarnished by moral filth – it’s ruled

both by young women who come from such backgrounds of abuse, and those who pretend to.

As one might expect, Lana Del Rey was a favorite among this crowd. Many of the young women belong ing to this cult community identify with the sometimes-hysterical femi ninity and sense of aimlessness Del Rey preached, at least early on. This community – sometimes grouped together as “traumacore”, “coquette”, “angelcore”, or “morute” but other wise relatively nebulous – was one to slap together Lana Del Rey’s “‘Ride’ monologue” (the restless expression of crazed femininity Del Rey performs in her momentous 2012 music video) in baby pink Gothic font over, say, a photo of an empty room, and post it for thousands of notes and almost as many hashtags.

In her article for NPR, Meghan Garvey writes of “the grim Bonnie and Clyde-isms of ‘Western Nights,’ or the sublime 10-minute fireside jam that is ‘Thoroughfare’” on Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter as “where the Lana Del Rey comparisons creep in: the all-American tales of a distinctly feminine auteur with ‘an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about it and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness,’ as Del Rey says in the video for her Tumblr girl classic ‘Ride’.” Here one sees white womanhood as something divorced from the experi ences of the elite or even the domes tic, that belonging to young beauties who’ve seen too much and want to see even more.

The character who is Lana Del Rey, she at once completely divorced from, and wholly entwined with, her cre ator, Elizabeth Grant, is from many places. She’s a Californian Manson

“Like me and all others strangely soft on the hardness of the working-class, bible belt South, Cain has a fondness for “nowhere places’” and for those who reside there. It seems I am, in many ways, a member of her prime demographic.”

Illustration by Saffron Forsberg Editor-In-Chief

groupie, a dreamy-eyed, Veronica Lake-ian Hol lywood femme fatale, a “Brooklyn Baby”, a Florid ian addict, an “open-road” biker chick (in cut-offs and a Native American headdress, lest we forget), a Venice Beach witch, a blithe, sucker-mouthed, and overgrown Lolita, and a disillusioned Vegas lounge singer. Indeed, over the last decade, Grant has had no trouble constructing a character who occupies all avenues of tragic, white American womanhood – Del Rey is sometimes rich, other times poor. She is sometimes “white trash” and other times the tennis-skirted product of old money. She’s been the first lady and she’s been the drawling mistress. She’s swayed agelessly through the twenties, the thirties, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies. Some times she is an impassioned and sincere lover who would die for her man, and other times she is a hollowed shell willing to “fuck [her] way up to the

top”. Lana Del Rey, especially in her early years, was a character belonging to no coherent narra tive. She is many women from many backgrounds, ripped from every page of the Mad Men book of mistresses, but she is always one thing – beautiful, often to a fault.

Because of her sprawling pop ethos, Lana Del Rey is often credited with many aspects of 2010s pop culture, especially among young white women. Sure, she’s famous now, but at her cult peak her following was a legion of sad-eyed, red lipstick-ed, flower crown-ed screenagers who believed, with chest-clutching sincerity, in her creative genius. And, sure, one can argue with little contest that she impacted Western pop culture, at her peak at least. But I am of the opinion that Lana Del Rey unveiled her persona at the perfect time, reception-wise. She rose to fame during Tumblr’s heyday, when a

generation of socially isolated young women were growing more and more addicted to the web and its aesthetics. At the time, Tumblr, where Lana Del Rey’s sepia pout was once unescapable, was more widely-used as a curation-based platform rather than an introspective, queer blogging outlet; it functioned more like, say, an anything-goes Pin terest than its current iteration. And it was unlike Instagram of the era because it attempted to en capsulate an alternative or counter-culture, which, in most cases, translated to users performing a sad sort of feminine beauty rather than a happy sort of feminine beauty. So, rather than the mythologized beauty of Instagram wherein one accumulates likes by posting their crystalline poolside outings surrounded by adoring friends, the mythology of Tumblr could be conveyed through the romance of tragedy – anemic bruises, streaked mascara, and

so many cigarettes. It was the sickly counterpart to Instagram’s cult of wellness – catnip for the disillusioned teenager. Thus the answer to the ageold question “who made who: Lana or the Tumblr girl?” is….neither. Theirs was the perfect collision at the perfect cultural moment.

In writing this piece, I attempted to visit the aforementioned “trau macore” realm of the internet again for the first time in maybe five years. Since coming out as a hairy, softarmed, and meal-enjoying lesbian, I’d felt increasingly (beautifully) more alienated from such a place – those fuzzy feminine aesthetics which once towered in my mind had become… sad, oppressive. And though, prob ably because of Tumblr’s new content filtering system (no porn, no gore, no thinspo or pro-ana…theoretically), this “community” seems less imme diately disturbing, more sanitized, it’s still holding tight to a similar, out-dated feminine ethos. Now, instead of things being tagged with “traumacore” or whatever else, things are tagged “trad”, “waif”, “the virgin suicides”, “BPD” and – with hilarious obtuseness, I think – “my year of rest and relaxation”. It seems any literary irony one might offer to the works of Moshfegh or Eugenides do not translate here. In fact, I doubt anyone could find a way to make this sallow corner of the internet come across even remotely feminist. It would be a tall order for any community dwell ing so whole-heartedly, and with so little depth, on aesthetics…it’s nearly impossible when those aesthetics are so devoted to a white-washed ideal of submissive womanhood. To this day, lending the community any nu ance feels generous because of just how stagnant it is. While the rest of the internet seems to shift constantly, for bet ter or worse, this corner of it seems to simmer in its own syrup of tradition. Where 2012 traumacore tumblrinas slapped a photo of Lily Rose Depp, there may now exist, in 2022, a ribby photo of Dasha Nekrascova – but what kind of evolution is that? The only thing that’s notably different between “traumacore” of 2015 and “traumacore” of 2022 is the prominence their biggest indie darling: Nicole Dollan ganger.

Canadian singer-songwriter Nicole Dollanganger was nev er as big as Cain or Del Rey, but she became a cult icon starting in 2012, when she released her first gothic indie pop album Curdled Milk. Dol langanger was a hit for a few reasons. First, there was her voice: a medicinely-sweet and jarringly childlike sound that I frankly cannot bear to this day, but which was beloved by many. Then there was her subject matter – which I

think can be adequately represented in mere song titles: “Please Eat”, “Angels of Porn”, “White Trashing”, “Tammy Faye”, the adorably naughty “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”. Finally, there’s her persona, culti vated on a Tumblr blog situated in the “traumacore” realm even before the release of her music. Nicole Dollan gager, plainly put, presented herself as a traumatized and overgrown child, round-eyed and dainty in pink gauze. Her femininity oozed with a sickly and youthful sort of sexuality that simultaneously delved into BDSM. To me, Dollanganger is the product of “traumacore” cult culture at its peak; she’s the personification of a small movement propelled to the (relative) mainstream at a time when Lana Del Rey was also an up-and-coming indie darling. Her – at the time, very active and popular – Tumblr blog was a heavily-curated showcase of every thing cute and scary, milk-breathed and boney.

Now don’t take any of this the wrong way; I don’t think Ethel Cain is necessarily romanticizing that which should not be, as this corner of the internet has done for years. On Ethel Cain’s own Tumblr, where she is still active on the daily, reblogging photos of rural America, cheerfully answer ing fan questions, and salivating bi curiously over Susan Sarandon, there is no gore nor thinspo nor chilling babyishness. It’s really all good clean fun. She’s no Nicole Dollanganger just as she’s no Lana Del Rey. If I were younger and more pop-oriented in my taste, perhaps Ethel Cain would be a much healthier woman musician to fawn over than who I did fawn over as a hungry teenage girl – Del Rey in all her assorted artificial flavors.

