The cliché of the artist as outsider remained an essential part of the pop mythologies of several generations. Even some of the most wildly successful musicians of the late 20th century — The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, even Madonna — became broadly admired not just for courting enormous audiences, but for their consistent unwillingness to compromise. The masses might still gobble up whatever was served to them but they were kept partially in check by discerning and knowledgeable obsessives and critics, insistent on at least some kind of standard for artistic integrity. Even the most kitsch-hungry audiences still maintained a sense that great artists were by nature opposed to the mandates of the cynical corporate bottom line of the music industry itself. As the last young people of the 20th century, Generation X summed up the ethos perfectly: there was nothing less cool or less authentic than “selling out”.

Now, one quarter of the way through the 21st century, it seems clear that almost every vestige of the sentiment has been summarily obliterated. The reigning value system of the arts in this century — sped along by the internet’s uncanny ability to fuse micro-celebrity with social media styles of personal brand management — has been one of increasingly unabashed obsession with wild financial success, naked greed, grifting, and cynical re-branding. Beginning in the 2000s, and ramping up to a fever pitch with megastars like Lady Gaga, Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Ed Sheeran, pop music became a field of nakedly-corporate brand ambassadors and stars happily turning themselves into avatars of narcissistic self-actualization. 

Gaga and Swift, for instance, have developed armies of loyal fans by crafting broad messages of inclusivity and churning out vicarious anthems of personal achievement. Beyoncé has turned herself into an empty symbol of political and cultural revolution. Singers with little interest in art, from Ariana Grande to Doja Cat, have carved out huge successes by presenting themselves as simultaneously ultra-perfect and ultra-relatable. The message everywhere is the same: the greatest artists of our time are the most famous; they have everything, and they deserve everything. To say otherwise is not only snobbish but discredits the mass popularity into which millions of distracted, depressed, and over-stimulated people have invested all their attention and aspiration. 

The usual name for this strangling monopoly of the mega-famous is “poptimism” — a phenomenon that crossed over to massive TV shows, film franchises, and fashion lines. At first an obscure internet discourse conducted mostly by critics and journalists, the term has come to signify the reigning ideology of our day, in which the old values of the avant garde are dismissed as out-of-touch and elitist (and, of course, trashed as too white, straight, and/or masculine). In the meantime, pop is associated with an enlightened sense of inclusivity, conveniently ignoring the many forward-thinking avant-garde cultures historically associated with LGBTQ artists and racial minorities in Western countries. 

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One accepted starting point for this contemporary discourse is music journalist Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 New Yorker article, “The Rap Against Rockism”. In the article, Sanneh defended the aspiring popstar Ashlee Simpson after a disastrous SNL performance. Simpson’s backing track had faltered, and people quickly realized she had been lip-syncing; the blowback essentially cost Simpson her music career. But what Sanneh articulated — which he opposed to the stereotypically old-white-guy rhetoric of an early-2000s “rockism” — was a defense of Pop as product, and popstars as patently commercial projects. His defense became central to the rhetoric of many internet critics after him. What began as a fairly anodyne plea for a more open-minded idea of “authenticity” in a music industry dominated by capitalistic necessities, became a steamrolling social ethos in which artists were valorized for their business savvy and their ability to represent popular dreams of self-actualization and economic domination. Naysayers were merely snobs and bigots, to whom the response was always the same: “Shut up and let people enjoy things.” 

But it is 2025 now — and the high days of poptimism are over. Just a few months ago, Sanneh himself penned a remarkably unselfconscious article called “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge”, bemoaning how toothless music writers have become in a world that rewards valorizing the most popular, while disincentivizing critics from championing lesser-known artists, knowing a review of the newest popstar’s record will generate more web traffic and revenue. Sanneh himself sounds wearied by the paradigm he helped usher in two decades ago. “Poptimism intimated that critics should not just take pop music seriously but celebrate it.” he writes. “This aligned with the changing imperatives of the media industry: on blogs, you could draw a crowd with a contrary opinion, but on social media you became a ringleader by saying things that your followers could publicly agree with.”

