Yall having a good time so far it’s been a great bookfest um my name is anel Singh I USI and they pronounce it and it’s an honor to uh moderate today’s panel I do want to start by just reading their bios I think words are important
And the work you have both done with your lives thus far has been pretty incredible so emiline Klein is a writer and a Columbia MFA graduate her criticism essays and Reporting have explored the intersection of disordered eating diet culture and contemporary feminism blending history cultural criticism and Memoir with a lifetime of
Personal experience fighting and eating disorder and consuming the literary filmic televised and online content propagating our destructive Cults of femininity defined by slenderness she has also spent years studying disordered eatings culture epidemiology and diagnostic history academically and writing about these issues in Memoir essays and investigative reporting let’s
Give emiline another round of applause welcome back home to New Orleans her family is here where’s her family let let’s give them some love too yeah I’m a new orinan so you know we got to do that uh Dr Lisa Wade um I’m always in awe of
Your work so it’s an honor to be here with you today is an associate professor of sociology and gender and sexuality studies program at Tain in 2017 she published the groundbreaking book called American hookup the new culture of sex on campus the text situates colle iate hookup culture within the history of
Sexuality the evolution of higher education and the unfinished feminist Revolution Wade Maps out a punishing emotional landscape marked by unequal Pleasures competition for status and sexual violence she discovers that privileged students tend to enjoy hookup culture the most and considers its effects on racial and sexual minorities
Students who opt out and those who participate ambivalently um thank you both for writing these books I told you before the panel that reading them side by side was such a powerful experience for me making me think about who’s in actually in charge of Our Lives is it us
Is it individuals or is it the media so let’s get started um emine just congrats on your book it just came out yes it did at the end of February more Applause more Applause okay well thank you it’s like 2024 uh it’s fresh off the presses um
You open your book uh kind of telling the reader that this book falls into the category of Memoirs of disordered eating but you also situate yourself a little differently you say in the eating disordered uh eating disorder Memoirs the girl recovers but she often still
Wants us to know how close she got to the ultimate Finish Line in so many of these stories she blames her sisters for sending her there teaching her their tricks and comparing limbs in high school holays and then in hospital Wards the only way to survive seems to be renouncing your suffering sisters
Transfiguring them into mean girl villains or naive vain illness vectors I’m trying to figure out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change can we all take a deep breath there um tell me why you wrote this book um wow big question so
I there were many reasons I mean I started struggling with disordered eating when I was really young um and was not able to recover fully due to any like normative medical treatment but through a lot of self-education about the kind of political history of these diseases and also through a lot of like
Really supportive conversations with other women who had struggled with these issues and that process was over a decade long right and so I actually when I first thought about writing this book I thought I wanted to write a book about female Hysteria and sort of what was it
Historically and what is it now who is it is it me is it Misha Barton who’s it going to be and then as I started doing my research I realized that a lot of the figures both in the Victorian era and in modern times that were sort of falling
Into this hysteria category were also struggling with a lot of disordered eating symptoms and then I started trying to look for a book that really treated disordered eating as kind of a seminal microcosm of a lot of our kind of political structures cultural forces and and economic changes that we’ve seen
Um over the past I don’t know like Century because I realized that any disease with the sort of demographic prevalence and uh fatality rates that Eating Disorders have which are very disturbingly high and very disturbingly prevalent uh get understood so diseases like opioid addiction or depression or alcohol alcoholism get understood yes as
Clinical illnesses but also as microcosms of all of those structures right and the sufferers of those diseases have access to a lot of resources that reveal the structural issues that have caused their diseases in a way that can relieve blame uh whereas Eating Disorders are generally treated in literature either in the
Memoir pure Memoir genre or the self-help genre or the academic genre all of which sort of trace this one very linear Narrative of eating disorder and of eating disorder recovery that is one centering usually a very thin white girl who does not represent the demographic prevalence of this disease who also has
This kind of just very specific and sort of narrow narrative as narrow as the beauty ideal about both how the illness manifests and the recovery and that that story often pits women against each other both in making people who don’t fit that beauty ideal or that Narrative of the sickness
Uh feel like they’re not sick enough or feel excluded from a community that could breed solidarity and also because there’s so much sort of misunderstanding of these diseases and of their suffers that can make people feel like girls are making each other sicker when they’re just being honest about the society they