But there is something to be said here about personas – what they do, where they come from, and who they’re for. What is it that’s so tan talizing, even sexy, about not only sad women, but sad women from the darkest places? It’s like asking why people take photos of their own bruises. It’s like trying to psychoana lyze the Gen Z cry-selfie. Why not just escape into the Candyland of the rich and happy? If both pop songs, dire and upbeat, are equally catchy, why choose the dire one? Lana Del Rey and her sex kitten suicide songs rose to fame in the wake of 2010s party anthems, in which everything was fine if you were wearing something tight in a club somewhere, blowing fat paychecks and fucking other beauti ful happy people with the freedom of carelessness. Lana Del Rey, dressed like a photograph of your striking young grandmother, seemed to say “hey wait a minute, I’m not happy. There is so much that’s wrong with me still.” Her massive hit “Summer time Sadness” topped the charts in 2012, the same year as Nicki Minaj’s party hit “Starships” and the Top 50 reign of sweethearts like fun. and Carly Rae Jepson. Even if so much of Lana’s persona was fake…it was almost refreshing.

So I guess the easiest answer here is something like: sad girls like sad songs about other sad girls. Right? Maybe. But I think it’s more than that; Lana Del Rey isn’t just for sad girls, she’s for those who think there’s something exciting about sad girls –specifically white, working-class ones wrapped in American flags. In Lana Del Rey’s “Ride” music video, she isn’t just a freedom-seeking young woman on the “open road”, she’s

a scantily-dressed one leaned sug gestively over a pinball machine by a much older man in a sleazy bar; she’s holding tight to another on the back of his bike; she’s holding a thumb out in front of a gas station for any willing stranger. Sure, she’s “free”, I guess, but she’s more so frail and broke. Her safety is dependent on rough-aroundthe-edges, working-class men who seem to be taking advantage of her vulnerability. And Elizabeth Grant, the soul behind the pout, grew up wealthy in New York – and never in Brooklyn. Her attention to the theater of cultural geography seems more influenced by old American movies than by her own experiences as an American woman – hers is too vast a persona to perpetuate with any true nuance.

And it’s this ambitious persona which put her famously at odds with Kim Gordon in 2015, who wrote in an early draft of her memoir: “Today we have someone like Lana Del Rey, who doesn’t even know what feminism is, who believes women can do whatever they want, which, in her world, tilts toward self-destruction, whether it’s sleeping with gross old men or getting gang raped by bikers.” The statement was withdrawn before publication, but still a nerve was touched, a per sona was prodded at.

The simultaneous incongruence and congruence between Grant and Del Rey is perhaps the reason those young woman internet users belonging to “traumacore” so adore her; she’s the perfect idol for everything beautiful and tragic, and she’s so much a per sona that she’s hardly human. It’s not a novel thing to say, especially five or ten years ago: “who the hell is Lizzy Grant?”

And the thing is: so many of the critics who adore An hedönia’s Jesus Camp-esque working-class narratives are those who, in actuality, have no idea what she’s talking about. They’ve never lived among poor whites and reli gious fundamentalists in the deep South, yet are breathless with praise of her exagger ated, dark Americana au thenticity. There’s something romantic about the tortured blue collar aesthetic she pours into every track in both EP and album. Subsequently, in all the establishment praise, there’s a strange condescen sion. It’s not Anhedönia’s fault; her music, at least somewhat, reflects her actual experiences. But it is a fasci nating lens through which to view class, race, and feminin ity in America. And there’s no doubt that it’s this schtick which has made Anhedönia and Cain so beloved so fast. I only hope her sound wooes me, too, some time soon.

Illustration by Saffron Forsberg

$oul $old $eparately Album Review

Max Miller Staff Writer

Freddie Gibbs’ $oul $old $eparately is a strange one. It seems to have been met with the coveted combination of good press and cultural recognition. I like it, don’t get me wrong. But I am hesitant to praise it as much as others.

You will like this album if you like Freddie Gibbs. This may sound obvious, but the most defining feature of this album is its “Freddie Gibbs”-ness. On this new album, he raps about cocaine over old soulful beats, as he always has.

Gibbs has never reinvented the wheel — nor does he have to. For the most part, throughout his catalog, Gibbs has stuck to his strengths, which are so strong that they alone make an al bum entertaining. Gibbs is endlessly charismatic and confident. He operates like an elder states man, with an ease reminiscent of a veteran quar terback in the pocket surveying his options and decisively throwing a beautiful back shoulder pass to a tightly covered receiver. Gibbs raps like he’s seen shit. This seemingly seasoned bravado ropes the listener in; at his best, however, Gibbs’ music feels less like bragaddocio and more like a journal of secrets he has let you in on. A lot of Gibbs’ music comes off as a simple snapshot of the Gary, Indiana rapper’s daily life. Songs often represent moments of grandeur, juxtaposed with a troubled, poverty-filled past.

And thus, $oul $old $eparately is just… a Freddie Gibbs album. It does everything Freddie Gibbs albums normally do. So it’s good, yes. But it’s not exciting.

The album lacks some identity. Gibbs was able to rely on collaboration to create cohesion on his last three projects (Fetti with Curren$y and The Alchemist, Bandana with Madlib, and Alfredo with The Alchemist). On this album he does not get that luxury; He is on his own for the first time since 2018. There are a few unclear throughlines in the album, the strangest be ing a frequent robocall that thanks the listener for their stay at the “Triple S Hotel, Resort and Casino.” There is no mention of this concept outside of this disembodied voice, making its appearance a consistently strange non sequitur. It doesn’t jump out on first listen, but when ana lyzing the album, its inclusion is a bit confusing.

There is another throughline that quite easily gives the album its worst moments. On several song outros, Gibbs features staged voicemails he has received from his celebrity friends. The voicemail featured on “Space Rabbit” is breath takingly bad, causing the listener to ask, “Why in the hell is the self-proclaimed ‘RoastMaster General’ Jeff Ross on a Freddie Gibbs album?” Sure, I was a fan of Ross in middle school, and I still think he’s good for a few cheap laughs every once in a while. But subjecting your audience to 45 seconds of mediocre Jeff Ross roasts over a warped old school-inspired beat is criminal. The pacing is all off — it’s not even close to Ross’ element. The next voicemail is not much bet ter; everyone’s favorite idiot Joe Rogan makes an appearance, telling Gibbs that he has mush rooms, DMT, Kevlar underwear, and extra bul lets before letting out a painfully hearty, “LETS FUCKING GO!” Ignoring all of the reasons that Joe Rogan is problematic and also generally a dumbass, the interlude is incredibly eye-roll-

inducing.

This is not to say that there aren’t highlights on the album. The first two tracks, “Couldn’t Be Done” and “Blackest in the Room,” are some of the strongest Gibbs has produced in recent memory. There are multiple instances where transitions between songs are so unbe lievably smooth that I only noticed them on my tenth or eleventh listen. Particularly, the transition between “Too Much” and “Lobster Omelette” is absolutely nasty, utilizing tempo changes to create an impressively subtle sonic shift.

Gibbs still does what he is good at. He is still lyrically clever and charismatic. He still raps about cocaine. But he doesn’t show any progress from his last album. My biggest issue with this project is it could be from any era of Freddie Gibbs’ discography. You could tell me this album released in 2015 and I would believe you without hesitation. If this was the first Gibbs effort I had ever listened to, I would love it, but I’m getting a little bit tired of the schtick.

Unheard-of// Ensemble Plays the Birenbaum

Orson Abram Contributor

Unheard-of//Ensemble, the Brooklyn-based contemporary classical music-based cham ber ensemble — consisting of only a pianist, a violinist, a cellist (Oberlin alum Iva CasianLakoš), and a clarinetist — performed at the Birenbaum this past Friday.

Their performance, consisting only of the piece Fire Ecologies, composed by Montanabased and environment-focused composer Christopher Stark, combined manipulated film footage of nature and auditory electronics, ranging from gorgeous Ravel-esque pianodominated textures to what can only be de scribed as a Stravinsky-inspired hip-hop beat, into a cohesive and engrossing program. The piece, tackling climate change by focusing on an aspect of nature over 9 movements, lasted 55 minutes and never overstayed its welcome at any point. The ensemble, shaded with porta ble purple lights shining on them from below, did not necessarily perform as an accompani ment to the film, but instead played with it.

