“Circus behavior, and everybody is monkey, monkey, monkey, clown.”

I hate media parties.

took this photo of you at Public Records last summer

I used to want to be a part of the media party circuit so bad. As a young person aspiring to be a writer, I would zoom into certain Instagram Stories of interest, wondering how everyone there got to go. Now, as a person attending them, I am pissed off! I was lied to. Bamboozled. Swindled. Hoodwinked like a young maiden in the depths of a dark forest. These things are not fun at all! And it is primarily because you people do not know how to put your boots on the ground and serve cunt.

To begin, what’s with this city’s devotion to hors d’oeuvres? Either serve a full meal, or stop inviting us all out at 6:30 pm. That is sacred time to be eating an entire bowl of vegetables on your couch, in your sweatpants. I spend most of my time at these things trying to chase down the poor servers so I can eat enough deconstructed summer roll bites that promise to eventually make one whole summer roll.

But what really makes my breasts ache with rage is the way you people (you, who care about your career too much and treat being a writer as some kind of altruistic personality trait; you who use words like bildungsroman in conversation but cannot identify the difference between prejudice and racism; you men who talk about being allies to third wave feminism but have never once Venmoed a woman back in your life) act. Circus behavior, and everybody is monkey, monkey, monkey, clown. There’s that one person in the corner putting on a contortionist act for some (white) editor they follow on Instagram. There’s the gaggle of Harvard millennials cold-shouldering people who went to state schools like some kind of Temu Avengers (you are literally pushing forty). All those eyes roving around in the middle of conversations, waiting for someone better to talk to. “Everything doubles as a networking event,” someone joked to me once at a book launch event. Wrong. Everything should double as an opportunity to take our nipples out. Anything else is a waste of time and, frankly, racially-charged hate bordering on a macro-aggression.

We need to reinvent the media party. We need to readjust our priorities. Nobody likes having their worth assessed on the currency of their job title when we know these job titles change every half hour. When I look out into the room and see the throng of 5'8” men who wear a criminal amount of Carhartt but have never touched a shovel, I wonder what the point of this is. What are we doing here? We all know the minute we step outside our industry, nobody knows who we are, nor does anyone care. How many writers actually become A-list celebrity, fuck-you famous? One. And she’s a transphobe. So lighten up. You’re a person, not a brand. You might think by drinking the Kool-Aid that you’re standing on business, but in fact, the business is standing on you.

To be clear, I can’t even stand on any moral high ground, because it’s not like I’m any different. I have spent my fair share of gorgeous, youthful energy pretending online media parties are fun and sexy, when in reality, I am taking one photo and calling the car home in the same breath. But I know you are probably not having fun either. You are self-scrutinizing your RealReal outfit and drinking a glass of dry red when what you actually want is a pina colada with a gigantic umbrella in it and a copy of everyone’s tax returns. 

We need to abolish the media party until you all learn how to be actually interesting again. No more lame industry topics of conversation, unless it is talking about how we hate CEOs. No more judging people by their job titles or their various pedigrees to make up for the fact that you were one of two people on the debate team in high school. We need more hot girls on the floor, drinking white wine from silly straws, mainlining shrimp cocktail sauce, wearing full morph suits (with the titties cut out, because again, unless this is a function where people can flap their entire areolas in public, then I don’t want it). No words longer than four syllables. “Gasolina” by Daddy Yankee every hour, on the hour. The world is too fucked up for us to pretend to be cooler than we are. —Sark Cuckerberg