It’s early spring and someone says that if I want to meet some femtrolls I should go see a new play in a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer’s loft. “We’ve got strippers at the after- party,” she says. No one is calling for a boycott of O’Flaherty’s. Inside, guests take selfies with the mannequin. So many people have showed up to the opening that the neighbors are complaining. Taste is out of the door.”Ī few weeks later, I see Jamian talking to a police officer in front of O’Flaherty’s. I ask Jamian if that’s a good idea - a black female figure as a piece of furniture. She also shows me a remake of an Allen Jones sculpture: a black female mannequin in S/M gear, lying on her back, her body functioning like an armchair. She gives me a tour of the space she has named O’Flaherty’s. I can’t remember the last time I saw something cool.” Downtown, where Essex meets Canal, was where the femtrolls were hanging out, saying “no thoughts, just vibes.” I am on my way to Canal Street when I come across the artist Jamian Juliano-Villani. When I heard the first rumors of the femtroll, it was September 2021 and the crypto market was hot, and because I needed a drink after a pandemic behind my desk, I decided to go downtown to see her for myself.ĭowntown was where the Based It Girls were gathering. This is no longer a city seething with racial protest. But this is no longer a country led by an autocratic billionaire. For seven years, the art scene reacted against police killings, creepy men, and structural inequality. During the Trump years, American culture lived through a moral panic. It makes sense it’s time for a backlash, a new era, a fresh cultural face. Loki’s trolling of the gods increases in severity until his mischief causes Ragnarök, the end of the old social order and, in the final stanza of the Völuspá, the beginning of a new age. In the Norse mythos, the trickster arrives at a crossroads in time. In ancient Greece, travelers placed stones on cairns at crossroads in honor of the trickster Hermes. And like all tricksters, she has arrived at a cultural crossroads. The femtroll, or the Based It Girl, is a mysterious figure, a contemporary trickster. The woman who is contrarian and provocative, who will transgress social taboos and have fun trolling online moralists the woman who cloaks herself in post-irony, wears an impish smile, and shares her mischievous life with thousands of followers this kind of woman has become the most influential figure on the New York art scene.
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