just a girl examining the lives of other women
Your honor it's the ancient way!
A few nights ago, Adrian Horton and I hashed out a crude theory of Dua Lipa, which is that her primary appeal is Study Abroad Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s got the whole ~cultured girl~ thing down with all the travel and the newsletter and the heavy duty reading (about algorithms, apparently?), and without cracking the door open into her inner turmoil (via autofictive lyrics), we’re left with…not much? except mystique!
Speaking of theories…and um judging women…I was clicking through that cat* essay from yesterday, of course, and I dropped it in the same working doc where The Times’ Hannah Neeleman profile (the Ballerina Farm trad wife piece), GQ’s Nara Aziza Smith digital cover story (“making from scratch” trad wife piece), a sex worker essay from The Cut’s “Cheaters Week” that now feels practically anodyne have all been sitting, awaiting judgment. Reading all that made me think about how future historians, when they start paging through the Internet Archive or whatever USB drive that makes it out to Mars in 200 years, might best understand our use of the web, or at least digital media, as a means of controlling and policing womanhood.
Like amidst the fun of (and trust me, I have had my fun) analyzing, judging and mocking Other Women’s Choices—an ancient tradition, to be sure, but now conducted at warp speed and scale online, I sometimes get a little Margaret Atwood-brained about it. When I worked at BuzzFeed, we took it as a basic tenet of the internet that much of “buzz” and “virality” is built on the phenomenon of mostly women making and sharing things. So it’s not a major leap to think of how at least large parts of the internet/online discourse are a kind of closed ecosystem fueled by the circular food chain? firing squad? of women posting and judging and sharing, examining each others’ ways of living and evaluating them against our own choices, then posting and judging and sharing some more. (One place that seems to understand this quite intimately would be, of course, The Cut.) (Call it the Refinery29 Money Diariesification of reader engagement.) (You could say that feminismly, having more choices as a modern woman no doubt exacerbates the anxiety of like, but who is choosing RIGHT? And that is what we will use this silly tool called the web for.)
These are rambling thoughts and I obviously don’t think any of it is terribly radical amidst uhhh life under patriarchy, obviously, but I think what I wanted to articulate was how you could maybe read some of this discourse as a means of in-group policing (or dialoguing! Idk maybe I’m just in a terrible mood!). Discourse is valuable; discourse is survival. I suppose the cavewomen whisper networks were not all about sharing longform and hugely urgent cave paintings, though, lol.
*It’s always cats with this internet, isn’t it? Even though I kind of think dog people are much crazier. But they are forced to be outside and therefore are less online by default.
On that note: if womanhood is so fraught online, no wonder we all want to be a “girl.” And no one is skewering that ethos of “being a girl online” like Safy-Hallan Farah.
Too broke to be Carrie Bradshaw and too old to be a wunderkind, I become an essence, a vibe. I squeeze myself into this canon of glamorous online philosophers and nymphet social critics, where our mediocrity is conferred with specialness and our contradictions are viewed through the kindest eyes. I perform this identity for maximum approval. I transmute unmet needs and buried desires into value through that performance. With each bit of disclosure, efforts and failures curated for relatability, I make a version of myself more legible to people I wasn’t put on this earth to be witnessed by, yet find myself in close proximity to because of the social internet. They are always in the room with me, witnessing me glamorously aestheticize and philosophize.
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