Ctrl+ Society
Season 1
“My therapist thinks we should break up”: Modern Dating pt. 1
“You’re not a dog, you don’t deserve a treat”: Big Backs on Skinny Tok and GirlyGirl Discourse
“Cheetos from Scratch”: A Tutorial for Tradwives
by Anshita Singh & Suchitra Harnahalli
This one opens with COVID and codependency — why needing people got treated like a personality flaw, and what the pandemic actually exposed about that. From there we follow the money: emotional capitalism turning partnership into a checklist (flowers, good morning texts, walking on the traffic side), and therapy-speak becoming ammunition people use on each other without ever sitting in a room together. Then the bigger structures come in — economic homogamy, why “caste-blind” and “colorblind” are both oxymorons, the actual data on racial hierarchy in online dating, and how fetishization hides inside what gets called representation. Credits: Track: Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats Group Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: • Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats | Moder... Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/disco-sunday Assigned Readings: Banerjee, A., Duflo, E., Ghatak, M., & Lafortune, J. (2009). Marry for What: Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India (Working Paper No. 14958). National Bureau of Economic Research. Bauman, Z. (2001). Consuming Life. Journal of Consumer Culture, 1(1), 9–29. Becker, G. S. (1973). A Theory of Marriage: Part I. The Journal of Political Economy, 81(4), 813–846. Calvi, R., & Keskar, A. (2022). ‘Til Dowry Do Us Part: Bargaining and Violence in Indian Families. Rice University. Finkel, E. J., Eastwick, P. W., Karney, B. R., Reis, H. T., & Sprecher, S. (2012). Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the Perspective of Psychological Science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(1), 3–66. Fisman, R., Iyengar, S. S., Kamenica, E., & Simonson, I. (2008). Racial Preferences in Dating. Review of Economic Studies, 75, 117–132. Jamieson, L. (1999). Intimacy Transformed? A Critical Look at the ‘Pure Relationship’. Sociology, 33(3), 477–494. Jayachandran, S. (2014). The Roots of Gender Inequality in Developing Countries (Working Paper No. 20380). National Bureau of Economic Research. Kalmijn, M. (1998). Intermarriage and Homogamy: Causes, Patterns, Trends. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 395–421. Lin, K.-H., & Lundquist, J. (2013). Mate Selection in Cyberspace: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Education. American Journal of Sociology, 119(1), 183–215. Minina, A., Masè, S., & Smith, J. (2022). Commodifying love: value conflict in online dating. Journal of Marketing Management, 38(1–2), 98–126. Rajadesingan, A., Mahalingam, R., & Jurgens, D. (2019). Smart, Responsible, and Upper Caste Only: Measuring Caste Attitudes through Large-Scale Analysis of Matrimonial Profiles. Proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019). Substack: The Problem With “If They Wanted To, They Would” I Started Dating Like a Man (and I Love It) The Real Reason Dating is So Hard Right Now (That No One is Naming)
SkinnyTok has had many names. Pro-ana. Thinspiration. Now this. The goals have not changed, just the packaging. In this episode, Anshita and Suchi argue that SkinnyTok is a visual regime that turns hunger into a monster, thinness into a moral virtue, and women's bodies into a site of pure aesthetics while ignoring that this aesthetic was never race-neutral to begin with. They also get into the girly girl discourse, commodity feminism, and why self-care went from Audre Lorde's radical political act to a white woman's Stanley cup run. The episode title is a direct quote from a SkinnyTok creator. It tells you everything you need to know about what this movement actually thinks of the women it's targeting. Important Substacks for the episode: Performing the Digital Girly Lexicon Surviving the Academy Selling Rest Back to the Exhausted Assigned Readings: orgad, Shani, and Rosalind gill. Confidence Culture, Duke University Press, 2022, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv24rgbjx.4. JSTOR. Maguire, Emma. 2018. Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74237-3. McComb, Sarah E., and Jennifer S. Mills. 2021. “Young Women’s Body Image Following Upwards Comparison to Instagram Models: The Role of Physical Appearance Perfectionism and Cognitive Emotion Regulation.” Body Image38 (September): 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2021.03.012. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 13(1), 1–9. Hoffman, K. M., Trawalter, S., Axt, J. R., & Oliver, M. N. (2016). Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 113(16), 4296–4301. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Originally published in Screen, 16(3), 6–18. (Source provided as a book chapter, pp. 57–68). Schwartz, A. (2020). Soft Femme Theory: Femme Internet Aesthetics and the Politics of “Softness.” Social Media + Society, 6(4), 1–10. Sturgis, M. (2020). Review of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings (New York University Press). Lateral, 9.1. Thomas, E. L., Dovidio, J. F., & West, T. V. (2014). Lost in the Categorical Shuffle: Evidence for the Social Non-Prototypicality of Black Women. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 20(3), 370–376. Music Credits: Track: Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats Group Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: • Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats | Moder... Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/disco-sunday
This week, Suchi bought a book at an antique store in Harrisburg, and somehow we ended up here talking about making Cheetos from scratch. In episode two, we’re talking about the rise of the trad wife movement and what it looks like on the internet. We ask what brought us here, who benefits when women romanticize losing rights, and where do we go from here? Featuring themes from Foucault, sexism, and feminism. Assigned Readings: Woolf, Antonia, Calli Tzani, Maria Ioannou, and Thomas James Vaughan Williams. “Social Media’s Dangerous Fantasy: How the ‘Trad Wife’ Movement Fuels Inequality and Gender-Based Violence.” Assessment & Development Matters17, no. 2 (2025): 36–41. https://doi-org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.53841/bpsadm.2025.17.2.36. Bower, L. J. (2025). The thorn in feminism’s side: black feminist reconceptualization and defence of #tradwives and the #tradwife movement. Journal of Gender Studies, 34(7), 1037–1053. https://doi-org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1080/09589236.2024.2423198 Bower, Laura Jane. “Shifting the Focus Towards ‘Tradhusbands:’ A Black Feminist Examination of the Visible Tradwife and the Invisible but Integral Role of the Tradhusband.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2026): 186–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843261442452.
Okay so Anshita got blocked. By an influencer. For citing extra readings. In our debut episode, we use one very petty moment as a launchpad into some big questions: What is knowledge? How does it come to exist? What counts as research? And who decided a degree makes you the authority on human behavior; because Instagram certainly has thoughts. Welcome to the first episode of Ctrl+Society, where we connect the dots between your For You Page and the assigned readings nobody actually did. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ Assigned Readings: Duffy, B. E. (2015). The romance of work: Gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(4), 441–457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186 Gershon, I. (2016). "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man": Typing the neoliberal self into a branded existence. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(3), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.017 Murray, R. C. (1980). Review of The credential society: An historical sociology of education and stratification, by R. Collins. American Journal of Education, 88(4), 488–495. https://doi.org/10.1086/443519 Nisbet, M. C., & Scheufele, D. A. (2009). What's next for science communication? Promising directions and lingering distractions. American Journal of Botany, 96(10), 1767–1778. https://doi.org/10.3732/ajb.0900041 Skea, C. (2021). Emerging neoliberal academic identities: Looking beyond Homo economicus. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 40, 399–414. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09768-7 Tsemberis, S. (1999). From streets to homes: An innovative approach to supported housing for homeless adults with psychiatric disabilities. Journal of community psychology, 27(2), 225-241. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6629(199903)27:2%3C225::AID-JCOP9%3E3.0.CO;2-Y Wasike, B. (2022). When the influencer says jump! How influencer signaling affects engagement with COVID-19 misinformation. Social Science & Medicine, 315, 115497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115497 Music Credits: Track: Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats Group Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: • Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats | Moder... Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/disco-sunday