Stark’s piece consists of multiple move ments and film scenes, each with a different “traditionally classical” composer and piece influence and a different sound and style. The films themselves often featured digital manip ulations of animals such as deer and turtles, close-ups of water processes, and in the stand out movement of the work, entitled “Infernal Dance,” influenced by Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, featured the same clip of burning wood on top of each other and being rhythmically intertwined with a hip-hop-adjacent beat driving the movement. Considering that most of the movements were based on melodic dissonances and the time lessness of the instruments weaving into each other texturally through the fascinating instru mentation, “Infernal Dance” was a particularly refreshing checkpoint in the piece. This is not to say that the rest of the performance was un derwhelming; instead, it displays how incred ibly versatile Stark is in his approaches.

Each movement provided a different musical and visual space, and the Birenbaum was com pletely transformed in every facet imaginable. Each performer of the ensemble was incredibly dynamic and virtuosic, and the music felt com pletely meticulous and wholly at ease simul taneously. Although Unheard-of//Ensemble’s time at Oberlin was less than a week, and this performance itself was less than an hour long, their incredible musicality and unorthodox use of multimedia in classical music will stick with me and many others for years to come.

Ilustration by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

CONCERT REVIEW: Jeffrey Lewis at the ‘Sco 10/7/2022

Catie Kline Staff Writer

On Friday night, almost exactly 16 years after he first performed in Tappan Square in 2006, antifolk singer-song writer/comic book artist Jef frey Lewis returned to Oberlin. With an electric-acoustic guitar, a small array of pedals, and a sketchpad, Lewis speak-sang contemplative, folk-punk tunes to a captive audience. In his trademark deadpan voice, the artist explored loneliness, world history, record stores, depres sion, singing trees, crazy old men, and tylenol PM (among other things). He surprised the crowd with several “low-budget films,” slideshows of colorful, original drawings that accompa nied his narrative songs.

Before the show began, the ‘Sco was bustling with a con centrated energy unique to cult music shows–dedicated fans bonded over their shared love of strange, intensely vulnerable art. Attendees bought records, t-shirts and comic books from Lewis himself at the merch table, excitedly conversing with the reserved and polite artist. Finally, Lewis approached the stage, drawing the audience in with disarming, plaintive songs that bleed with that particularly 2000s DIY authenticity. When Lewis played the ending of “Back When I Was Four” from his 2003 album It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through, which char ters his life from the past to the future, he allowed the captive audience to hang in the slow, funny yet depressing verses detailing a 106-year-old Lewis, alone with only a dead goldfish. After a silence that suggests this is the conclusion of the song and life itself, Lewis comes back in full force, and the audience sings along to a verse about 128-year-old Jeffrey’s whimsical neighbors’ decorations, joyously repeating the final line “every Halloween they hung a mil lion rubber skeletons.” Like a

magic trick, these songs dive into the nitty-gritty, gross, depressing details of life, and just when you think it’s over, Lewis pulls the rug out from under you. With one final verse, he impossibly ends on a note of genuine hope.

Lewis’ four illustrated songs stood out deeply: one about the history of revolutionaries in Chile, one about the life and death of Keith Haring, one about a “creep ing brain” who takes over the world with its wisdom, and one final ditty about the plot of Star Wars. Reminiscent of a strange folk punk kindergarten lesson, with each new whimsical, informa tive line, he skipped to a new slide of hand-drawn colorful illustra tion.

Lewis’ art beckons us to be brave enough to see the beauty within our simple hearts. He explores not just joy itself, but the pursuit of joy and the windy, difficult, disgust ing, complicated, never-ending journey to get there. And then he began to sing his 2019 track “My Girlfriend Doesn’t Worry,” and I was yanked out of the haze of Lew is’ psychedelic projected backdrop and plopped back into reality — it’s so 2000s, but it’s also so…2000s. In the song, Lewis complains that his nondescript girlfriend never seems to think like he does. Lewis discusses girlfriends in other songs too, these women always vague and featureless.

Lewis’ DIY attitude is inspiring, and he has an impressive body of work, but it wasn’t just the antifolk style that made me feel like I’d traveled back in time at his con cert. I’m grateful for the late nights I had in high school attempting to learn “Life” and “Seattle” on guitar, and I’m grateful the show happened. But I prefer the nights at the ‘Sco I’ve attended where the post-show conversations aren’t appended with asides like “well, yeah, a few lines were pretty out dated. It was a bummer. But the rest of it was good.”

Photo by Saffron Forsberg

Try Guy, Wife Guy Tries Cheating

Ellen Efstathiou Contriutor

I got a phone for the first time when I was twelve, which also meant that this was the first time I could access the internet on my own. I spent a decent amount of time on Youtube watching clips from America’s Got Talent, Film Theory, and Buzzfeed. It was 2015, so Buzzfeed basically ran the world, especially on Youtube. Being so promi nent on Youtube, a lot of groups who worked there rose to instant fame, including Ned, Eugene, Keith, and Zach-–aka the Try Guys.

The premise for their channel was that they would try anything and everything. This ranged from trying prom dresses to swimming with sharks. I, like many other people, liked them be cause they were funny and game for anything.

After a while, I stopped watching Buzzfeed vid eos in general (everyone that was cool there left). I more or less forgot about them for seven years. Then, over the summer I started getting recom mended the Try Guys’ videos again, when they were no longer associated with Buzzfeed, and I watched a few for old times sake. I still found their videos enjoyable, and their personalities to be a big draw.

Then the internet found out that Ned was cheat ing on his wife. Videos of him with one of his employees holding hands in public or making out at clubs were sent to his wife, Ariel, the other Try Guys, and were posted on Reddit.

None of this would have been as bad as it is, if it wasn’t for the fact that Ned was branded as the “wife guy” of the group. Since the beginning, he has said the phrase “my wife” in almost every video that the Try Guys have made. You can even find compilations of him saying it. While it did have a bit of an “annoying couple that won’t leave each other alone” vibe to it, it was also cute to see that a couple could stay so in love. This type of relation ship was idolized, especially by younger people that didn’t want to become every boomer that says they hate their wife. It was also great to see a guy that’s a more stereotypical “dude’s dude” showing these emotions.

Regardless of how he felt about the person he cheated with or his wife, there were larger con sequences that he should have considered. He cheated with a person that worked at the Try Guys,

which put the entire company in danger of a law suit for an inappropriate workplace relationship. Regardless of how “consensual” he says the rela tionship was, there is no way for it to be consen sual with the power imbalance that was present in the relationship. Which means he doesn’t under stand the definition of consensual. He also brought Ariel into his work. She is in innumerable videos, she is in podcast episodes, they wrote a cookbook together. He has made her be in the public eye. And now, he has publicly cheated on her.

You also have to take into account the fact that this is going to be on the internet forever. The Try Guys started on Youtube, which already makes them feel more homegrown than other celebrities. They are first and foremost, internet celebrities. Also, Ned and Ariel have two kids together which means that when those kids grow up they are going to be able to see all the comments and posts and videos that people have made about this. Since the internet is still relatively recent, we don’t know the exact consequences that this sort of thing can have on the parent-child relationship or the mental health of the child, but it most likely isn’t great.

Luckily, the internet does seem to be taking Ariel’s side and not blaming her for Ned’s cheat ing. In fact, a lot of comments show that people think that Ariel has always been the better one of the two of them. She was in some of the videos I watched over the summer and I found her to be insightful and intelligent. The fact that Ned had to make another person his personality shows how much personality he has.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20. I think that it is often the case that as soon as something bad comes out about someone everyone jumps to say that they knew the person was awful before it all happened. If you go to Youtube and look up Ned Fulmer you will find compilation videos along the lines of “Ned Moments that Aged like Milk.” You will also find comments of people saying things like they never liked him, he was the worst Try Guy, there was always something off about him, and other such sentiments. I don’t think that you could have easily found these sentiments before this happened, but I do think he has always been a bit of a frat bro. When I was regularly watching

their videos, I would get frustrated when he would try and ruin the other guys’ things just because he felt he wasn’t doing well.

