Two Different “Cool Girls”
When I was in high school, I let my guy friends shoot crumpled paper balls into my cleavage at lunch. I thought this made me cooler than the other girls, and that my ability to assimilate and remain sexualized was special. Besides, it was just a silly thing they did. It would be years before that memory soured, and I realized how dangerous it was that this had become my basis for what acceptance looked like …
[She describes several instances of sexual harassment.]
Encounters like these stopped when I got serious with my now-husband. I could say that men who never cared about my autonomy were respectful of another man’s woman, but to me that would be willfully disingenuous. I’m sure it’s true that they stopped mostly because I had stopped setting myself up for attacks in a visceral search for validation. This is not me victim-blaming myself—it’s a cold, hard look at the culture. I didn’t want to fuck these men, but I thought being powerful, popular, and even self-possessed would follow if I could set myself up as a figment of their fantasies. In between these assaults I didn’t sleep around, or even date all that much. It wasn’t that I traded sex for self-esteem; it was that that I’d spent my whole life convinced—and being convinced to believe—that girls with an adoring gaggle of guy friends were empirically more valuable than other girls. Long before anyone was capitalizing Cool and Girl, I understood that the template involved exuding an effortless, accidental sex appeal.
Hannah Keyser, Some of the Times I Didn’t Consent
Once I organized a dinner
for office friends
and I was proud when I ordered
barbecued spareribs, eggroll appetizers
bird’s nest soup
empress chicken with asparagus
peking duck and thousand-layer buns
lobster cantonese
mushrooms, grass, black, button
yang chow fried rice
sweet and sour rock cod
oolong tea
fortune cookies
and almond delight
and I was prouder still
when I invited my guests
to tour dark alleys
the sing-song waves of faces
peeping from second-story windows
pointing to ducks, squabs, thousand-year-old eggs
me on the perimeter of Chinatown
with my office friends
gulping wine, holding my nose,
masked, playing oriental,
inscrutable, wise.
Now standing
before a brass spittoon
I recall that time
and i want to puke
not from the food, my friend
not from the foodNellie Wong, Not From the Food
I don’t have a larger point here. I just find it interesting that both of these authors had a sense that, as part of being the “cool” woman/minority member, they had to offer themselves up as willing exemplars of other people’s half-formed stereotypes.
“I will instantiate your fantasies in exchange for positive regard”
(Not meant to imply that feeling like this is illegitimate)
These are really good examples of a reaction that I just don’t grok. Like, I guess I can see in the abstract how they might feel like they were being pressured to play a role they didn’t want to play, but like… trading performances for social attention is just kind of a thing that everyone does? Idk maybe it’s something specific to being a minority (in the sj sense).
Mmmmrph. I think I do understand this. But the thing that I understand is uncharitable and cynical, so…maybe there’s something I’m missing, maybe there’s a nicer spin that can be put on the dynamic.
Trivially: we change as life goes on.
In particular, our identities change and our values change. Things that we used to prize very highly, things that we used to try to be and display, become disgusting and shameful to our sight. Sometimes it’s because the broader fashion changes; sometimes it’s about life-stage transitions; sometimes it’s because we fall in with a new crowd, or because our friends change and we follow after; sometimes it’s because we arrive at epiphanies on our own, or through our reading. Lots of avenues. And of course this is totally unavoidable, and it’s no one’s fault, at least not in a broader sense.
But it does mean that sometimes we look pack on our past selves, whom we still consider to be us, and cringe. We can’t change what we were or what we did, however much we hate it. It’s a source of terrible psychic pain, at least for me, and authors from David Foster Wallace to Dave Barry have convinced me that this problem is pretty damn universal.
People in terrible pain are easy marks for ideologues.
The thing that this meme has to offer is: It’s not your fault that you did all those shameful things, that the you-of-yesterday didn’t live up to the standards that the you-of-today holds so dear. You were tricked. You were bullied. You were FORCED to be shameful by the pressures of oppression. So long as you hate the oppressors, you don’t have to hate yourself.
…and of course it’s actually worse than that, because the ideology that’s offering you this moral-blame-shifting technology is the same ideology that pushed these new standards on you in the first place, that made you feel like your old self is disgusting. The Culture Juggernaut tells you that wanting to be the Cool Girl is sexist and degrading, that wanting to be the mysterious exotic Asian is racist and degrading, and offers you absolution for having committed these spiritual sins by letting you push them on someone else.
It is very, very, very reminiscent of the kind of tricks that certain evangelical faiths play with actual concepts of sin.