The Internet makes it easy, maybe especially for women, to perpetrate stories of outsized personal misery. Do we take a special pleasure in seeing them debunked? Sarah and Nancy discuss!
Nancy is spitting hot fire in these last couple episodes!
I love the jag about imposters stealing resources from the people that actually have these problems is really at the heart of the issue. If just our feelings equal the actual truth then our feelings can excuse anything which completely flattens the scope the magnitude of people’s real problems and trivializes real suffering.
We are all vulnerable to falling for the schemes because we generally want to be helpful to people (like Nancy’s runaway car example) and we are also now primed to construct humanized voices around us anyway (like Sarah’s stuffed animals or the door dash bot). So as we are immersed into an environment with more and more artificial humans and alternate realities these broken people are chameleons adapting to whatever favorable sympathetic color they can display.
Sorry I’m late to the party commenting on a conversation from two months ago. I don’t expect anyone to remember the context anymore, but I wanted to comment regardless !
Fascinating that, per Sarah, there are therapists out there telling clients, paraphrasing, feelings = truth. Wondering if this reflects a perspective from the new generation of therapists. I, and most of my friends around my age (44) who have been in therapy a while, have been counseled basically the opposite. Feelings are real in that we feel them, but are an internal experience and don’t necessarily reflect the reality of the outside world. The “feelings are always truth” is a dangerous trend.
May 21, 2022·edited May 21, 2022Liked by Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em
I found it so interesting when Sarah said (truthfully) that Bonnie & Clyde showed that social media mythologizing isn’t a new thing, it’s just a new platform for an old thing. Only a bit before that Nancy had talked about the Fatty Arbuckle case. Nancy and I are about the same age, so she probably heard about Fatty from Hollywood Babylon (a very salacious book about early Hollywood written in the 70s). Nobody really knows what exactly caused Virginia Rappe’s death - there are tons of theories about it; check it out, it’s a very interesting rabbit hole to go down - but it’s a fact that the coke bottle thing was made up, and that Fatty himself was acquitted (after three trials), despite the media of the time almost baying for his conviction. Arbuckle never worked under his own name in Hollywood again. So social media cancellation isn’t a new thing, either, just a new platform.
Julia Fox also has BPD per earlier interviews/artworks she made. An interesting tangential story: she had also accused the artist Chuck Close of sexual harassment, and Chuck Close’s spokesperson didn’t refute that he had hit on Fox when she was posing for him, but also said that part of Close’s disability was degeneration in a part of his brain that has to do with impulse control. I had seen him speak at a science festival about prosopagnosia, which is another brain condition he has that inhibits him from processing faces (quite interesting in the context of his artwork style) and even in the 80s, his condition was bad enough that he’d have a conversation with a woman on the street and not realize that she was a girlfriend he had previously lived with.
So much food for thought, as usual!! And my reading (and movie) list is exploding with all of your recs (but I'm happy about that; so much to dig into)! I just subscribed--treated myself bc it's my birthday this Sunday! 💜
I’m just here for the baked goods. Love you guys. Listened to the last ep with my 80 year old mom she n the last leg of a road trip. She is now officially a Nancy stan.
There's more Amber Heard support, you just need to know where to look for it. The website OhNoTheyDidn't has posts every 3-4 days summarizing the trial in support of Amber Heard.
This dropped just as I was getting in my rental car to head back to the airport wondering what I was going to listen to. Like the universe is saying welcome back to normality after a crazy week. Thanks ladies!
Welcome! And yes, we are all susceptible because we don't expect that people are conning us. Good con artists understand they need to keep up and appeal what makes sense to us now, which is why in 2022 we do not have aluminum siding con artists but crypto con artists; which is why I might have someone appeal to my sense of protecting children and someone else, their desire to be seen as a leader in their field. Those who aggressively insist you make room for their feelings I think have a separate agenda, which is to kneecap you and make you feel small, to publicly shame you. It will well-documented that the sociopathic experience fewer emotions than the rest of us, which I do find heart-breaking, however one they do so experience include a delight getting one over on others.
Nancy is spitting hot fire in these last couple episodes!
I love the jag about imposters stealing resources from the people that actually have these problems is really at the heart of the issue. If just our feelings equal the actual truth then our feelings can excuse anything which completely flattens the scope the magnitude of people’s real problems and trivializes real suffering.
