twee utopias

on comfort culture's reactionary fantasies

For a few months as a teenager I spent one afternoon a week working in my local public library. I worked in the Early Years section — either because no one else wanted to do that job, or because I’d expressed interest in YA on my application form and my manager had got confused. I spent my hours retrieving picture books flung to the four corners of the humid, over-heated room and methodically re-shelving them according to the Dewey Decimal System. Sometimes they would be caked with a layer of snot, drool, or other less savoury bodily fluids, and I’d sigh, shove my squeamishness down into the depths of my stomach, and wipe them clean. The soundtrack to my shifts was invariably screaming from over-excited toddlers and exhausted parents alike, which covered up the gentler undercurrent of storytime sessions and utterly submerged the white noise hush of the rest of the library, where teens my age studied and adults browsed on outdated desktop computers.

I hated working in the library. Maybe because of the screaming children, or the spit and snot, or the way my heart sunk when I saw the state of the shelves I’d left so neat the shift before, I dreaded passing through the revolving doors. Yet occasionally, watching the tender, engaged way adults read with children, pronouncing every syllable and putting on voices, or seeing the delight with which babies react to touch-n-feel and pop-up books, or noticing a precocious kid pouring over a chapter book alone, I’d remember what it was like to visit the library as a child. How it opened up a world in words for me, one I never really left.

As a PhD student, I now spend most of my daylight hours in a library, although thankfully I’ve graduated from picture books. Maybe that’s why this particular viral tweet has kept popping up on my feed this week:

‘Instead of nightclubs I want a 24hr library with hot chocolate stations, a dessert bar, coffee machine, big comfy chairs and beanbags, blankets, dogs welcome, just people who want to spend the evening reading alone, together, peaceful, a cosy fire, plants, an indoor waterfall.’

Setting aside the muddled list of amenities, which seems intent on joining a Hobbit Hole with a Gulf State airport and a Midlands university library constructed in the 70s but renovated somewhere around 2010, there’s something fishy going on here. What we’ll call the fantasy library envisions — as numerous commentators have pointed out on Twitter — a space for people with the people taken out. People are ‘alone, together, peaceful’, but the purported ‘togetherness’ appears to manifest more as a ‘leave well alone’ attitude. The public space sounds more like a series of private spaces tacked together at the seams — like a suburban cul-de-sac, or a traffic jam full of SUVs, each entirely enclosed from the interference of the outside world, ensconced in its own conspicuous consumption of TV, music, or books. It’s a neoliberal version of the public space as individualised, privatised, packaged-up and sold back to us as an approximation of community, one which rests on a troubling distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

As I discovered during my brief stint working in one, libraries are not peaceful places. Setting aside the screaming, sugar-high kids, there are storytime sessions and classes for the retired, bored tweens and students blasting tinny, too-loud music through their headphones, and the inevitable weirdos looking up porn on the desktop computers. Public libraries are community places, places for and with people. And places for people are very rarely peaceful. Libraries are also places where people work incredibly hard, often as volunteers or on low salaries, in the face of funding cuts and government hostility, to provide essential services for the community, from foodbanks to homelessness support to reading lessons to elder and childcare. By contrast, the services provided by the fantasy library are ultimately socially-useless, serving only well-off, middle-class consumers like myself (and I assume the author of the tweet) who desire an enhanced and aestheticised experience. Hot chocolate, plants, etc, these things are nice, but they are luxuries — and luxury is meaningless when necessity is not met.

The labour required to maintain this idealised space is also rendered invisible. Who cooks the desserts? Who cleans the coffee machine, and picks dog hair off the beanbags? Who wipes the sick and snot off the children’s books? (Assuming children are permitted in this silent, sacred space, which I highly doubt, given the rise of anti-child rhetoric in similar posts). As Twitter user @ozzthegr8 put it: ‘That's my problem with many people's fantasies of third places - usually they imply someone being there at all hours to serve them’. The slick, concealed mechanics of the 24hr library are like the mechanics of an AI generated image — uncanny in its unpeopled smoothness, a bit too neat at the seams.

