Hello again,
I’m back after a short “illness and work” related break.
Recently I wrote the definition of “a silly wee piece” about goblin mode being the word of the year for the Guardian and then I checked on Twitter and I was being called a fascist (?!??!!) over it. Which, well, you have to laugh…
And then I had this out last week for Slate, on wanting narratives of female behaviour which afford us as women more nuance, and the currency a certain presentation of female abjection is awarded in a patriarchal society. I covered some similar themes in this piece for NYMag a few months ago. I see these as companion pieces to each other.
I’ve been concerned lately with the regressive turn certain supposedly feminist strands of discourse have taken. I feel that I am seeing a lot of reactionary and limiting views about women dressed up as progressive stances. I perceive a shift backwards lately on, for example: accepted wisdom about the way women ought to present themselves to us before they are afforded empathy (never mind sympathy); what trauma looks like, and hence, what a victim is supposed to look and act like; and the assumed true underlying nature of all women (apparently submissiveness).
Elsewhere what started as a useful critique of white feminism is now being used as a way to slander, say, Amber Heard. And the old dichotomy of “acceptable vulnerable women who need to be protected” versus “mean nasty bitches who need to be reprimanded” seems to be in ascendance again.
I’m finding all this quite bleak and depressing to be honest, so it’s a topic I will probably be writing more on.
But I was pleasantly surprised by the response to the Slate piece. I was told off for it less than I expected.
I did see some people (a mixture of women and men, I do find it troubling how enthusiastic certain kinds of men are to participate in this stuff) calling me “stupid”, “ignorant”, “cruel” a “pick me” etc. And then saying I was a “cool girl or a girl boss” who had never experienced bad treatment at the hands of a man.
This is facile and childish. But I think it’s worth pointing out the issue in assuming that women who don’t foreground their vulnerability (and a very specific presentation of this, I will add) have never experienced mistreatment or abuse. This kind of talk is in keeping with the “good victim” narratives which lawyers have traditionally used to discredit women in court.
It also demonstrates a limited understanding of trauma responses. There is no right way to respond to trauma and everyone is different, but emotional reserved-ness is not an uncommon response. Neither is anger, erratic and volatile behaviour, substance abuse issues, and so on. Women who present in any of these ways are broadly not viewed as sympathetic (I’m not sure they ever have been, sadly). Meanwhile women who declare themselves to be hyper vulnerable (I was crying, I was shaking, etc) are perceived to be hyper sympathetic, whether this is in response to trauma or not. This feels like a step back to me, if we ever even took a step forward on this. Honestly, I’m not sure we did.
I’m wary of a culture that tells us this old-fashioned way of thinking is progressive. And I’m very wary of a culture which encourages hectoring and badgering of women who don’t go along with it.
I admit I have a soft spot for women who have a hard time expressing their vulnerability, or doing so in a “palatable” manner. By which I mean the manner which is legible in the schema of Hollywood tropes. Every time I hear a woman described as “scary” (usually by someone who is laughing, which tells you something about how earnest their fear is) as a way to discredit her experiences, narrative, or general trustworthiness I’m gripped by the urge to bang my head against a brick wall for the rest of eternity.
The women I grew up with were like this, so I’m familiar with how much can lie beneath a façade that is liable to be declared “unfeeling” by the outside world. I’m also familiar with how badly the world broadly treats women who present like this, so if I’m a little biased in their favour I don’t think that’s the worst thing I could be.
And as for the cool girl! Goodness. That was a blast from the past. I looked her up to remind myself what her deal was and found this passage from a speech by the protagonist of Gone Girl, which seems to be where the term comes from:
Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me.
I was trying to think of other representations of her in culture. I think Daphne from the second season of the White Lotus perhaps? I suppose it depends whether you believe she is truly happy or not, and this was left deliberately ambiguous.
But it seems, in short, that the cool girl is someone who sublimates her needs, desires and expectations from a relationship to make herself more palatable to a man. To me that sounds the same as the “I made myself small bit by bit” tendency described in these essays. I don’t see a difference there, except that one of these women is jocular about her performance, while the other is regretful. If the inference is that this performance is an inescapable fact of reality for all of us, and the only choice we have is whether to be jocular or miserable about it, then I just don’t agree this is true.
I imagine if this cool girl figure had a rubbish boyfriend she would stay with him and pretend to be happy about it. Again, I don’t see a considerable difference there to the option presented in these essays, which reads to me as “stay and pretend to be happy about it”. All this behaviour seems of a type to me.
It occurs to me that maybe less thought has gone into this “cool girl” business than I have credited it with. It may simply be a way of saying that any woman who doesn’t foreground her vulnerability is sublimating her true self. If that is the case then… Yikes, things are worse than I thought…
Till next time!
Some Things I Liked Recently:
The second season of The White Lotus. Now I HATTTTEEDDDD the first one. I really couldn’t abide it. The tone felt so hectoring, the dialogue so stunted, and the characters so dimensionless. The second season was such an unexpected treat! I’d very much recommend if the first one put you off it.
In that vein I loved this piece about Portia’s outfits, the deliberate and curated misfires and how much they spoke to the reality of Gen Z today, bombarded by too many signposts to curate a coherent style.
I went down a kind of wormhole reading about this stylist (can you tell) and especially loved this interview, on the flourishes of certain key details such as “white socks” ;)