When laughter becomes sacred.

How the Woke Agenda Revived Conservatism: On Being Offensive, Hungover, Gender Fluid, and a Poser.

I was reading an article about “The lost art of surviving a hangover” by Michael Sebastian. There he concludes that a hangover is a unique route to self-realization. It was even honorable by the act of picking up after yourself after the horrible painstaking consequence of a remembrance–or lack thereof–of a good time. But this once common occurrence to adults is now unmistakably slowly being forgotten as more and more of the population sobers up from alcohol. The drinking rate is at a new all-time low, and the liquor sales are suffering. It is quite a reason to celebrate in retrospect that a new generation will not fall into the same level of alcoholism that the past generations had been accustomed to. And yet, what follows is a surge in cannabis use and even more vape uses. Sure, one could make the argument that the usage of these substances aren’t as impairing in real time as alcohol, but it seems that even in our new culture of being a wellness-freak, people still turn to vices like a 2000s Gwyneth Paltrow. Surprisingly, in the U.S., republicans win the rate of being alcohol sober with less than half of the population taking it.

Perhaps we can even stretch it to the obsession with healthiness by taking it to the extremes of raw milk and anti-seedoil rhetorics. There is a breeding ground for conservatives who are partaking in what was once a hippie culture as people would used to stereotype, they have become milkmaids in trendy clothes and wannabe cowboys with a pornstache. Julia Nurse describes these milkmaids as a symbol of wholesomeness and romantic pastoral innocence. In a series of catalogues, she delves into the sexualization of milkmaids turning their fresh milk into something that is sour, that a milk is bad if its milkmaid is impure.

According to recent fashion trends, it appears that the properties of the milkmaid and her associations with health have long outlasted their career. “Milkmaid chic” emerged out of post-Covid optimism to suggest that the wholesome image of the milkmaid look was aspirational and glamorous. A resurgence in the need for invigorating country air, exercise and entertainment has apparently revived the image once again. — “Milkmaids and the image of purity”, Julia Nurse

The milkmaid chic is a fetish, the woman had failed to transform into something else. The woman had failed itself after a series of girlboss feminism and white liberal pomposities. The pandemic had put everyone in their own bubble. During a time that BLM protests were so performatively alive and gay rights along with their microlabels and pronouns are more important than ever, people have deluded themselves into thinking that this was true progress. But in the creation of these agendas an evil space had emerged and lurked, the redpill, blackpill, incel spaces. There is no reason that a Filipino teenage boy is as much of a Nazi as a German soldier in WW2. There is no reason that obscenities towards women and the language of intimate acts themselves are reduced to something so shallow. Cracked, hit, tapped, clapped. This reminds me of a Substack article that delves into how porn is everywhere and eroticism is not. Wherein porn eliminates the existence of the other person, wherein desire is now perceived as something that is entitled to us. It minimizes the risk, the consequences, it is merely meant to be efficient. Seems familiar? This is the problem with the online trends when done out of ignorance. It completely kills a culture and their community. There is a reason why fashion enthusiasts keep on crying about taste, why Carhartt is no longer affordable for the blue collared worker, and why Japan cannot keep up with the need for ceremonial matcha. I have a lot of alternative friends that would label random people as “TikTok Alt” implying that their style was curated by Shein, and that they didn’t carry along the politics it requires of them as alts.

People have become posers. It is never really done intentionally of course, but when someone moves from being an e-girl, then a clean girl, and then a swagapino. You can start to wonder what the fuck is wrong with everyone around you. Me and my friend used to laugh at people who are so obviously wearing something that is fast fashion (Shein), until people had called us elitist and we ceased to make further opinions. But I fully believe that a lot of individuals just don’t want the burden of creating their own identity and their own style. They refuse to keep their own sense to themselves. When your tastes are defined by your algorithm and so are your beliefs. How many disinformation, misinformation, and dumbed down political ideas do we see in one single scroll of Twitter? That each like we contribute without affirming if we do actually agree with it, has meant to set us up for life. Like in a Filipino family, how can you even begin to hate Palestinians? If not for the stupid propagandas force fed unto us for decades?

When in such a short time, we had taught people to be so sensitive, and so… woke. To push us into another side of the spectrum of acceptance, it becomes derogatory. That instead of helping people to be better it had become the face of dishonest social justice. A wokeness that has stemmed from white people and their performative activism. But it turns out what they are really good at doing is merely leeching off of everyone’s purposes and struggles. The White Savior Complex is alive and well, but perhaps it is more appropriate now to say that it is the American Savior Complex, and this includes everyone that has become so westernized that they are inclined to follow the American news more than their own country’s.

Everyone has said that everyone has become so sensitive now. This laughter is now sacred. Like when you call yourself fat you have to double check if anyone’s offended. Or when you misgender your friend that had transitioned a month ago and you want to kill yourself. People often think they are in their own spotlight, that these little offenses can be taken against them, but this is the truth. We are constantly monitored. We lose our jobs and university acceptance letters over stupid decisions we make that have found themselves on the internet. Our presence has become infinite, and our time and identity have become community property. We can also delve into the offenses of rapists, sexual harassers, offenders, assaulters, and how these are so interchangeably used that it just becomes a world of threat. That a pedophile can accidentally be on the same level of wrongdoing with a married boss and his consenting secretary to the listening ear. Yet, the cases have never gone down. Like how are all these so offensive and yet nothing’s happening? This again circles back to the fact that people are merely afraid of a label. That as long as faux feminism is on trend everyone subscribes to it. As long as men pay for women, the divine feminine TikToker gurus accedes to it, and so will thousands of their impressionable audiences. And as long as people mourn over George Floyd, everyone has the hashtag on their Instagram bio, until he becomes an Instagram brainrot reel.