And look, I get it. It’s a fantasy. We all have fantasies, and I’d rather yours is a cosy library than, say, eugenics. But the fantasies we indulge in, the fantasies we seek out and sanction, are formed within and in reaction to the societies which shape us. The fantasy library — like the queer cafe (more on that later), or the child-free pub, or the comfortable privacy of a self-contained car in another of last week’s viral Tweets — is a utopia. An imagined, ideal place, outside the bonds of necessity and obligation which make up society. Or, from the classical Greek origins: a not-place.

These two aspects, the unreal and the ideal, render utopia a deeply political concept, one which has generated fertile imaginings up to the present day. Fantasy lands are shaped by the quotidian conditions of social reality. In medieval Europe, the prototypical utopia (though the word would only be coined by Thomas More in 1516) was the Kingdom of Cockaigne, an abundant, sensual paradise overflowing with nourishment. This imagined land of plenty and comfort was far and free from the hardships of everyday peasant life. In Cockaigne, rivers run with wine and buildings are made of cake, whilst pigs offer themselves up to be eaten, as in a painting by Pieter Breughel, where a pig with a kitchen knife strapped to its back for easy carving frolics beside a passed-out trio of idle revellers — who look distinctly porcine themselves.

Cockaigne, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567). Or: me after a pub lunch.

With the dawn of modernity, however, this archetypal collective fantasyland faded into memory, and by the twentieth-century utopian imaginings were bound up with ideas of progress and human achievement. This was also the era of dystopia, as novelists like Orwell, Huxley, and Wells delved into the darker side of fantasy, revealing the costs of building a no-place in this-place. An ideal of perfection, these writers suggest, will always entail the violent exclusion of those whose bodies and lives are considered less than perfect, or who cannot live up to the standards of the utopian society. Today, fantastical alternate societies are most often associated with the hyper-modern and science-fictional, with sleek glassy facades and flying cars and AI operated servants. Real-life attempts to realise these technoutopias, from the futurist Saudi Arabian city of Neom, built on the back of forced evictions and modern slavery, to the proposed Martian colonisation championed by quasi-eugenicist Elon Musk, cast the darker side of utopia into sharp relief.

Recently I’ve noticed another current of utopian aesthetics, one which is more muted than its shiny sibling, and which finds particular expression in the Anglo-American online sphere on both sides of the political divide. Unlike the technofuturists, this utopian aesthetic sets itself up in relation to the social, but ultimately promotes an atomised vision of the world. This is a world characterised by comfort, self-enclosure, and longing for an imagined past — both on environmental, social, and personal levels. It is a reassuring version of reality which is quaint, and cutesy, and sentimental. This is twee utopia.¹

Generative AI ‘art’ is a twee utopia full stop but that’s a whole other essay.

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What we’ll call the ‘fantasy library’ tweet reminds me of the periodic ‘cafe discourse’ around LGBT+ spaces. If you’ve been lucky enough to miss this one, it calls for the replacement of queer spaces centred on drinking and partying with sober, daylight venues. As a 2019 tweet puts it:

‘Can there be like gay cafés, libraries, frozen yogurt shops, etc instead of only gay bars & nightclubs? There’s no reason why our safe spaces should only be surrounded by alcohol, bc that’s not a safe space for everyone.’

Proponents of the queer cafe — who are mostly young, perhaps not even of legal drinking age — are articulating a valid desire, founded on a real sense of lack, as well as an apprehension about the role of alcohol in queer social life. But the language within which that desire is expressed and the proposed solutions often reveal uncritical assumptions about morality, respectability, and who qualifies for community. As James Factora writes in their 2019 piece on the issue (a sign of how cyclical this discourse is), ‘arguments against the supposed hypersexuality, danger, and inebriation of our (remaining) nightlife spaces…sound not unlike those we’ve long heard from the homophobic religious right’. This at a time of conservative cultural backlash, when safe spaces — including community centres, bookshops, and other sober venues — are vanishing at a record rate, with 60% of LGBT+ venues in London closing in the 2010s thanks to the forces of gentrification.

