Horny Horror and the Privilege of Not Panicking

Seduction, sabotage, Substack, and the soft launch of the apocalypse.

Horny Horror Is Here

We are being lazy calling this a ’90s erotic thriller revival.

To Die For. Wild Things. Fatal Attraction. Spooky sexy was the style. A woman who could ruin your life and your marriage in a silk blouse and a razor-sharp pencil skirt and still look composed while doing it. Also, when I reference Wild Things, I mean the pool scene. Gun to my head, I do not know the plot. I remember the pool. We all remember the pool scene. I loved that era.

But this is not that.

Now it is horny horror.

I watched The Housemaid and immediately started looking up Zillow homes in upstate New York. And fine, if it comes with some murder. That’s excitement, I guess. Amanda Seyfried deserves an Oscar and Sydney Sweeney already has so much, so we just wish her well. She is the face of Horny Horror and she wears it well.

Horny horror is seduction charged with sabotage.

It always takes place in a nondescript town. Not quite the Hamptons. Not quite anywhere. But there will be nature. Wide hallways. Kitchens with multiple islands and a row of identical stools. Closets the size of condos. Homes that pretend to be restrained but quietly scream money and murder will happen here, just you wait.

Sex will happen too, but you do not have to wait for that. It is either in the opening scene or already humming in the air. The tension is in the interior design. Affairs conducted between school drop-off and wine at dusk.

You are not watching to see who is good or bad. They are all bad. That is the electricity. Everyone wants something. Everyone is calculating. Sure, it is maybe gory, but it is gorgeous.

And I think we like it because the real world feels destabilizing. We need Savannah Guthrie’s mom home now. Everything feels vaguely apocalyptic and slightly absurd. Horny horror gives us danger we can see, touch, stage. It turns anxiety into choreography. It lets us flirt with catastrophe instead of being crushed by it.

The ’90s erotic thriller had tension.

Horny horror has an appetite for destruction.

And I will absolutely take that morally messy energy.

Substack I’m Loving

Monica Heisey just launched Work Life. She introduced me to a poem I cannot stop thinking about: Having a Coke with You. and it’s about someone reciting that poem from memory and realizing, mid-walk, that maybe love is higher than art. There’s a line about the “idiocy of caring about art at all when you could spend all that energy caring about someone you loved instead,” and it has rearranged something in me.

When you think love is higher than art, there is so much artistry in that.

Simone Harouche’s Substack Many Hats has had me seriously considering a short leopard fur for the past two weeks, which is growth. I can. And I will. But what I actually love is her decisiveness. The links. The edits. The tone. It makes fashion feel like perspective instead of consumption. Getting dressed as authorship.

Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, which the New Yorker book review put on my radar, as well as my slack sisters Emily Jane Fox and Caroline Kassie. it sounds messy and hungry and risky in exactly the way this moment feels.

I took Instagram off my phone because it was boring me but that’s my fault. I was boring myself. I was confused with envy and I am not a visual learner. I am a paragraph girl. Just ask my ex.

Right now I am in a committed relationship with Substack. I want it to be so many things and I think they do too. Is it my twitter feed? My news feed? My social commentary intake? We don’t know yet . But somehow it feels slower. More intentional. Less scroll, more stories.

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AI and the Privilege of Not Panicking

Because I contain multitudes and multiple group chats and Slacks, we are obviously talking about AI.

It started with this viral essay Something Big Is Happening. Comparing this moment to early 2020, when everything still felt normal right before it wasn’t. The “this seems overblown” phase before everything quietly rearranges itself. Calm’ish tone. Urgent timeline.

Since then the debate has been aggressively binary and boring. Fear or freedom. Automated into irrelevance or handed leverage. Private school or AI Alpha School. Public school just sitting there, as usual. No jobs left or entirely new ones we cannot even name yet. Very Scott Galloway coded. Apocalypse but make it a panel. I love the obsession with Scott. He tells men to get dressed and drink tequila and suddenly he is our economic father. Sure. Okay.

Here is the twist. My Slack spiritual friend Mo Koyfman told me that viral essay was probably written 80 percent by AI. And it still touched people. That part feels important.

Instead of panic, I felt curious. Because if machines handle the mechanical, what are we left with? Taste. Discernment. Conviction. Soul. Maybe the tool does not erase the human. Maybe it sharpens it. Maybe it expands the human mind. Maybe we add taste and discernment to the list of actual assets.

Here is the honest part. I do not really have a job for AI to take. That is my privilege. Also being cute is a privilege. Let us not pretend otherwise. My employment appears to be having extremely specific cultural takes on the internet and hoping a niche but powerful group of women nod along. Taste. Timing. Vibes. I am currently anti peptide, minus the weight loss ones. I do not need to glow from the inside that badly. That is the work.

And I have built something before.

HelloGiggles my media company started as a feeling. A tone. A specific kind of friendship and humor on the internet. It was women wanting to talk to each other without irony poisoning the room. It was taste, and timing, and a point of view you could feel.

Now I want to build again.

Between Friends makes me feel excited and curious. It feels less like content and more like infrastructure. A cozy salon for paragraphs. A place where the group chat becomes something you can actually live inside. A place for women (and men) who do not want to panic, but do want to pay attention and play!

I do not know which future is coming. I just know which one I would rather build toward. It is the last week of the Year of the Snake, which my group chats have taken very personally. Talk to me next week in the Year of the Horse. For now, I will be watching horny horror, which I am almost certain AI can handle.

I’ll keep having great taste.