In seven essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.
Often these wanderings make it difficult for the reader to identify a central gathering point for Bolin’s musings, though she manages to hit at some sharp truths ... The author’s most meaningful observations concern the 'post-feminist apocalypse' American women now find ourselves trapped in ...
Where these essays deal in more global subjects, holding the reader at arm’s length, the essay Real Time invites us in as she indulges in some of the more frivolous joys of the computer age—and it’s more compelling, and persuasive, as a result. Her writing shines as she describes her six-week obsession with Animal Crossing ... Culture Creep may struggle to pin down a single thesis—but that’s not to say Bolin doesn’t have a point. The problem might be that she has too many.
At times, Bolin’s meta-commentary about essays as they unfold can be distracting. Culture Creep succeeds in questioning the direction of popular culture in a time of upheaval and in prompting readers to ask what cults they have willingly joined.
Bolin is determined to exhume what makes these cultural influences both so compelling and so problematic, and her exhaustive probing sometimes becomes fumbling or overdrawn. But, repeatedly, she stops just short of full-blown rant to press quote-worthy, crystalline passages of chilling clarity into the reader’s palm about how the ambitions of patriarchy and capitalism dovetail and how their impact has watered down the promises of feminism for a generation. (Essays on the NXIVM cult and on the teen magazine industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s are particularly, disturbingly excellent.) If power comes from clear-eyed, uncompromising knowledge, Bolin’s text is a tool for the takedown of more current trends of consumerism, oppression, and the new technology that fuels them.
