Emma Sulkowicz, who is best known as “Mattress Girl” for her “performance art” protests aimed at administrators at Columbia University, may have turned over a new leaf including a willingness to speak to conservatives about their ideas.
Emma Sulkowicz caught national attention when she carried a twin mattress across the Columbia University commencement stage. Sulkowicz was protesting the university’s alleged mishandling of a rape allegation that she had lodged at one of her classmates. The university found in favor of the accused. Then, Sulkowicz released a sex tape that attempted to recreate the alleged assault.
According to a column by The Cut, Emma Sulkowicz, has been socializing with prominent libertarians. Sulkowicz’s window to right-wing politics allegedly came through a man she met on a Tinder date. The column describes the man as a handsome, “Tucker Carlson”-esque conservative. He encouraged Sulkowicz to read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind to better understand his worldview.
Eventually, Sulkowicz stalked him on Twitter and realized that he was conservative — “like, very conservative.” At first, she was repulsed and considered breaking it off. But then she thought, “Wait, actually, that’s kind of fucked up because he’s the most interesting person I’ve come across, shouldn’t I be open to talking to him?” After dispelling her initial fear, she texted him that it would be “interesting (progressive? Powerful?) for two people who might be the antithesis of each other to go on a Tinder date.”
Sulkowicz quickly became friends with Reason Magazine reporter Robby Soave, an author that was critical of her story when it circulated throughout the media in 2015. Soave’s latest book that covers leftist campus radicals criticizes Sulkowicz directly.
However, the column’s author, Sylvie McNamara, seems less than convinced that Sulkowicz’s new social life is an indication of a genuine political shift. McNamara calls Sulkowicz a “trickster,” implying heavily that Sulkowicz’s entire existence is, in a sense, performance art.
Leaving Robby Soave’s book party, I walk Sulkowicz home through the June heat and she wants to know how I’ll describe her. “You’re a trickster,” I say, and she asks how I came to that word. I tell her that she seems to relate to the world on the level of mischief and play, rather than through any kind of ideology or strict moral code. I use the word “chaotic,” and she doesn’t object. A friend of hers wrote a book about tricksters, and she says she relates to it. Tricksters, he argued, can move unrestricted between any circumstances, because they’re always playing.
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