when were there first cool girls. like obviously there were cool girls in the 1920s. lily bart is proof there were cool girls in the 1890s also. but before that i'm not so sure what was going on
introducing the lingerie index
~23% of households use GLP-1s
average user loses ~15% of their body weight
~80% of users need new clothes
victoria’s secret sales: +15%
victoria’s secret stock: +50%
this is also why superhero theory and monster theory are part of the same conversation to me. both are about what a culture externalizes as threat and what it imagines as solution. the monster tells you what you fear. the superhero tells you what you wish you could become. they’re mirrors of the same anxiety
the fact that no other tradition produced this genre despite things like manga and other types of comics coming out across various cultures concurrently is the most interesting data point. the divergences btwn each tell you what each culture needed its myths to do. the muscled individual savior only becomes a dominant fantasy in a culture that simultaneously idealizes institutions and viscerally distrusts them which is a very particular american contradiction