As Factora asks, ‘how is opening a café, usually done in steadily gentrifying areas, inclusive of the working and middle-class queers of color who are being priced out of the neighborhoods they have historically occupied?’. Cafes are third spaces founded on consumption (in both senses of the word), requiring capital to purchase entry. This is unlike both community centres or groups, and nightclubs, which may require an entry fee but are centred far more on the collision of bodies, whether dancing or kissing, than on consumption. Much like the fantasy library, the services offered by the queer cafe offer a mere simulacrum of community and solidarity. Purchasing a £4.50 oat latte or a frozen yogurt alongside someone you assume shares your worldview and experiences is community as consumer-identity. It’s a twee utopia — it makes you feel comfortable, but it doesn’t encourage you to think or engage in any meaningful sense.

In ‘cafe discourse’, like ‘kink at pride discourse’, a section of young people, alienated from in-person communities by the forces of gentrification and austerity, have embraced the respectability politics of the right. In their article, Factora links this to earlier marriage equality campaigning ‘predicated on the idea that queer people, queer love, and queer culture were exactly like the respectable, heterosexual versions of those things’. But are respectability politics, which seek to sanitise and discipline spaces and bodies perceived as disorderly, often those of marginalised communities, truly compatible with queer liberation? Not that I am against the existence of queer cafes or sober spaces in general, but I simply wonder why nightlife and daytime spaces must be placed in opposition, especially given the radical history of nightlife spaces, most famously the Stonewall Inn? Why replace the queer bar with the queer cafe, or the nightclub with the fantasy library? Why not both?

Creating arbitrary divisions within communities, labelling different groups as good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, is only liberatory for the one who does the labelling.

P.E. Moskowitz

calls this attitude ‘Secular Puritanism’, writing: ‘It is easier to live in a morally clear world in which no actual change happens, as long as you have moral authority in that world, than it is to commit to the messiness of true radicalism’. To return to the fantasy library, the moral censure of ‘instead of nightclubs’ echoes the nimbyism² of the gentrifier, the sort which has driven London’s once vibrant Soho into the ground through cries of ‘unsafe’ or ‘ugly’ or ‘uncomfortable’.

Why must we shut ourselves into the little boxes which capitalism has made for us — whether our cars or our living rooms or our TikTok FYPs or our cafe orders — when we could instead imagine a diverse, fulfilling social world, where there is space for everyone’s needs and desires?

In fact, why not more of everything? Why not more community, more solidarity, more intimacy, more love? Why not embrace the messiness of the body, which can never truly be respectable or sanitised or safe, which always threatens to overwhelm us with its strange, discomforting mix of Otherness and sameness? To quote Becca Rothfeld’s ‘praise of excess’ in ‘More is More’ (an essay I cannot stop citing), why are we seeking to declutter and standardise our worlds, from our closets to our social scenes, when ‘what could be better than this glittering gratuity that we do not need, do not deserve, and nonetheless receive as a senseless and marvelous gift?’.³

With their smothering emphasis on comfort, their neatly tied up loose ends, twee utopias bury power relations and inequalities in a pile of good feelings and nostalgia. Those TV adverts for banks and booze and delivery services which feature a diverse array of smiling individuals, living happily and comfortably, free from prejudice or suffering, free from having to consider the costs of their ease? Those are twee utopias. Those artfully-edited self-care routine TikToks, involving masses of single-use plastic tat from Amazon, and a Deliveroo consumed in a lengthy bath? Those are twee utopias. Those edits of Paddington Bear ushering yet another royal or celebrity off into the afterlife? That’s a twee utopia — as is awarding said fictional bear a UK passport, when real immigrants face the ‘hostile environment’ of Home Office policy. There are no sharp edges in a twee utopia, no bad feelings. There is no flesh and blood. A twee utopia makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. A twee utopia makes you stop paying attention.

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Respectability politics are a crucial part of the twee utopia. An emphasis on comfort means that anything discomforting must be banished, exiled from the perfect fantasyland. Utopias are, and always have been, innately exclusionary — as Christopher Forth notes in Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life, early modern utopias following the decline of Cockaigne regularly invoked a Spartan aesthetics, proposing eugenicist breeding between too-thin and too-fat individuals to promote a beautiful, perfectly-proportioned population.⁴ Bodies which do not obey the rules must be cast out, or bred out of existence. In the language of philosopher Julie Kristeva, that which disturbs our sense of boundaries must be abjected, so that we can form our own identities against them. Boundaries and bounded identities hide behind the cosy facade of the twee utopia. You will notice that crisis shelters and childcare do not play a role in the fantasy library or the fantasy queer cafe, which create a simulacrum of community welcoming only for some — like the anti-homelessness architecture disguised as harmless, cutesy public art.

