is waif
SPRINGS
90s Sleep Number and Select Comfort ads weren’t trying to be cool, or your friend, or target you at all. They were for your grandparents, or your mom: someone working a long shift a la 9 to 5. They were adult in a distinctly unsexy way, like yeast infection treatment. Now, nearly half of people who buy sleek, well-designed, podcast-approved mattresses like Casper say they’re bad for sex, and science backs it up. The mattresses, while comforting and inviting for sleeping or taking to bed in the middle of the day like a dramatic mid-century actress, are just too soft for good sex. There’s something sexy about a shitty mattress--one that could be lurking on the floor just out of view of the camera in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” video--but that’s not it. These mattresses are emblematic of everything made for upper middle class millennials, designed to coddle you in a world just slightly too pink and cartoonish to be meant for adults. Just look at a Casper ad on the subway, all vaguely fantastical, like a little kid telling you a bedtime story; even their depiction of “lovers” looks like a child’s idea of a good date. Pure comfort for those who can afford it, or something more sinister? Could these sex- repellant mattresses, this pervasive and perverse infantilization of an entire generation, be the white supremacist response to the growing number of non-white Americans and interracial relationships?
issue 09
“If millennials can’t afford to have kids, why shouldn’t their mattresses make it impossible?"
Generally, these mattresses are pure foam, or close to it. Comfort foam, memory foam, ventilated foam, support foam, latex foam, foam zones, gel, all soft, no springs, no rough edges--no real edges at all, just miles of foam with no place to find purchase. They’re made in the United States, in Georgia and Pennsylvania and all sorts of places with rough edges. Like mattress springs, these factory towns have gotten a bad reputation, while unwittingly supporting us in our sleep. Both were once a novelty, factory towns and mattress springs. Once the foam is assembled, the mattresses are squished flat and vacuum packed, like meat, the reason for their sudden, violent expansion once in your home. Like a hookup who makes you worry they might never leave, it immediately flops open in your bedroom, literally sucking the air out of the room.
Cultural boogeymen burst out of our collective unconscious in sordid places, straining the ligaments holding together polite society in bedrooms and at frat parties. Millennials are already putting off having kids, and buying houses, and starting “careers,” and facing stigma from older generations for all of it.
Has every other generation struggled to adult, or are we just the first ones to document it? We’re the first to be weighed down with $1.5 trillion in student debt, just to get our first jobs; no wonder all we want to do is lie down and sink into a supportive stupor. As we move from a generation that saw interracial marriage legalized nationally to a generation that increasingly sees marriage as an optional life achievement, as we become increasingly multiracial, as we reimagine partnerships between equals, what does it mean that mattress technology just happens to be incredibly inconducive to boning?
Maybe it’s just that everything has become so round-cornered and foamy, protecting us like we’re rare pears. Tech-bros-as- tastemakers is just 80s-business-guys as tastemakers redux, with less self awareness. Instead of the kitschy/guilty gilt of Bonfire of the Vanities-era Rich New York, we have the sterile white showrooms and fake food trucks of Palo Alto (and the nauseatingly trite angst of Palo Alto). The ease of a privileged life has an ironic way of creating stunted demi-adults, and capitalism’s willingness to reward those that feed into the worst tendencies of our gnarled little secret greeds.
If millennials are feeling alienated from each other and from that which sustains them, why wouldn’t a corporation lean into that and send us sterile little modules of ingredients, already perfectly portioned, vacuum packed and prepped for two? If millennials can’t afford to have kids, why shouldn’t their mattresses make it
impossible?
The promise of optimization is in many ways a promise that someone, or something, will always be there to make decisions for you. If you know what “the best” is, you don’t have to decide which one you want. Algorithms, AI, mommy, are all just ways we avoid being responsible for the path of our lives. Algorithms created with our sexist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, just generally horribly bigoted data works on white supremacist logic, which has a tendency to end at bizarre, dead-end cesspools, creating people like purebred dogs that can’t copulate in the wild anymore. Don’t let them lie to you--Silicon Valley’s wet dream is for climate change to keep happening, for big pharma to keep polluting our water until nobody’s bodies are safe, until every aspect of our lives are carefully childproofed and baby-proof, until every new person has to be deliberately merged in a lab when and only when someone pays for it. That’s capitalism’s dream, too--get your DNA read, optimize your body, optimize everything, all from the comfort of your unfuckable bed.