Live in um or like trigger each other whatever and so I wanted to say you know I’ve read so many memoirs about eating disorders that I used as a manual and even if that’s not what the author intended and I’ve seen I’ve seen so many books that cast girls that are in pain
Because they are reading a room they’ve been locked into correctly and understanding the Beauty standard that they’re getting from all sides and so they’re developing A coping coping mechanism that is also a disease uh but then are being told that they’re just crazy and overvaluing thinness and Etc
And I wanted to say to those people you know you’re not crazy and this is a sort of sororal story and a collective Memoir and I kind of wanted to just amplify and attend to stories of disordered eating that don’t fit into that narrow narrative but that but to also kind of
Deconstruct that narrative and ask how it got seated into our synopses so deeply and no I’m rambling but that’s sort of what I was I don’t think you’re rambling I really if you haven’t gotten this book please get it because I I think one of the most powerful things is that you’re
Flipping the script and you’re calling media in uh facilitated a talk with Dr patina love yesterday and she talked about this concept of the super predator and who actually is the super predator and I think it’s one thing I really took away from your book is the pitting of
Women against one another but also like the deflecting away from the media uh Lisa in your book American hookup the new culture of sex on campus you bust some myths as well that we’ve all grown up when it comes to the media that everyone is having uh in college is
Having sex and enjoying it and I think through your research you find something different and I wanted to read from the beginning of your book you say bringing it all together I make a case for why hookup culture makes so many students unhappy I offer an anatomy of the hookup
And explain where it came from and why it dominates the college setting I show what it feels like to opt in or opt out and for those who choose to participate I discuss what they’re in for the emotional landscape of hookup culture politics of its pleasure punishing expectations of physical Perfection
Intimidating games of status and possibly of becoming the victim or the agent of a sexual crime tell us why you read this book thank you um I’d love to and before I do I just want to um say that emiline’s book is really truly amazing it’s so
Good um the expertise the breath of knowledge the way she weaves together Memoirs into this meta Memoir that is also extremely analytical and insightful I just thank you um okay so I was teaching classes in the sociology of sexuality and I was listening to my students talk about
Hookup culture um I was really you know lucky to be kind of at the at the front of that and be being able to hear their stor and I was also paying attention to pop cultural sort of um coverage of hookup culture I noticed a couple things that
Really didn’t jive with what I was hearing one was in this in the same way uh the person that was always sort of centered in these pop cultural analyses was this like very um conventionally attractive heterosexual white middle class or upper class girl and then the conversations around her were always
Like should she or shouldn’t she be involved in hookup culture and um then the answers would always be something like someone would jump in and say well she should cuz that’s what Liberation looks like and then someone would jump in and say no she shouldn’t because um
It’s it’s it makes her it’ll make her unhappy it she she’ll be harmed and then there was a third person that would jump in and say stop telling women what to do um and as a sociologist with access to actual a diverse group of actual college students I felt like I could
Offer a couple things and one was a more um a more diverse tale of what was really going on and then instead of asking should she or shouldn’t she I wanted to ask like what’s the context in which students are making these decisions and so I really focused in on
Trying to tell the story of what is this culture that so many students enter when they get to uh residential colleges and tell that story instead which I think was very humanizing and I also um am so lucky to have had one students submit diaries for this book so I was able I
Mean the students themselves were so insightful so funny so lovable um and once I got the first batch of Diaries I got three batches I knew I had something really special and I really wanted to give them a platform awesome and this title of the session is uh social media and image
Emiline uh you have a chapter in your book that explores some of this titled Starving in cyberspace and I’m reading from their books cuz I just want you to hear their words and there there’s every word is so beautiful and Powerful after the search bar two paths diverge in the
Dark down one pain and potentially Dire Straits spiky shs of self-hatred and self harm but also love care shared Secrets girls who get you a place where no matter how sick and sad you are someone will say same down the other girls who got off the other road before
It kened off a cliff pain too but also a life where picking up a fork doesn’t have to mean a fork in the road a life like you’ve lived before back when you and your body were on speaking terms so tell us more about kind of that Paradox
That exists within media and social media and how this shapes kind of the image you had have of yourself that’s a great question I I mean that chapter was actually so um pivotal for me in this project of sort of Shifting the frame much as you were