The birth of the 4B movement in the feminist circles of South Korea is one of the most notable consequences of the modern suffocating misogyny. While Korean feminists who actively participate in no sex with men, no birth, no dating men, and no marriage with men are just marginal, this still serves as a foundation in knowing the current state of misogyny in their country. There is a prevalent state of transphobia, homophobia, and misandry in the spaces of these movements in Korea, but these types of spaces emerged from fear. Once again, we focus on the body and biological essentialism, and this of course reinforces the binarism that the West feminists like Moi intends to break with the reason that this dictatorship of the genders will merely boil itself down to essentialism. Chang Kyung-sup also talks about the idea of compressed modernity wherein Koreans modernized all in 30 years, when it took the West 200 years. This then explains how their economic freedom is mostly free, but their gender dynamics are stuck in archaic and feudal gender roles. And here we can distinguish a very similar framework that I am talking about, wherein principles are deemed to have in more than one ways been better for the advantage of equality, but people’s own belief and certainty of themselves remain unrealized and ambiguous. Now, people do not know what to do with themselves.

All of this of course will always go back to Marxism. We will tackle the idea of fluidity, Marx was right when he said that in a capitalist society, the economy was guaranteed to work to be more fluid, as seen as in the mode of productions too. The first real problem started with the “McDonaldization” of society wherein we are tricked to be more productive in able to let go of more staffs (see the giant screens in Mcdonalds and mostly one or two cashiers or the famous CLAYGO to get rid of more janitors.) But then we also see this fluidity in gender, and I go back to the trend of microlabels in today’s society, wherein unique individual experiences and identity are poured on over as a better understanding of themselves. I’m sorry for my wording but, people think too much of themselves. I would argue that there is a lack of being in today’s world and a lot more “I am.” This is why capitalism thrives, corporate rainbow washing remains efficient because we had thought that identity can be consumed or that it is something that we can merely learn about in labels. This binary of gender and of sexuality appears to be more fluid when identity is put in labels but instead it merely categorizes itself once more polytomously, adding even more into the binary constriction. What is homosexuality that is understood under the umbrella of capitalism? Homonormative.

Using Chang’s framework it is now easier to realize why everything seems so artificial, and why everything seems to be an imitation of something else. Like how our trends have ceased to be new trends and are stuck in a cycle of nostalgia. When society collapses upon itself because of its compact principles of what justice meant were all fast-forwarded in less than a span of a decade, a new thing grows: the nostalgia for a time where everyone is offensive. The rise of the r-word is back again, and fatphobia is back, the use of cocaine is back, the violence against women is unspeakable. Trump is president again, the son of a dictator presides over my country, edgy humor is popular in standup crowd work again, and everyone just wants to be normal. But what is normal? It is so hard to tell what the current state of anything is anymore because people have ceased to truly know themselves. More than the rise of conservatism once more, there is an ongoing larger scale of the prevalence of the rise of conscious ignorance.

People yearn to be offensive not because most of them are actual bigots. They yearn to be so because when certain ideas, thoughts, and words are suddenly put to an abrupt stop they can often feel like dictatorship. This sudden change of the sphere has also reduced people’s capacity to have thoughts. This is the thing with censorship, like Orwell’s Newspeak in his novel 1984, it forbids an idea to form and so we rely again on algorithms and trending words—and yet porn is a thriving industry. This perceived itch to be offensive is only brought about by it being forbidden, like Eve’s apple, and now because everyone cannot stand to perform anymore, they go back to what they think is “normal.” The other extreme: conservatism (even if they think they are unaware of it).

References:

Amin, Kadji. “Trans Materialist Critique as Feminist Practice: Lessons from a Polemic Against Nonbinary Identities.” Frontiers in Sociology, vol. 10, 2025.

Andronic, Mihaela. ‘Life is to Protest’: Evolution of Korean Women’s Performance and Contentious Resistance. 2025. Thesis. hdl.handle.net/20.500.12608/74419.

Bengi-Sue. “PORN IS EVERYWHERE. EROTICISM IS NOT.” Bengi-Sue’s Substack, 3 Jan. 2026, bengisuedotcom.substack.com/p/porn-is-everywhere-eroticism-is-not?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer&triedRedirect=true.

Chang, Kyungsup. “Compressed Modernity and Its Discontents: South Korean Society in Transtion.” Economy and Society, vol. 28, no. 1, Feb. 1999, pp. 30–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085149900000023.

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Marx, Karl. “The Poverty of Philosophy.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, International Publishers, 1976, p. 166 (chap. 2).

McWhorter, John. Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Portfolio, 2021.

Moi, Toril. “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, edited by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, Blackwell, 1989, pp. 117-32.

Nurse, Julia. “Milkmaids and the Image of Purity.” Wellcome Collection, 4 May 2023, wellcomecollection.org/stories/milkmaids-and-the-image-of-purity.

Ritzer, George. “The ‘McDonaldization’ of Society.” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 1983, pp. 100–107.

Sebastian, Michael. “The Lost Art of Surviving a Hangover.” Esquire, 14 Aug. 2025, www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a65657781/surviving-a-hangover.

“The American White Savior Complex.” Tablet Magazine, 6 June 2019, www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-white-saviors.