The first sign of this slackening grip may in fact have come from Charli XCX’s Brat. Like her contemporary Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX was a confusing figure in the 2010s. Both were initially “indie”-coded artists who went through heavily-corporatized windows of popularity, before settling down to work with specially chosen producers, honing distinct internet-savvy aesthetics. They positioned themselves on the edge of genuine stardom, and yet maintained a delicate sense that they were still first and foremost creatives, willing to make occasional sacrifices to preserve their own right to self-direction. It wasn’t unusual to find listeners and critics with a lingering distaste for poptimism, who were quite willing to make an exception for them: Charli and Lana represented an interesting compromise between poptimism’s valorization of striving stars and older ideals of artistic integrity and autonomy.

On the surface, Brat was ostensibly a victory for the poptimist ideal of self-marketing — though if anything, there was something old-fashioned about the record. Even that spectacularly successful campaign and rollout saw Charli going against suggestions from all sides, releasing the album after a rough renegotiation with her label, with little concern for whether the record would be considered commercial enough. What resulted was an exciting cultural moment that was at least as exciting because of the music itself. Like Madonna bringing voguing to the masses, Brat came close to mainstreaming subgenres of hyperpop and 2010s electronic club music, the closest things to actual underground subcultures in that decade. Still, Brat wasn’t quite the monocultural success many wanted it to be: it made next to no dent on the US Billboard Singles Chart, it was denied album of the year at the Grammys, and a year later the streaming numbers are still nowhere near that of much bigger stars. But this only helps to preserve a sense of cool. Brat Summer became cringe quickly but it hardly took Charli XCX to the same heights as Taylor Swift. This is ultimately a good thing.

The question all of this begs is just what will fill the vacuum: what will the popstar of the near-future look like? The younger generation of up-and-coming popstars all seem cannily aware of their era. Singers like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and even Addison Rae are all savvy young women, versed in the contours of internet discourse, plugged into specifically Zoomer kinds of nostalgia, well-trafficked in internet “aesthetic” curation, and eager to declare themselves the vigilant students of previous popstars and eras. They’ve learned the lessons of Lana and Charli, working with specific producers (often Jack Antonoff, or The 1975’s Dan Nigro), rather than massive teams of rotating writers and engineers. And they each stand in unique relation to poptimist notions of “authenticity”. 

Two of these women have already reached levels of popularity to rival their forebears. Eilish initially seemed the most likely to become musically and aesthetically interesting, though she’s since backed away into far more conventional pop territory. Rodrigo has worked almost exclusively with Dan Nigro on both of her albums. And though she started off as something of a Taylor Swift copycat, her most recent record GUTS felt different. Compared to the ultra-compressed sound of contemporary pop, GUTS did spectacularly well without sacrificing great production and an actual dynamic range: certain tracks could’ve passed master on a Nineties alt-rock station. Sure, it’s pure throwback music, and the ballads are maudlin; there’s really nothing even vaguely experimental or new to be found anywhere on any of these young artists’ albums. But the anthems sounded bigger and better than just about anything else on Top 40 radio in the US or the UK Rodrigo became the first Zoomer starlet to make something that felt like good, solid, old-school pop-rock from a different time.

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This same kind of Zoomer nostalgia for the late 20th century also marks Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan’s music as well. For all Roan’s dramatic drag costumes and theatrical performances, the music is pure Eighties synth-pop and feels more cohesive and sounds better than any regular radio fare. Carpenter’s newest album Man’s Best Friend — which caused a firestorm of backlash online for its possibly-sexist album cover — is filled with lyrics straight out of the current internet discourse on dating woes and heterosexual resentment; but the music itself is pure Seventies AM radio, country, and the occasional Prince-lite Eighties disco track thrown in. Even if it’s relatively insubstantial, it still feels more “real” than most of the anonymous processed songs we’ve been subjected to for the past two decades. 

