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Thought Daughters and Mary Oliver
Poetry, The Grind, and Performative Intellectualism
Would you believe me if I said a recording of Mary Oliver is popular on TikTok?
This is going to be a wild ride if you’re not up on contemporary slang. The phrase THOT (That Ho Over There) describes a promiscuous young woman. At some point over the last two years, the crass side of the internet jokingly asked the (homophobic) question if it was better to have a gay son or a thot daughter? The phrase thot daughter made the rounds as a meme, mostly in the form of videos of people pretending to be upset with a variation of the following text over their heads: “When you chose thot daughter and now you gotta help her take her beach pic for Instagram.”
The literary corners of the internet discovered the phrase and repurposed it as Thought Daughter. The Thought Daughter is the bookish/poetic/dark academia type of young woman. She most likely turns her nose up at the romance section and reads serious literature. She likes philosophy and muses on the role of the creative in our society. She carries a leather-bound journal and is committed to intellectual pursuits.
And the Thought Daughters love Mary Oliver.
The audio making the rounds on ThoughtDaughterTok is Oliver reading her poem “Journey” with…