Very Humble, Very Merciful, Very Redeemed

In Which I Discover the Demure Trend

Not to provide daily cat updates—except that the fate of feline fur babies and the ladies of whatever marital status or ideological inclination who own them seems to be a hot political potato this year and I’d hate not to be completely up to the minute on trend—but Lucy the Aged has now spent two whole nights in the anti-chamber to our bedroom without suffering any ill effects. There she is provided with plenty of soft places to sit, a large window, substantial amounts of food and water, her scratching contraption, and most crucially, her box. I, I am happy to say, slept the sleep of the safe and secure. We let her back into our bedroom this morning to walk up and down over us for a bit and she doesn’t seem any more unhinged than usual. Thank you for all the cat advice—most grateful.

File:"Crucifixion" de Franz von Stuck.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

On to other pressing matters, while I was wandering the French countryside peaking in at glorious old churches and contemplating the heritage left by a believing world to those who can’t remember anything about the God who made them and sustains their very existences, I occasionally dipped into the news back home. It was thus that I heard about the sudden reprisal of the old and useful word “demure” among many TikTokkers. Then, when I came home, I literally heard one of my kids say the word “demure,” which I found odd because none of them are on TikTok, especially not as creators. They don’t leer into the camera. They are not men pretending to be women, lathering their faces with grotesque, caricature-like applications of makeup, flat ironing their hair, and splaining to their heaps of lost and lonely followers what it means to be a good person.

Is it really true, I asked myself, that an internet-manufactured niche linguistic meme, lit aflame by the New York Times as if it were “a thing,” could make it all the way to the homeschool community of a rambling out of the way place like Binghamton? What a foolish question. Niche linguistic trends spreading themselves around the world in a matter of desultory and meaningless days is how this all works.

The main thing about the “demure” trend, as far as I can tell, is its ironic acknowledgment that the unrelenting effort to “normalize” people switching their gender, trying to transfer themselves from one sex to the other, and otherwise embracing the l.g.b.t.q. whirlwind is disorienting, perhaps even upsetting to a lot of people who hadn’t seen it coming. Therefore, be “demure” about your self-expression in the places where you live and move and have your being. But let’s let the New York Times explain about this new and special word:

If you opened TikTok this week and felt that suddenly everyone was using the word “demure” out of nowhere, you’re not alone. Your morning coffee with just a little half-and-half? Demure. The way you sit down gracefully on the subway? Very demure. The way you floss your teeth after lunch in the office bathroom before returning to your cubicle? Absolutely, totally demure. Seemingly overnight, an adjective usually reserved for a reserved woman has become the semi-ironic word du jour on social media. On Aug. 2, a TikTok creator who goes by the name Jools Lebron posted a video with tips about managing makeup and mustache sweat and being demure.

I clicked on the profile of Jools Lebron and watched a lot of the content, because, well, I guess I feel I’ve got enough time that I can throw some of it away. Monsieur Lebron is a large, youngish man who dresses, at least for TikTok, almost exclusively as a woman. What fascinates me about the rows and rows of short clips is how very much the same they are. Monsieur Lebron’s face fills the frame as he applies lashings of maquillage, referring to the viewer as “Diva” and explaining about guava lip-liner and other kinds of beauty products should anyone be interested in dropping everything to purchase them online, links below. The New York Times keeps explaining:

Later that day, she posted another video, which has been viewed four million times, offering tips on how to be demure at work. “Very demure, very mindful," she says, explaining her perfume, clothing and hairstyle choices for the workplace. Ms. Lebron has since posted dozens more such videos discussing how to be demure in all sorts of situations, like nail salons, hotels and drag shows. Ms. Lebron, who did not respond to requests for comment, is one of several trans creators on TikTok whose playful use of “demure” in recent videos has helped the word catch on with other users. “There has been so many demure divas who have come before me,” Ms. Lebron said in a video, naming two fellow content creators as well as Venus Xtravaganza, a trans performer who featured prominently in the influential documentary “Paris Is Burning.” On TikTok, the word has spread far beyond its original roots. Now, the viral term has become fodder for brands, like the restaurant chain Chili’s and the New York City Department of Sanitation, which posted on Instagram that the city’s new official garbage bins were … you know what.

I don’t want to be unkind, but after a while, clicking on “Demure” content renders the internet excessively boring. I did begin to feel that perhaps I should do literaleigh anything else, and that paying to read the New York Times is not a very great improvement to my overall quality of life. But then I came across this video:

H/T Protestia

If you click the picture it will take you to Twitter where you can watch a man take the viewer on a tour of his 300-year-old church. He uses a lot of terms I don’t have time to look up, like “no cap,” “slay,” “rizz,” “bussin,” “brat,” and “menty b.” By use of this opaque jargon, he invites whoever might be watching to—I guess—church.

In each frame, he opens his arms wide in a simpering, non-threatening virtue signal and smiles. His place of “worship,” you see, is both like and not like those other places where Christians have traditionally gathered. Sure, there is the Ladies’ Parlor, the Elevator, the Sanctuary, and the Fellowship Hall, but the difference is that “everyone” is welcome to come. Midway, when showing off the little trans flags placed on what appears to be an altar, he says “very cutesy, very mindful, very demure.” I guess that allows him to use the hashtag “demure” so that the video will be swept up in a sea of Demure Content. And here I am, writing a post, so obviously it worked. How very cutesy, mindful, and demure of that man who goes in drag and is charged with the spiritual cure of some group of people wherever that church is:

H/T Protestia

I don’t have any particular attachment to the word “demure.” If the community of people who believe they can only be happy by trying to be the other sex want to have it, I relinquish it with no deep feelings of upset. Instead, in a spirit of real mindfulness, I would long to explain to both Jools Lebron and the man charged with pastoring a church that the reason we are invited to consider the good of other people is because God did not spare anything, but sent his own Son who took on the likeness of men, submitting to death, even on a cross, to redeem and restore what is so broken and destroyed about each of us. There is no amount of make-up, no slang that will remedy the dark alienation of wanting to be loved and accepted by the Creator without having to accept who He really is. No, the only way is to strip off the disguise, to abandon the taunt, to throw away the wig and guava lip-balm, to go into a dark, lonely room, to look that invisible God square in the face and admit that He alone has the power to make, to redeem, and finally to restore that which belongs to Him.

Very humble. Very merciful. Very redeemed. Have a nice day!