Destroying the gender binary to become 'the abstract personification of softness' https://twitter.com/TmxChristian/status/1317952238581616641

I really worry abt this kind of thing because 'softness' and 'cuteness' do not in themselves guarantee goodness or kindness- they are simply tokens of an aesthetic sensibility which can easily be recruited towards pernicious or manipulative ends

There is a kind of excessive, infantilised bourgouise sentimentality at play here, based on the implicit idea that identifying with 'softness', 'cuteness' etc is to disassociate oneself from more 'toxic', more 'traditional' forms of self-presentation

Also at play is the idea this represents a kind of liberated self away from the strictures of traditional gender presentation, liberated by virtue of opting for *this* particular aesthetic over the that, the former being 'more true to the self' than the latter

But what we see is so obviously a performance, a caricature of real life, in which certain qualities are cartoonishly exaggerated at the expense of others- there is absolutely no guarantee that adopting this persona enables true vulnerability or intimacy

It's in fact the aestheticisation of these qualities that severs them from the reality of a recognisable human experience, makes them, in effect, into a carapace-like emotional armour all their own, which is all the more insidious for its superficial representation

In a way it reflects the wider fetishism of 'empathy' within liberal discourse, which exists as a pretext for legitimising the management of human behaviour + the interpersonal cruelty used to enforce that management, an uncanny 'empathy' lost from its sensible context

You can't expect real empathy from a machine designed to produce 'empathic sentiment' (which is what this persona ultimately incarnates) because real empathy requires a sensitivity to the particulars of a human situation

But then what happens if yr scepticism of the empathy-producing machine is taken as symbolic of hostility towards empathy in the same way the empathy macine is supposedly symbolic of real empathy?

You end up in an upside-down world, in which the 'avatars' of empathy, of kindness and decency, of social justice etc, are grotesque themepark costumes acting as enforcers of social etiquette, holding the world to ransom

Not saying this 'controllerkid' is a bad person necessarily- but the aggressive performance of softness, cuteness etc feels sinister, feels like something *of* the world described above- where the Real of kindness has been fully submerged beneath its own indifferent performance