I don't know who gets to define generations. There is no governance around it as far as I know. The guys who coined the term "Millenial" say that millennials are born after 1980. I've seen 1984 as the cutoff. The concept of a generation or a zeitgeist is the stuff of humanities, which sadly tend to bring up questions about the nature of truth, and rarely seems to get to the interesting questions. Schools of thought, consensus, data, blah blah blah. The fact is that we all know that a generation is something, and embedded as we are even in alienated skin, we get it.

Sometimes I fall into the millennial generation. Sometimes I fall out of it. Old school. And it makes sense to me that I am situated between two epochs. To me, a millenial doesn't know a world before smart phones. At its most stripped down what it means to be a millennial. I think about using beepers and dial up Internet, and I feel prehistoric, like a dinosaur as they say. The other major shift I've seen is in attitudes about fat, especially women's attitudes about it. You can disarm almost any woman boomer or X just by calling her fat and ugly. Millennial women, at least some of them will fight back.

But cultural shifts are not like tides, moving in one direction (given my albeit limited understanding of liquid dynamics). I think "funhouse mirror" is a more adaptable metaphor. I believe that in every generation, the battle between power and liberation plays out as a battle of memes. Some things become less restrictive and others more restrictive. Pressures build up in the system and blow different gaskets and valves. Some things that are tall look short, and some things that are short look tall.

Millennial women are radical in their words. I constantly find myself delighting in the fierceness of what 20-30 somethings are willing to say. They are like storybook ninjas disarming bullshit left and right. They're on The Young Turks sarcastically mocking doublespeak, making it look cheap and outdated. They're on Twitter shutting down male princesses, rendering them infantile and idiotic. They're suing radio hosts who grab ass instead of giggling. They're calling out empire everywhere they see it, with much less regard for being fired than any generation that came before.

Just don't call a millennial fat. Because they will shut up and run under the bed, tail between their legs, faster than you can say "fat and lazy." Millennials are rumored to be the self-care generation. I'm not even gonna hyperlink that one just google it. My experience with the women I know, who fall on the other side of the generational line, can be summed up thus: A millennial woman might do an unmedicated homebirth, in a stupefying act of stoicism, meant as a big middle finger to the insurance-medical-pharma complex, but she is gonna do it with a manicure, facial, and a fresh Brazilian. She will apologize for acne or yellow teeth. These acts of aesthetic crassness are unforgiveable to a millennial.

It's as if the superego of millennial women is Ghandi, but when looking in the mirror, it morphs into Hitler. As a former anorexic, compulsive exerciser, and finally bulimic (respectively) I get it. I get the voice of hatred that wells up to critique the self in the mirror. If only you look perfect, nobody will cancel on you, nobody will cut you off, nobody will I interrupt you, nobody will call you a leech for being a socialist. At the same time, the self looking out, the self that speaks, is more liberated than ever. Donald Trump's weird shaming of a pleasantly plump Alicia Machado would be met with a thousand lawsuits today, not the dumb grinning acceptance of 80's TV anchors, females alike. Voices like Solnit, Coates openly criticize our hijacked presidency. Black Mirror. Ex Machina. Catastrophe. Girls. Transparent. Moonlight. An endless procession of devastating talent, which leaves old identity memes convulsing in ruins on the side of the highway, congealing like zombie brains in the sun.

But for god's sake don't be fat. Or, stated otherwise, be "hot" or be "cool." Fat is the secular abject. Fat is the thing that atheists are still supposed to come out against. Fat-shaming is the only institution that anarchists are supposed to support. Why? Because fat isn't marketable. Fat resists being coopted. Even though the fat market is probably the biggest and best market, brands would rather sell them diet products than hot or cool clothing. In the end, fat is the backdoor, through which the revolutionary tide that propels millennials is undermined and coopted, turned into a Bob Marley poster. Fat is how power sneaks into the rave.

I'm not that fat but I also don't see the point of fearing abject fatness. Some people are fat. It's probably genetic. Thin people get sick and die at nearly the same rate, and besides it's not anyone's duty to erase ones own footprint on society. Why is that a goal? To not be a "cost" to the system? I think the founding principal of a system, which covers the costs of civil society to reap its divine benefits, is that cost and profit are equally primary. Nothing good is ever without value, but sometimes valuable things come free, as it were, i.e. Gifts.

Put it simply, I thought the founding idea of civil society was that every man and woman has the right to ecstatic experiences. Isn't that the whole pursuit of happiness thing? Not for boomers and X. They are the MBA generation, and the hollowed out shell of the revolution, respectively. The grunge of the 90s was not a brave fuck off to the gods of "hot" and "cool." It was genuine despair, pickled in heroin and Ronald Reagan racism. Catholics convinced to go along with the personal responsibility side of debt, rather than the forgiveness side, as Jesus surely would have taught.

The thing is, we are indeed the fat in the system. Millennials are fat that the MBA should cut out. There's really no logical end to universal profit maximization than shrinkage, rot, and death, in a very real way. We as flesh are facing extinction. Taking care of everyone will never be as profitable to a concentrated few, in relative terms, as screwing mostly everyone. But one system's fat is another's vital beating organ.

The boomers ended up being the generation of the MBA. They love management and value it above love. Indeed management is what you can do if you have mastered tough love. Millennials know that is bullshit. They are radicals. Except don't call them fat! I say: It's time to embrace sensuality without pretending that beauty is control. Stage makeup, McMansions, ironed out wrinkles, glowing denture smiles on every face, skeletal bodies rattling down the runway in torture device shoes, lips that look like allergic reactions, blank expressions, infantile noses, poreless skin, mouths agape, regular proportions, Instagram followers, images seen by images; all of it is bullshit and we know.

At this point I don't trust anyone who doesn't identify as fat. Being fat means your life is rightly wonky. It means the person looking out is not the person in the mirror. It means that you supposedly have a pathetic existence, trapped in your own fat. When really it's an advantage of sorts. Being fat means you see just how willing people who are cornered will cut your heart out. Being fat means you are prepared to do battle.