“The more effort and calculation put into the performance, the harder it becomes to portray oneself as one desires, so if you think it’s giving Didion or Babitz, you are delusional.”
I hate “interesting girls.”
In My Body, Emily Ratajkowski attempts to disentangle herself from the prefigured identity — that of a life-size doll — imposed on her. She wants us to know that she’s more complex than her beauty, but if she must be a doll, she’ll be a matryoshka doll, studiedly attuned to her layers of self-commodification.
Ratajkowski’s performance of self is premised on “the aesthetic of information” — interestingness — as theorized by Sianne Ngai in Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany and Interesting. It’s an aesthetic category that lends itself to a feminine performance that’s easy to dismiss for its perceived glamorization of mediocre, unoriginal thought, as well as for the net production of an uneasy suspicion in consumers: that women dealing in the affects and aesthetics of interestingness are a simulacrum of others’ best, shiniest parts these women have curated for their branding.
But Ratajkowski gives a convincing performance. She’s no Kendall Jenner, whose own performance of interestingness amounts to nothing more than vacuous aestheticization and reminds me of the movie Ingrid Goes West. And yet, I think Jenner believes she has us all fooled because she’s fooled herself. That’s high-level self-deception on par with Caroline Calloway, who, on a recent episode of the podcast “Girls Rewatch,” said she’s a “Jessa,” when she’s very obviously a “Marnie” — the patron saint of interesting girls. You know who else are Marnies? Jack Antonoff’s menagerie of interesting girls, most notably Lorde and Taylor Swift. But Lorde strikes me as having awareness around it — maybe even pride, while Swift is on the record as a self-identified “Shoshanna,” which is plausible, but still false (yet not aspirational enough to make anyone raise an eyebrow). The thing about girls like Caroline Calloway who say they’re Jessa is that they’re playing in our faces. They’re confidence artists. Bullshitters. They know they’re lying, and they know you know they’re lying. But that doesn’t faze them. They care about perception more than integrity. They want to appear aspirational because they’ve conflated it with worthiness. The goal, for them, is to be an object of envy, someone worth imitating — because that’s the only way you know you are good.
According to Renée Girard, genuine innovation only arises from imitation. However, due to the algorithm, we no longer pick our aspirational models. Instead, we imitate the same lowest common denominators of "cool" and “interesting.” Anything that deviates from that model becomes the coveted "it." Yet, over time, this perceived uniqueness inevitably reverts to uniformity because the algorithm is engineered to standardize. It’s hard to be singular when sameness is what rises to the top in the attention economy. Sometimes the only point of differentiation is the medium. For example, Swift’s eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, scans no differently in its affectedness than Substack dilettante critics leveraging essay writing and cultural criticism as an identity performance.
The algorithm has effectively democratized "it girl" and “cool,” making it deeply imitable, and profitable. Figures like Ratajkowski and Swift aspire to be seen as traditional writers, while would-be traditional writers aspire to the status of celebrities. Once an interesting girl's performance proves marketable enough to join the writer-influencer ranks, it’s deemed "cool," elevating her to the status of a "literary it girl." A paradox arises here: "cool" and "it" represent extreme polarities. "Cool" is a self-conscious pose and a branding scheme, while "it" embodies unselfconsciousness.
Identity performance, particularly in the realm of feminine public presentation, has a way of attenuating as it becomes more self-conscious. The more effort and calculation put into the performance, the harder it becomes to portray oneself as one desires, so if you think it’s giving Didion or Babitz, you are delusional. It’s most definitely giving Marnie, or worse, it’s giving nothing like a certain screed written in the second-person I’ve been advised not to directly reference because that would be “punching down.” This screed was brought to my attention because it was embedded in a Substack post recommended by the Substack app’s algorithm, with the writer of said Substack post hailing said screed as “an electric defence of messy, dirty, imperfect creativity against the shiny glossy lies of online marketing-speak.” The “eclectic defense” in question? There is no such thing. It’s so incomprehensible and so illegible you can’t categorize it at all, which you’d think would give it the singularity it’s striving to project in its charmless rebuke of glamor and “it girl” archetype in contemporary popular culture. The glamour she’s railing against is plotted on the same continuum as her outsized self-pity, just on opposite ends of that spectrum. And quite frankly, self-pity is not powerful enough to swim up against the current of “cool” because it’s repellent to everyone except the most insecure interesting girls. To them, her patheticness — her victimhood —emanates a warmth they identify with. The second-person voice implicates them in that victimhood. They feel “seen,” so they fawn.