Saying uh sort of from the super narrow Narrative of the one victim we’ve been talking about and what went wrong in her decision-making process and saying instead sort of what are the structural forces and specifically the systems and corporations that are profiting from her hating herself in a very specific way
That makes her behave in a the next very specific set of ways and so something that I found was that like I was sort of thinking back to these sort of pro Ana Pro eating disorder forums that I had frequented during my own disordered eating in sort of this like as era and
Early 201 and what I found to be so interesting and paradoxical about both those spaces and the way that they were framed by the media at the time is that these were spaces that like for those of you that were online and using those B
At the time or Al just like a reading mainstream media they were places where people were posting like diet plans for their eating disorders and sharing the like images that would Inspire them for their Eating Disorders but they were also places where people were going in like an extreme vacuum of
Care for eating disorders that do not fit that extremely narrow body standard so like you have Eating Disorders are the only disease in the DSM that doesn’t that has a biometric demand you can’t get an anorexia diagnosis if you’re not a a certain amount of thin and so people
That are being rejected from treatment spaces are finding each other online to come up with harm reduction plans and to help each other and to also validate each other and say you know you are like I’m so sorry this is happening to you right and to like help each other get
Through the days that whole side of the of those websites was like completely ignored but if you were reading like the New York Times in like 2008 or 2009 you’d often be coming across a article that would be like teenage girls invent crazy new cult called being thin and
They’re getting each other sick with these terrifying photos they’re posting and really dangerous diet plans and these articles like I’m not exaggerating they were incredibly cruel incredibly condescending and there was no acknowledgement of the fact that most of what these girls were posting were diets they cribbed straight from the pages of
Like tabloids of women’s magazines and put alongside photos that they had taken from tabloids and from women’s magazines so like yes these girls were coming up with like funny portmanto for a diet like they came up with inspiration which isn’t like my favorite word I’ve ever heard but they’re just like making a
Joke anyway they’re doing all that and then they’re being hugely demonized in the media cast in this way like as their patient zero of a moral panic and there’s no acknowledgement that a series of adults in high-rise buildings signed off on all of those diets originally and those photos originally and that now
They can make money from not just publishing the diets but ALS and from publishing the stories about inspirational celebrity weight loss but also from publishing sensationalized stories about teenage girls that are obsessed with dangerous celebrity weight loss yeah and so that is one thing where
I was like girls are being caught in a trap that is like just really constrictive and dangerous and they’re then finding each other online and then when they do that they’re being censored and so a lot of those spaces were censored uh because the social platforms just didn’t want to take on the
Liability of the dangerous things being platformed on their spaces and so there’s like really tragic stories of people that would like make a threat on Reddit after their like self harm boor got banned and they’d say like you know my like as a brown person in a larger
Body who like would never get diagnosed with an eating disorder and was never able to like get validated by the medical establishment now my one space of support has been banned by Tumblr so that they can avoid a lawsuit and so all of that was just like really sad and I
Wanted to give those spaces sort of a a tender treatment that also validated their intellect because also these teen girls were often being cast as just like like vain idiots when in fact they’re very literate and caring um but then on the flip side like we had all of that
Happening in like the A and now we see much more algorithmically generated social platforms where like to get on to one of those Pro eating disorder boards where you’re going to get indoctrinated into the dangerous cult in fact the studies show that you don’t usually even find those boards until you’ve been
Suffering for like at least a year and so people who had already were ill and I know that was my experience find these spaces it’s not like you’re just stumbling across it right and learning about a dangerous new thing but today that is actually happening and yet we’re
Not talking about it like with Tik Tok for you page and with Instagram’s um discover page those algorithms are coded in such a way that presents young girls who actually aren’t typing those words into the search bar and aren’t seeking it out with really intense both just both diet content and eating disorder
Content and I also think that the in the the media obsession with parsing apart this like false line between just like a normal healthy diet and like disordered eating which they’re they’re like going too far language that like implies you start off on the right track as you
Should be trying to lose weight you just shouldn’t lose too much whatever all of this stuff is being fed pardon the pun to young girls in a really crazy way like if they they did a wsj did an investigation that showed that if you just code a bot as a 13-year-old girl