Overall, this entire scenario sucks. I feel bad for Ariel and their kids and what they are going to have to deal with in the immediate future. She’s already getting harassed by paparazzi wanting to know what she’s planning to do. Obviously, no one deserves this sort of scrutiny about their private life. However, I think it’s important to look at this situation and see what signs were there all along. This was not the first time that something like this has happened, and it certainly will not be the last time.

Is AVI Incapable of Improvement?

Reggie Goudeau Features Editor

By this point in my Oberlin career, my partner and I have long given up on getting consistent meals from this school. We still use most of our swipes whenever we remember, but we usually blow them at Decafe for chips and various types of pop. I remember a time during my first year when 75% of my meals came from the Rathskeller, Decafe, Stevie, and, occasionally, Umami. I’m shocked I managed to survive, but after slowly acquiring more responsi bilities and a little self-respect, I realized I needed better. That’s why I now have a partner who cooks very well, and I have several jobs to afford takeout as needed (mostly to cover my chicken quesadillas).

The rest of this article will mostly be me giving “highlights” about Makayla, and I’s dining experiences at Oberlin. If I listed each time we received food that wasn’t up to par for an institution with an $80,000 price tag, this article would take up the whole section. Before I begin the new content, I’d like to briefly get readers up to speed on what happened last in this saga. In the final piece I wrote for The Oberlin Review, I detailed how Oberlin tried and failed to feed Makayla and me while we were trapped in Lord-Saunders with COVID over Winter Break. Makayla and I cooked 80-85% of our meals during that time because what AVI sent us was usually cold, unseasoned, and generally disgusting. On the day of Christmas, Makayla received a salad without dress ing, eggs, and lukewarm tater tots for breakfast at 11:30 a.m. Lunch that day was somehow worse, with them receiving only a lukewarm salad at 3:30 p.m. The school also delivered 3-4 days’ worth of food to my door, despite many emails, texts, and the contact tracing form indicating that I was staying with my partner after discovering that we were both infected. While the food qual ity gradually improved with each passing day, improving from a 2/10 to a 4/10 is still pretty pathetic.

Sadly, even the current semester retains some of these same issues while in troducing some “fun and quirky” new ones. First, the lines at the Rathskeller are still horrendous despite the new electronic swipe system that lets students order their own stuff. With no exaggeration, getting food from there takes up

to 30 minutes during lunch and dinner. Even when they’re less busy, it takes at least eight to ten minutes (assuming you don’t have an order with an al lergen). Occasionally, this terminal will run while someone else operates the main counter, and you can actually get some damn food. Sadly, most of the time, only this terminal is working, and ordering food takes the same amount of time as ever, making me question why Oberlin bothered in the first place.

The indirect promotion of EDs (eating disorders) at this place has also somehow gotten worse. Even in previous years, one could use a meal swipe at Biggs to get a large smoothie or a small smoothie and chips. A large drink at Azariah’s is also worth a swipe, which is simply not the healthiest for a campus where everyone is constantly on the go without time to sit down for a meal. Decafe has recently adopted a similar business model by allowing students to flex any singular non-board meal item for a swipe. Candy, drinks, and many other treats that should not substitute meals for students are easily accessible thanks to this policy. I only hope Oberlin recognizes how dangerous this situation can get without more supervision soon because otherwise, its students vulnerable to this temptation will suffer.

The most disappointing part of AVI is its frequent lack of accessible glutenfree options. My partner Makayla has celiac and needs to avoid eating gluten so they can remain alive and healthy. Sadly, most on-campus locations are not the most friendly to someone with that and diabetes simultaneously. Clarity has accessible options, but many times the food there contains too many car bohydrates or is simply sub-par. Umami has little to no gluten-free food, and Decafe is mostly a sea of snacks and drinks. A-House is frequently the least disappointing option, but most of their dishes are not gluten-free or have the carbohydrate issue once again. Stevie rarely has gluten-free meals, and what they have is often questionable, such as their shrimp alfredo nachos with salsa verde. Even simple dishes are mediocre here, such as how this place has trouble making potatoes and often overcooks or undercooks them. With these options being the standard, why would I, Makayla, or anyone else bother us ing more than one or two swipes on an actual meal per day?

Ilustration by Molly Chapin

Roe v. Wade and the Myth ofAutonomy

Skye Jalal Staff Writer

One Tuesday afternoon this summer, while getting off the train from work, I saw a group of women standing on the platform and I paused. It was the largest group of white people I had seen at the station since Coldplay performed downtown a couple weeks earlier, and it wasn’t until I saw the poster boards in their hands that I remembered what happened in the morning. Roe v. Wade had fallen.

That morning when I had woken up to the news, I put my phone down and left for work. Apathetic in a way I couldn’t quite name, in stead of turning on NPR or calling a friend to mourn, I sat and rode westward on the train in silence- staring outward at black bodies around me, and down at the hands of my own.

Coming back home, three black babies were running up and down the aisle of the train car. The two older ones wore matching sets in blue and green and the smallest one trailed behind them, shirtless and tripping over his own feet trying to keep up. Together they counted the seats of the car: “1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 10”. I found a parent, as they climbed on top of the sleeping body of a younger man with a brown paper bag in his lap. At each stop the children would scream into his ears, “Daddy wake up!” asking if it was theirs. He would startle, look around, and then bark for them to settle.

The rest of the train car shared looks of concern as the three small bodies hopped over the playground obstacles of briefcases and luggage and take-out bags of styrofoam containers. There was a dissonance in the car between the joy emerging from the children, and the sense of danger we could all feel was eminent for them. I wanted to do something, but what was there to do? There is little more dangerous for a black child, than the hands of the government. I would not dare call the police or CPS. I looked around again and saw other people making the same calculation. Knowing there were no good options, when the train car pulled away, I let them leave.

Jia Tolentino spoke in conversation with Stephania Taladrid about how the fall of Roe has led her to a greater disillusionment with the Democratic Party, “When the decision came down and we saw what the Democratic Party leadership had to offer, that was a moment for me where I began to genuinely suspect for the first time in my life that, actu ally, the Democrats are not interested at all

in protecting the right to abortion.” Tolentino has been a prominent writer in the past few months on the impact of abortion regulation in a Post-Roe America. She’s written exten sively about the failures of American democ racy and about how the abortion surveillance techniques we are all currently fearing have already been prototyped on black women in the South for years.

Considering this, I find it interesting how even she, like many, is still negotiating the reality of Roe with a certain faith in our politi cal process. Her statement reflects not only an outrage with the Supreme Court’s decision, but a sense of disbelief in who should’ve been our “protectors. The issue of Roe is not simply that it fell, but how it’s fall contradicts cer tain beliefs about our country: that America is good and just, that our courts are meant to protect us, that the politicians we vote for do their best to serve us, and that our rights do

and impenetrably exist. However, where is the evidence for this belief other than in our own collective imagination? How is the fall of Roe experienced differently by people who have lived lives of such violence from the state, to never expect their freedoms or rights to be protected?

TaNehisi Coates writes about an alternative perspective of American history informed by trauma, “But if your notion of American his tory is very different, if you believe […] as a lot of African Americans believe, that democracy has mostly been a goal in this country at vari ous periods, attained at various brief periods of time, but generally that has been a struggle, the way you cover our country is just very, very different.” In the current abortion de bate, there has been a gross underestimation of how bodily autonomy has also mostly been a goal in this country. When you percieve the abortion debate not as a binary of Roe versus

not-Roe, but as a landmark in the long politi cal history of a country that has built itself upon the regulation of personhood, the way you think about it changes. The fall of consti tutional abortion rights is not the fall of bodily autonomy, because something cannot fall that for many never existed.