We are all vulnerable to falling for the schemes because we generally want to be helpful to people (like Nancy’s runaway car example) and we are also now primed to construct humanized voices around us anyway (like Sarah’s stuffed animals or the door dash bot). So as we are immersed into an environment with more and more artificial humans and alternate realities these broken people are chameleons adapting to whatever favorable sympathetic color they can display.
Sorry I’m late to the party commenting on a conversation from two months ago. I don’t expect anyone to remember the context anymore, but I wanted to comment regardless !
Fascinating that, per Sarah, there are therapists out there telling clients, paraphrasing, feelings = truth. Wondering if this reflects a perspective from the new generation of therapists. I, and most of my friends around my age (44) who have been in therapy a while, have been counseled basically the opposite. Feelings are real in that we feel them, but are an internal experience and don’t necessarily reflect the reality of the outside world. The “feelings are always truth” is a dangerous trend.
I found it so interesting when Sarah said (truthfully) that Bonnie & Clyde showed that social media mythologizing isn’t a new thing, it’s just a new platform for an old thing. Only a bit before that Nancy had talked about the Fatty Arbuckle case. Nancy and I are about the same age, so she probably heard about Fatty from Hollywood Babylon (a very salacious book about early Hollywood written in the 70s). Nobody really knows what exactly caused Virginia Rappe’s death - there are tons of theories about it; check it out, it’s a very interesting rabbit hole to go down - but it’s a fact that the coke bottle thing was made up, and that Fatty himself was acquitted (after three trials), despite the media of the time almost baying for his conviction. Arbuckle never worked under his own name in Hollywood again. So social media cancellation isn’t a new thing, either, just a new platform.
It was Hollywood Babylon!
Yep. That’s where I learned a lot of the Hollywood urban legends I’ve since had to unlearn!
Julia Fox also has BPD per earlier interviews/artworks she made. An interesting tangential story: she had also accused the artist Chuck Close of sexual harassment, and Chuck Close’s spokesperson didn’t refute that he had hit on Fox when she was posing for him, but also said that part of Close’s disability was degeneration in a part of his brain that has to do with impulse control. I had seen him speak at a science festival about prosopagnosia, which is another brain condition he has that inhibits him from processing faces (quite interesting in the context of his artwork style) and even in the 80s, his condition was bad enough that he’d have a conversation with a woman on the street and not realize that she was a girlfriend he had previously lived with.
Whoa, what a tangled web. Also, not sure if that handle is your real name, but it's my middle name. -- SH
So much food for thought, as usual!! And my reading (and movie) list is exploding with all of your recs (but I'm happy about that; so much to dig into)! I just subscribed--treated myself bc it's my birthday this Sunday! 💜
Happy birthday! More on the way tomorrow... xx
Happy Birthday!
Which version of Apocalypse Now? One of the original releases, Redux or the Final Cut?
Original "Apocalypse Now" FTW. I could never make it through that Final Cut.
I was wondering the exact same thing. There is a difference!
I’m just here for the baked goods. Love you guys. Listened to the last ep with my 80 year old mom she n the last leg of a road trip. She is now officially a Nancy stan.
Hi Mom!
It takes real balls to marry someone and lie to the about being a cancer and transplant recipient! Without scars? Your wife is an RN!
There's more Amber Heard support, you just need to know where to look for it. The website OhNoTheyDidn't has posts every 3-4 days summarizing the trial in support of Amber Heard.
Thank you! We have a very specific Depp-Heard episode dropping tomorrow morning and there will also be a thread discussion. Chime in!
Awesome - looking forward to it!
Ok, yes, of course, take my money.
This dropped just as I was getting in my rental car to head back to the airport wondering what I was going to listen to. Like the universe is saying welcome back to normality after a crazy week. Thanks ladies!
Welcome! And yes, we are all susceptible because we don't expect that people are conning us. Good con artists understand they need to keep up and appeal what makes sense to us now, which is why in 2022 we do not have aluminum siding con artists but crypto con artists; which is why I might have someone appeal to my sense of protecting children and someone else, their desire to be seen as a leader in their field. Those who aggressively insist you make room for their feelings I think have a separate agenda, which is to kneecap you and make you feel small, to publicly shame you. It will well-documented that the sociopathic experience fewer emotions than the rest of us, which I do find heart-breaking, however one they do so experience include a delight getting one over on others.