And she doesn’t even search anything about weight they’re like okay 13-year-old girl let’s try out some weight loss content and then if she doesn’t scroll past fast enough she’s very quickly getting things that are called like the Corpse Bride diet and so that is all being funneled to her while
Creators in larger bodies and creative creators of color are being actively Shadow band and none of that is getting any of the type of media treatment that the teen girls who were just on a small Forum with a few hundred people talking about their issues we’re getting as in
Terms of and so I really wanted to sort of like shine a light on what these false Notions we have about how teen girls are behaving and how they are how their self-loathing that they’ve been taught by this Society is or is not being ventriloquized into their
Interactions with other girls and then I also wanted to sort of like fift shift the frame for today and say like people aren’t even being allowed the space to find their own communities or to to decide how they understand themselves because they’re being funneled into these like very whirl pooly algorithms
Well I think that’s what I really appreciate is that you do turn the tables you hold accountability you call people in and out and I’m a counseling psychologist that has worked mostly with black and brown folks who have survived uh disordered eating and um I don’t know
That word tender you used earlier I don’t know if y’all feel it as she talks and as I’ve read her words like it’s just that tenderness is I think what you’re gifting us with your Memoir is that not just I see you but I really see
You and it’s okay I’m going to believe you and that’s such a first step to Healing is being able to hear people’s Story from beginning to end with a middle with emotion all the way through about what you’re surviving in the outside world so thank you Lisa um you talk about social
Media and image in your book as well I want to read um you say students go back to their rooms after brunch to edit and upload photos and stories to me social media I think a lot of our this was a a participant I think a lot of our hookup
Culture and party cultur is glamorized wrote One student referring to sites like Instagram and Facebook a big part of these parties another explained is uh also taking mobile pictures and their sole purpose is so one’s whole social network can see that one is having a great time at College what is the
Challenge when things like this are so glamorized maybe maybe you all have heard about the sex recession that young people aren’t having as much sex as the two previous generations which appears to be a little bit true um and I often get asked about well how does that jive
With the observation of hookup culture on college campuses that suggest that all these young people are having tons of sex with lots of people and the truth is that um something can be culturally normative and also actually quite unusual or rare like for example it’s culturally normative in our society to
Grow up graduate from high school get your college degree get yourself a nice job um maybe meet someone you like get married buy a house get a dog have a kid stay married forever right but most people don’t do it that way there’s all kinds of other ways right you might get
The dog before the house you might have the kids before the marriage you may not stay together right it’s actually that particular narrative that is quite culturally dominant is not normal and the same thing is happening with hookup culture um there’s this idea that everyone should would be having sex all
The time with all kinds of people and about a third of students don’t do it at all not even a single time and then most students the plurality um they do it a little bit and then they’re like uh I’m not sure I love this about 10 maybe at
Max 15% best thing that ever happened to them they love it so it doesn’t have to be um totally normative for it to be culturally dominant and so that’s what see on college campuses so hookup culture is actually quite consistent with a sex recession and I would argue it’s causing
The sex recession because it says that the only way to have sex because the relationship script is off the table on college campuses so the only way to have sex is to have the sort of um you know stones to like go ahead and have it for
The first time often with someone you barely know under circumstances that are sort of chaotic and a lot of students just don’t have the stomach for that kind of environment especially because these kids are having sex and learning about sex for the very first times in
Their lives so I think cocoa pure is causing the sex recession actually and to get back to social media social media is part of how the idea that everyone is hooking up all the time um sort of spreads spreads around and they don’t hooking up is so consistent with
Partying they don’t even have to be talking about hooking up or showing themselves hooking up all they have to to do is indicate that they’re going to these parties that are you know that that is the space in which hooking up happens to um give the impression that
They are doing College the way they’ve been taught that they should who’s in control here the media are us and I think with AI it’s not coming it’s here you know so many questions we could continue to delve into emiline you shared towards the end of your book uh this chapter it’s aoda
Against dissociation feminism and you say that the rise of the internet as a means of mass communication seems to have opened up a lot of new ways to dissociate what is dissociation feminism and how does this play out on the internet um so basically dissociation
Feminism was a term that I kind of came up with in like 2019 because I was really kind of trying to understand this sort of kind ironized and kind of nihilistic and dead pan tone that I found a lot of really intelligent women across all disciplines of art uh sort of
