Capsule #23: The Vulga Drawings edit! ft. Times New Roadman

Hello loves -

Hope you are okay 🖤…

I’m very pleased to bring you another guest edit today, this time from Lily O’Farrell aka @vulgadrawings. We featured Lily in our Hot & Not a few months back, but I wanted to invite her in to share more with us because she has so much to say that’s really worth listening to. So here we are! 

For those who are just encountering Lily for the first time, she is a feminist writer and cartoonist from London. She publishes funny, educational drawings on Instagram as @vulgadrawings to her 300k followers, and has published a book with the Indigo Press called Kyle Theory. On top of all that, she now has a documentary podcast series called No Worries If Not, covering women and internet culture. She’s written for and been featured in publications across the world, and has published a free informational pamphlet on how to spot signs of misogynistic radicalisation used in schools in the UK. How cool is that???

Her bio is hard to top! And it’s made all the better by how cool and nice she is IRL. Funny, warm, approachable… Meet her once and feel like it’s been a lifetime sort of person. Luckily for us, she’s here to share some stuff worth engaging with, and some cultural recs for your weekend. 

AND Niall Gallagher aka @timesnewroadman is here to share his Hot & Not. 

Enjoy!

Holly x

The first thing I want to share with you is… 

Andrea Animates. Andrea uses felt to make these gorgeous short animated films. Felt is so slow to work with, so her patience must be out of this world. She puts the films on TikTok and Instagram, they’re really relaxing and wholesome and just so satisfying to watch, she’s so talented.

andreaanimates

View more on Instagram

And I have to point your attention to…

The Toupée Queen. This girl is AMAZING. She fits toupées on mostly young men who’ve gone bald. I think this is quite a difficult thing that men go through that isn’t really talked about as much as it should be. The toupées she fits look so real and it makes me so happy when I see the smile on the guy’s faces at the end! She teaches the men how to re-apply them themselves, and I just hope in the future more men are comfortable doing this. To me it’s just like wearing makeup or fake tan - it’s not a big deal, and if it makes you feel more confident, go for it.

@legohugs

W sound

Another cool thing on the internet is… 

Alice Capelle's video essays. Alice is a French feminist YouTuber who posts amazing video essays that I just DEVOUR. She’s publishing a book this month called Collapse Feminism, which looks at the future of feminism online. I think she’s gonna be the next big thing!

And finally…

It’s Poppy Watch time. As we enter the dreaded English monthly discourse of ‘where’s your poppy!???’ follow Poppy Watch on Twitter and laugh/cry at this insane country. It keeps me sane during November.

This week, Niall Gallagher aka @timesnewroadman popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Niall is a Bournemouth-based painter, reflecting on British culture and experience. His witty artworks capture current trends and political occurrences with a sarcastic yet light-hearted twist…

📺 Watching: I just went to see Bottoms at the cinema and fully choked on popcorn because I laughed so much.

📖 Reading: Something About Her by Clementine Taylor! It’s a queer romance novel about two young women so it’s kind of a coming of age story too. I can’t put it down, it’s such a great mixture of nostalgic and erotic.

🎧 Listening to: No Worries If Not! My podcast. We’re halfway through the first season and it’s been AMAZING to see the response. I’ve loved getting messages from women all over the world who’ve resonated with it. We cover alpha males, eating disorder culture online, AI, the orgasm gap, spirituality and so much more.

After having a chat with Lily, Marshmallow thinks we’re about to see even more men who roll their eyes at horoscopes.

Lily told Marshmallow about the time she made a podcast episode about the spirituality renaissance online, and why young women in particular are attracted to astrology. She went into it kind of being a snob herself, but when she actually spoke to professional astrologers, tarot card readers etc, they were all really level-headed and rational, proving to her that the stereotype isn’t true, and is slightly misogynistic… All of these women had created huge communities of women who were really helping and supporting each other - many of them had health conditions and were being failed by gender biases in medicine. Women with endometriosis, PCOS, or autoimmune diseases. The spiritual world and the community they found helped them through this, after years of being ignored by doctors.

When Lily spoke to Aliza Kelly, formerly Drew Barrymore’s professional astrologer, Aliza said she thinks men are actually afraid of astrology, and that’s why they’re so snobby about it. She said sexist men will roll their eyes at anything with a majority female fanbase, they’ll say it’s stupid and not worthy of respect (this is what Lily calls the Taylor Swift effect). Aliza also said that astrology encourages you to reflect on yourself, your emotions, your insecurities and your relationships - which is something women have been socialised to do, and are comfortable with. For many men, this is new territory, so their knee-jerk reaction will be to call it stupid, instead of actually taking the time to learn about it. Marshmallow has noticed the same.

So, Lily and Marshmallow both hope that, as more men actually take a second to learn about astrology and why women are attracted to it, they’ll stop being so weird and defensive. Also on a more shallow level, being a man who rolls his eyes at astrology is a quick way to lose out on a date…

If you’d like to adopt Marshmallow or one of her friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, please forward on 🥺

See you next week 💋