Tolentino’s recent disillusionment with the democratic party is something that I have nev er experienced. Every ballot my parents have ever cast for the Democratic party has been done with a sigh. The decision between Demo crat and Republican has never been a choice between good and bad, but between bad and worse: the mouth of a shark or the mouth of a bear. Lyndon B. Johnson, who’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act helped reform the Democratic party as we know it today, refered to the same legislation as the “nigger bill”. Two years ago in 2020, we had to cast ballots for a presidential candidate who dedicated most of his political career to imprisoning our fathers and brothers. Staring at the babies on the train, I faced a similar conundrum as my parents have for decades at the ballot box, the shark or the bear. Which would be worse? The sleeping arms of their father, or the predatory

arms of the state? There are no good options for us. There have never been.

That day, the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and even in Georgia of all places, I did not think much about it. Something in me knew that the freedom of my body had long been restricted. Baldwin said that “to be a negro in America is to be in a constant state of rage”, but on certain days, it is also to be in a constant state of numb. That morning, like many mornings, I woke up to ride a train that is never on time, connected to a transit system that only goes in four directions to prevent black bodies from infiltrating white neighbor hoods. I rode it so that I could avoid traffic created by an interstate system that slices up black neighborhoods for the exact same pur pose. I went to my job on the Auburn Avenue that MLK was born on, and from the window watched police officers chase homeless people and the elderly out of the shade. We can’t fully mobilize to protect the children of our com munity, we can’t even freely move across our own city. How can a body be autonomous if it is not allowed to move?

Sometimes the weight of it all is just too much. Sometimes, it can be hard to feel one

Illustration by Saffron Forsberg Editor-In-Chief

blow from the state, independently from the rest. As white women rode into the city to riot, the rest of us rode in silence to go home. The day Roe fell, I watched three black babies ride away in jeopardy, knowing there was nothing anyone could do, and I wondered who among us really had the right to choose the day be fore. How could we, when this train station was built decades ago, those babies were born years ago, and I’ve known not to trust the Supreme Court for as long as I’ve been alive? The perception of the Supreme Court decision as a completely unprecedented event, is blind to how such state violence forms black muscle memory.

Yes, the specific issue of abortion access is important and negatively impacts the most vulnerable among us most of all. However, what’s missing is an understanding of how abortion is only one example of how bodily autonomy is unilatierally denied in this coun try. White women will take to the streets when their own rights are violated, but where are the pussy hats and painted poster boards riot ing for those babies? For their father? Why is the only anger when white women find them selves looking down the barrel?

Why I’ll Never Leave MyToxic Relationship

The Philadelphia Phillies have broken my heart again and again. And yet, I can’t quit them.

Max Miller Staff Writer

A few years ago, Women’s Health magazine published an article titled, “24 Signs You’re in a Toxic Relationship and Need to Let Go.” A few key red flags included:

● “You’re not practicing self-care”

● “You keep waiting/hoping for them to change”

● “Your family and friends are concerned”

● “You often feel worse when you’re with

them”

● “They don’t bring out the best in you”

● “They like to play games”

These sound like clear knockout factors, at least in a vacuum. Purely on principle it is almost impossible to ask why someone would stay in this hope less, seemingly loveless union. But what Women’s Health fails to mention is how intoxicating unstable relationships can be, especially when it feels you know no other reality than togetherness. The highs are high and lord knows the lows are bottomless.

I had grown to trust took my heart and stepped on it, leaving nothing but a broken mess for me to clean up. Being surrounded by people who hated them (New Yorkers) didn’t help me get over what was a catastrophic blow to my self-esteem. I still get upset thinking about it now.

After the incident, I took a little space from the Phillies. It was the first time I had been burned. I was so used to the glory days of our relationship. I had expected nothing to go wrong. I was spoiled. So it stung. I gave it a few months.

And then, after they showed a few signs of improvement, regrettably, I got back together with them the next April. The Phillies disappointed me yet again. I gave them another try the next year. Despite giving more reason to believe in them, they disappointed once more. The magic we had once shared was gone (trading away long-tenured fan favorites for prospects).

I decided to stop pursuing our romance for a while. My heart just wasn’t in it anymore. I friendzoned the Phillies. I needed to figure some things out for myself. I started to see other Philly sports teams, especially the 76ers. The Phillies and I didn’t talk for a few years. I missed them at points, scrolling through their social media feed to see what they were up to. It seemed pretty bleak for my first love.

We started talking again in 2018. We were still friends, but there was a bit of a flirty undertone to our conversations. I was grateful we had made the decision to move on from our romantic relationship; they had changed pretty substantially for the worse. At first, it seemed like they may have turned a leaf, but it was ultimately clear that they were the same Phillies that broke my heart in 2011. They disappointed me time and time again. I was hellbent on ending our flirty relationship and considered ending all communication. But, as much as I hated to admit it to myself, I knew a part of me still loved them.

The pandemic strained our friendly relationship at first. I started spending more and more time with the 76ers (Who ended up being a consistent heart breaker too, I should note). In September of 2020, though, I couldn’t help but believe in the Phillies. This time, it felt different. It finally seemed like they had figured it all out. The Phillies seemed stable. And so, we got back togeth er. I was still trepidatious, but I began to grow more easy around them.

My union with the Philadelphia Phillies began at birth. Hailing from Brooklyn, New York (a rarity at Oberlin), I was not meant to be a Phillies fan, but my father was born outside Philadelphia and raised me as such. As a new born, I was placed in a Phillies onesie as a hypothetical Philadelphia baptism.

The Phillies and I began on excellent terms. I was swept up in their charm and good looks. It was a whirlwind romance; when I was with them, I lost any sense of time or future. I started wearing their hoodies to school and day dreaming about them in class. I was extremely invested in their goals, and they kept not only reaching but surpassing them. From 2007 to 2011, nothing could go wrong. They were reliable and trustworthy. I was infatuated with them; they were a beautiful mix of power and finesse. It felt like life couldn’t get any better.

Around this time, my father warned me about their potential to disappoint me. He told me to brace myself for when times got tough. He had seen teams like the Phillies before, and he knew I couldn’t trust them. But, like a true young person, I didn’t listen. I was so naive. I didn’t know what was coming.

In October 2011, the Philadelphia Phillies broke my heart (the historicallygood-in-the-regular-season Phillies lost in heartbreaking fashion in the first round of the playoffs and star first baseman Ryan Howard tore his Achilles on the last play of the game). It was a blow to my soul. I took it hard; the entity

And then they broke my heart again. (They had to win two games in their last eight to make the playoffs. All they needed was to go 2-6. And then they went 1-7. Mind you, most of this was against the MIAMI MARLINS, who STINK! I am still very upset about this.) It wasn’t as deeply depressing as 2011, but it was a hell of a lot more infuriating. It was hard to deal with. I lost all trust in them… That is, until the next season, when I once again believed in them, and, of course, they broke my heart yet again. (In mid-August, they were first in their division. Though they were quickly dethroned, they threat ened to retake the division in late September. And then, in their last seven games, they went 1-6!) I expected this one. But it pissed me off just the same, reinforcing a pattern quickly solidifying itself to the point where one ques tioned whether the Phillies were even capable of change.

Our relationship was loveless. I despised them with every fiber of my body. Every time I interacted with them, I would become a different person. I would yell and throw my hands in frustration. It was a never ending cycle of hurt. I couldn’t get away from it; I was tethered to them for a reason I could not de scribe. Love was no longer what I felt. It was pure, unadulterated hatred.

It is here where the metaphor of the toxic partner ceases to capture my relationship with the Phillies. This season, for some strange reason, I decided to get fully invested.

