Brittany Luce

And as you said, they were disproportionately used on women and many queer people were subject to the procedure as a way to address what was thought of as deviant sexuality.

So I think for some people, joking about wanting a lobotomy has become a shorthand way to say that the brutality we're living with is so, so much greater than this incredibly brutal procedure.

I'm glad you bring up the whiteness and thinness of it all, because I think that that is like, that's, it feels so key to this aesthetic, whether you are imagining it visually or just sort of imagining the way that it might feel as an attitude.

Yeah.

Whiteness, it feels like it just permeates throughout the entire thing.

But I mean, it's not just white girls who are kind of performing this kind of numbness.

I think it might be a majority of people I've seen doing it online are white.

But there are women of a lot of different kinds of backgrounds performing this kind of numbness, but it doesn't always look the same.

It might look like performing a step back in terms of political engagement.

I've seen plenty of women of color do that in the wake of the 2024 election.

It might look like a certain type of femininity content that might privilege wearing pastel pink sweatsuits and not reading the news and trying to live a certain kind of smooth life.

That is something that I've seen across the board from women of all different kinds of backgrounds.

However, I do think...

that the white girls stick out in people's minds.

The white girls are emblematic of this sort of numb girl aesthetic.

In some ways, I think it's much more likely for a white woman to be able to profit from this kind of numbness or performing it.

I wonder, why is white women's numbness sticky?

And why does it seem like white women benefit from this performance of numbness maybe more than other people?

It's like choosing to take up less space or choosing to be less expressive in some ways, choosing to have like a, perhaps not saying that this is all people who experience weight loss,

who are on GLP-1s.