Sweet Submission
topping from the bottom with pinkydoll and addison rae
The coquettish persona known as Pinkydoll wants you to tell her what to do. With a few clicks and cash delivered on TikTok Live, you can have her eat ice cream. Make her feel like a cowgirl. Watch her pop balloons. She submits to every request - or performs submission - responding with her signature “Yes, yes, yes!” as her well of followers pay-for-play. The NPC fetish she operates in is a rather lucrative one, earning character-creator Fedha Sinon upwards of ten thousand dollars a day. There is money to be made in submission. Capital in capitulation. By selling the promise of submission, and rarely breaking character, Sinon cashes in on the guise of control and predictability.
Acquiescing and the performance of it is something I have been experimenting with this year. I have wandered the spectrum of “speaking my mind” and “being difficult” to “going with the flow” and “being chill.” From this, I have learned that submission has little to do with appeasing those around me and more to do with maintaining control over the only thing I can control: myself. My friend Nic and I often repeat the same mantra to each other when one of us is at risk of popping off on someone or a situation in opposition to our line of thinking: Would you rather be happy or right? As much as we say it, I don’t know how often I believe it. Ideally, with effort and care, you can achieve both but it’s evident that certain situations and people do not deserve that labour. Sometimes it’s better to be happy and let someone be wrong than be dominant in your attempt to control what is external to you.
Two weeks ago, the TikTok-incepted Addison Rae released AR, a 12-minute extended play housing one failed debut single and four leaked loosies. When Rae became one of the most followed people on TikTok, I wasn’t on the app, making me ignorant to her genesis. But the release of her EP caused waves, at least in the corners of the internet I frequented, with many content creators using the moment to establish a comedic connection between Rae’s sound and fictionalized pop stars such as Cyrus’s Ashley O, Gaga’s Ally and Rose-Depp’s Jocelyn. Devoted LOOSEY readers will recall that fictionalized pop music is an indulgence of mine as it’s a performance of a performance. It implicates the listener by breaking the fourth wall through parody, diminishing the need for complex songwriting and production. This reduction has an inverse effect, leading to more punchy, accessible, earworm-y music than the pop it satires. With this in mind and a 15-minute jaunt ahead of me to my sushi takeout, I queued Addison up in my earbuds and hit play.
There is a red thread that connects the formulaic theater of Pinkydoll to the transparently manufactured performance of Addison Rae as “pop star.” In both scenarios, we witness wooden femmes submit to our most rudimentary expectations of what they should be.
AR and the project of Addison Rae is digestible because it doesn’t offer anything new or challenge our imagination of popstar portraiture. It emboldens it. Although I found Rae’s EP to be serviceable, it didn’t alter my understanding of her or the genre. This, however, is not an artistic failure as I don’t believe her objective is to disrupt. Instead, her artistic ambition, if it is to be believed that she has one, is to bring herself closer to a pop star archetype that her intended audience has already accepted. By seeking proximity to the definition of “pop star” through posturing, Rae provides listeners a sonic pat-on-the-back in exchange for recognizing her dog whistles. Rae does this expertly by aligning herself with the titans and evangelists of the genre, through the re-recording of a leaked Lady Gaga demo, an Easter egg for golden era pop purists, and an on-the-nose collaboration with pop innovator Charli XCX. Perhaps, her future projects will combat our definitions of what a pop star is but, right now, Rae’s primary concern is cosplay. And maybe that’s all our internet-rotted brains can absorb at the moment: a concept album by a concept artist.
It must be acknowledged that Pinkydoll and Rae’s capitulation is in line with our relationship with female-voiced technology assistants. Siri, Alexa and the Google Assistant are The Destiny’s Child of digital fembot query-machines, all engineered to ‘Cater 2 U’ and your endless needs. All three submit to our demands rather than surprise or challenge us. There is no reward in responding to our queries with divergent answers, only troubleshooting. This notion mirrors society’s message for women at large: be subservient to expectation or risk re-rendering.
If I were more submissive and catered to people’s expectations, would I get more of what I want? Pinkydoll earns thousands per stream by performing her followers requests and Rae is finally developing a musical fan base and earning acclaim for submitting to our primitive definitions of a pop star. I used to believe that we wanted to be challenged but maybe what we need most right now is ease, predictability and validation.
This past Labour Day Weekend, as the weather began to hint at the close of one chapter and the beginning of another, friends and I made plans to go to the beach. One friend pushed extensively to go to a beach that I hadn’t been to, one that I was less enthusiastic about. As I readied myself to petition for another beach, knowing that this friend was more convincing than me (read: he was a lawyer), I paused. I deleted the counter points I typed in the message bar of the group chat. At that moment, I chose to go with the flow. At that moment, I chose to be happy.
It turned out that I was not only happy, I was wrong. The beach my friend had suggested was better than where I wanted to go. In that moment, submission was sweet.
As I think back to Pinkydoll and Rae, all performing in line with our expectations, it occurs to me that not only can they be happy and right but they can also be third thing. Satisfied. And maybe that is the power of submission. When done right, everyone gets off.