After making big splashes in free agency, this season started worse than most Philly fans could have imagined. The Phillies absolutely stunk in the first half of the season. Then, they fired their manager and started winning again. At points, it seemed like the same Phillies team that hadn’t made the playoffs in eleven years. In September, the collapse that viewers had gotten so used to was deemed inevitable. They lost five games in a row from 9/24 to 9/29. It felt like they were dead in the water, just waiting to be overtaken by the Milwaukee Brewers in the Wild Card race. And then… they did it. After 11 years, the Philadelphia Phillies made the playoffs. Not only that, but they recently won a playoff series. I do not expect the Phillies to win this upcom ing playoff series against the Braves, which will be underway when this paper is printed. But that’s ok. After all of the heartbreak that has come since 2011, just making the playoffs is enough.

There is beauty to following a terrible team. You grow to love small, tri umphant moments. You dream of the future of the franchise, thinking about

what young players will achieve five, ten, fifteen years down the line. You fall in and out of love with your team. There are points where watching gets so frustrating that you think about changing teams or quitting sports altogether. But you don’t, whether for familial loyalty or just plain stupidity and stub bornness.

I have hated this team for the majority of my life. They have caused me more stress than I am proud to admit. They have likely taken years off of my life. And yet, I stick around for moments like these, when the stars align and 26 men dressed in silly little red pinstripes achieve the opportunity to hit a ball for three hours on a crisp autumn day in the beginning of October. Yes, I keep waiting for them to change, my family and friends are concerned, and they bring out the absolute worst in me, but I can’t help rooting for the men in red as they defiantly trudge their way towards hopefully eventual victory.

The Final Word on Harry Styles

Anna Holshouser-Belden Staff Writer

Singer, songwriter, actor, fashionista, One Di rection member, contestant on the X factor, “king of pop,” movie star, makeup-line creator, center of controversy, alleged queerbaiter, tweenage wet-dream, guy my mom calls “Henry Whatshis face;” Harry Styles is a household name whether we like it or not. He’s graced cofee tables, den tists’ ofces, and CVS aisles across the world on the covers of many a Vogue or People magazine, packed Madison Square Garden three nights in a row, and worn so many scarves we’ve lost count. In recent months, the beloved pop star has come under siege for his role in the movie that practi cally broke twitter—Don’t Worry Darling–di rected by his latest fame, Olivia Wilde. I’m sure I don’t have to go into depth here, anyone with ac cess to Google can at this point recount the entire story of the top of their heads. Maybe it seems obvious to me that a teenage pop star wouldn’t translate well into a serious movie set on track for the Oscars, maybe that’s just one person’s opin ion. I digress, however, the Don’t Worry Darling drama is not what I want to talk about when it comes to Mister Styles—if you’re so inclined, it’s playing at just about every theater in the United States. What I’ve picked up my metaphorical pen to discuss today is Harry Styles’ role in setting the male beauty standard.

Western society has, for many centuries now, valued the strong, the stoic, and the unemotional in masculine public fgures. The Oxford English Dictionary defnes masculinity as “qualities or attributes regarded as characteristics of men” and provides the example sentence: “handsome, muscled and driven, he’s a prime example of masculinity.” The frst synonym to come up for masculinity if you Google the term is virility, defned as “the quality of having strength, energy, and a strong sex drive; manliness.” There are a set of bodily and emotional rules that cisgender

men are expected to follow in order to live up to this harsh masculine standard, difering of course across cultures and generations. We unfortunate ly are still ruled, in many aspects of our lives, by a strict gender binary, with masculine and femi nine as two opposing poles and anyone in the middle of this vast spectrum seen as lesser than by those closer to the outside. Men who are seen as more “feminine” are often publicly criticized, and Harry Styles has become a fgure of much debate surrounding gender identity. My question is whether or not all this attention is deserved.

In December 2019, Styles broke tradition and the internet by being the frst man to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine. It wasn’t the mere appearance of a man on the cover of Vogue that took the world by storm, it was the fact that under his suit jacket he wore an extravagant lacy blue-and-black Victorian number; a Gucci dress complete with bustle and train. Styles’ fashion choice was met by positive and negative remarks and everyone’s twitter feed turned into a lengthy criticism piece as soon as the magazine was re leased. His fan base, which can only be described as rabid, echoed their deafening praises which ranged from sweet comments to borderline erot ica. Negative comments came from many sides, with some scofng at a cisgender man choosing to wear a dress and others scofng at this particu lar cisgender man’s choice to make a statement about gender on the cover of Vogue, or Vogue’s choice to let him.

Billy Porter, well-renowned queer icon, activist, and star of the TV show Pose detailing the ball room scene in 1980s New York, spoke out against the Vogue cover. According to a 2020 CNN Style piece by journalist Leah Dolan, Porter criticized the ease with which the fashion industry accepted Styles’ stint into femininity, and the choice to employ a white, cis, straight man to make a state

ment on gender. Porter lamented on his difcul ties building a successful acting career as a black openly-gay man and the hoops he had to jump through in order to dress how he wanted–decked to the nines in jewels, skirts, makeup, and the occasional tassled hat–on the red carpet without being pushed to the sidelines. “All he has to do is be straight and white,” Porter claimed, explain ing that for him feminine dress isn’t a trend but politics, an identity he can’t toss to the side when it goes out of style. He says that Styles is only par taking because it’s “the thing to do.” Porter has a point–Harry Styles is a conventionally attractive straight, cis, white man–why would he be setting the standards for anyone but others of the same categories? As someone who embodies male beauty standards perfectly in all areas but cloth ing choices, Styles certainly isn’t speaking for the underdogs.

The point that Styles isn’t doing anything re motely new or groundbreaking with his fashion choices hasn’t just been made by Billy Porter, many argued that the praise he gained for being the “frst” man to publicly wear a dress is unde served. Countless celebrities (Prince, Elvis, Fred die Mercury, Bowie, Boy George, Jaden Smith, even Vin Diesel and Kanye) have worn skirts and dresses in public, some of which did so before Styles was even born. The argument that he could be the frst man in a dress is a bit laughable to anyone who knows their pop culture. However, the Vogue cover was so widely celebrated that an array of public appearances in feminine clothing followed in quick succession, including but not limited to: a spread in Dazed magazine, a “Har ryween” Halloween show where he dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, a night on SNL dressed as a ballerina, the infamous Grammy’s lime-green blazer and purple boa, Coachella, the Met Gala(s), and countless tour performances.

The Final Word on Harry Styles

An abrupt shift from his boho-beanie boy band One Direction-era looks and even the be ginning of his solo career, which was marked by crisp suits and slicked back hair, it’s hard to tell whether Styles’ shift into the more femi nine is a genuine realization of a more fluid identity or an expensive publicity stunt.

Either way, Styles has had quite the impact on young men. In the last few years, a trend has arisen, mainly on Tik Tok (yeah, I’m talk ing #femmeboyfriday), in the wake of Styles’ multiplying appearances in feminine clothing, of straight, relatively masculine boys sporting skirts, makeup, jewelry, and copious amounts of rings. Pearl necklaces and schoolgirl plaids were a favorite of the for you page, with teen girls absolutely losing their shit over straight white boys with the same haircut. Youtube compilations of boys going from ultra-mascu line to miniskirts have millions of views, and headlines like “#Femmeboyfriday is Changing the Men’s Fashion Game” or “Are Male Skirts

About to be the Next Fashion Essential?” or “Men are Shopping for Skirts. Is the World Ready?” The thing about this trend that I can’t quite wrap my brain around is the fact that the “femmeboys” and the “men” referred to here are straight, cis, and usually white. Queer and gender non-conforming men don’t have to get hip to wearing feminine clothes, they’ve been doing it for years. The idea of gender fluidity as a trend that will inevitably be commercial ized and monetized for big brands also gener ally gives me a gross feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It’s interesting to consider Styles’ fashion choices in light of some of his more recent commentary. Styles has been quite the movie star recently, not only did he star in Don’t Worry Darling but also in My Policeman, the story of a British cop who cheats on his wife with a (male) museum curator in 1950s Brit ain. Set to come out on the 21st, I’ve heard this movie described–quite aptly if you ask me–as a British Brokeback Mountain. The choice of Styles as the lead is an interesting one, especially coming from a movie with a gay director, gay screenwriter, and two gay costars (maybe they knows something we don’t); you’d think that in 2022 white gays with floppy brown hair would be a dime a dozen. An article in The Guardian by Guy Lodge outlines an unfortunate interview with Styles about the film in which he is questioned ex plicitly about his sexuality, and responds with: “Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone,” a statement both cryptic and contradictory, considering he is in

a very public relationship with Olivia Wilde at the moment. While I give him the benefit of the doubt for that one–I don’t think anyone should have to be confronted with a straight forward question about their sexual orienta tion so publicly–his next comment I can’t exactly get behind. When explaining the film’s objective, Styles comments “It’s not like ‘This is a gay story about these guys being gay,’ [it’s a] very human story,” as if gayness and hu manity are not at all mutually exclusive. Styles fumbles further with the statement, “So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,” another confusing point as gay sex is barely ever depicted in mainstream film, and when it is, the most graphic it gets is the closing of the tent flaps as an allusion that the two cowboys inside are doing more than baking beans. The second comment in particular blew up on Twitter, where people once again found them selves questioning why a presumably straight, cis public figure was being looked at as a spokesperson for the queer community.

