We Don't Know How to Talk About Girls

Cognitive Dissonance Online

About two months ago, I returned from an eight-day trip to Japan, bruised, sunburned, and loopy. I shuffled to Trader Joe’s the morning after my flight landed, unsure whether the light outside was of the early morning or late evening variety. Up was down, down was up. My hair was somehow frizzy and greasy, my undereyes were bloated. I wore a hodgepodge of B-grade clean clothes that were shoved to the bottom of my dresser drawer (my first-rate items were sweaty and wrinkly from travel). Needless to say, I was not rocking my best look and I knew it, but alas, my empty fridge needed to be refilled. The grocery store is not a place where I typically need a confidence boost.

After restocking my plastic basket with my weekly essentials, I waited in the checkout line for a Trader Joe’s employee to assign me a cashier. “Seventeen,” he uttered, and I walked to the middle-aged cashier kindly holding up the number on his wooden paddle. He made small talk with me as Trader Joe’s employees do, politely asking about my plans for the day and so forth. After arranging my yogurt, eggs, and peanut butter neatly in my canvas tote, he handed me my receipt with a smile, and said four very familiar words to me, and one quite foreign one:

“Have a nice day, ma’am.”

“Sweetheart,” “hon,” even “miss” - all gender-affirming labels that I’ve found oddly comforting coming from the mouths of service workers several years my senior. Terms of endearment I’d call them, terms of friendliness. Platitudes. “Ma’am,” was a word I’d heard before, sure, in reference to a teacher, perhaps. An overly-mannered child speaking to an overly strict mother. A young man helping an elderly woman load groceries into her car. A label often implying respect, often implying a level of subordinance. Let me help you with that ma’am. Happy to help ma’am. Yes, ma’am. Me? I’ve never been ma’am.

I performed some meta-cognition on the commute home, shoulders uneven from the grocery load. I thought about how it was all quite amusing, how meaning is thrust upon words. How you’re “pumpkin,” then “young lady,” and then eventually “ma’am,” and how your vitality is thought to decline with the label progression. It’s a complicated feeling - feeling uncomfortable about an identity you’re destined for. That you have great respect for, or at least claim to have great respect for. The paradox is so awkward, so untidy - condemning the disrespect aging women face in society but trying to curb your own aging. It reminds me of so many of the other Great Debates about womanhood online. Being pro-plastic surgery or anti-plastic surgery, pro-bimbo or anti-bimbo, and so forth.

So much changes when you learn to talk about things on a more macro scale. In terms of “systems” - systems of thought, for instance - instead of individual perpetrators. You can cast a much wider net, speak more abstractly. But systems and systems of thought are kind of flowing, invisible entities - they need vessels to be properly observed. And in our attempts to critique the systems - and all their convoluted intricacies - we sometimes allow stray bullets to graze casualties. Particularly when analyzing modern iterations of patriarchy, sexism, and feminism, and the nuanced ways that gender is conveyed and refracted through online performances. It’s much simpler to castigate a small circle of individuals and their odd behaviors than to ponder the conditions that led them to behave this way. And, in the case of online performances, it’s also simple to lump in other, more innocuous behaviors, that are easy to hate simply because girls and women are performing them.

To put the point in bolder font: people are quite interested in discussing how girls and women act online, but many are failing to do it adequately. Publishers, writers, and internet personalities often center on a niche subset of performed behaviors and invite onlookers to ogle, often without complex illumination. Trad Wives, for instance, and their seemingly backward lifestyle of prioritizing homemaking and childrearing over career prospecting have remained center stage under the internet discourse spotlight for quite some time now. So have adopters of various “cores,” or aesthetic trends, and those posting “What I Do/Eat in a Day” style videos. Tomato girls had their moment, girl dinner had its fifteen minutes. And now the latest “Boots and a slicked back bun” TikTok trend, and its many variations, are under their temporary microscopes. Mainstream publications ask us to look and look and offer some chitter-chatter about the peculiarities of these behaviors. There is often little else to glean beyond the news of girls behaving oddly online being news. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, grand evaluations are made about how whatever is trending is fundamentally altering the beliefs and behaviors of girls and women. Sleeper agents awakened by TikToks.

CNBC warns about the rise of the Trad Wife

I don’t take issue with these online behaviors being closely observed and discussed, per se. I, too, am interested in examining how the internet affects how women act and relate to one another - it’s the bread and butter of this newsletter. I’m beginning to take issue with online performances being taken out of the context of what they are, which at the risk of sounding redundant, is a performance online. A choreographed display.

