On today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with
, an artist from Northern England and longtime member of my Substack community.Topics include:
The history of Newcastle, from which Kirsty hails
How Kirsty first got into politics as a working class Northerner
The British fixation on class (fox hunting etc.) vs. America’s fixation on race
Particles vs. Waves (credit to
for the concept!)How self-perception impacts presentation when creating internet content and during courtship
Why old-school dating sites like OkCupid were better than swipe apps
How constant accessibility encourages ghosting
How Kirsty met her husband through a psychology meme group
Girls are pumping and dumping men now :(
Kirsty’s experience with the UK COVID lockdowns
How Substack lets intelligent / eccentric people develop a Found Family
Why Kirsty is so interested in abstract thought despite her ISFJ personality
Kirsty is one of the few people who intuitively understands Walt’s art
Anima Possession—the male desire to dominate and subjugate women emerges from a revulsion with and resentment for their own anima
How exorcist movies have started to reject traditional absolutist notions of good and evil for more sophisticated Jungian ideas of shadow integration
Extreme episodes of PTSD / BPD / NPD often look like demonic possession
Codependence emerges from embodying your lover’s animus / anima
People have more freedom to create in their thirties vs. their twenties
Why Walt feels a civicminded obligation to be exhibitionist to create space for other people to speak openly about their experiences without feeling cringe
What makes something cringe vs. based?
Everything that ends up based starts off as cringe
The Dissident Right is sclerotic / culturally dead compared to the Alt Right
Pluralism vs. parochialism
Walt’s desire to massage the Substack discourse into a coherent “story” with a colorful “cast of characters” who resemble a theatrical troupe
All coping mechanisms were developed for a reason—abandoning them isn’t always the optimal decision given the tradeoffs involved
The “Final Girl” trope in horror films and what it represents for women
Why horror films are so effective at explaining cutting-edge social dynamics
How horror films portray woman as spectacle vs. woman as agent
The grotesque side of femininity and confounding female impulses to hide this from men vs. shove male faces in bloody smelly viscera
The appeal of True Crime—women see elements of their ex-bf in serial killers
Walt’s Hot Take that Gone Girl is actually a heroic story of feminine agency
the iconic Cool Girl monologue
Kirsty explains why Mia Goth triggers working class Bri’ish sensibilities
Did Ted Bundy love his girlfriend and adopted daughter?
People don’t want to believe good and evil can exist simultaneously
Walt argues that when middle class women puritanically pressure men into suppressing their aggressive libidinal energy it is usually just absorbed by uneducated working class girls less capable of standing up for themselves
How “boys will be boys” culture ascribes an excessive level of agency to young girls and doesn’t give them room to experiment and test boundaries
Women who advance from working class to middle class idealize self-restraint
The modern world never affords us sufficient time to develop social scripts to deal with disruptive technologies
Kirsty suggests that increasing literacy in visual art would help us better accommodate new technological paradigms
How AI democratizes creation, especially for multimedia and conceptual artists
Why monomedium / craftsman type artists are snobbish about AI
LLMs are tapping into the Jungian collective unconscious
Kirsty explains British art schools no longer emphasize technical training
The skills required to be a good prompt engineer when creating AI art
Turning one’s life into performance art
Kirsty - Horror, Art, and Identity