The Internet And It’s Completely Different But Also Still The Internet: On Ethel Cain, homogeneous identity, and living outside of irony.

By Poppy Gooch

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In October of this year, iconic lyricist and musician Ethel Cain took to Tumblr to express her frustration at the internet’s ever-growing meme culture. ‘We are in an irony epidemic’, she declared, ‘nobody takes anything fucking seriously anymore’. The ‘loss of sincerity’ with which her art was being discussed had become overwhelming: ‘no matter what I make or what I do, it will always get turned into a fucking joke’.

Cain’s work is no laughing matter. As the trans daughter of a Southern Baptist deacon, her poetic folk songs explore religious trauma, shame, and an emerging female identity, alongside suicidal urges and issues with substances. Lines like ‘Jesus, if you're listening let me handle my liquor and Jesus, if you're there why do I feel alone in this room with you?’ hardly call for a response based in satire and wit, and yet this seems to be all that the digital world has to offer. Why has our earnestness disappeared?

This frustration with irony has plagued me since my early teenage years. It began when I entered into a mostly male friend group who had been dragged, primarily through their gaming communities, down the alt-right pipeline. The extent to which they genuinely believed the racist and misogynistic rhetoric that they spewed is still unclear to me, and that is exactly the problem. It was impossible to engage in a genuine debate or even vaguely political conversation with my peers; any attempt to ask about or combat their ideology was met with laughter, and a repetition of the quotable soundbites that they had seen on 4chan. What struck me most about this was its exclusionary nature. This ironic language was almost a uniform, separating those who ‘understood’ it from the normies who didn’t. The strengthening of their in-group, and the humiliation of those outside of it, led me to the topic of my dissertation. My research will focus on the language of men’s rights activists, specifically the strength that they draw through their weaponisation of humour.

It may seem ridiculous to compare the seemingly supportive, left-wing fans of Cain with the neo-Nazis that terrorize the very group that she is a part of. It is, in a way. Those telling their favourite musician that she’s ‘serving cunt’, and that she ‘ate like Isiah ate Ethel’ are not committing hateful mass murder or advocating for the revoking of suffrage. The largely queer, progressive participants in these exchanges are for the most part, completely harmless and well-meaning. The central issue with their dialogue is greatly preferable to that of their ideological opposites, but it is an issue nonetheless: their words are empty, and emptiness serves nobody.

It is not just Cain who has suffered at the hands of this trivialisation. Recent discussion surrounding Halsey’s new album has been laden with similar challenges. One twitter user expressed their frustration, complaining that ‘Halsey lost her dog, got lupus/cancer, dropped by label, abandoned by friends/fans/son’s father, made this album thinking it would be their last and you chronically online brainrotted bitches are reducing it to charts and jokes. y’all are in dire need of a breath of outside air’. All art, regardless of its explicit connection to trauma, seems unprotected from this wave of irony.

Before heading further into my complaint, I would like to draw on a quotation from Jessica Drakett’s essay, ‘Old Jokes, New Media’: ‘through the juxtaposed presentation of women as technologically naïve and men as technologically privileged, online spaces and technologies are coded as masculine, and the spaces claimed through the deployment of meme humour’ (p.117). What we have seen on the internet across the last few years, reaching its peak during 2024’s Brat Summer, is the justified and powerful reclaiming of this technological space. Memes are no longer the property of the straight, white man, and a new in-group has been formed.

As Tina Askanius states, ‘laughing together is one of the swiftest and most effective routes to a feeling of belonging together’ (p.152). Laughter is not immoral, and nor is the construction of community based in common experience. The question must be put, however, as to whether a digital presence is truly rebellious if it borrows, quite exactly, from the tools of the enemy. Para-sociality, homogeneous identity, and trademark phrases, are vital conditions for the success of the alt-right; their combined function has greatly contributed to the re-election of Donald Trump. They are strategies that ease susceptible adolescents into extremism, creating a false sense of strength and unification. What use are they to the left? Why steal this template of indoctrination when no malicious, ideological scheme is being enacted? We must look elsewhere, step outside of irony, and fill our words with meaning.

