What’s up with some of you bubble bitches?
Some of y’all act like you have the right to live an untouchable life.
Hi again! I’m returning from a month-long hiatus (I’m sorry, the guilt of not writing does consume me most days if that’s any consolation) to bitch some of you guys out (not you guys, my beautiful subscribers, but other nebulous substack-consumers). I’ve been absent because I have a full-time writing job, which is a blessing when there are like 4 jobs left in media, that I actually do like immensely and also requires me to write a lot of words. As a result, on busy months, there aren’t a lot of them left in the brain bank for me to spill out on here, much less stitch into legible sentences. I’ll make it up to you, I promise, maybe by sending out a letter every week for the next month. Or maybe I’ll do a little choreographed jig in tap shoes and post it to the feed for your enjoyment (I do not have a background in dance).
Anyway, back to the heartless among us.
First and foremost, I want you to know that this scold is a gender-neutral one. When I use words like “bitch” and “wench” and “girlies,” I’m referring to men, women, non-binary people, really anyone who falls anywhere within the gender spectrum. We’re very inclusive over here at Mish Mashy and proud of it. These are just words that are familiar and dear to me.
It’s come to my attention that some people really truly and earnestly believe they have the right to live within a bubble — they’ve come to the understanding that they deserve an untouchable existence, untarnished and uninhibited by the miseries of the world. They deserve, because they were born into an affluent, cushy life, one they must work very hard to maintain (aperol spritzes in the West Village at 2, zeitgeisty brand event in Soho at 6, martinis at balthazar 9 and a nightcap at jean’s (they’re on the list duh) before going home to the brownstone they paid over market price on in a previously working-class neighborhood. Pay no mind to the family who just got displaced from the building, look how cute the sconces are!!!!!), to scroll through their “proenza dupe” links in peace.
There’s obviously been an influx of accounts who are either people trying to survive a genocide in Gaza or posing as such in many newsletters’ subscriber chats. Some of these requests do look bot-like and do look spammy and Substack should likely have a better vetting system in place (many such cases), and I can understand that it’s mildly annoying to have 15 bot notifications to scroll through before you can access the actual conversation at hand. But it’s not exactly life-altering. It’s literally not hard to just scroll past them if that’s your journey. I’d hope you’d turn around and donate some money to the PCRF on your way. What’s been interesting to watch is people, primarily in a lot of fashion/culture Substack chats, complain incessantly about these messages. “It’s beyond ridiculous” one member of a chat said of the DMs, “I just block profiles as they pop up,” responded another. At the very least, these messages are a mere reminder of the anguish our governments are causing on a trapped population. We should be reminded of that, and often. And if that’s a real person on the other end of the Gofundme ask, you’re coming off quite cruel.
I’m trying, desperately, to wrap my brain around what might make you sooooo perturbed by an account, bot or not, asking for help, and thus ignoring it. They’re not hacking your computer or asking for your social security number. It’s literally not a real-life inconvenience should you choose to look the other way. And most everyone does. People on this app are asking each other about $400 shoes to purchase and shopping the SSENSE sale for Margiela and importing Italian leather bags, and sure, these are all things I like talking about too! I’m, by trade, a fucking fashion writer. But I need us to be so for real — children in Gaza are being forcibly starved. I know someone volunteering there as an international aid worker right now, and he’s eating one meal a day that consists of rice and canned tuna, and he’s considered lucky.
These atrocities do not exist in a bubble and neither does your soft life, and assuming that’s the case is what has brought fascism to our doorstep. In one chat, someone asked for clothing rental recommendations for visiting tel aviv while Gazans and international anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-genocide movements are calling to boycott israel/israeli goods (it was the final straw in crumbling South African apartheid). One member with a grip on reality recommended “not visiting a country carrying out genocide,” to which another, desperate for a crumb of propriety on the internet I guess (a famously tame landscape), said there was a “time and place for discussions about this, but this is NOT it. Being rude is neither helping your cause nor convincing anyone. Let people mention israel without acting up like one of those fundraising bots in all substack chats…” A lot to unpack there! First and foremost, that last sentence is giving racism/bigotry etc. And, actually, there is no right time and place to bring up a literal genocide, to be bring up the AT LEAST 13,000 children killed by israel, 57 of them due to malnutrition caused by the intentional aid blockage. Kids who should be in school, skipping a jumprope, drawing with chalk on sidewalks and beading friendship bracelets, are DYING. We’ve all seen the images of children shredded to bits; one young girl, pigtails in her hair, filleted and hanging from a power line, we saw a grandfather cling to a child’s tiny corpse, crying over her lifeless face, and we all heard Hind’s last words — a 6-year-old girl whose family car had been shot at relentlessly by an israeli tank. Surrounded by the deceased bodies of her loved ones, she placed a call to the Red Crescent. Her voice tiny and shaking.
"The tank is next to me. It's moving."
"Is it very close?"
"Very, very. Will you come and get me? I'm so scared."
Hind’s body was found five days later, the car she was traveling in littered with hundreds of bullet holes. Her last moments on this earth were spent, audibly, in outright fear, with the sound of a tank closing in and the sight of her most loved ones bloodied and lifeless. Our tax dollars made that moment, made her demise, a reality.
And! Let’s address the whole “mention israel without acting up” bit. How do you think that state was founded? Bingo! Another genocide! Mass displacement! Ethnic cleansing! I talk about it incessantly, but my father literally grew up in a refugee camp, completely impoverished, after he and his family were violently expelled from Palestine. It makes me wretch thinking of all the comfort that was stolen from him — the life that was stolen from him. Maybe if the world had taken a deeper interest, a more firm stance, on the plight of the Palestinian people back then, he and his family could’ve gone home. Could’ve had a home.
If you’re wondering how the rest of the conversation went in that subscriber chat, a few girlies recommended Nuuly as a great clothing rental option! Yay! Enjoy your trip to the ruins of Jaffa! If you can, swing by my grandparents’ homes in Haifa and Safad! Our family heirlooms and the gold rings they passed down for generations might still be somewhere in the attics. And I hear it’s beautiful there this time of year!!! If you’re hellbent on ignoring all this very real suffering, at least try not to be a dick about it. Regardless of whatever trauma you’ve gone through personally, none of us have been tasked with surviving a relentless genocide like this, and you look insensitive beyond belief when you try and minimize being confronted with it to a nuisance — to indecency. It’s been made abundantly clear to me, living in the heart of the empire helping enact this genocide and working in the nucleus of an industry so enraptured with self-promotion, self-ascension and self-centeredness that empathy, to some, is a mere concept rather than an implicit way of being.
There is, believe it or not, more to life than designer Tabis or reclining in a chaise lounge on a stolen seafront. The genuinely coolest people I know care deeply about the real world and understand the way they move through it has a ripple effect — has real, tangible consequences, big and small. They care about their neighbors, they care about the planet, they care about people they don’t know. And many of you out there, and on here, obsessed with mimicking a lifestyle filled with effervescence, bliss and cashmere sweaters draped over shoulders, will never, ever be able to tap into the deepest most human thing tethering us all to one another: compassion. What a shame it must be to live like that.
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if you’re against what the modern-day Mister Rogers is doing, you need to CHECK YOURSELF SOOOOOO HARD.
have been thinking about this a lot—and remember feeling very disturbed seeing a writer apologize for all of the “spam” in the chat with no other acknowledgment of what those messages were about. appreciate you putting words to it.
This! And it’s been going on since day 1 — I can’t tell you the number of Americans I know who “prioritised their mental health” after October 2023 and got off Instagram because it was too much for them to see the images … like if it’s too much for you to see images of genocide, what do you think it feels like to live through one?