My Policeman discourse and all, do we have the right to make so many assumptions about Harry Styles? His biggest critics (my self included) have been so up in arms about why he’s getting so much coverage, whether he’s dressing to get attention, whether he’s queerbaiting or not, isn’t there someone more qualified to be put in the spotlight. There’s a lot of discussion that as a straight man, Styles

shouldn’t be wearing a dress on or off the cover of Vogue for the sake of not appropriat ing queer culture. Him and his legions of Tik Tok boys should change back into slacks and button-downs and ditch the pearl necklaces and dangly earrings. I’ve personally come to the point where, recently, as much of a staunch Harry-Styles-hater I am, I think the guy should be able to wear clothing without the entire world discussing it. Who are we to say that he’s not queer enough, its not impos sible that he could be. What I take issue with is that we always have to be talking about it, how whenever Styles drops a new photoshoot or magazine spread it’s impossible to escape without flushing all technology down the toilet. In my opinion, we should stop talking about Harry Styles entirely, and let him go back to doing whatever he was doing before he put on that Gucci dress, making music, being a heartthrob for an entire generation, etc. The irony is not lost on me that I am not heed ing my own advice–writing an article about a man I think we should stop discussing, but I wanted to get my thoughts down because this conversation is going to keep cycling around and around through public consciousness, like a merry-go-round no one can get off of no matter how hard they try. One day, hopefully, we can stop using the same poor man for our gender in pop culture discourse and move on to the next victim.

Illustration by Olive Polken

Director

Dr. Gags is currently out of the ofce, having been excommunicated from the Grape. Gags has declined to comment at this time. The Grape hopes to continue a working relationship with Gags in the future, pending litigation.

Interview with Toothbrush Guy

Ellen Efstathiou Contributor

This interview has been edited for increased length and less clarity.

(For the past month, I have become aware of a certain guy that lives in my hall. We shall call him “toothbrush guy” until I learn what his name is. Toothbrush guy has caused a ruckus in the hall because of what he does when he brushes his teeth.

He walks. Weirdly. Imagine a baby girafe trying to do a balance beam routine. Weirder than that.

Luckily, my room is right next to the lounge, so when he is alone there, I decide to calmly interview him on why he does this.)

ME: WHY DO YOU WALK LIKE THAT WHEN YOU BRUSH YOUR TEETH!?

TG: What are you talking about?

ME: The whole town is talking about it! The way you walk when you brush your teeth!

TG: You mean a normal walk?

ME: That is not normal. This is a normal toothbrush walk. (I demonstrate walking.)

TG: I’m pretty sure that’s how I walk.

ME: It’s not. You know, if you’re going to be hostile I might have to take drastic measures.

TG: Fine, what do you want to know?

ME: Well, if you’re so certain that you walk normally, then how about you explain to us how you walk.

TG: Like everyone else. I put one knee in front of the other, I don’t use my hips at all, I stick my neck out as far as possible so I don’t spill any toothpaste on my toes. I care a lot about my toes.

ME: Hold on. Are you not wearing shoes in the bathroom?

TG: Absolutely not. I fnd that constricting.

(If you are listening to the audio tape of this interview,

you will notice that there is a long pause here. There is a long pause because I had to run to the bathroom to throw up. Eventually, I return to the lounge.)

ME: Okay, it’s time I say this. This interview isn’t just for personal curiosity. We’re all concerned for you.

TG: Who’s “we”?

(It is at this moment that everyone else that lives in our hall comes out of hiding and reveals to toothbrush guy that this is in fact an intervention. Even toothbrush guy’s room mate, the person he thought was his friend, is there. Betrayal sets in.)

TG: What’s going on!? What’s the matter with walking a little ridiculous!? Why don’t you all just mind your own business!? I’ve worked hard to become the man I am today, and you aren’t going to take me down because you think that I walk a little silly! Have none of you ever walked goofly while brush ing your teeth? Are all of you perfect? I don’t think so!

(Some of our hallmates look down, embarrassed. These people are weak and anything they said in this interview has been stricken from the record.)

ME: You fool. You absolute fool. This has nothing to do with any of us. This is about you and your abysmal walk. It’s an embarrassment to the great institution that is the Barrows dorm! This dorm is sacred and you have ruined it with your walk! If you don’t clean up your act, you’ll be removed! Sent to live with the squirrels! Transformed into the new Yeobie!

TG: Wait, that’s a thing that can happen? I thought that was a myth.

(Now our RA, George Achoo, takes over the interview.)

RA: It’s not a myth. We learn about it in RA training. You have a week or you’ll become a squirrel.

(Toothbrush guy runs out of the lounge, crying.)

ME: I think that was a great success!

Everyone agrees with me because I am a great neighbor and an excellent interviewer.

Have I Mentioned How High My Bed Is Now

Isabel Hardwig Bad Habits Editor

Oh, sorry, I didn’t see you there! It’s just that I’ve gotten so used to looking down that my neck automatically cranes no matter where I am. It can’t be helped. I’m usually much higher off the ground than this. If you’d seen my bed, you would understand. Have I men tioned how high my bed is this year?

People think I come by high bed naturally, but it isn’t true. I worked for high bed. I bled for high bed. I had to find my friend Rose’s dad who brought a hammer to move-in. Let’s not forget that I have earned high bed, and the rewards of high bed have been a long time coming. Shall we review?

A Brief History of High Bed

Last year, you might remember, my bed was also pretty high. Not like this, of course, I think this is uncharted territory for us both. But no slouch in the height department, for sure, and it’s not like you could ever just hop into my bed. You had to climb up the side, reflecting on your sins, before bed could wel come you.

Some would say I have been in training for high bed since the very beginning. You’re too kind! It’s true that in eleventh grade my bed was high enough for a whole desk to live un der there, and I divided my time between the Under Place (dark, damp, covered in chemis try worksheets) and the Over Place (raptur ous, pillowed, a life as simple and joyous as a mountain goat’s).

Despite all of this, I am so shy and humble about the height of my bed. “Yeah, it just made sense,” I say. “I don’t know how we would’ve fit the fridge in here otherwise. My bed had all this lofting space, it just seemed like the right thing to do.” As if high bed is something I just stumbled into, and not a path assigned to me by God.

Some Facts About High Bed

Demons cannot touch me in my sleep; they simply stand at the base and wail.

My desk is always neat, because it is neces sary to aid my bed ascension. Although inti mately connected, these are often perceived as

Advice for Freshmen

Ellen Efstathiou Contributor

separate virtues.

I live in a different world than you. It is not a worse or better world, it is just distinct, set apart from the little floor-lives down below.

In my dreams I am atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, or perhaps in space.

Frequently Asked Questions About High Bed

Can you get into it when you’re drunk/high?

Yes, and I am so good at it and so quiet and I think loving thoughts about my bed and its height the whole time.

Where do you keep your phone?

It doesn’t matter. Can’t you see? The mate rial world has no bearing up here.

