Note: As mentioned at the beginning of the last essay, this was something I wrote sophomore year. However, this essay actually managed to get that same philosophy bro to talk to me, unfortunately it was during our conversation about this article that I realized I was never that interested in men.
Maybe it started with my parents, or the 2013 Lolita Tumblr posts, or maybe there was a butterfly way back in the Jurassic period that flew west, but by some force of the universe, I found myself in a bookstore in Midtown South browsing antique books. Looking at vintage copies of Don Quixote and leather-bound copies of Medieval Germanic Law, I try rationalizing $700 books for myself. This is a new activity. This is the first time I’ve been to this bookstore. Argosy Bookstore, 116 East 59th Street. Surrounded by the tote bag, hair clip, and Aritzia leather pants girls, I feel like I’m succeeding. Somehow, in the mundanity of bookshopping, I have asserted some truth about myself. I feel like I am somehow better than the average woman, with their "Barnes & Noble". How pedantic. True women of culture wander around the streets of New York (the only city that allows an individuality complex this strong) and stumble across a bookstore. In it, they discover an extremely attractive bookkeeper who also owns a two-bedroom apartment in the East Village with no roommates because... he has a trust fund? The details don’t matter; I don’t even think there are bookkeepers at this particular shop. The cashier is a sweet 80-year-old woman, though, named Sue. That’s actually not her name, but it could be. She looks like a Sue. I leave the bookstore without buying anything (surprise! You don’t have $100+ to spend on vintage books). Regardless, you feel accomplished. Today, you won at womanhood.
Womanhood, obviously, is more than just bookstore visits (although that would be nice, and a lot easier). As much as ‘the media’ would like to tell you that there exists a rigid definition of womanhood, it’s easier, and more practical, to think of it as a list of behaviors and aesthetics that you must perform in order to be seen as such. Of course, how many of these behaviors you need to tick off depends not only on the individual woman, but the observer.
What defines a woman has been a hot topic in feminist circles for as long as these circles have existed. Simultaneously, there has always been a corporation trying to profit off of these feelings in order to make money. The female identity has almost always been a product. Whether they try to sell you razors, or clothes, face creams, or bras, womanhood has always been drenched in capitalism. The motivating message of these campaigns, in essence, is that this thing will make you more of a woman. However, I would say it’s a more recent development that this commodification has become self-imposed.
The strange thing this time around, is that the things women identify with are less products, in a traditional sense, as they are media (books, movies, TV, music, etc...). I would trace this back to social media, as it forces everyone, not just women, to present an idealized version of themselves. However, women have already been performing their femininity, which is now being heightened via social media. It makes sense that women would commodify their identities down to certain pieces of media because a movie, for example, has more complexities than a toaster ever could; it portrays a more complex facet of a woman's identity. I don’t even object, necessarily, to the idea of a woman heavily identifying with a set of movies, and using that to explain their identities to others. To me, that’s less of a womanhood thing and more of a stan culture thing. That being said, I am concerned about how eager women, including myself, are to do it. Not only has social media forced women to perform their identities, but it has put those same identities behind a paywall.
All of these aesthetics exist for one main purpose, though: being cool. The Cool Girl. The infamous ‘Cool Girl’ originated in the Gillian Flynn novel, Gone Girl. She is described as such: "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."
Gillian Flynn’s model has limitations, though. It’s a novel published a decade ago. Times are a changin’ and the archetype of what the ideal woman should be has changed too. Cool girl is still aspirational, but you want to know what’s more aspirational: chill girl. Chill girl is the chiller, cooler cousin of cool girl. If you thought being called ‘cool’ was a good compliment, wait until you hear about ‘chill’. A chill girl is a cool girl, but she lacks depth. The cool girl is passionate, she’s obsessed, she exists— in her own way. ‘Chill girl’ does not. Chill girl goes with the flow, chill girl never complains, chill girl never thinks about the implications of one of her male friends making a throw away rape joke. It’s a joke. Take it. Chill out. Perhaps the chill girl is another way for men to project onto women, I wouldn’t know though; I am not a man, nor have I ever been the chill girl. In her essay "Against Chill," Alana Massey describes the appeal of chill: "Passion is polarizing; being enthusiastic or worked up is downright obsessive." Chill, like cool, is used to draw borders between women. There exists the chill and the unchill. To be unchill is to be like the others, to be chill is to be special, for a man to validate the fact that you are different— you are better. I’ve found the ‘chill’ category is more desirable. The same applies to the chill vs. cool dichotomy. Chill ascertains a certainty that cool lacks. Cool is subjective, chill is not.
