The past 20 years of culture wars, explained by the word “wholesome”

Wholesomeness once meant sexual chastity. Now it’s progressive — and fashionable.

“This is wholesome,” proclaimed a Honey Maid ad in 2014.

In an idyllic montage, the camera pans over a white family with two dads, a black family with a military father, a tattooed white family playing punk rock together. A soothing male voice declares Honey Maid the brand of “everyday wholesome snacks, for every wholesome family.”

“No matter how things change, what makes us wholesome never will,” the announcer says.

Five years later, it’s starting to feel as though we’re calling everything wholesome. BuzzFeed has a content category devoted to the concept (sample entry: 23 Posts That Will Make You Say, “Sometimes the Internet Can Be Good”). Wholesome Memes has 420,000 followers on Twitter (“for us here at wholesome memes, our favorite dinosaur is a brachiosaurus”). Teens aspire to be wholesome. Puppies are wholesome. Celebrities having fun together is wholesome.

Wholesomeness as we’re using it now means friends supporting friends. It means valuing kindness. It means not judging simple pleasures. And while just a few short years ago, wholesomeness might have suggested a regressive nostalgia for the 1950s, today’s wholesomeness is determinedly progressive. If we’re going to have wholesome family values, the thinking seems to be, they’re damn well going to be diverse and multicultural wholesome family values.

This is the story of the rise of aspirational wholesomeness, and the word’s slow transformation from stale signifier of evangelical morality in the ’90s and 2000s to trendy buzzword in the 2010s. It’s the story of our ever-changing language, and it’s also a story of a major shift in the cultural mood. It’s the story of the rejection of evangelical purity culture and the left’s embrace of sincerity in the face of the rise of the alt-right.

It’s a story that suggests that, despite what Honey Maid might say, we’ve changed our minds quite a bit over the past 20 years about exactly what it is that makes us wholesome.

George W. Bush-era wholesomeness was anything but aspirational

Wholesomeness was not always trendy. When I was a teen in Philadelphia in the mid-’00s, I would never have dreamed of describing myself as “wholesome.” It wasn’t that I didn’t consider myself a good kid (I didn’t even drink!); it was that “wholesome” as a label didn’t feel particularly flattering or relevant. It had the dutiful smell of unsweetened oatmeal.

On the occasion that wholesomeness did manage to become mainstream aspirational, it did so in a tone of deep nostalgia. In 1998, Jancee Dunn approvingly declared a young Katie Holmes to be “wholesome” in Rolling Stone, by which she meant, essentially, that Holmes was the opposite of modern.

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Holmes, Dunn wrote, “is so sweetly wholesome and genuine that she seems to be a throwback to another era, one in which Mom stayed at home and Dad gently taught you right from wrong, families helped each other out and people went to church on Sundays.”

Wholesome circa 1998 was the ’50s. Wholesome was father knows best. Wholesome was a mother vacuuming in pearls and high heels.

And for most of the ’90s and the ’00s, “wholesome” and “pure” were nearly synonymous with sexual chastity, with wholesome family values and evangelical Christian purity. Girls would put on purity rings at purity balls, which were a “wholesome event” for fathers “bringing up daughters to live in purity and in truth.” Daughters would pledge to remain virgins until marriage, and fathers would pledge to protect their daughters’ purity. Wholesomeness back then was en vogue for evangelicals, but in mainstream culture, it was Moral Majority dull and dated. The Waltons was wholesome. The OC was not.

By the late ’00s, the left was pushing back vigorously against the evangelical right’s love of all that was pure and wholesome. In 2009, Jessica Valenti published The Purity Myth, arguing that American culture’s obsession with virginity was harming girls. Jezebel created a “purity” category that chronicled the purity ring movement’s worst offenses (sample entry: “The Purity Bear Will Cockblock You Until You’re Married”); those stories go back to 2008.

“Pure” and “wholesome” felt stale, and the words were used to neg. Pure as in puritanical. Wholesome as in bland. Nothing a teenager would want to self-identify as.

