How pop culture controls you: from Rosalía to Yanagihara

How celebrity social engineering works: from Dua Lipa to Rosalía

When celebrities recommend books about other people's suffering, it's not harmless. Behind Dua Lipa and Rosalía's reading lists lies a pattern of cultural distinction that, according to an analysis circulating in skeptical circles, functions as a tool of soft social control. The thesis: the system uses trauma literature to depoliticize discontent and promote an empowered but depoliticized singledom.

The hidden message behind influencers' reading choices

When Dua Lipa and Rosalía recommend Hanya Yanagihara's «A Little Life» —an 800-page novel about four friends with trauma— according to the critical reading emerging in certain circles, they aren't sharing literary tastes: they are normalizing suffering as a collective experience. The subliminal message would be: «We all suffer, but together we'll overcome it», which deactivates criticism of the system that generates those conditions. This is what some call «trauma porn»: pain is aestheticized and becomes a mark of sophistication.

From Britney Spears to Taylor Swift: the engineering of hypergamy

The analysis doesn't stop at literature. It runs through the music industry from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and Rosalía to show how pop has always sold the same message: woman as an asset that depreciates. In the United States, without a welfare state, hypergamy was survival. In Europe, with the dismantling of the welfare state, the same narrative sneaks in but wrapped in empowerment. Taylor Swift marries at 35 to give hope to those over 40; Rosalía appears with her girlfriend in the middle of the «men are surplus» campaign.

The Tavistock Institute as a backdrop

Behind these strategies, the Tavistock Institute in London is mentioned, which since the 1920s has worked on mass psychology and propaganda. The move isn't to dictate readings to celebrities, but to create cultural climates where certain values are naturalized. That the masses read Colleen Hoover while the elite reads Yanagihara isn't coincidental: it's packaged cultural distinction. Trauma becomes a certificate of sarracena superiority.

The conclusion that emerges is uncomfortable: celebrities' recommendations aren't simple tastes, but pieces of a mechanism that shapes how we feel about our loneliness and our suffering. Are we reading what we think we're reading?