Issue N° 14 || Obsession

Issue No. 14

OBSESSION

Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, As a new academic year began, we all were faced with an array of changes: changes in rules, changes in our social landscapes, and—for Alt—changes in leadership. With that in mind, the prevailing sentiment both on the board and among general members was one of democracy. This year’s board reformulated the theme ideation process to better reflect that democratic spirit.

Vi Bui’s theme proposal was chosen for our Fall 2021 issue as a product of this new process. Vi’s theme was “Obsession.” Her idea took inspiration from the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, for whom art operated as an escape from her struggles with her mental health. Kusama has openly spoken about the ways in which the repetitive motifs portrayed in her work offered her relief from trauma. Vi extended this continuous theme of Kusama’s work to speak about how one can lose oneself in an obsession over a pattern, task, or idea in order to escape from reality. This sort of escape is particularly relevant in light of the ways in which we all lost ourselves in things to find relief from our collective trauma over the course of the past two years.

Our work on this issue explored the different ways in which one can relate to those obsessions; to lose oneself in them, to break out from them, or to coexist with them.

These three relationships—blending in, standing out, and repetition—came to define the three approaches with which we investigated our theme for this issue of Alt. I would like to extend a thank you to all of our readers for your continued support, and to all of our members who have put so much energy into producing the great work contained within this issue. In addition, I would like to give a special thanks to the members of Alt who are graduating after this semester for their great contributions to the magazine. We will all miss each one of you, and we wish you all the best in the future.

Enjoy Alt Magazine’s 14th issue, Obsession.

Chris Ziebert, Editor in Chief

Table of Contents 1 - Contributors Page 5 - “Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)” 13 - “Are We Obsessed with Chaos Because It Gives Us Space to Be Perfect?”

17 - “Social Media and Standing Out” 23 - “On Growing Up Odd” 29 - “A Social Fixation” 33 - “Staying Trendy, but at What Cost?”

37 - “On the Society of Spectacle”

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On Growing Up Odd

by Katja Fair

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I was the staple weird kid.

The kid who built fairy houses and made comics while other kids played four-square on the playground. The kid who would read and doodle during class while my teachers desperately tried to refocus my attention on the task at hand. I was the chubby kid who hid behind oversized hoodies and baggy jeans and the kid who came to school with Einstein hair that battled the pink-sequined headband her mom would use to push her bangs back so she could see. Needless to say, I didn’t fit in like the other kids.

Partially by choice and partially by obligation.

And instead of growing out of it, like some of my teachers encouraged me to do, I grew into it. By the time I hit my acnefilled, hot topic, decaf coffee middle school years, it had become my identity. To beat my boat against the current.

To not conform. To be a social nomad, comprised a little bit of everything, but never enough to find a home. I cherished my individuality and blushed when

people would call me a weirdo.

Why would I want to be anything else?

But eventually that pride came to an end and I hit a wall… really, truly, deep down, who was I? I remember the first time I stared into the mirror, looking at infinite versions of myself.

Every component of my identity shuffled like cards. Every word I have ever used to describe myself floated around in a cacophony of sludge. I tried to latch on to one fixed definition, but it would melt through my fingers and drip back into infinity. I wished to myself that I had just listened when I was younger. I wished that I hadn’t been so foolish in thinking that I could be my own person. In that moment, I would have traded anything to be something, even if that something was a version of myself that I would never want to be. And as I write this, I can’t say that that feeling has entirely gone away. But it sure as hell has gotten easier to deal with.

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I think the change came when I decided that the only thing I could do was take it a day at a time. It was a strange era of my life… one day I was wearing Barbie makeup and the next day I was a warped-tour-fueled fever dream. I dyed my hair every color in the book—and, to be honest, I rocked yellow.

I did the things that scared me, like signing up for my high school’s track team and forming a band that sang love songs to our former principal.

Despite the overwhelming feeling of being a constant contradiction, it taught me more about my identity than staring into the mirror ever could. It taught me that I could be an aggregate of many things, and still be whole. It taught me that I was way more than a binary or a category on the social spectrum of the jocks and nerds.

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I don’t—and probably never will—have the answers to how to be my most authentic self, how to give myself permission to free the fragmented weird kid that still remains in my brain, how to settle into my own person without accusing myself of selling out. But I have made peace with that. I have made peace with myself, today and tomorrow, and the day after. I have forgiven and decided to love that weird kid that I used to resent. Life is short and strange, and I have found a preference for embracing my constantly changing identity rather than forcing myself into something that doesn’t make sense. And that’s my answer. And I know it’s incomplete and messy, and I know it’s gonna change by next week, but for now that’s exactly the way it needs to be.

