“This one’s got to start in my bedroom,” begins one essay in Bolin’s Culture Creep, about the now-defunct teen magazines that had their glory days from 1998 to 2002. The origins of contemporary influencer culture can be traced back to publications like Twist, CosmoGirl, Tiger Beat, and Seventeen, which featured trend pieces, personality quizzes, and reader-generated content and were heavily marketed to young women. Bolin describes her teenage self, curled up in pajamas on an inflatable chair, surrounded by well-worn issues of these mags. Such details, and “the cloud-printed pillowcases from the Delia’s catalog,” characterize girlhood as a soft and impressionable space. Case in point, Bolin occasionally writes in the argot of these magazines, chiming in with parentheticals like “LOL” and “not to brag.” Here, as in the rest of Culture Creep, she readily admits to being influenced by the glossy images of the early aughts, even divulging that she spent a significant amount of time making inspiration boards on Pinterest in the name of research for the book. Bolin admits to other “corrupting activities,” such as consuming true crime and chick lit, with some shame, while still acknowledging their inspiration.
Insofar as she was once a teenage girl herself, Bolin comes across as an uneasy critic, one whose argument tends to get gummed up with apology and disclosures of complicity, as if her appreciation of pop culture might undermine her authority. While at times digressive, Culture Creep is also a hypnotic read precisely because Bolin is a magpie writer who fixates on shiny objects and pursues her fascinations. In that sense, nostalgia serves as radar, as much as a distraction.
Crucially, this formula is not intended to resolve questions but rather to avoid answering them. It allows users to skirt unfortunate realities in favor of life’s more animating mysteries—for Carrie, keeping her romantic delusions alive; for the rest of us, achieving something close to self-actualization. The irony is in the illusion of agency, as if we could consider questions that high up on the hierarchy of needs from a place of such precarity.
By revising the media from our past with reboots, we avoid reckoning with their content, therefore maintaining the status quo and staving off the future.When Third Way/ve policies fail to deliver on their promise of self-actualization, techno-capitalism has conditioned us to believe that we’ll find satisfaction from the sheer act of consuming and staying productive. In “The Enumerated Woman,” Bolin explores how self-tracking apps like FitBit and MyFitnessPal have enabled the resurgence of the dangerous diet culture that has tormented millennial women since their youth. The rise of social media has added additional incentive to these rigorous beauty standards. “Women are better and more invested than men, by and large, at projecting a coherent personality on social media,” Bolin argues. We are more susceptible, for one, because those teen magazines—with their personality quizzes and parables of which women not to be (i.e., bald Britney Spears)—made us more accustomed to choosing from “a curated catalog of identities.” “There must be some drive in the human psyche,” she speculates, “that takes comfort in shrinking ourselves, simplifying ourselves, surrendering ourselves.” In that sense, the best comparison for social media in the Y2K curio shop might be Shrinky Dinks, the special canvas that transforms drawings into little plastic charms when baked in the oven. Platforms like Instagram use algorithms to push people to make their bodies smaller and preserve their image so it can be marketed, turning individuals into products. Essentially, like the polystyrene novelty of yore, we’re all cooked.
Bolin was on the nostalgia beat as early as 2015, when she wrote the “Teen Witch’s Guide to Staying Alive” for Vice, an online publication one could nevertheless mistake for yet another nostalgia artifact. Back then, girls were donning brown lipstick and ’90s fashion in a throwback to “a wealthier, sweeter, frumpier era, when fashion trends tended towards a joyful eclecticism that at times veered gently into the occult.” People were thinking we might soon have a female president, and no one had said a word about reviving low-rise jeans. Bolin noticed a cultural resurgence of witches—a rise of spell-casting on crushes, the downloading of moon-cycle apps, the embrace of domestic routine. Such compulsive activities could be understood as an attempt to legitimize “the restless avenues teenage anxiety takes, the rituals of vigilance and control children are prone to.” These days, Bolin is far less sympathetic to nostalgia and other girlish whims. To some extent, she is right to be skeptical. After all, attempting to make anything from the present precious has proven too often to be a trap for our best feminist intentions. (Take, for example, the regrettable branding of Kamala Harris as Brat—which symbolized the Democrats’ preference for projecting a bold aesthetic over offering a coherent policy platform. See too Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which once graced the New York Times bestseller list, only to be replaced years later by books like Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, rejecting Sandberg’s corporate feminist philosophy.) In Culture Creep, nostalgia also serves as Bolin’s own ritual of vigilance; her inspection of erstwhile icons and aesthetics leads to insights on what lessons to learn from their mistakes. At times, her vigilance veers into seeming penitence.
The contradiction that frustrates Culture Creep is that it is both insistent on the political importance of pop culture and skeptical of the merits of actually writing about it.In the final pages of “The Rabbit Hole,” Bolin drives her argument home with a somewhat overwrought metaphor: that nostalgia encourages us to chase the iconic Playboy bunny down a hole where progress turns upside down and indoctrination resembles freedom. However, without affection, why else would we pay attention to these symbols from our past? Without seeing upside down, how would we notice that not everything from our present is right-side up? Because I’m a member of that hyper-earnest Generation Z, I ultimately find this millennial’s metaphor endearing, so I’ll extend it with this reminder: Before Alice was charmed by a plush bunny—even before she threw herself off the ledge in a bid to prove her bravery to those back at home—she was a curious girl bored by her sister’s “real book,” to borrow Bolin’s phrasing. “What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”
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