this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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El Chisme
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Satire does not work. It just reinforces the thing it's satirising because it is literally the content that its fans want to see.
It sells, because people on one side are entertained by the satire and the people on the other side get the exact content they want reinforcing their beliefs anyway.
I am anti-satire.
Interestingly the hogs in the UK hate this. Daily Mail comments section can be summed up with "This sets women back decades, it's like we're in the 60s/70s again".
Also, I don't see how this is satire.
Sabrina is pretty openly horny and makes horny music, often about how she likes being in subby roles with men. I think she may just like giving head while getting her hair tugged and wrote some music about it.
The biggest problem with satire is that people don't know what satire is. "Satire" sucks now because it isn't satirical. Words no longer have meanings, everything is just vibes.
Making an allusion to a concept without any statement at all on that concept? fuck it, that's satire.
You mean something figuratively? fuck it, say literally.
Even prescriptivism is useless, because reading comprehension and media literacy are non-existent.
100% I don’t think this is satire it’s just hot
It's what bad modern day satire has turned into which is just "look at me I'm doing the thing"
Okay but that still suggests some satirical intent. I don't think she's gone that far even, I think she just likes the thing and is doing it.
This is my least favorite recurring Hexbear take tbh. Not all things dubbed "satire" are the same and didacticism is not the only way.
Do you have examples of useful satire?
I am willing to debate this and reconsider my view but I never see anyone materially demonstrate its usefulness.
Blazing Saddles single handedly killed an entire (racist as fuck) film genre
can't believe we're forgetting shrek
Some... BODY!!!
Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed
She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb In the shape of an "L" on her forehead
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
I don't think I even like the initial premise that it's art's job to be "materially useful"
That's fair. But art still falls into politically useful, politically useless, and politically harmful categories. I'm going to prefer the useful and I'm going to tell people to make more of the useful and less of the useless, while actively trying to prevent the harmful.
With that said. I'm not going to say something useless but entirely unrelated to politics should stop. Just that people making political art could do so in a different and more useful way.
L'art pour l'art arose out of 19th century France when the French bourgeoisie finally controlled the entirety of French society. Art being done for its own sake or being done as a form of self expression arose out of capitalist society. This was 100% not true in feudal society where artists weren't expected to even credit themselves. Various socialist art movements like socialist realism also eschews l'art pour l'art for its literal bourgeois origins.
The idea of some dirt-poor artist channeling their mental illness to produce sublime art is just some stereotype that arose out of capitalist society.
I thought this instrumental funk album I put on was neat, dismayed to learn it's actually bourgeois decadence.
So we're not allowed to do art for art's sake?
When I make paintings that nobody but me will see or write poems that nobody will read because I enjoy the process and creating art, I'm doing a liberalism? Lol
I think there are many ways to approach art, but "art for art's sake" shouldn't be seen as a model. If anything, it should be treated somewhat dismissively.
did "hey let's eat irish babies" do anything over there or is swift's only legacy being used as a school lesson? they skipped the part where they should've told us if it made a difference.
The name "Vanessa" comes from a poem of his, but I don't think that's too relevant to his satire.
i also forgot about a bunch of stuff from gulliver's travels, but byte-order conventions are probably not relevant either
Honestly have no idea, not one I'm an expert on. Perhaps? I wonder if the efficacy of this style of critique changes depending on society and media literacy rate. Probably? This would also be different historically I assume.
the way I see it, the problem with satire is that good satire straddles a very very thin line: if you're too subtle, the satirical aspect is lost on the target audience that you're making fun of, but if you're not subtle enough, it's no longer identifiable as a plausible representation of the thing in question, and then it becomes pointless
but see almost anything but outright clownish representation ends up as too subtle unless something else about the work makes it so inapproachable that the only people who bother to consume it are able to pick up on it.
what I find lame about this "satire", as someone who has jokes, is that it is obviously banking heavy on the controversy and titillation of the audience that enjoys overt misogynistic expression anyway. it's lazily doing the thing while claiming it is against the thing. that's not clever. might as well blast the N-word to get everyone's immediate attention and then expect them to recognize the subtext of one's far-less-obvious body of work in anti-racism and begin applauding.
good satire makes the thing it satirized unpalatable to the people it lampoons with shame. it scorns them such that they would not want it shared or seen.
This is true, but what’s the solution? Make shittier art because we need to make sure the absolute dumbest motherfuckers in the world get the message?
Why are you assuming that non-satirical art is inferior? Wouldnt you prefer art tackle issues directly instead of abstracting them into meaninglessness?
Because tackling issues directly and in a way that dumb dumbs can absorb by definition must be bereft of subtlety, nuance or contradiction. All of which are a part of the human experience that good art is able to express. Not all art absolutely must have indirect qualities to be good or even to have depth, but art as a whole would be way less rewarding without them.
Directness necessitates subtlety and nuance. You are making big claims about "good art" and what it entails, but I don't see how something must be satire or indirect to accomplish this. I don't even think satire is inherently bad, but I think it's pretty clear what purpose it serves in the modern world since it's massive proliferation in the 20th century.
Also, people don't misunderstand art because they are "dumb."
This is accurate. People misunderstand art because it requires cultural literacy, and most people are partially to completely culturally illiterate, because we live in a time of the massive fracturing of mass market culture.
This includes myself. Perhaps it is satirical, perhaps it is sincere, perhaps it is good art, perhaps it is bad art. I wouldn't know, I am not the targeted demographic.
Hell, having been a Charlie xcx fan for years since her collaborations with the PC Music label (RIP) I thought 'brat' on release as mostly just a very well produced semi-self aware pop party album, a decent in-between of her best (imo) and most experimental pop album 'How I'm Feeling Now' (which was also one of her worst selling) and her more return to form of 'Crash' but then she went and attempted to turn it into a feminist political vehicle, and now she is attempting to keep pressing on the whole 'brat' concept and even going so far as to rebrand many of her previous albums in that light, which is hella weird and a bad move imo, because none of her earlier albums exhibit those characteristics. If I can't even be truly media literate in the messaging of an artist I have been following for years, I have absolutely no chance with someone like Sabrina Carpenter.