If I were to point to a single woman as the ‘Cool Girl’ it wouldn’t be Amy Dunne, although slay. If I were to point at the cool girl, it would probably be Fleabag. Fleabag, the main character of a show with the same title, is a 20-something woman living in London. The show documents her life as she deals with grief, love, and family. The show isn’t long; it’s two, six-episode seasons, with each episode lasting no more than 30 minutes. It's viciously effective entertainment. The charm of Fleabag, the show and the character, is the intimacy it creates. Fleabag regularly breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly, often voicing her own musings on feminism and her thoughts on the matter at hand. It feels like we’re tagging along in her life. This intimacy is also what defines her Cool Girl status. The intimacy of the show allows us to see Fleabags' flaws in an almost unbearably raw light. Her flaws, however, are endearing, she’s awkward but in a funny way, not in a profusely apologetic way. As Rebecca Liu describes in “The Making of a Millennial Woman” : "Pretty, white, cisgender, and tortured enough to be interesting but not enough to be repulsive. Often described as ‘relatable,’ she is, in actuality, not. The term masks the uncomfortable truth that she is more beautiful, more intelligent, and more infuriatingly precocious than we are in real life. But her charm lies in how she is still self-hating enough to be attainable." Which, yeah.
Also contributing to Fleabag’s Cool Girl essence is her ability to distance her femininity from her feminism. Fleabag, throughout the show, for all intents and purposes, is a feminist. Yet, there is a distance from that feminism that allows her to engage in "unfeminist" actions, like enjoying BDSM and trying to seduce a banker to get a loan (she fails). That distance, is evocative of a new strand of feminism— dissociative feminism.
Dissociation is like zoning out. The distinction I would make is that dissociation is triggered by an emotion other than boredom. You know the feeling when you remember that one old embarrassing memory you have, and your mind completely draws a blank because of how skin-crawlingly cringy it is: dissociation. In a similar vein, dissociative feminism is a form of feminism that involves separating your womanhood and your feminism. It involves recognizing that you wear make-up and therefore uphold the patriarchy (feminism) while simultaneously acknowledging that you don’t feel good when you don’t feel pretty (womanhood). Often times, womanhood wins out because feminism, in all its forms, goes against the patriarchy, thus making compliance easier than resistance.
Dissociation would also be a way to explain the existence of aesthetics like Bimbos (think anti-capitalist Elle Woods), a separation between the commodified, fetishistic aspects of womanhood and the gritting self-hatred that feminism often insists upon. It’s a way to make up for the cognitive dissonance that the patriarchy presents. I won’t pretend I don’t feel it. I won’t even pretend that I don’t agree. At the end of the day, if you’re going to be disempowered, you might as well look good doing it.
Although, as much as it is easier for me to be critical of the women who do commodify their identities, I kind of get it. It’s easier to commodify our identities down to the most simple parts. Me, for example, I’m the Ottessa Moshfegh/Mitski/Fiona Apple/2014 Tumblr/I’ll just drink a glass of water/Ramona Flowers/Diane Ngyuen/Nihilist/Self-aware/Self-deprecating type of girl. Of course, not all of these things are true. I’ve only read one Ottessa Moshfegh novel, it was ok. The goal of this level of commodification is to be seen as someone who could do these things, not as someone who necessarily does— in this case performance takes precedence over reality. Who cares if I didn’t read Eileen, when the idea that I could be a girl who did is so much more valuable? Typically these lists of buzzwords are talked about almost within female circles. Not to say that men don’t know who any of the people I listed are, but rather that it does not carry the same cultural currency. If I were to ask any of my male peers or my brother, as a woman, what it meant to identify with Diane Ngyuen, the response would be something along the lines of "is that the girl from Bojack Horseman?". I say this endearingly, of course. I envy their ability to not see me as a collection of pop culture references. Although, I’m not sure if they don’t see me as a collection of limbs either. The commodification is an inside joke I have created with myself as the punchline.
