We all know what it is. We all have our favorite examples. Perhaps, like many, yours is Bruce Springsteen, whose new look is giving off Tilda Swinton trapped in a tanning bed.
It’s the unigender uniparty. It’s about much more than the occasional lesbian-style jokes aimed at aging celebrity men. It’s about the strange way our high-profile elites seem to be converging on a neutral (neuter?) public image — one that seems to convey through specific common cues that they are on their way toward transcending secondary and perhaps even primary sex differences.
Cuban is on the fast track to laughingstock status. But if he cracks and slaps back, he’ll have to choose between chaining himself even more tightly to his fellow unitards or somehow distancing himself from the team — always a dangerous decision in our digitally tribalized age.
And as the internet discovered this week, it has claimed Mark Cuban as its latest victim.
No longer the Wall Street-presenting alpha Chad familiar from “Shark Tank,” Cuban has self-adjusted in keeping with his emergence as a top spokesbeing of the “progressive” upper management class — adopting, whether consciously or somehow otherwise, the smooth, animatronic presentation of the Masters of the Ellenverse.
But it’s the glasses that complete the picture and the glasses that have launched a million memes. Searching Cuban glasses on X returns an infinite scroll of references, who-wore-it-betters, and general japes — a chorus of mockery that, as of this writing, Cuban has declined to respond to, although it beggars belief that he hasn’t caught wind of the trend.
Taking advantage of the uncanny mutation, Elon Musk himself took a swing amid his MAGA road campaign. “Mark Cuban and Rachel Maddow are the same person,” he joked, reposting the visual evidence. “Don’t believe conspiracy theorists who claim otherwise!”
Cuban is on the fast track to laughingstock status. But if he cracks and slaps back, he’ll have to choose between chaining himself even more tightly to his fellow unitards or somehow distancing himself from the team — always a dangerous decision in our digitally tribalized age.
You’re in or you’re out — that seems to be the reality in the unigender uniparty, which won’t settle any more for mere ideological uniformity. Thou must be remade in its image to earn thy spot on the screen and stage. Surely, the final step into full posthumanity is just a reveal away. The choice is yours, Cuban. You must respond. Doth thy soul belong to the bespectacled Borg? Or dare you disavow?