Strangest of all is Addison Rae — the massively successful TikTok dance star — who earlier this year released her debut album Addison to astonishingly good reviews, becoming the ultimate poptimist redemption story. She released a slew of grainy MTV-referencing music videos, rebranded herself as a fervent student of Madonna, and hunkered down with producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser to produce a record full of Nineties house, trip-hop throwbacks, and obvious nods to Brat. Infuriatingly, it sounds fantastic. Rae’s savvy turn was clearly meant to dazzle doubtful audiences with its sense of curated cool, and it worked: comments online are full of listeners in awe of the change, saying things like “this is how you rebrand”. It doesn’t matter whether she’s a particularly strong singer, or whether she actually wrote a single line. What matters to people is the sense that she played the re-brand game the smart way. Rather than chase the anonymous sounds of the charts, Rae pursued something that felt cohesive, and gestured toward an older sense of cool. It shows that the future for aspiring popstars like her may lie in cultivating good taste.

This is the strange legacy of the last days of poptimism. What began as a rejection of previous standards of cool has left us with decades of empty pop music, uncritical critics, and huge fandoms deeply resentful of anyone who suggests that the pop idols they worship are not brilliant simply because they’re massively wealthy and successful. The decline of poptimism has opened space for aspiring popstars to define themselves by their taste again. This is a step in the right direction. Still, the return of really exciting and adventurous pop music requires the return of authentic subcultures, too. This is going to be difficult: the victory of poptimism hampered the ability of subcultures to protect their sense of cool, just as it strangled the ability of critics to argue for anyone other than the most popular musical artists.

“The only alternative to criticism,” the great film critic Pauline Kael once said, “is advertising.” We have lived for many years now in a world that has increasingly collapsed the boundaries between the two. The job of critics now has to be to reject the market; to advocate again for neglected artists, and a sense of cool, and to push back against stan culture. But this also means recognizing and celebrating better pop music when it appears. If the young popstars are any indication, and the years of poptimism are giving way to a slight chance at a change for the better, then what artists need most is to be empowered to shift towards making good music for its own sake. This can only be done through the establishment of trustworthy critical voices. Such trustworthiness can only appear when enough people insist that art is not better simply because it’s more popular, and that commerce will always be a partial enemy to art. Do so long enough, and history tells us that audiences will eventually adjust. And it is at this point, when audiences really begin to adjust, that popular artists become free to make something truly new.

“When you’re writing a story with violence in it, how do you balance the need to entertain an audience against your responsibility to depict the violence sensitively?”

That this question is, itself, question-begging, is never discussed. It is simply a foregone conclusion that the responsibility exists, born of an ubiquitous sense among writers and readers that exploring the dark underbelly of humanity — even through the medium of fiction — is fraught in a way that requires some sort of reckoning. Even those who would grudgingly admit that the depiction of fictional crime on a page has little to do with its real-life counterpart — that the killers and rapists and thieves among us are probably not perusing the local bookstore in search of inspiration — will nevertheless insist that crime novelists are accountable in some nebulous, moral sense. If you write about murder, or assault, or kidnapping, or armed robbery, you must be at pains to treat them with the proper respect — or at least, you need to be seen as such, lest someone think you are not only exploiting these things for their entertainment value, but also that you perhaps secretly enjoy them.

Exactly how to do this is an enigma unto itself. The thrillers and mysteries that make up the world of crime fiction often follow a formula. Countless books have been written about how to construct one, to pace your red herrings and twists and reveals so that the reader remains fascinated, compelled to keep turning the page. But there is no such rulebook for how to plumb the depths of human depravity without crossing the line between a respectful depiction and a lurid one, nor can anyone tell you precisely where that line is (even those who are happy to criticise you for falling on the wrong side of it). Every attempt to sketch these boundaries is a failure, and this is perhaps never more true than when attempted by the writers themselves.