I am not an avid listener of Cain, and have not had a presence in any online fan communities since my early teenage years. To fully understand her grievances, I endeavoured to look deeper into her artistry. It is first important to note that the name she uses professionally, and the name that I use in this article, is that of an invented character. Her off-stage title is Hayden Silas Anhedönia. Ethel is a dead teenage girl, who narrates her tragic life posthumously throughout the album Preacher’s Daughter. She is both an alter-ego and an immaculately crafted work of autofiction. Fleeing from her abusive father, she falls in love with a fellow traveller, who subjects her to prostitution and torture. She is eventually killed and cannibalized by this man. I was horrified to discover that this was the very tale from which the soundbite, ‘ate like Isiah ate Ethel’ originated. It is hard to imagine a less appropriate subject to memeify.

I searched these terms on twitter, and my horror only grew. One user posted a screenshot that read ‘imagine dating me then BOOM I eat you’, accompanied by their own text, ‘Isiah to ethel cain’. Another, repeating the same text, inserted a conversation from Grindr which concluded with a picture of a spooky, rural building, followed by the message ‘daddy wants to take you to the woodshed’.

The most revealing result of my search manifested in the form of an exchange between two users. The first tweet read, ‘Bitches say theyre ethel cain fans then ask who Isiah is…’, and its lone reply exclaimed, ‘TEAAAAAAA ik who Isiah is #biggestfan’. Within this digital realm, representative signals of understanding appear to be of greater importance than genuine engagement with the core material. Art so often appears in discussion, not for its quality, depth, or beauty, but for its value as a staple of collective identity. To remain a part of this in-group, one need not offer detailed analysis of lyric or theme. Instead, one must only repeat, copy, and mimic the ironic language that aligns them with their community.

In the run up to the launch of her new album, Perverts, Cain posted a lengthy excerpt of descriptive prose titled, The Consequence of Audience, alongside several, separate photos with single-word captions. Many of the comments expressed sincere excitement, but a great number offered only empty references to popular memes. ‘Im not reading allat luv you tho’ read one, with nearly 1000 likes. ‘Me at the local spelling bee’ said another. As the reclamation of the internet from the dominant male community has progressed, the urge has remained to assert oneself as technologically knowledgeable, and others as technologically naïve. Ironically, the methods used to dispel this naivety centre mostly on anti-intellectualism. A monolithic voice has emerged, one that seems to its users to exist independently of regional dialect. In actual fact, the majority of this speech is a fairly botched re-enactment of African American Vernacular English.

There is value in group identity, particularly when it permits the unification of marginalised groups. There is value in laughter, and in language that signals safety and understanding. All value disappears, however, when these trivial exchanges replace constructive discussion, and when the words of the individual are buried beneath empty mimicry. If all digital communities have adopted the same template of interaction, are we really that separate? Is dialogue truly rebellious if its format is indistinguishable from that of those who we aim to rebel against? Perhaps it is time to listen to Ethel Cain, to live outside of irony, and to stop serving cunt for one fucking minute.

Links and References A link to Ethel Cain’s now-deleted tumblr post: ethel cains fly on X: "ethel cain speaks on the ongoing irony epidemic and how it frustrates her as an artist https://t.co/Cka4n6GQzW" / X

Askanius, Tina. “On Frogs, Monkeys, and Execution Memes: Exploring the Humor-Hate Nexus at the Intersection of Neo-Nazi and Alt-Right Movements in Sweden.” Television & New Media, vol. 22, no. 2, Jan. 2021, pp. 147–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982234.

Drakett, Jessica, et al. “Old Jokes, New Media – Online Sexism and Constructions of Gender in Internet Memes.” Feminism & Psychology, vol. 28, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 109–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353517727560.