Which gets at the root of the whole dissociative feminist thing. It is the rejection of traditional femininity while also understanding that no matter what you do, you will exist as a sexual object. 50 years ago there was a body type to be, to strive for. Now, there still is an ideal body type, but with the rise of the internet and general interconnectedness of today’s world no matter how a woman will exist, she will exist under the male gaze; because even the subversion of the male gaze is, you guessed it, another facet of the male gaze. This is not to say that all body types and facial features are created equal, they’re not. But if a 1950’s housewife wanted to prevent herself from getting married off to a man, she just wouldn’t shave and wear pants. Now, the rejection of the ‘male gaze’ within itself is an act of desirability. Even lesbianism, a sexuality devoid of any male presence, is the most searched term on Pornhub— fetishized for men, freely.
It’s almost romantic to be desired in such a way. To be able to wink at the camera to say, I know what I’m doing is wrong, but to go along with it anyway. To reject the hot priest who sees through your dissociations, the one that randomly startles you from these turns to ask who you’re nodding to in the first place. No one. The answer is no one. Because if you ever tried to tell a man what it's like to exist as a body, and only a body, in a public space, try telling them how they are complicit in doing so! Be advised, do not do this at Thanksgiving, it’s not timely (or so I hear).
A woman with pain built in. The trade mark line of Fleabag and dissociative feminists everywhere. I would contest this. Women are not born with pain built in. Periods, childbirth, and such are not innate truths to a toddler, female or male. It is only in puberty where you start becoming cognizant of your existence do you realize that periods suck and wish for early menopause, warts and all. Only when you start menstruating do you realize how much "girl" you actually are— too much. You are too much girl. Not a woman with pain built in but a woman building pain in. To keep it bottled up, as such cool girls do. If you keep bottled up long enough maybe you’ll even forget about it, enter chill girl. You’ve ascended. You forget you are an angry woman.
It’s only agonizing if you think about it, hence the 2000 some odd words. This is why the nods work so much better. To be able to wink at a camera, a brief acknowledgement of your pain to snap back into whatever character you chose to play as. Fleabag gets it. That’s the crux of the whole thing. Getting it. Womanhood has become something of an inside joke, by defining along the lines of commodity and not experience, we compartmentalize our emotions into easily rational bits.
It would probably not surprise you at this point that the story at the beginning of this article is a total lie as well. Although, I do like Argosy (really, you should go). The allure of telling a story where I think in public and not in my bed at 11:30 on a Wednesday night putting off studying for my mandarin quiz is a hard one to fight. Even in confessing to the lie, I create an almost paradoxical situation of performing a certain type of "cool girl". If you want to watch me continue to spiral, know that I’m living out my Raynecorp-Substack fever dream, assuming that means anything to you.
Side Note from Future Me: I enjoyed living out this fever dream so much I made a Substack, crazy how these things pan out.
There exists a dichotomy of being a feminist and indulging in anti-feminist behaviors. I’ve sat here for however many words but when all is said and done, this to is a performance of feminism. But I’m also not sure what else to do? There is a saddening reality of female existence, that no matter what you do, how you act, what you say, there is no escape of the confines of the patriarchy. It would be hypocritical of me to pretend like I am not disempowered as well. We are all disempowered, that’s all there is to it.
Maybe I am just a mentally deformed woman. I would like this to be true. To know that I suffer only as myself under whatever stupid, self-imposed restrictions I create out of thin air. I hope I become the woman that alpha male podcasts talk about. The in-control woman, the woman who manipulates her womanhood because she knows how to, the woman who doesn’t care about anybody but herself. I pray to be her. My life would be so much easier if I could do that. If I could turn the switch of performing my gender— my life, on and off, I would be so much happier. To be the woman that all men think I am, truly wondrous.
I often think back to Argosy. I feel the performance of womanhood, I get it, I think. I get it as much as I can stand to get it. It being feminism, the patriarchy, abortion rights, phone banking, Hillary Clinton, low rise jeans, Lana Del Rey, the whole lot. I think about all of it a lot. It’s almost crushing, the only reason I’ve even made it this far is because I’ve kept it at a distance. But, I’m tired. Legitimately, just tired. I understand that within my lifetime, I’m stuck performing my femininity— my womanhood. I would be surprised if I see women's liberation before I’m buried in the ground (not to be a downer or anything). But I just can’t perform my womanhood and my feminism. It’s too much. This article is just as much a performance of my feminism as wearing skirts is a performance of my feminity, so maybe I am just the biggest loser.