“How do we ethically portray violence in crime fiction?” asked veteran author Don Winslow in TIME magazine in April 2022. If anyone should know the answer it’s Winslow, who has written his fair share of crime novels. And yet the conclusion he reaches, after nearly 1,500 meandering words, is that he doesn’t and cannot know. Far from establishing guideposts for fellow writers or discovering the ethical sweet spot between bloodless cosy mysteries and graphic accounts of bodies ripped apart by gunfire, the writing of this piece accomplishes one thing and one thing only: it demonstrates to the world that Don Winslow Has Really Thought About This.

Whatever one thinks of the term “virtue signalling” (I’m not a fan), it’s hard to see essays like this as anything but a cursory advertisement of the author’s moral bona fides. Having demonstrated them — maybe of his own volition, maybe at the behest of a nervous publicist — he will surely go on to write whatever he would have written anyway.

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This is, of course, what all novelists do, whether we’ve been permitted the benefit of an ass-covering TIME essay or not. Keeping the sensibilities of some hypothetical reader in mind is simply not possible when constructing a work of fiction — partly because it’s creatively paralysing, but perhaps more because every reader has different sensibilities, and predicting what will set any one person off is impossible. (I received dozens of angry messages about the death of a cat in my last novel, while the severed human nose someone pulls out of a garbage disposal ten chapters earlier provoked not a single objection.)

But the more interesting question is why the ass-covering is required at all, and here the notion of responsibility in depicting violence on the page dovetails perfectly with the present-day obsession with authenticity in literature, asking what we owe to the real-life victims of the real-life horrors for which we write fictional counterparts. I was once chatting with a fellow author who was working on a novel about a mass shooting; she had sent sample pages to an agent, only to be floored when the agent asked if she had run her story past a sensitivity reader — a person who, by definition, would have to have survived a mass shooting in order to offer critique.

“Imagine approaching someone who’s been through that and asking them to relive the worst experience of their life, just so I can describe the sound it makes when a body hits the floor,” she said. What she didn’t say, but was understood, was the obscenity underlying the agent’s question. Far from stigmatising the writer’s imagination, we should understand it as something to be celebrated: among other things, it saves those of us who write fiction from retraumatising people who have been through the unspeakable, people who hardly need dramatised accounts of a horror they know firsthand. Is the resulting story less authentic? Maybe, at least by some definitions of the word — though if the reader is lucky, they’ll never have to find out.

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But also, crucially, the multitudes which human beings contain means that imagined and authentic need not be mutually exclusive. One thinks of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, such a fully rendered depiction of the Civil War that many actual veterans were gobsmacked to learn that the author had never himself been in battle. The most remarkable thing about this is not that a man could imagine himself into a textured, visceral rendering of something he hadn’t lived, but that we have somehow since come to the conclusion that doing so is a bad thing.

And then, there’s the question of the role of women in all this. Jokes about the overwhelmingly female audience for crime fiction and true crime alike bump up against the reality that women are also producing this content. The expectation that a writer should agonise over every fictional act of violence, fretting over the hypothetical offence it might cause — is it too lurid or too aloof? Too sanitised, or too graphic? — seems not just unrealistic but profoundly gendered, the product of a broader conviction that women must, whatever they are doing, maintain a baseline level of concern about other people’s feelings. The trope of women as nurturers dies hard, even (or perhaps especially) when the woman in question is writing about the discovery of a partially dismembered rat-bitten corpse in a trash can. If men want to write or read about rats nibbling on a severed human head, well, this is to be expected. But if women want the same, a story inevitably springs forth about why they want it for noble reasons: the rat is a metaphor for the vulnerability women experience in a misogynistic world, and so on. That women are full and complex human beings who take the same dark pleasure as anyone in stories designed to disgust or titillate or terrify us is, apparently, too real.

