As much as we do say “it’s okay to like problematic shit” I do think there’s this weird pressure on the left never to express an interest in what’s dark, what’s ugly, because to express an interest is somehow an endorsement, or a lack of empathy.

Like you know, sometimes looking at photographs of awful skin sores isn’t callous prurience, and sometimes fascination is an attempt to understand what happened, what went wrong, how to stop it happening again, how to fix it. 

And you know what sometimes jokes about dark shit are about coping with it, about processing it, about dealing with it (this btw does not mean shitty standup comics should get away with their shit).

This isn’t a post-hoc excuse for bad behavior, for insensitivity, for cruelty or callousness, or failure to listen to people who are too often silenced.

I think though that sometimes there is a sort of callous insensitivity in the demand for cheer, in the demand for light, in the demand that people who have been compared with monsters for their whole lives never identify with monsters unless they’re the defanged cartoon kind.

It’s fucked because I see people getting away with horrible shit because of positionality in terms of their behavior on the one side, but people with similar positionality getting shat on for ever making art that is dark or ugly or scary, for having dark, ugly, scary things in them, and for having the audacity to say so, to show people what’s wrong  instead of performing purity and hurting others, passing their pain along.