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In 1985 a group of female artists from New York called the Guerilla Girls began to protest the under-representation of female artists. They reported that less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections of the Met Museum were women, but 85% of the nudes in the entire building were female. This prompted their 1989 campaign in which they displayed posters on New York City buses titled “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”

The domination of the male viewpoint in society is not exclusive to the visual art world. Emergency room doctors have medical training based on the average patient being a male, 75-kilogram white patient, according to Laura Huang, PhD, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. Huang says medical technology like hip replacements are designed for the male body, and surgical instruments are designed for male physicians’ hands.

While failure to understand the differences in male and female biology ultimately harms everyone, it especially harms women. It stems from years of biomedical research that essentially assumed all patients were male and that studying males alone was “good enough.” This problem derives from a more deeply rooted practice in society called androcentrism. It is, simply put, society’s obsession with men. It is the infatuation with masculinity whereby all things originate. It is the belief that anything masculine is “normal,” and all things outside of that realm are “other.” It is the reason we think the color blue is gender-neutral, yet pink is gender-specific. Androcentrism is not just extreme societal fixation on men, but the belief of men as the original, the prototype, the default.

It is important to differentiate androcentrism from male superiority. The latter suggests that women are inferior to men, which is simply untrue. Androcentrism is cleverer than that. It sustains gender inequality by disguising male advantages as a neutral standard. Thus, androcentrism is simply an ideology meant to justify the

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many structures of male power and control. A demonstration of one such structure – one that women familiarize themselves with at concerningly young ages – is catcalling.

Catcalling is idiotic, crude and primitive, yet men get away with it every single day. They feel that they are inherently desirable because of their gender, and that it is the woman’s obligation to give themselves over rather than the man’s obligation to exert self-control.

While people may be individually horrified by the sexual harassment of women, androcentric cultural norms hold the man’s world in place.

Combatting this male-centered society is no easy task. Androcentric theory suggests women are likely to be discouraged from taking risks as there is fear of being further differentiated from the norm. Despite this, confidence may be the answer to individually resisting androcentrism.

Confidence refers to the expectation of a positive outcome, and this expectation manifests very differently in men and women. According to Mika Brzezinki, author of Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth, women tend to use collaboration as a leadership strategy more frequently than men, thus helping them overcome reluctance to take risks. Men, contrarily, tend to emphasize individual strengths and competition among peers.

This is not to understate the key role men can play in addressing androcentrism in their institutions. If men support women and amplify their voices, the feminine viewpoint will become normal and expected in our culture.

If men remain neutral, however, and continue living in ignorant bliss, women will always be held to a completely unrealistic standard that is based on, created by, and in the interest of men.

by Aditi Debnath 30

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Staying Trendy, but at What Cost?

by Maddie Bergstrom

Fashion is constantly evolving: new trends follow every season and capture the attention of millions. In order to blend-in with the demand for ever changing styles, people look for the most affordable options. Many brands, such as Fashion Nova and Shein, provide the answer to trendy pieces at a cheap price tag. In fact, some items sell for as low as $3. These deals are hard to pass on, but do not come without an additional payment. Clothing that is produced rapidly and inexpensively has a name: fast fashion. Fast fashion not only harms employees, but poses a great threat to our planet too.

In order to manufacture clothing at such a fast rate, a large number of employees are required. Yet, clothing companies continue to demonstrate that making clothes quickly is more important than the people who are completing the work. The work environments that these employees face are run on intimidation and fear. Lunch and bathroom breaks are contingent on whether the production demands are met beforehand. While women predominantly make up the garment workforce, powerful positions are often held by men. As a result, women face physical abuse, sexual harassment, poor work conditons and even forced overtime. Despite working for hours on end without breaks, employees do not receive liveable wages.

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While the fast fashion workforce tries to get by, the industry also sneakily destroys another area of livelihood: our planet. In 2012, Zara was able to produce new items in as little as two weeks. Sure, this is great for those who wish to stay up to date on trends before they disappear; yet, producing massive quantities of clothing quickly results in a lot of waste. The world is currently consuming about 80 billion pieces of clothing a year, which is an increase of 400% from as little as 20 years ago. Due to this, around 82 pounds of waste from the fashion industry accumulates yearly.

Not only does fast fashion cause waste, but the process of making clothing is harmful as well. The fashion industry alone is the world’s second largest consumer of water, with a single cotton t-shirt requiring 700 gallons to produce. In addition, many brands have taken up the use of microplastics, which are synthetic fibers that do not biodegrade for hundreds of years. A report in 2015 estimated that 35% of all microplastics in the ocean come from fashion itself.

Although it may be tempting to buy the newest trends at the most affordable prices, it is important to understand the repercussions of doing so. If fast fashion continues to spread at the rate it is now, there won’t be much of a planet left to enjoy. In order to make change, it starts with us. Instead of ordering as much as you can off of Shein, take some time to thrift and find sustainable businesses. One of the biggest ways to help is to consume less; find pieces that will work with any trend and can be reworn multiple times. It is time to start holding the fast fashion industry accountable, before it is too late.

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