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Essentially, the quest to control the depiction of violence in works of fiction — or to demand that authors flagellate themselves over it — seems to centre on the uncomfortable fact that the stuff of real-life tragedy is also the stuff of compelling drama, and that the line which separates entertainment from trauma is not just blurred but entirely subjective. What delineates one from the other is not in how the author chooses to describe it; it’s whether the trauma in question is happening to someone else. And while murder is one of these traumas, it is hardly the only one. The list of things we love to read about yet don’t want to live through includes affairs, betrayals, breakups, and estrangements; deaths and disasters; broken hearts and broken bones. One person’s action-packed man-vs-nature survival story is another’s utter devastation as they sift through the wreckage of their tornado-flattened home. One person’s exciting forensic thriller is another’s spouse, parent, or child lying cold and in pieces on an autopsy table.

Novelists capture these moments not for those who have lived through them but those who haven’t, trapping them in a medium through which we can examine murder, tragedy and terror, and experience an emotional response to them. It is like viewing a solar eclipse through a shadow box: the sun you’re seeing isn’t exactly real, but you can consider that little sliver of light for as long as you like without burning your eyes.

When my performance was over, my professor asked: “Would you have done that if you were painting your nails in your room alone?”

“Yes,” I said.

But the truth was, I wasn’t sure — and 20 years later, I still think of this moment every time the brush slips when I’m painting my toenails and I say “god damn it”. I wonder: am I authentically a person who swears when she messes up her pedicure? Or have I become one because, all those years ago, I said I was?

I thought of that moment, too, while reading Emily Bootle’s new book, This Is Not Who I Am, an examination of authenticity in the digital age, which attempts to suss the “realness” of everything from politics to personal brands. One early definition of authenticity, offered in the book’s introduction, is drawn from Rousseau: that you must not only be who you are but be seen to be who you are. But surely being seen, especially if you’re trying to be, influences your behaviour? If you dance (or paint your toenails) like no one is watching but in full awareness that an audience does, in fact, exist, where does authenticity end and performance begin?

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This was a difficult enough question to answer back when authenticity was synonymous with the mundane — when those “They’re Just Like Us!” photo spreads of celebrities running errands or exiting the gym wearing sweatpants were the realest thing out there. It’s even more difficult in an era when authenticity is increasingly synonymous with tragedy, when being real requires nothing less than eviscerating your own trauma in public so that everyone can see the suffering. That well-known meme, “pics or it didn’t happen”, implies a constant burden of proof, a sort of Turing test whereby you prove your humanity by posting. The irony: there remain circumstances when whipping out a camera to post the moment is decidedly inhuman.

One of the most disturbing things I saw amid the posting-mad days of the pandemic, now gratefully deleted, was a selfie from a woman standing in a hospital room, the camera angled so that the patient, her father, was clearly visible in the bed over her shoulder. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, and not only was it unclear whether he was merely dying or already dead, it is hard to say which of these things would have been worse. “Overexposure to this type of image diminishes their power to induce revery,” Bootle writes in the chapter titled “Celebrity”. She’s talking about Beyonce’s pregnancy photo shoot, but she could just as easily be talking about this. This is the content we’re most rewarded for sharing: the Botticelli-style pregnancy photo shoot or the deathbed selfie (but not much in between).

Having become synonymous with the ugliest moments of life, the notion of authenticity intersects with another term, relatability, which is equally hard to pin down. Bootle notes that it is “overwhelmingly used to describe a generic self-sabotaging personality that leans towards extremes”:

“It is relatable to lie in bed all day; it is also relatable to try to cram too much into the day. It is relatable to run out of money… it is relatable to spend a lot of money on something frivolous but not on something sensible. It is relatable to have a panic attack. It is relatable to eat burgers; it is relatable to forget to eat. It is not relatable to resist sleeping with your ex, and it is not relatable to have a gym membership… It is not relatable to get married. Relatability, in short, suggests mess.”

The question, then, is what happens when we start thinking of our mess as something to be posted about instead of something we need to clean up.

