Senior correspondent Constance Grady shares her path to cultural criticism, and her top 5 stories.
Cultural criticism is the process of un-gaslighting yourself.
A lot of us carry around murky, subterranean beliefs around with us that we can’t always see clearly before it is too late: weird ideas we picked up somewhere as kids about how people who are the victims of structural inequalities probably had it coming somehow. We would be horrified if anyone told us we believed these things, but still those persistent myths are lurking in our minds, untended to and unobserved.
In cultural criticism, it becomes possible to make those beliefs legible. Cultural criticism un-gaslights us (a term I first learned from Anne Helen Petersen) because it shows us the myths all the ugly things in our culture hide behind, and then it lets us decide what we want to do about them.
I came to Vox to work as a cultural critic in 2016 after years in book publishing, and in my time here, I’ve been able to un-gaslight myself about a lot of the popular culture I grew up on. I un-gaslighted myself about Sixteen Candles, a movie which taught me as a teenager that girls who get date raped probably deserved it. I un-gaslighted myself about Paris Hilton, a woman whom I thoroughly looked down upon as a child because her sex tape was leaked without her permission.
Doing this work with the past makes it easier to spot in the present when people are trying to hide behind these old myths. I’ve been able to use the same skill set to decode what MAGA is up to with all those ICE ads and women’s podcasts. Most recently, I un-gaslighted myself about ugliness, and whether it’s really worth being all that afraid of.
I’ve loved getting to do this work, but the most rewarding part of it is when I get to hear from readers who say that my essays have helped them draw connections in their own lives and make sense of the world in new ways. We live in a world that lies to us a lot, and the lies we absorb by osmosis from popular culture are the hardest of all to see behind.
The support of Vox Members helps me make those lies as clear as I possibly can. Thank you for helping me do it.
—Constance GradySenior culture correspondent
Read Constance’s work:
1) How Republicans became the party of raunchThe right thinks that hot girls can “kill woke.” What?
2) The rape culture of the 1980s, explained by Sixteen CandlesThe beloved romantic comedy’s date rape scene provides important context for the Brett Kavanaugh accusations.
3) The sadistic appeal of ICE’s recruitment adsThe retro, cryptofascist aesthetic of all those ICE recruitment ads, explained.
4) Paris Hilton’s sex tape was revenge porn. The world gleefully watched.What a generation took away from the case of the Paris Hilton sex tape.
5) A MAGA influencer says there’s no space for her in women’s media. Is she right?The weird lie animating the right-wing womanosphere.