Speaking in both online and in books and in films that I was watching at the time uh about their sort of very feminized traumas and very feminized forms of pain and I sort of felt like it was this move kind of away this sort of like Sally Rooney heroin flea bag era
Kind of thing where you’re sort of like seems like there were a bunch of generations of feminists who are like screaming and shaking and throwing up and like getting in the streets and like really trying to do things and like we still have these horrible beauty standards and we still have this like
Horrible sexual culture and Etc and so there’s this subset of women who then were sort of being like okay well what if I I I understand politically that I don’t believe in that beauty standard or that sexual culture and I disagree with it and I’m going to be but I understand
In this sort of kind of both highly individualistic and white feminist way like I understand that I can succeed with my body and my position in this Society by ass seeding to those Norms that I don’t politically believe in and I can sort of have it both ways by doing
It in this sarcastic dead pan tone that makes it clear that I don’t want to uphold it but I can’t control the system little old dainty old me and so it was like I wanted to kind of say to those people and again like throughout this book I’m trying really trying to like
Look at this like emaciated thin we woman Paradigm that and neither demonize entirely her nor glamorize her because I feel like we’ve tried both of those approaches and it hasn’t dethroned her and instead sort of say what like I I see what you’re saying I understand the impulse to do it but I
I don’t even think it’s going to be feel as good as you think it is and haven’t we noticed that most of these sort of like sad white girl icons of our culture over time have actually had their stories end in suicide or alcoholism or depression or whatever so like she’s not
Even having that good a time but also she’s seeding these very dangerous messages into our culture and so I was trying to sort of propose as an alternative this idea that it really resonated with me what you were saying about having the students write Diaries and wanting to amplify them of this kind
Of feminism of attention where we sort of create more spaces to just listen to each other’s stories of our the types of pain we’ve experienced across I mean also across a gender spectrum and also just of anybody of being you know non-men and like non super thin people growing up in this
Society and sort of say like what if we just like kind of widened the emotional as effect I’m not saying that like you can never make a Gallows humor joke cuz sometimes they’re funny but like what if we also allow for something being said through sobs something being said
Haltingly and so I really wanted to kind of and in that chapter on the proing disorder forms that we were talking about before like really like I I I sourced a lot of my firstperson stories that I quote in this book from social media because I think a lot of those
Voices have been mocked and maligned and like really condescended to and also just not taken seriously by journalists as like a gold mine of research on psychiatric diseases like people in these forums people on Twitter people on Reddit are being so much more honest about their experience than anyone than
Any than any than they would be when they they’re talking to a random journalist and and then even when I was talking to them oneon-one these people would be like really reticent at first and would be like look last time I talked to a journalist that came into
This proing disorder Forum they said they were going to write something to to show what’s really going on here and then they made me look insane and so it takes it’s just really complicated and I really just wanted to make space for like a much wider range of narratives
And I really think that if you ask pretty much anyone honestly and empathically like what has nourishing yourself meant to you as it relates to the way that this Society receives your physical body and how you move through it you’re going to have a really cathartic conversation
With with most people if you actually come at it from this like place of kindness and I felt like the dissociation feminism was a very like kind of one disembodied like it was it was a way for a very slim subset of people to escape a
Double bind but in doing so they’re also disconnecting from all of their friends and the people they could be communing with by like taking this sort of like bird’s eye view of Their Own life and trying to like make something that is actually very painful into a joke in
Order to like reap the rewards of a society they don’t even believe in so I was just like what if we stopped maybe we could do that and fully present you know and and really um Association the anti- dissociation is to sit with those stories to feel the pain
To know that an emotion emotion has a beginning a middle and an end but we don’t usually in our society want to get to the middle much less the end um I want to kind of start this with you Emma line and uh pull you in Lisa you also
Talk about the influence of race and racism and this kind of myth of the super thin white woman um if youall haven’t read fear of the black body it’s a wonderful wonderful book about just kind of the roots of anti-blackness and how that shaped this kind of image uh so
Can you talk about like how race and racism how you how you thought about those things in dead weight yeah um so that book is amazing it’s I was a great source for me I was always research um the author’s name is Sabrina strings uh