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For every person who quietly recoiled from the sight of that hospital room selfie, from the gaping mouth of the dying man looming like a black hole over the picture-taker’s shoulder, another punched the retweet button and praised her bravery, her realness, in sharing that moment. This is perhaps unsurprising — it’s widely known by now that negative post receive more engagement online because they make people feel good — but less studied is the peculiar alchemy whereby positive posts can get the same sort of traction if they make people feel bad

Last month, a woman who posted about the pleasure of spending mornings drinking coffee in her garden with her husband became Twitter’s main character of the day. Her authentic expression of joy accrued outraged demands that she check her privilege. When a person is seen to be who they are, but who they are is a happy and well-adjusted adult, we don’t quite know what to do with it. We don’t like it. We don’t trust it. And if you won’t show us the mess lurking under the surface of your seemingly-happy life, we’ll just have to make one for you.

This toxic breed of engagement isn’t unique to Twitter, but it does seem to find its purest expression on that platform. Recently, on a friend’s podcast, I listened while he spoke ruefully about the behaviour that Twitter incentivises, comparing the site to a drug from which he wished some external force would cut him off. But I wondered how much we can get away with blaming the platforms for the behaviour of the people on them — and said as much. My friend, a sweet and mild-mannered guy in real life, has an entirely different persona on Twitter: pompous, caustic, bullying, openly antagonistic. Surely this is at least partly a choice, I said.

My friend conceded that Twitter does not bring out the best in him. Then he told me that personal responsibility is a Right-wing talking point — which is, ironically, exactly the kind of argument that would play maximally well on Twitter. Does this manifestation of extremely-online silliness in a non-online dialogue just go to show the lengths to which Twitter has rewired our brains, just as that acting class might, I sometimes think, have rewired mine? Or is it simply revealing what was already, authentically there?

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Bootle asks questions like this without ultimately offering answers. She concludes: “If any self we put out into the world is subject to the same analysis and questioning, to the same rules of performance, is being authentic materially different from being inauthentic?” As a means of understanding who we are and how we live in the present, then, her book is inscrutable — but I don’t think that’s the book’s fault. Perhaps the only conclusion that can be drawn about authenticity is that it’s become a useless term.

But the emptying-out of how we gauge “realness” has very real consequences. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he announced his intent to upend the old system that delineated verified versus unverified accounts. Overnight, the site’s blue check was transformed from a sort of “trusted source” badge into a commodity anyone could buy — and within hours, Twitter was overrun with accounts touting “inauthentic” blue ticks tweeting all manner of nonsense and wreaking all manner of havoc. When you consider that this is where some people get their news, where some influential people form their opinions, where political movements have been known to begin: authenticity is more than a question of what your average social media user feels able to share with a small circle of friends online.

But as for the average social media user’s search for authenticity, it seems fundamentally self-defeating. The most recent great hope was the app BeReal, which encourages the sharing of in-the-moment mundanity during an arbitrary two-minute window each day. This is understood to be the nearest thing available to a spontaneous and honest glimpse of a person’s life, yet is achieved only through the most rigid of constructs, the strictest rules — which, of course, self-conscious and digitally-savvy users are already figuring out how to manipulate (and sometimes using to go viral on other, more performative platforms). BeReal might be the app on which posts share the closest relationship with the truth, but it is not the truth — any more than brushing your teeth or painting your fingernails in an acting class, for an audience, is precisely the same as the real thing.

And even if you manage to draw back the curtain on your real life so that the internet can see everything, the act of drawing it back is inherently, well, unreal. Erasing the barrier between our inner and public-facing selves doesn’t reveal our authentic selves; it creates a third self, something uncanny, like those mirror-image photos that show what you would look like if both halves of your face were perfectly symmetrical.

