As a kid, I used to spend Saturdays running around the bowling alley on the military base. If I was lucky my dad would give me a few bucks to play arcade games, but I wasn’t supposed to go into the arcade room (although I did sneak in a couple of times), so I was limited to the ones in the main hall. The one I played most was called Egg Venture. Next to it was Mortal Kombat.
I never played Mortal Kombat, but sometimes I would watch other adults play. It was gruesome. Virtual blood sprayed the screen throughout the fight, and when they lost and walked away, I’d watch as their characters fell to their deaths, the bottom of the pit set with spikes that pierced through their bodies. I was six years old. It gave me nightmares.
Mortal Kombat was controversial at the time for being excessively violent. It’s now among the list of highest-grossing media franchises, generating over $5 billion. In hindsight, it was edgy — it pushed the boundary of what we deemed acceptable as a society and financially benefited from doing so.
Eleven years later I went to college and took a class called The Personal Essay. Trying to be edgy, my stories were profane. At one point I received a red ink note written by the professor in the margin of one of my essays.
“It seems like you’re trying to relate to your audience. It’s having the opposite effect on me.”
Sixteen years later I’m in a translation workshop connected with the most prestigious writing program in the country, attending events and listening to people whose writing is more vulgar than mine was. This is the present day.
Being edgy is no longer edgy. Edgy is now mainstream.
If I look back on the last six months of my professional life, it’s filled with bizarre experiences. I met a businessman in Japan who, when speaking in Japanese, spoke very respectfully, but once we switched to English, it was like we were in a nightclub. I’ve been subject to multiple conversations in which I was the recipient of direct insults, as though the offender was convinced that’s normal because they saw it on TikTok. Prospective sponsors of our podcast are hesitant to say our name because it has “bros” in it. Profanity? That’s just business. But bros? Woah. It’s okay to stand the fuck out. Just don’t point out this is a predominantly boys club.
We are living in a post-professional era. Shock value, at one time exploitable, is now as dead as satire.
If you want to stand out now, all you have to do is be polite and thoughtful.