So it’s like I all my answers are long but it’s a it’s huge topic and I’m not going to be able to address it fully and completely here but I mean one of the things as I’ve been talking about there is this that stereotype just is not like
The the thin white girl stereotyp type is not demographically born out eating disorder data um but often something what one thing that happens when people of color have eating disorders is that they’re often diagnosed far later than white women if they’re diagnosed at all and often they end up misdiagnosed
Because a lot of black women H suffer from anorexia that goes entirely undiagnosed and end up developing uh binge eating disorder as many anorexics do there’s a lot of crossover between these two diseases in the wake of the Restriction because your body thinks it’s been in a famine and
It’s really difficult to not crave a binge and so because black women are not asked the same screening questions as young white women they often are only get diagnosed when they’re on their sort of like second eating disorder and there something I talk about a lot in this
Book is this the way our diagnostic regime creates a really stigmatizing hierarchy despite the fact that like half of anorexics go on to have been Jing disorder and bulimia and the same is true vice versa there’s this like hierarchy with anorexia at the top as though it’s the like disease where
You’re just like taking society’s dictates too far and too good a girl and you’re too perfectionist whereas like the bulimic and the bider are cast as like greedy and impulsive and like irrational and very very like racially coded terms um and so when people of color are only being diagnosed if they
Are diagnosed with these more stigmatized diseases that both makes it harder to access and stay in treatment and it also just makes people want to talk about it less and it makes that narrative get a lot less media coverage than the the white anorexia narrative
And so that was one sort of myth I really wanted to unpack and talk about but then we also have um in general a beauty standard and also a health standard that is rooted in like a long story of racialized capitalism and in the chapter where I try to get into sort
Of the wellness industry and orthorexia which is the new like wellness eating disorder I try to sort of look back at the Victorian era and when the first time we sort of started seeing Proto Health Spa in this country and a lot of the rise of like the first generation of
Wellness which was really happening it’s kind of in like the late 1800s in a way that you’d be surprised by where everyone was like really freaking out about like the concept of people having like stomach problems and it it was very odd but anyway they were like inventing
Col colonics and having all these First Health spots and inventing these like vegetable diets and all these extreme Wellness things that we now see in our Wellness industry as well but it was all presented as like the duty of white women to better the race and to make
Sort of thinness and like a functioning digestive system this symbol of whiteness in a very uh overtly racist way and also in a very capitalist way that was trying to sell a lot of products obviously so I tried to get at those two threads and also just sort of
Listen to a lot of just stories of people whose eating disorder stories hadn’t been listened to and sort of just like give them space and attend to them into this book and like use a lot of those people’s first- person words and sort of sounds like the same yeah well
And I think in your book American hookup culture I mean you break apart race and what that actually is what comes to mind when we think about American hookup culture can you talk about how you saw race and racism in your research yeah so across research it’s quite clear that um
Students with various types of privilege are hooking up and enjoying hooking up more than other kinds of students uh students of color in particular tend to get both pushed out and they pull themselves out of hookup culture there is of course a racialized erotic hierarchy that especially puts uh
Dark-skinned women down quite low and Asian men down quite low East Asian and South Asian men um and so it’s just not as safe a playground for students of color or for any anyone who has an a devalued you know a physical or physical physical characteristic identity um and
So we see this data across many many different studies but I want to and and then they pull themselves out too because students of color tend to be more religious and meaningfully religious they tend to um uh be more interested in studying and less interested in partying
And they drink less alcohol and um in particular um black students tend to have more gender egalitarian norms and and then they have like cultural ideas that contrast with hookup culture that they can draw on to pull themselves out but I want to point out that this is
Also this these these racial and other hierarchies are also very structurally embedded in many institutions of higher education so for example On Any Given weekend on any campus with a Greek system there is a group of men in a fraternity house sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties with alcohol
For the most part and these men are disproportionately white heterosexual uh wealthy and these men are throwing a party where they are serving underage drinkers alcohol the president knows this the presid the The Faculty know this the mayor knows this the police knows it you all know this right
Everybody knows that this is happening and it is I’m not you know saying alcohol is bad but it is very illegal and yet they are the only people who somehow we allow to give students this experience and we dropped the drinking age or we raised it from 18 to 21