In 2022, the politics of queer respectability and the fantasy of the idealised library coalesced on ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’, a long-running programme of children’s events in which drag queens engage children aged 3-11 in reading. Protestors mobilised by the online religious right and homegrown Mumsnet TERFs descended on the events, arguing that the performers were sexualising children and threatening their safety. Bear in mind that drag has a historic role in British theatre — from Shakespeare to the Christmas pantomime — and it becomes obvious that what scared the protestors was not the cross-dressing element of the shows, but their proximity to queer culture, depicted as dangerous and discomforting. These protests, with their abject rhetoric of us-and-them, safe-and-dangerous, clean-and-polluting form part of a virulently trans-and-homophobic culture which is currently setting back decades of hard won progress in LGBT+ rights. They also reflect an emerging cultural assumption that comfort, or the freedom from different and perhaps challenging encounters with other people, is a right.

Whilst the notion of a right to comfort plays a part in the current conservative backlash, it has also come to define ostensibly left-leaning moral and aesthetic trends online. Think not just of the ‘Secular Puritanism’ of queer cafes and fantasy libraries, but of the memes featuring children’s book characters like Frog and Toad, Angelina Ballerina, and Paddington Bear, and the defensiveness of adults still indulging in YA and Middle Grade novels. As The Bookseller reported recently, ‘cosy content’ is in, both in the publishing world and on BookTok — a trend perhaps tied to the much-discussed disengagement of young people from ‘challenging’ texts. Why try the Iliad when you can re-read Percy Jackson?

There are valid reasons to desire comfort. To state the obvious, the world is depressing right now, the future is bleak. In a time of crisis, when people are scared, seeking safety, identities often harden and group boundaries are asserted. And beyond that, it’s hard not to feel disengaged and exhausted, to long for the past — whether that’s a childhood bedtime story or a bygone civilisation, like those venerated by right-wing ‘Culture Critics’.

This state of collective exhaustion provides an opportunity for the market to step in, selling us products which promise to incrementally improve our individual lives, or (like Generative AI) enable our escapist fantasies to run wild. Even if they don’t solve the core issues, they provide comfort. Comfort which is privatised, individualistic, clean, tidy, hushed, and respectable, which enables us to remain within our personal bubbles whilst paying lip-service to communities of people just like us. But to be constantly comfortable is to be unchallenged. Twee utopias hide their reactionary sentiments — their limited visions of respectability, morality, labour, and access — beneath a blanket of sentimental mush.

I have often longed for comfort and escape, to indulge in a children’s book version of reality for a while. But I would far rather live in the real world, the world with people in it — people who are messy, sticky, uncomfortable, and unpleasant, who offend our sensibilities and push our boundaries, who knock books off our shelves and stay up too late and dance to abandon — than pull the covers over my ears and hide my eyes.

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Mary Cassatt (1878). I’d say it’s giving fantasy library, but I don’t think kids are allowed.

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Congrats if you got this far. To be clear I don’t think the fantasy library person, or the queer cafe person, etc etc, had any nefarious intention. But I do think our desires are reflective of our social conditions, and that that is worth investigating.

More prosaically, since I’ve started my doctorate I’ve had far less time to both read and write on Substack. So I apologise for my absence — do let me know any thoughts on this piece in the Comments or Notes!

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1. I should stress that I am using the word twee here in its quintessentially British sense, to mean ‘excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental’, rather than in reference to twee fashion and music, which has its roots in a more radical, feminist subculture of the 1960s-80s.

2. ‘Not In My Back Yard Syndrome’

3. Becca Rothfield, All Things Are Too Small, p.39. Everyone should read this collection, which had had a profound influence on my own thinking this year.

4. Christopher Forth, Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life, p. 156.