Why We Can’t Quit Our Y2K Obsessions

The final essay of the collection, “The Rabbit Hole,” is a near-50-page examination of the Playboy empire born out of Bolin’s self-conscious obsession with celebrity tell-all memoirs that eventually brought her to Down the Rabbit Hole by Holly Madison, the principal Playmate on E! Network’s series The Girls Next Door. The reality show, which ran from 2005 to 2010, followed the girlfriends of octogenarian founder Hugh Hefner through an incessant string of parties at the Playboy mansion. Bolin reckons with her penchant for these women, as well as with Spears and Paris Hilton, all of whom perpetuated and profited off the oppressive patriarchal ideals of thinness, whiteness, and wealth that she rejects. It’s her turn to wonder, à la Bradshaw, “Was I only indulging my secret postfeminist sympathies, childishly playing with the blond Barbies of the Y2K imagination?” The essay is something of a dismal inventory of the many Playmates who attempted self-empowerment by playing into the same system that exploited them. Bolin also horns in a brief history of how the women’s liberation movement approached porn and sex work, pointing out that concerns about feminism’s image marginalized working-class and trans women. She spends more time wrestling with whether it is worth writing about her frivolous obsessions at all, questioning whether she is only further promoting their brand. In that sense, the essay serves more as an exorcism of those obsessions than a dedicated examination of stigmatized labor. Taking a psychoanalytic turn in the last few pages, she writes, “I experience a kind of Freudian repression, where ambiguous memories of my past continue to recur, and I have no choice but to sublimate them into ironic affection” and “to have fun with them in the same way I did then, when I didn’t know any better.” Such indulgences are, in Bolin’s view, a distraction from more serious efforts to address our present discontents that risks reproducing past mistakes. Her conclusion would seem to downplay the intellectual substance of this very collection.

Bolin was on the nostalgia beat as early as 2015, when she wrote the “Teen Witch’s Guide to Staying Alive” for Vice, an online publication one could nevertheless mistake for yet another nostalgia artifact. Back then, girls were donning brown lipstick and ’90s fashion in a throwback to “a wealthier, sweeter, frumpier era, when fashion trends tended towards a joyful eclecticism that at times veered gently into the occult.” People were thinking we might soon have a female president, and no one had said a word about reviving low-rise jeans. Bolin noticed a cultural resurgence of witches—a rise of spell-casting on crushes, the downloading of moon-cycle apps, the embrace of domestic routine. Such compulsive activities could be understood as an attempt to legitimize “the restless avenues teenage anxiety takes, the rituals of vigilance and control children are prone to.” These days, Bolin is far less sympathetic to nostalgia and other girlish whims. To some extent, she is right to be skeptical. After all, attempting to make anything from the present precious has proven too often to be a trap for our best feminist intentions. (Take, for example, the regrettable branding of Kamala Harris as Brat—which symbolized the Democrats’ preference for projecting a bold aesthetic over offering a coherent policy platform. See too Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which once graced the New York Times bestseller list, only to be replaced years later by books like Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, rejecting Sandberg’s corporate feminist philosophy.) In Culture Creep, nostalgia also serves as Bolin’s own ritual of vigilance; her inspection of erstwhile icons and aesthetics leads to insights on what lessons to learn from their mistakes. At times, her vigilance veers into seeming penitence.

The essays in this book are exhaustively researched, loaded with citations of academic articles and social theory, in addition to some truly fascinating insights from Animal Crossing fan forums. But it’s hard to shake the sense that Bolin included some of these secondary sources to compensate for a concern that Y2K artifacts and early-2000s media are not topics serious enough to constitute an essay collection. She anticipates her detractors before they can come for her, flagging her awareness of the limitations of “the classic think piece genre where a feminist writer reconsiders the sex symbols of their childhood,” in which her own writing could be categorized. Pages into her first book, 2018’s Dead Girls, Bolin apologizes for her title, which “in addition to embarrassingly taking part in a ubiquitous publishing trend by including the word girls, seems to evince a lurid and cutesy complicity in the very brutality it critiques.” Bolin’s insecurity as a critic appears to stem from self-consciousness about participating in the genre of female-authored criticism-cum-memoir. In a disclaimer for the very premise of Culture Creep, Bolin admits, “I know I am on shaky ground criticizing people for the lighthearted kitsch they are attached to from their childhood. I’m the one reading Britney Spears’s memoir instead of real books.” I wonder what books Bolin considers “real”? Would she count her own among them? The contradiction that frustrates Culture Creep is that it is both insistent on the political importance of pop culture and skeptical of the merits of actually writing about it.

In the final pages of “The Rabbit Hole,” Bolin drives her argument home with a somewhat overwrought metaphor: that nostalgia encourages us to chase the iconic Playboy bunny down a hole where progress turns upside down and indoctrination resembles freedom. However, without affection, why else would we pay attention to these symbols from our past? Without seeing upside down, how would we notice that not everything from our present is right-side up? Because I’m a member of that hyper-earnest Generation Z, I ultimately find this millennial’s metaphor endearing, so I’ll extend it with this reminder: Before Alice was charmed by a plush bunny—even before she threw herself off the ledge in a bid to prove her bravery to those back at home—she was a curious girl bored by her sister’s “real book,” to borrow Bolin’s phrasing. “What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”