The congratulatory echo chamber dilutes and flattens any legible point-of-view, but for the interesting girl, marketability, likeability, reputation, and relatability outweigh this concern. For the women writers truly transacting in this ecosystem, the objective isn’t necessarily to write with authority, but rather to passably demonstrate "knowledge" and "taste" to a cool-girl buyer persona — a fictional representation of the ideal cool-girl customer as defined by the market. This buyer persona is envisioned in a projected personae, delusionally, hence it's no surprise she's also usually a Jessa. It’s fascinating, though, that with all of this emphasis on appearing like an assemblage of high-consecration tastes and literary knowledge, there isn’t a preoccupation with craft and style.
Instead, the collective Jessa delusion energy seems more focused on a cultivated air of self-importance and projected effortlessness. Take, for example, the recent Nylon rebrand. Nylon, once a publication tasked with picking the aspirational models for a women’s general interest/cool-girl audience, has instead opted to signal interestingness to their industry peers — not even other interesting girls who view themselves as a précis of their media consumption, but to a cultural writing milieu they’re largely not factored into by commissioning writing from Naomi Fry, a writer who is off-brand for Nylon Magazine but whose authority they’re cynically leveraged to quell their status anxiety and preempt philistine allegations against them for the crime of working at Nylon instead of somewhere they deem more legitimate. I don’t think they need to do that because Nylon is widely read by many people eager to discover emerging, feminine voices. (I wrote a piece about the rapper Kari Faux for Nylon years ago, which prompted Betsy Morais to send me fan mail.) It’s objectively insane to outsource the good writing to Naomi Fry. And it’s insecure, so it weakens their signal. If they’re not confident about their rebrand, how will that inspire confidence from the consumers? They have a lot to be confident about: in the absence of cultural centrality, girl culture is the so-called “vibe shift.”
The interesting girls of Substack appeal to each other in a way that borders on sycophancy to secure the basic human need for validation. The Nylon girls, who have some of the few existing jobs, are bypassing the other interesting girls for “serious people,” in the hopes of perhaps securing their next jobs through them. Their vertical obsequiousness seems illogical if you’re doubtful there will be any more jobs. The future, after all, appears laden with entrepreneurship via platforms like Substack for everyone, regardless of whether you vertically or laterally simp.
A woman writer's image is tied to the reactions to her public performance of womanhood, even if she’s using a magazine as a proxy to project a false image. I can respect Lauren Oyler for projecting a public persona that accurately represents her chosen identity as a writer. Oyler’s new collection of essays, No Judgement, generated a lot of unfavorable discourse from interesting girls because she represents the ideal interesting girl — true interesting in the cool-girl alignment system — which is unrelatable to them so long as they’re imposing limits on how much they can potentiate and self-actualize. Deep down they think the most they can aspire to is to be hailed as it girls —a designation their overexposure belies —propping them up as aspirational models by the algorithms, the same method of selection that put them in this position. Oyler chose her aspirational models — figures like Katie Roiphe, and Camille Paglia, who are familiar and legible to "serious people” – long before the algorithms began prioritizing self-styled literary it girls en masse.
A competent, skilled, enviable performance of interestingness demands sacrificing one’s relatability. You can convincingly ape everything except craft and style. And truthfully, the concerns of the interesting girls — their likeability, marketability, reputation, and relatability — wouldn’t matter if they were more skilled writers. All of that camaraderie, all of the self-deceptive posing, all of the excessive lauding and rhapsodizing of other women writers only serve as distractions from producing good writing. Nobody can be everything or everyone. Nobody can like everything or everyone.
For the record, I am a Hannah Rising, Shoshana Moon, and Marnie Sun.
—Princess Babygirl
I think I'm too far outside of the media ecosystem to appreciate most of the references, which definitely made it harder to follow. I realize this series is about hating, but I after reading this piece I am genuinely interested in learning more about which female writers the author does like.
Cultivated personality is a slippery thing - it's easy to cast as judgement.
Most of the hate-reads so far register as satire but I can't tell with this one. Is the prose some kind art-imitating-interesting-girl-life meta commentary? If you're writing this pretentiously in earnest I'd wager you don't actually want people to understand you, so that you can then turn around and say "see, you just don't get it". Or perhaps the joke is on me – maybe I'm just an "interesting girl".