Obviously, we all contain multitudes; obviously, we all make context-dependent choices to display some aspects of our inner selves while withholding others. Obviously, it is fully possible for a person to be a terror on Twitter, a doting cat dad on Instagram, a glib interlocutor in political debate, and an absolute peach to have a beer with. But which of these personas is real, or most real? All of them? Or none?

I was genuinely exhausted after a long day, but remember feeling slightly ashamed at the possibility that I’d weaponised the guards’ machismo in the interests of my own convenience. I suppose, though, that it was a textbook example of the now oft-condemned “white women’s tears”.

This supposedly potent weapon is, we’re told, usually directed at less privileged classes of women, typically to avoid being “called out” for some moral infraction or other. This debate-ending power to weep on demand is supposedly predicated on the special, celestial status of white middle-class women as fragile entities whose emotional well-being must not be disturbed — even if that means warping all of politics and culture to accommodate their emotional comfort.

“Our sanctioned victim status shields privileged white women from accountability in interpersonal interactions and in the political sphere”, argues feminist Alison Phipps. But is it really just white women, like my younger self on the Guatemalan border, who get listened to when we weep? The debate reignited yesterday, after Keir Starmer’s tearful appearance on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on Tuesday evening.

The Labour leader recounted a number of painful personal events, including the loss of his mother, the devastating effect this had on his father and a house fire that killed the family dog. Morgan is the master of extracting a visceral confession, and it was affecting to see the usually very controlled Starmer in the grip of deep emotion.

Morgan described the interview as “searingly honest and intensely emotional”; it was an exchange that “shows the real him”. From this perspective, there’s something more real about tears than self-restraint: a stripping-away of artifice to reveal the person that’s really inside.

Britain, long notorious for emotional restraint, started to embrace this emotional openness more than two decades ago with the 1997 death of Princess Diana. Crowds piled bouquets in front of the Palace; people who’d never met Diana wept openly. The Royal Family initially remained in Scotland, only returning to London after public outrage at their reticence. Almost overnight, it didn’t just become acceptable to emote in public; failing to do so demonstrated crippling emotional inadequacy.

Tony Blair, a natural for the emerging aesthetic of public emotional display, declared that Diana had been the “People’s Princess”. She had been, as she hoped (and in a phrase reportedly borrowed from a novel by her step-grandmother, the romance writer Barbara Cartland) a “queen of people’s hearts”.

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How times change. Diana was pursued by humans with cameras; but today the intrusive reach of the cameras is something we do to ourselves, via social media. As in the age of Diana, intense emotion remains a currency: weeping selfies garner a powerful reaction. But with so much more coin in circulation, the market is growing jaded.

The generation that came of age when Diana was still alive may treat tears as an “authentic” manifestation of the “real you”. But now we are all encouraged to be both a tearful Instagram Diana and also the paparazzi swarm. And the question of whose tears garner sympathy, and whose trigger cynicism, is itself becoming a battleground.

One individual regularly lionised as authentic for her weeping (despite being a white woman) is New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Widely celebrated for her emotionally engaged political style and willingness to talk about wellness, compassion and empathy, Ardern herself argues: “you can be strong, and you can be kind”.

Perhaps that’s why Ardern regularly weeps in public: in 2017, for example, she wept while apologising to the family of murdered backpacker Grace Millane; she did the same two years later while commemorating the Christchurch mosque massacre. Again, last year, she openly cried at a service remembering the White Island volcano eruption. Crucially, her tears invariably make the headlines: evidence of her compassion and authenticity.

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Elsewhere, the press luxuriates in stories about whether Kate Middleton made Meghan Markle cry before the royal wedding, or of Markle weeping into her pillow the night before the couple’s notorious Oprah interview. But even our royal emoter-in-chief, Prince Harry, has spoken of how surreal it was to follow his mother’s coffin as thousands who’d never met her lined the streets, sobbing.

Harry may be keen to make a career rejecting his repressed upbringing in favour of emotional authenticity as a route to mental health. But even he has, it seems, some concerns about that era-defining moment of emotion. No surprise, then, to find that our culture more generally is by no means unambiguously in favour of tears.