Over the past decade, wholesomeness has become aspirational

Two things had to change for wholesomeness to move from its Bush-era position to its current place. First, it had to pick up new connotations, dropping the emphasis on sexual chastity to focus on progressive values like multiculturalism and friendliness.

Second, it had to become fashionable. It had to be trendy enough that teens would aspire to wholesomeness.

The new connotations came first. By 2014, wholesomeness had effectively severed its ties with evangelical purity culture.

2014 is when Honey Maid debuted its “wholesome” commercial, which suggests that by then, multicultural and progressive wholesomeness was emerging as a salable category. Honey Maid may have had strong social convictions about its wholesome ad — but Honey Maid is also a for-profit business. It would not have produced the ad if it didn’t have good reason to believe it could make money from it. Which means that by 2014, at least some brands had concluded that “wholesome” was a word people would spend money on.

BuzzFeed’s “wholesome” category emerged around 2014 as well. It came about organically, says executive director Jessica Probus: Writers were using it to describe their content on their own, without any larger discussions of editorial strategy.

Amanda Northrop/Vox

Probus added that she wouldn’t have chosen the word “wholesome” herself, because she associates words like “wholesome” and “pure” with “morality policing.” (Throughout our conversation, she referred to BuzzFeed’s wholesome content as “sincere” and “earnest.”) The choice emerged, she said, from writers who were steeped in internet culture and were using the word “wholesome” in its newer, more internet-centric sense, not the religious sense of the 2000s.

“A lot of our content comes from writers who are entrenched in the internet,” says Probus (including, it’s worth noting, a pool of unpaid amateur writers who submit posts for free). And one of BuzzFeed writers’ explicit goals is to find a way to spread joy. “Which is really hard in general right now,” says Probus, “but especially on the internet, given how toxic it’s become in many places.”

The earliest post in BuzzFeed’s wholesome category is from 2014. It’s a video titled “9 Best Things About Being Filipino-American,” featuring affectionate Filipino in-group stereotyping: Filipinos love vinegar! They’re always late! And that’s fantastic!

The top comment responding to the video is a GIF of an animated panda dangling contentedly from a tree. “Yes, good,” the panda is saying.

Aspirational wholesomeness started to become fashionable shortly after the rise of the alt-right

The second half of wholesomeness’s journey came next, after those new connotations had been well established. The idea of wholesomeness as friendliness and warmth and support seems to have become not just salable but fashionable shortly after another movement began to gain momentum online. And that new movement was assuredly not friendly, warm, or supportive at all.

In the fall of 2014 — several months after Honey Maid’s wholesome commercial — the video game world erupted into a civil war of sorts called Gamergate, one that featured a massive group of gamers strategically organizing to target and harass those who they believed were trying to push a social justice angle onto video games. In a systematic campaign plotted on message boards, they sent out rape and death threats, and at least one of their targets went into hiding.

Ostensibly, Gamergate was about video games and ethics in gaming journalism. But in reality, it was an eruption of violent toxicity from a group of primarily straight white cis men who felt that they were losing their cultural power and were lashing out in response. And their outrage helped nourish and strengthen the nascent alt-right, which co-opted the Gamergate playbook to target its own enemies.

Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The alt-right is a reactionary conservative movement that emerged from the deepest and weirdest depths of Reddit and 4chan. It is characterized by an embrace of fascism, white supremacy, and misogyny, veiled by a screen of ironic memes and “do it for the lulz” troll humor. It was just starting to take off in 2014, when its leaders began to aggressively recruit from the ranks of Gamergate. By 2016, the alt-right had become a major part of Donald Trump’s base.

Part of the way the alt-right spreads its message is through internet trolling. When it is ascendant, the internet landscape around it starts to feel more than a little toxic. And wholesomeness becomes an appealing escape.

To test the theory that wholesomeness became popular in reaction to the alt-right, I created a Google Trends chart mapping the search history for “wholesome” since 2004 against the search history for two words associated with the alt-right, “red pill” and “cuck.” In the chart below, you’ll see that both “cuck” and “red pill” start to trend heavily upward around 2014. “Wholesome” is starting to pick up its new connotations around the same time, but its search history is stable: It’s not an object of intense interest just yet. It’s lagging far behind the alt-right words.