Between 1984 and 1987 which through all this power to the fraternities combine that with sororities aren’t allowed and then they just get this free reign to offer this one thing that these underage students um have been really taught to want and that gives this particular small slice you know it’s not just men
It’s a very specific kind of man um of students all of this power to sh shape the the the social and sexual environment that students encounter and so it’s also very much embedded in higher education well and we’re about to go to questions just wanted to give you both a
Chance to share some final thoughts um Emily at the towards the end of your book you say I’m trying to listen to live here with everyone else stumbling around trying to open our eyes a little wider and perk our ears up in case a story is being told one that might
Change lives I might be actively un chill and even a bit little bit hysterical but I’m here and I hope you’ll stay what are both of your wishes for for us you know when you think about how social media media in general kind of shapes our image of oursel what are
Your wishes for all of us because you you go beyond women who live with disordered eating you go beyond college students in your book what are your wishes for us in the future that’s a big question I know you which one of us should go first I’ll go um you know
I’m not against casual sex um but I would I do think that the way in which casual sex manifests given the culture on college campuses is really harmful and dangerous and it’s harmful and dangerous in the same way that American culture is harmful and dangerous like there’s nothing wrong with hookup
Cultures on college campuses that’s not wrong with The Wider Society uh and so oftentimes in the same way um we like criticize the college students as if they’re inventing something that the whole society doesn’t endorse when of course it’s all right there and a big
Big piece of it is that we um still sort of fail to value and recognize femininity and feminine ways of going about the world and interacting with one another and so I I think that if if we’re ever going to solve the hookup culture problem we need to solve these
Wider problems which I do argue are sort of um secondary to this bigger problem in which we as a society just don’t really value one another or value the Earth or value other countries and so on and so forth um yeah no I definitely that’s a great answer and I want to Echo
Everything you said um I think to to I guess make it on the specific topic of social media I think I would just hope that like there are there is so much incredibly like eloquent and articulate writing on blogs on Reddit threads presented in video essay
Form on Tik Tok and on YouTube by people that are really struggling and also recognize how this Society cheer point is designed for them to struggle and so I just would hope that we all sort of listen to them more and and are just sort of like widening the frame of what
We’re what kind of media we’re consuming um and then yeah I just I really think that for so long people with es especially like feminized feminine people with with any form of mental illness are constantly construed as individual failures or people who are individually not able to hack it as or
People who like people who individually misread a society’s smoke signals instead of people who are like incredibly smart and just literally read the room they’re literally locked into correctly and we’re like okay I guess gu I’m here and I will try to find a way to survive and I think that just like
Really flipping the frame and trying to understand who taught the people that we usually like to demonize the things they learned that who taught the people to feel that way about themselves and also who taught them these diseased coping mechanisms and why those were so appealing instead of sort of demonizing
Them or saying oh that’s gross and weird and scary like say like why why why was that the best option and who’s benefiting from that being the best option and I think once we start looking at those super structures we can start to kind of be more of like cogs in the
Machine because this machine is kind of it’s not actually that hidden and it’s not even that smart so right if we it’s just so easy to be ground up as gristle but I I do think we can there’s enough of us that care if you really start having those honest conversations with
People like once you realize how many people this affects it can be so empowering to realize that if we just sort of do it together and to literally shed that dead weight uh can we give Dr Wade and emine a round of applause and lots of love I strongly recommend reading these
At the same time it’s definitely an experience we’ve got some time for questions so we’ve got one question thank you faith for being our mic Runner you know um as a parent um of boys and girls um we we really spend a lot of time this for Dr Wade um we spent
A lot of time talking about respecting the opposite sex and I know that you know between the me too movement and the whole ideas of consent um do you find that that that people are asking for consent more in your studies and in writing your book I mean what about the
Me tooo movement what about you know consent now with social media and like you know the instant shaming that people can do I mean there must be something to people respecting each other or at least getting consent I mean there must be some some information about that please God
Please I think I think college students today at least many of them are much better at articulating um a a sort of um intelligent and and well-educated idea about how to ask for consent um and I hear a lot of parents um really trying to like make sure their kids have good