Take Trad Wives, for instance. When Nara Smith makes bubblegum for her child from scratch or homemade sourdough because her husband requested a grilled cheese, she’s not providing as clear of a window into her psyche and the psyches of her followers as people and publications would like to think. The connection is not that clean. When the camera isn’t rolling, she hangs up her apron, edits the footage, uploads it to her social media profile, and goes about the rest of her day. What we aren’t seeing is the ready-made peanut butter likely in her refrigerator and sliced, packaged bread likely in her pantry. The childcare likely being paid for behind the scenes. She could be making every item her family consumes from scratch but she likely isn’t - she too is a working woman, perhaps the breadwinner in the family, due to her growing following and brand partnerships. And I doubt she is influencing that many of her followers into being on-demand homemakers either, as most of them don’t have the time or resources to live that way. Most of her followers probably wouldn’t even want to live that way, given the time and resources. She isn’t reflecting a trend in behavior, but a trend in entertainment - a trend in fantasy. She’s offering viewers a hyperbole of herself, and we’re taking it quite willingly.

Same goes for more innocuous social media trends like “Boots and a slicked back bun,” which consists of women hyping each other up with a lilted chant about what the members of their friend group are wearing. The trend, like most TikToks, has become a source of entertainment or a cheeky marketing tactic. It’s far from a reflection of someone’s lifestyle or competence, but it’s sometimes being read as such. Originally coined by Maisie Sellwood, Amelia Gregorian, and Eloise Lord in a video made on a night out, the song-and-dance has been adopted by fellow TikTok users, including employees at tbh Skincare. A TikTok of the trend created by the skincare company’s employees was met with unsavory comments - including calls to “bring back the gender pay gap” and asks into the void on whether or not this is what “feminism wanted back in the day.” These comments were then parodied in a response video made by the company’s employees, which has spurred more critical stitches and duets than one can count.

Another example of women doing the “Boots and a slicked back bun” trend in an office, and some of the top replies on a Twitter repost

The internet necessarily shifts how we perform our identities to the public, bending and rewriting long-held social scripts. It’s a kind of technology and thus has a slew of affordances that sometimes become muddled. Is social media a conduit for connection or a career kickstarter? Is it a source of artistic expression or a more utilitarian archive? Can social media platforms truly be divorced from performance? I have often remarked on these questions and the behaviors that spurred them in my essays about performing nonchalance, romance, intelligence, activism, and more online.

But what I and many other critics have often failed to properly illuminate is the cognitive dissonance that often occupies these performers’ minds. We often attempt to make grandiose assessments about how gender is shifting - towards a mono-girlhood-centric culture, towards dozens of aesthetic-focused microcultures, towards pseudo-intellectualism, towards bimboism, and so forth. The online performances that many girls share may indicate their aspirations and desires but they aren’t transcriptions. It’s also possible to hold multiple truths in your head and hands, to exhibit contradiction. Living as a girl in a culture that despises girls necessitates cognitive dissonance. It requires living with a level of conformity, even as you resist. Rejecting performance, while performing. Respecting “ma’am” while despising “ma’am.” We were never set up to produce satisfactory performances and we never fully will be under these conditions, online and otherwise. It’s also possible to make a silly video, singing a song and dancing a dance, and not have your brain capacity diminish.

We often ascribe even weight to all moves girls make on the internet - remarking on the myriad ways young women choose to appear and behave online in a homogenized manner. However, assigning yourself a hyper-specific aesthetic categorization and promoting anti-aging facial exercises is not the same as singing a chant about your friends’ outfits. Yet, these types of behaviors are often flattened in online discourse. Particularly by popular internet personalities like @coldhealing on Twitter, whose favorite internet pastime is posting captionless, out-of-context screenshots of girls existing online, only to draw in droves of male shitposters whose replies range from “Why are they like this?” to more inflammatory rhetoric.

I used to be an avid @coldhealing follower but their replies are becoming more and more like this, which is - needless to say - deterring me

Girls and women are not exempt from critique simply because they’re girls. However, our discussion needs to expand beyond jabs at lukewarm perpetrators and innocuous behaviors. We should strive to provide a more comprehensive appraisal that thoughtfully reflects on the entangled realities of gender, cognitive dissonance, and performance. No girl or woman lives in a complete vacuum - no person does. Simple as it seems, when analyzing how girls and women exist online, we should probably also ask: is this behavior harming girls or do I just not like girls? Is wearing a combination of cream and chocolate garments and dubbing it “cold brew girl” really setting women back decades or do I just find it annoying personally? Or better yet, if I find the performance annoying, why is that the case? Is it because of this particular girl or because of a larger system of thought that pressures this individual to perform this way? There is a difference between being a critic that’s a champion for women and a critic that’s slamming on women because they’re one of the lower-hanging fruits.

As I turn my key in the lock with my Trader Joe’s haul, I’m reminded that in my Sunday best, the label will likely flip back to “sweetheart.” I earnestly look forward to when I grow into my “ma’am” title - I just wonder how long I’ll be looking forward to it. I, too, am a walking contradiction. A critic and a hypocrite. A conduit for a system that I’ll try my best to expunge.

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