If the tears are low-status and male, for example, you can buy a t-shirt that celebrates bathing in them, as modelled by feminist Jessica Valenti. Even those tears emitted by Britain’s (male) Secretary of State for Health, on hearing of the first Covid jabs, were mocked as “pretending to cry”.

And despite what Phipps asserts, being a white woman is no guarantee that your tears will reach a sympathetic audience. Theresa May, long panned as the “Maybot” for her lack of warmth, was panned for breaking with her usual buttoned-up form as she announced her resignation. And when the classicist Mary Beard was rounded on for defending the sexually predatory behaviour of Oxfam workers in Haiti, the weeping face she posted in response triggered not sympathy but further condemnation.

It’s sometimes claimed that greater political participation by women will result in moral improvements to politics in general, thanks to women’s superior capacity for empathy and aversion to conflict. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that as more women have entered public life — Parliament is now 35% female, an all-time high — so too our embrace of emotional display in public life has grown alongside it. But while it’s true that women are statistically less violent than men, it’s less certain that this means we’re nicer human beings.

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By Mary Harrington

When I was at school in the Nineties, I often watched the Popular Girls amuse themselves by baiting less popular classmates with carefully calibrated and plausibly deniable barbs. When the victim retaliated, usually with less subtlety, the Popular Girl would respond by ostentatiously crying — a move that usually resulted in an outpouring of sympathy for the girl who had in fact been the aggressor.

Since then, along with the rest of social life, much of our political discourse has transferred to social media. And here, actual violence is off the table — it’s all words on a screen — but verbal cruelty and social ostracism are easy to mobilise if you’re popular. It’s the perfect hunting ground, in other words, for Popular Girl-style covert aggression.

I was reminded of this recently by one of the most noted weepers in American public life: the politician Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. After the Capitol riots, Ocasio-Cortez was mocked by conservatives for over-dramatising her own experience, after convincing herself that an officer who’d come to find and protect her was actually about to kill her. In response to her critics, she grew tearful and talked about being a sexual assault survivor.

The Hispanic Ocasio-Cortez, at least, challenges the idea that it’s the tears only of white women that reign supreme — at least contrasted with Mary Beard and Theresa May. The politics of the breaking voice and artfully dabbed eye are indisputably more female than male; its power-users are always women. But these examples suggest the effectiveness of this method is less about race, than something more like Popular Girls schoolyard ranking.

If you’re ugly, old or badly-dressed, don’t expect crying to work; if you’re male, it’s a gamble; and if you’re not in the in-group, you can forget it. But if your face fits (and you don’t ugly-cry) then you can do what you like. And as long as you sob in public now and then, you’ll be considered a paragon of compassion.

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What does Laurence Fox stand for?

By Tanya Gold

The policies Jacinda Ardern actually implements are, after all, often considerably less cuddly than her sometimes-weepy public persona. She may shed a tear to mark a terrorist attack or natural disaster, but she also intervened to water down public condemnation of the use of enslaved or forcibly sterilised workers in China’s Xinjiang region. Evidently, New Zealand’s compassionate Prime Minister prefers the pragmatic realpolitik of balancing export priorities to compassion for the plight of China’s Muslim minorities.

Yet watching Sir Keir, I had no sense that he was playing a game of tactical tears. A politician who came of age before the sobbing selfie, his emotion — rarely seen in political life — seemed unforced. But I also wondered how much longer we’ll see that kind of authenticity, as pre-internet politicians grow fewer, replaced by millennials steeped in the Mean Girls politics of social media.

There’s much to be said for a more emotionally open, less aggressive and more empathic style of politics — more feminine, in a word. But we should be under no illusions: embracing this will also bring a rise in the public use of emotion, Popular Girl style, as a weapon. And that, in turn, will breed cynicism — even of those tears, like Keir’s, that seem to come from the heart.