Lainey Molnar Comics & Consumer Positivity

It's okay for women to make any choice they want (except not spending money)

I feel kind of guilty writing something not-so-nice which is legibly about the work of a specific online person, I’m realizing. When I have said mean things here before it’s usually been about dead directors. Also I don’t think this essay is particularly original.

You have seen Lainey Molnar’s comics around. They’re very popular. They look like this.

The surface message of the comics is, I think, that it’s okay not to be okay, but I can’t help but notice she is having her breakdown in a $400 sweatshirt.¹

This is a general theme. The explicit message of the comics is basically always general positivity and acceptance. The underlying message of the comics is a strict set of rules for how to be a woman, and the rules are very expensive to follow.

Same thing from these body-positive ones:

Explicitly: any body type is okay! Implicitly: as long as you spend good money on the trendy swimsuit/lingerie!

The dyptich format she usually uses reassures us that lots of things are equally okay, being in a relationship or being single, being a parent or not, meditating or watching tv, working out or eating pizza, & (in one memorable case) playing tennis or shitting. I already find this message kind of nihilistic and depressing because (while there’s some deep moral sense in which a person who does the first option in each pairing is equally valuable as someone who does the latter option, & not everyone can do everything, & it’s very often true that people have bad luck which means they can’t do the first item in the pairing even though they want to) in each case the first option takes more effort to do, and people need² more help & support doing harder things. But it feels even more depressing and nihilistic to kind of say “Everything that requires striving is equally okay as everything that doesn’t requires striving” while pushing consumption as hard as these comics do.

The weird thing about this is that the artist is clearly a try-er. Like, she made all these comics, got all these followers, that can’t have been easy. And in the photographs she posts of herself, she always looks exceedingly put together. It makes me feel a little weird when accomplished people over-celebrate ease—like they’re pulling the ladder up after them.

To me it seems like a dark world if even when I am fat/single/having a mental breakdown, that doesn’t liberate me from the expectation to wear expensive, uncomfortable underwear. What these comics claim to be doing is saying, “It’s okay not to live up to society’s expectations.” What I think they functionally say is “You can ignore all of society’s other, smaller expectations, as long as you fulfill the most important one: spending your money.”

1. Or a $170 sweatshirt, if she bought exactly the same one secondhand today. But the comic came out in 2022 at the latest. So let’s be lazy, & say the sweatshirt in the comic was new at the time, & still cost about $400 in 2024 dollars.

2. I need.