⭐️ New Blog Post Up! I wrote a long-winded research essay on the temperature of reality TV called:
#Torture as Content: Reality Television, Netflix & Friends Abuse, and the New Witch Trials
Read the piece here → (warning: it’s very long and has some descriptions of suicide and violence)
An industry that measures every minute of viewing has declined to maintain a count of its dead, and the asymmetry of bookkeeping is not an oversight but a finding: the true number is unknown, is unknowable by design, and is larger than any published list.
The charge is never the act. The trials did not burn women for what they did; they burned them for what the act revealed them to be, and the genre convicts on identical grounds: not she cheated but she’s trash, not she drank but she’s a mess, not she wanted but look what she is. Conduct is the evidence. Essence is the verdict. The genre does not stumble onto its women. It hunts them the way the trials did, by knowing in advance what kind of woman it needs, finding her, documenting her, and presenting her to a community that has already agreed what the verdict means. Four centuries on, the tribunal still asks women the same two questions: what did you do with your body, and what does that make you.