Lexicon ·
decentering men
verb phrase
- Stated meaning
- Choosing to organize one's time, attention, and sense of worth around something other than romantic relationships with men.
- Operating meaning
- A sound principle that the video format keeps returning to the center, since each post about not thinking about him requires about 40 minutes of editing footage about not thinking about him.
- Origin
- A 2019 book by the writer Charlie Taylor, who coined the phrase, carried by feminist online discussion and later adopted by lifestyle video as a daily routine with morning footage and product links.
- Antonyms
- centering men, lover girl
As a principle, decentering men (opens in a new window) contains nothing I can find to object to, and I looked with the diligence of a man with a stake in the outcome. It proposes that a life be organized around friendships, work, sleep, and a sourdough starter with a name, and that romance be admitted as a guest. The principle is sound. The format is a separate line item.
The format requires documentation. A representative video runs under a minute, shows a class, a coffee and a bookshop, and carries a caption that mentions him twice while explaining that he is no longer being thought about. Each day of not centering men is announced, filmed, and posted, and the algorithm delivers the result to the men being moved off center, which is the one audience the practice does not need.
The market has responded in the usual way, with journals (opens in a new window) and podcast episodes (opens in a new window). None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is that the term describes a change in the allocation of attention and is practiced as a change in the allocation of output, and those are different things that produce very similar video.
I am not in a position to be superior about this. What I did with 120 days was center one person completely and then produce 16 documents about it, with scorecards, running totals, a reciprocity panel and a design language. The decentering video and this file are the same artifact: a period of a person’s life converted into publishable form, at a length that exceeds the thing it describes. Mine took longer and has more columns.