Heads on their shoulders um but I think what’s so important what is so so important is that when you put a person into an environment that doesn’t support having a good head on your shoulders um it’s extremely difficult in that environment uh to to make the decisions
That are now off script that they have been taught are right and good and we’re just human beings and we’re taught to respond to our environments and Rec recognizing the power of the situation I think is something that we have um a hard time doing CU we’re such an
Individualistic Society but many many Stu many many students um get into these particular toxic situations and then they behave in toxic ways because that’s what’s expected of them in that environment and it’s a lot to ask for them to do differently so yes like they get it but we still haven’t um renovated
The environments in which they’re in in a way that allows them to to do the thing they know is right one question here the mother of 15-year-olds who love social media um they’re creating their self-image right now and they are already aware of the hookup culture in
College and can’t wait to get there so um taking a step back from your experience in your research what can we do on the small individual basis to prepare our children and to help them um see themselves better than what they’ve been given and to prepare for toxic
Situations um yeah I mean I think that something that can be really powerful is just like if you go through like with your teenager kind of not like that’s not like go through their feed with them but like just like kind of do that like I think it’s really can
Be helpful to like look at what they’re consuming if you’re just sort of like what is your algorithm sort of up to today like what kind of thing are you looking at before you go to bed and then like if you see that it’s like a lot of one extremely specific Beauty standard
If they’re open to it there’s like you can just be like well why don’t you follow a few of these other types of accounts like I really just think like it’s so much about what we take in like if you add diverse bodies into your news and you make your algorithm know that
You want to see that stuff or you want to see stuff from Project or from fedup Collective or these with various places that I think in the end of the book that that do this type of work for diversifying the eating disorder narrative frame but also just general
Like fat Liberation and diverse body positivity stuff like I do think that that that type of content like subliminally does get into your mind if you choose to follow it and that stuff is really good for our brain I mean our brains are soaking in 400 plus years of
Anti-black racism of patriarchy over centuries and Millennia so th those images literally flood your eyes if you’re cited with new kind of ways of being I think we have time for one more question there was one in the maybe third fourth row yes right here Faith thank you coming to
You oh sweet hi so my question was actually pretty similar so I’m someone who grew grew up with social media I think I got Instagram for the first time when I was 11 um and it’s a real LoveHate relationship I think it’s obvious that it’s very damaging to mental health and can
Reinforce all of these like terrible structures that yall were talking about but I also really appreciated that you mentioned that it can be have very validating spaces and like there’s nothing inherently wrong with social media it’s all about how we use it I think and so I guess what is your
Recommendation as just a person in the digital age and how to use social media in a way that’s healthy yeah I mean I think the what I said before but also like I mean it’s really hard so I think just like honestly pairing your consumption of social media with like really kind of
Attentive consumption of other forms of media and of media in fact deconstructing the media you’re consuming you know what I mean like I think it makes me it hurts so much less when I see an influencer Hawking an appetite suppressant lollipop than it used to because now I’m mad at like the
Company that sold it to her instead of at her and I think that that type of sort of Shifting of like this like impulse to either like be angry at someone who’s making you feel bad about yourself or like to just sort of like Channel an NE an a negative emotion at
The actual social platform or the corporation or whatever instead of at somebody else that’s being used as a pawn in a different way than you are I think can make those spaces actually in some ways even Illuminating you know like sometimes I feel like I can like
Learn something and stuff in this book like like I can like think critically about a lot of stuff that I find on social media that in the past would have only harmed me and now I can use as like analytical fod to make some other
Argument so I think if you sort of like are buttressing your consumption with like enough kind of like an intellectual framew it it can be make make it so much more empowering to like confront it bravely rather than feel like you don’t have any agency if that makes sense and
That’s the resistance so everyone in here we’re about to close I want you to think of one person you’ve probably already thought of them who you want to have a conversation with about this panel give me some head nods and now don’t look at us look at each other
Seriously look at each other look around the room there’s about a hundred of us in this room that’s the resistance uh Stacey Abrams is writing a whole next third book on AI uh it’s about to get way worse but we can get way better in terms of our resistance right and so I
Hope you have those conversations let’s give them one more round of applause thank you so much for the beautiful gift of your books they’re phenomenal
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