Review by Booklist Review
The second essay collection from Bolin (Dead Girls, 2018) centers around cults: the cult of exercise tracking, the cult of tech founders, an actual sex cult. While the individual cults vary, Bolin explores the ways in which modern culture has evolved to be all-encompassing and all-consuming. In "Stardate," she shows how Sex and the City remained encumbered by gender expectations, in contrast to Star Trek's bold hopes for a utopian society. She looks at the popular video game Animal Crossing in "Real Time" and finds the game's intentionally slow pace distorted by its incentives. While ostensibly about Hugh Hefner and the cultural impact of Playboy, "The Rabbit Hole" also comments on the feminist movement, Gloria Steinem, early 2000s reality television, celebrity memoirs, #MeToo, and sex work and questions whether abolishing tipping would benefit service-industry workers. 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Essayist Bolin (Dead Girls) probes the intersection of technology, culture, and feminism in this ferociously smart collection. In "Enumerated Woman," she argues that using Fitbits or other devices to track steps, calorie intake, and other data is a manifestation of a "postfeminist" ideal that uses notions of bodily autonomy to uphold traditional standards of beauty while fueling capitalist consumption. She returns to the bankruptcy of "a feminism that does nothing but prop up privileged women's choices" in essays about Nxivm, a sex cult that recruited women using the language of "empowerment," and the politically apathetic characters of Sex and the City. The Obama era comes in for reexamination in "Foundering," where Bolin contends that the veneration of "boy geniuses" in such hits as Hamilton and The Social Network laid the groundwork for the billionaire class's takeover of American politics. Elsewhere, she reflects with unease on spending her adolescence obsessively reading Teen Vogue and Seventeen, suggesting that the magazines shaped her desires in insidious ways while distracting her from the abuses of the George W. Bush administration. Bolin's sharp analysis draws unintuitive connections between a variety of political and cultural targets, offering a caustic take on the vicissitudes of modern life. This solidifies Bolin's status as a vital chronicler of millennial ennui. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House Literary. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Critical reflection from deep in the trenches of pop culture. The touch points for Bolin's essay collection are not the usual suspects of recent pop culture analysis--neither billboard stars nor social media tropes of the 2020s are under the microscope here. Instead, she looks slightly backward, to the steady diet of MTV video countdowns, reality television, glossy magazines, and meandering trips to the mall, that shaped--and still hold a strong, nostalgic grip on--millennial women. In a style shared by many of her contemporaries, Bolin self-consciously burrows into and through her own restlessness, disappointment, and wary curiosity to form a reflective analysis of topics from fitness trackers to Nintendo'sAnimal Crossing. For those not fluent in her cultural material, the author's personal investment bolsters the sincerity of her inquiry and the applicability of her hypothesis. The predicament into which corporate executives have pushed us, Bolin suggests, is as problematic as a cult, and our wistful loyalty to the individuals and narratives they have sold draws women into their own oppression. 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. A ferocious defense of a generation of women against the forces that made them. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