Google

Then, starting around 2017, not long after Trump’s inauguration, the trends begin to reverse. Cuck and red pill begin to trend downward, and wholesome begins to climb.

This isn’t a formal study that can prove any kind of real causal relationship between these words, but anecdotally, it does suggest that wholesomeness began to gain traction in the cultural vocabulary around the same time that the vocabulary of the alt-right was at its peak — and that perhaps the rise of wholesomeness was a reaction to the rise of the alt-right.

That’s also what most of the people I spoke to for this article theorized.

“I see the renewed use of this particular meaning as a reaction to the cynicism of our time,” says Emily Brewster, associate editor and editorial ambassador for Merriam-Webster, “to the cynicism of our political state and to how nasty the internet can be. There is an interest in the wholesome as it pertains not to the physical body but to the mind as it is impacted by bullies and trolls and all this brutal ugliness.”

The internet certainly can be nasty: Hate speech online is increasing steadily. In 2017, studies showed that 41 percent of US adults had been the targets of hate speech online. In 2018, the numbers went up to 53 percent. For members of disenfranchised communities — LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, Jews, women, people of color — those percentages are higher.

In that context, it’s no wonder that a person might just want to look at a cute picture of a cat trying to hide under a box and forgetting its paws, and to praise it as wholesome.

Natalya Lobanova, a former BuzzFeed staff writer who contributed multiple entries to the site’s wholesome category, told me that wholesome memes “serve the same purpose that ‘fluff pieces’” do for TV news. “They’re basically a break from the constant barrage of bad news of the past few years,” she explains. “Wholesome memes will always do well after something devastating (Trump, Brexit, whatever) because in those moments, people crave to be reminded of good things, and to simply just switch off from feeling uneasy or angry.”

She adds that embracing aspirational wholesomeness also means rejecting intense, performative irony and its attendant rhetorical mode, snark.

In 2014, the idea of leaving snark and irony behind was appealing. “I think that originally, maybe in 2014 and 2015, it was a pushback to the super-ironic tone of most memes online. Think 4chan and ‘shitposters,’ and even the ‘ironic’ hipsters of the early and mid-2010s,” says Lobanova. “I think feigning irony and apathy can be exhausting, and it was refreshing for people to see memes that have no underlying message, no meme archeology necessary, just something cute and heartwarming, memes that were immediately accessible and made you feel good, rather than cynical or like you weren’t in on some joke.”

Rejecting irony wasn’t just a simple matter of getting tired of it, though. It was part of the left’s reaction against the alt-right, for whom irony is a weapon.

As Aja Romano wrote for Vox in 2016:

One of the most significant and pernicious ways that members of the alt-right use trolling is to create a sincerity-proof chamber of distortion surrounding what their actual message is. They do this by pretending that what they’re really doing is satirically spoofing how progressives and members of the media view conservatives.

Trying to understand an alt-right post as an outsider means parsing multiple layers of irony and meme history. It’s an exhausting process, and often it feels fruitless: At the end of the day, usually an ironic swastika is just a swastika.

A wholesome meme, in contrast, is wonderfully straightforward. There’s a little playful hyperbole to the language, but by and large, a wholesome meme looks like a cat failing to hide under a box, and it is a cat failing to hide under a box. So simple. So pure. So wholesome.

But beneath the simple pleasures of the wholesome meme, there’s a sweeping and complex story. It’s the story of the slow fall of the evangelical right from a place of cultural dominance; the rise of the alt-right; and the left’s counterreaction. It’s the story of how the left began to embrace a language of virtue and positioned itself as America’s champion of family values.

And it’s the story of how the world became so cynical and so polarized that thousands and thousands of people were left with a profound and unquenchable desire to see two animals of different species who are also best friends. Look how wholesome!

Source: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/4/18282247/wholesome-memes-culture-aesthetics-aspirational-explained