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When going 'bad' goes bad

JoJo Siwa tries to escape teenybopperdom. Also: Sydney Sweeney as anti-woke bellwether, stay-at-home girlfriends after a breakup, and more in the weekend roundup.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Apr 7

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JoJo Siwa, a former Nickelodeon star known for her adolescent fan base, is attempting to rebrand herself as a “bad girl,” and it’s made her the laughingstock of social media.

Over the past several weeks, the 20-year-old teased the release of her new single and music video, warning that “the following content is not made for children and… may contain sexual themes.” The lyrics made the aim of this rebrand clear: “I was a bad girl, I did some bad things.”

The former Dance Moms star was trying to walk the well-trodden path of a white starlet going “bad” in order to break from a teenybopper past—and she was trying to do it while also embracing her queerness. Siwa, who came out in 2021, posted a still from the music video showing her with two other women in a sexy embrace. The song, “Karma,” is about a love triangle between three women.

Instead of generating shock and intrigue, her prolonged social media campaign inspired mockery. When her music video finally dropped this week, the internet endlessly made fun of her stomping dance moves and Magic Mike-esque floor-humping. People laid into her sparkly makeup and wardrobe for seeming to interpret sexiness through the aesthetics of figure skating and the band Kiss.

What came across wasn’t “badness” so much as an attempt at it, like that devastating Diane Arbus quote about “the gap between intention and effect.” The mockery has been brutal and unforgiving—in part because so many people felt that Siwa’s I’m-all-grown-up-now makeover was as corny and contrived as her endlessly cheerful child-star persona.

Of course, the passage out of teenybopperdom is always highly engineered. I’m left wondering just how much of Siwa’s corny contrivance might have been forgiven if she had catered more directly to the straight male gaze.

To the links…

A stay-at-home girlfriend post-breakup.

Right-wingers think Sydney Sweeney’s breasts are proof that wokeness is over, says The Polyester Podcast.

Alicia Kennedy on secular saints: “We all establish our own cultures, but maybe I turned culture—literature, art, film, food—into religion, in order to place it into a framework I understood,” she writes. “To make a religion that wouldn’t feel like surveillance and shame, but ecstasy and evolution.”

I recently spent an entire night watching ‘90s music videos, which I obviously recommend, but one in particular left me blubbering: Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover.” I was a very big Mariah fan circa 1994 and sang many renditions of “Hero” in my room, with my hand on my heart. I hadn’t watched this video since, and it brought me right back to that earnest, wide-eyed pre-adolescent moment. It’s just an extremely sweet music video. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

Moira Donegan was interviewed by Merve Emre for New York Review of Books: “The political status quo around gender in general and sexual violence in particular was not sustainable.”

Women are going off birth control pills because of misinformation.

This was a lovely shoutout from Sophie Strand, whom I’ve quoted here before on the topic of desire. If you’re here because of that shoutout, welcome.

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