Radical Warmth and The Cult of Cool

Right before I moved away from Australia, my housemate’s mother described me as “the warmest person she has ever met.” It’s something that’s stuck with me. 

Like a horoscope, I immediately identified. It bolstered me — this was a compliment, surely? I like to think that I try to be open, generous, inclusive, caring … but I will not go on, reader, for you will think me truly deluded in my levels of self-esteem. 

Luckily though, being who I am, I spiralled. I began to ponder being “warm” as the natural opposite to being “cool.” Warm has a tepid stodginess about it. Could it be that the correlation was that I am uncool? Too earnest, too “much,” or worse — cringe?

Cool is the ultimate illusive compliment. Enigmatic and aloof but singularly tantalising is coolness.  Then, there’s the tricky balancing act with being Too Cool (being a TC, was Australian schoolyard jargon), mightier than thou-ness, trying too hard. To dog your mate, act with betrayal or disloyalty is thoroughly uncool. The ultimate insult: Not Cool. 

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Cool is put on a pedestal, it’s conflated with natural goodness and righteousness. But it’s hard to infer any inherent morality in coolness when it seems primarily projected, rather than inter-personal. Perhaps it denotes an uncaring, un-needy independence. Yet in chasing the tail of that thought, the very word cool cool cooool bounces around to the point of semantic and cognitive dissonance. It becomes soporific noise. Circular.

So, why is it fetishised to the extent it is? Can cool be cultivated? A mythology curated? How then, to pick apart the authentic from the audacious? Honestly, you are a liar if you say you haven’t ever thought about how you relate to the concept of cool. Everyone cares a bit, but to admit it is the ultimate act of uncoolness (I am now allowed to admit it though, because I am not cool I am warm).

I wonder whether I only read Joan Didion because she is, as Daphne Merkin puts it for the New York Times, “The Archpriestess of Cool.” Choices are made in the project of self-actualisation. Signalling taste can overtly be performative, and unconsciously becomes homework. Externally, I read Archpriestess Joan to connect to writing about death in the shadow of a significant death in my life. In that moment, her voice was a salve, yet I found a decidedly haughty distance to her. In that Daphne Merkin piece it’s called “a tic of un-self-conscious snootiness.” Not warm, Didion doubles down on cool.

Sometimes I try to unpack my warmth through a feminist lens, justifying that to be open-armed, maternal and soft is the antithesis to the “fierce” girl-boss, masc-coded capitalist feminism that threatens to engulf us. But doubt creeps in when I debate whether warmth is enough of a protest when these traits have traditionally been what is expected of good girls, to play nice.

It’s a tangle that’s been probed before. Indisputable cool girl SZA queries in “Drew Barrymore,” “Am I warm enough for you outside baby / Warm enough for you inside me, me, me.” Drawing on physical and sexual expectations of femininity, outside and in, SZA’s angst is barely disguised, a loathsome wail. 

That song draws off Noname on “Warm Enough” from the Donnie Trumpet album Surf, “Who are you to tell me / I’m not warm enough for summertime? / I know that I get beside myself / But you don't know me like the sun / You’ve never seen my horizon.” Both women see their warmth as an outsider’s demand, weaponised against them. 

These are girls who talk back and object, but are they refuting some inherent warmth, or protecting it against those who would take advantage? Coolness here may be a shield to protect warmth in the face of imposed presumptions which would take advantage of a quality - instead coolness implies ownership and control. 

When feminine warmth is taken to be the status quo it is suffocating and reductive. Similarly, if warmth is performed in compliance with politeness and pleasantness, it perpetuates our current distorted hegemony of gendered civility. Is it possible then, to reclaim warmth under the feminine gaze?

“Where Didion, SZA and Minor Threat possess radical coolness, so too did they possess radical warmth in their honesty, empathy and insight.”

Recently, Dan Ozzi’s REPLY ALT newsletter spoke with great tenderness about Minor Threat. Hardcore punk, short-lived, critically acclaimed band — trés cool. Ozzi’s boyhood journey with this music reflects how deeply music can shape our youth. For him, this group of screaming men caused Ozzi to unlearn “traditional thinking [and] the kind of masculinity drilled into boys’ heads […] Minor Threat rewired me to consider where I was directing that aggression. Bullying was easy, I learned. Empathy was radical.” It was cool to be kind, said Minor Threat some 30 years ago, a message wrapped up in rage and fury, passionately warm in a way coolness cannot.

Thus unfolds the great quandary where men may seemingly unlearn masculinity down a one way street, yet femininity itself is both relational to patriarchy (and must thus be dismantled) but also inherent to womanhood (and must thus be celebrated). Whether my warmth is merely congenital to my gender, or whether it’s just that I’m simply uncool, well that must be contextualised too. Dissected in this way, to me, warmth is political and engaged just as cool is protective and distanced. 

When it comes down to it, I liked being described as warm and I want to take ownership of it, accepting it’s contradictions. I don’t feel like I owe others warmth under the male gaze. For as long as I can remember, I have reeked of earnestness. I’m a massive hyper-self-conscious dork, to the point that I obviously can’t take anything at face value, not even a compliment of warmth.

Perhaps cool and warm coexist in their essential dichotomy. Coolness is jagged and hard, while warmth is sticky, and neither have inherent virtue. It’s just that the case should be made for radical warmth to have its trending moment. Where Didion, SZA and Minor Threat possess radical coolness, so too did they possess radical warmth in their honesty, empathy and insight. Let us lament for a while the cult of cool, thaw in warmth, and give it deserved celebration.

Words: Joy Qin