What do you do if your blanket falls off in the middle of the night?

I suffer. We have all forgotten how to suf fer. The world is not always kind–even in bed, the world is not always kind. It is important to understand this. If you don’t understand it yet, then maybe you should lower your bed a few notches. Your time will come; it just isn’t here yet.

1. Drop out.

There are so many of you. Just think about how long your gradua tion ceremony is going to take cause you’ve got 900 whatever names to get through. Do yourself and your class mates a favor and drop out. Shorter graduation ceremony means happier people.

2. Don’t make friends.

By now you’ve probably heard that the first friends you make at college aren’t going to last. Get around that problem by never making friends in the first place. Problem solved. You’re welcome.

3. Download YikYak.

It’s great for your mental health and everyone on there is so kind and it

Hey freshmen! You’re the new meat on campus and as a sophis ticated 2nd year I’m here to give you some advice so you don’t get eaten alive! I don’t give a shit that this is a month later than what’s helpful. You don’t run this school yet so listen up!

won’t make you anxious about others perceiving you at all!!!!!!

4. Don’t go to the Rat.

I don’t want to alarm you, but all the food there is actually made out of rats. And everyone knows, if you eat a rat, you’ll give birth to a rat. Just like if you eat a watermelon seed.

5. Follow everyone in your class on Instagram.

You might not meet all of them, but you will see them in the halls. And stare at them. And they will stare at you. And you will never say anything to them. And you will develop a crush on them even though you’ve never talked. And you will wonder what you are doing with your life. And they will all unfollow you because they won’t

know you. And you will keep fol lowing them. And living vicariously through them. Forever.

6. Don’t follow the honor code.

Real college students don’t care about consequences. In fact, follow the anti-honor code which says that you must be as dishonest as possible. Plus, the more you plagiarize, the more you’ll have time for fun things like, I don’t know, staring wistfully out of your window.

7. Make out with a squirrel. You haven’t had the true Oberlin experience until you’ve done this. Rabies aren’t real and isn’t, like, half of this school furries? Have humansquirrel hybrid babies for all I care!

8. Get drunk before class. If you’re the type of person that’s more talkative when drunk this will help you get your participation grade up.

9. Don’t look both ways before crossing the street. What am I, your mother? Are you still in kinder garten? No! You’re a fucking college freshman! The cars will stop for you out of awe!

10. Stand in large groups. This makes it easier for the upperclass men to get you with our bow and ar rows. Uhh. It’s a fun activity and you should have fun at college.

Sign My Petition to Put MORE Pianos in Azzies!

Flip Ptarmigan Baby Grand Enthusiast

By now, many of you will be familiar with the newest addition to Azzies, Ober lin’s much-beloved library coffee shop — a full-size baby grand piano! Nestled against the wall in Azzies’ oft-neglected periodicals section, this three-legged music-maker is a welcome addition to campus’s favorite study space.

You may worry — wait, if it’s only a baby grand piano, is it as resonant as your typical piano? Well, worry not, because despite its size, Azzies’ new piano boasts a headacheinducing volume, sure to interrupt both your studies and your conversations no matter their decibel.

When the live piano performance min

gles with the already-playing Azzies’ playlist — now that’s music to my ears. As everyone who’s ever been witness to this phenome non will tell you, these two sources of music always mesh perfectly, creating a medley fit for a choir of angels.

So, if you agree with me about the virtues of the new Azzies piano, sign my petition to put MORE pianos in Azzies! If we gather enough signatures, we can replace every booth with a baby grand — maybe some day, we can even get an upright behind the counter! With your help, we can make it absolutely impossible to study in Azzies at any time of day. If you want to start getting your straws & silverware from under the lid of a Steinway & Sons, email me at morepia nos@azzies.gov, and I’ll get your electronic signature on that baby.

How to Navigate Talking About Fall Without Lying About How Often You Rewatch Over the Garden Wall

Isabel Hardwig Bad Habits Editor

When talking about fall, my brain switches into a different and wellpracticed social script, with key top ics such as Leaves So Colors Now and I Eat Sweaters For Breakfast. At some point in this conver sation, the following exchange will occur:

“Man, it’s getting cold! Must be time for my annual Over the Garden Wall re watch!”

“Me too, because I also do that every year!”

Other statements I have verbally and en thusiastically agreed with are, all my time is going to be taken up by this Over the Garden Wall rewatch, I probably won’t be able to do any home work this month due to this Over the Garden Wall rewatch, and fall hasn’t really started until you wrap yourselves in blankets and rewatch Over the Garden Wall, as we have all done every October since time immemorial.

I watched Over the Garden Wall once, and enjoyed it. I re member some things about it. Probably I saw a Mountain Goats AMV about it in eighth grade. I capitu lated to a high school girlfriend’s desire to rewatch it once, but we only made it about an episode in before I asked if we could kiss sometimes and she said no. There was a frog in it, and I think also a dog that was larger than a normal dog.

And yet, it seems that every year,

the flood grows larger. I’ve watched it every year since birth, people assure me. I wouldn’t even recognize the changing season if it wasn’t so much like what Girg Overalls went through.

to be cashing in for OTGW clout.

Look, kids, it’s okay. I understand. Even I have the rare, weak moment where I claim, apropos of noth ing, that I need to rewatch Over the

mimicking human speech. No one is ever willing to back down, to label themselves as vulnerable. And so the cycle continues, and each person feels more alone than ever.

Illustration by Lucas Ritchie-Shatz Contributor

Where did all of you people come from?? Were you abandoned at birth in a hollow pumpkin and raised by a kindly horse farmer? Did you crawl out of computer? I can maybe believe that some of you watch this show ev ery year, but at least half of you have

Garden Wall soon. My conversational partner rushes to agree, eager to mark themselves as someone who also does this and will probably be doing this soon, maybe even to night, haha. We can circle each other for hours like this, like two Furbys

Was there ever a way to discuss fall without lying about how often you rewatch Over the Garden Wall? Was there even a season between sum mer and winter before Boy With Hat first stum bled across our screens? It’s dif ficult to imagine any such time, but I encourage you to join me in this thought exercise. The next time someone tries to bring up Over the Garden Wall in your pres ence, try to steer them gently away. Agree with certain neutral topics, such as it’s fall and wow, cold, but avoid the temptation to gain instant, unearned ap proval from your peers by lying about how often you rewatch Over the Gar den Wall. You have many great attributes that don’t come from your choice in TV, and maybe it’s time to redirect the conversation to those instead. Try reminding everyone how creative your Halloween costume will be, or how cute you look in your little boots.

ACROSS:

1. acronym for organization whose mission is “to uphold the right of the working class to keep and bear arms”

4. something you might do to your legs in Mudd

6. where you might see your professor, your ex, and that random person from class at brunch

8. drivin’ in my ___, you really have to see it

where you might order a pastrami on rye or a bagel with lox

11. acronym for Fuck The Board

12. guy that didn’t try hard enough

. something you might hear around Mudd during midterms

15. Peppa’s catchphrase

16. Phineas + Ferb character that turned me gay

18. another word for flashlight

19. what people will offer in exchange for all your textbooks for the semester on the oberlin barter and trade FB page

DOWN:

1. shit but British

2. Lizzy used to command this military unit (RIP)

3. according to their Spotify, “a Punk Rock Booty Bass Rap group featuring best friends Debbie D. + Daphne D.”

4. a good time to get drunk on your grandmother’s Manischewitz wine

5. what your friend might say about the bangs you cut yourself

6. 2nd person to orbit earth

7. protagonist of The Vampire Diaries

8. something you might text your friend in response to getting undercooked meat at the Rat again

10. abbreviation for when you don’t know what to put down for the crossword clue

14. comes from Old English gesnot; akin to Old High German snuzza or “nasal mucus”

15 known for their propensity for beans and nudity

17. “I kiss’d thee ___ I kill’d thee” - Othello

Crossword by Ilana McNamara and Taso Mullen