consuming the girl

"you think you fell out of a coconut tree? you exist in the context of all the girls around you and all that came before you"

SANDY LIANG | MAY. 24, Daria Kobayashi Ritch

Being a girl is all about knowing your references, which is why in Paris I walk for several hours each day and visit Lemaire, Dover Street Market, The Broken Arm, and about 14 different vintage stores, not even to buy anything, because these days I buy almost everything online, but just to look at the J.W. Anderson paw mules in person and see what the women around me are wearing. I always felt since I was a little girl that being female was about tracking down the correct, elusive objects. I remember being 14 and reading Tavi Gevinson’s blog and feeling frustrated with myself because she was convincing her parents to buy her, like, vintage Comme des Garcons skirts on Ebay and I didn’t even know what those were, I watched The Devil Meets Prada when I was 12 and didn’t recognize any of the brands.

I don’t think it’s anything as simple as equating femininity with consumption but I do think that women are always the ones who are marketed to, and what they are marketed is an idealized version of femininity, in particular a certain type of girlhood, a la Tiqqun’s Young Girl. See: Sandy Liang’s uniform skirts, Tabi Mary Janes and the shiny red Carel pumps, straw baskets to imitate Jane Birkin. We’re reclaiming girlhood, we’re subverting girlhood, everything goes back to the girl. A certain recreation of the girl, really: girlhood with the knowingness of a grown woman, like Suki Waterhouse wearing shorteralls in the park while Bradley Cooper reads Lolita to her, like the 25-year-olds wearing thigh high socks and captioning their Instagram pictures with Lana Del Rey lyrics.

“There is something professional about everything the Young-Girl does.”

Girlhood is big business. The ones who are best at it literally treat it as an occupation, modeling or taking suitably candid-looking pictures of themselves, recommending clothes and jewelry and books, going viral on TikTok. They’re performing a way of being that looks joyful, effortless, and adorable. It’s a performance that by definition has a short lifespan, because the Young-Girl can’t become a mother, can’t show visible signs of aging. Mothers sell domesticity, care: Artipoppe baby carriers, cream-colored linen pants, Doen dresses. (See Nara Smith bridging the two by baking cinnamon buns in a Simone Rocha dress).

Everyone wants to be a girl, but girls themselves always fear that they don’t measure up to their occupation, that they’re not pretty enough, they’re too basic, they can’t spell pharaoh, their hair is flat or their hair is overly styled, their facial features aren’t right, their boyfriend isn’t cool enough. It’s hard when you’re a girl yourself to notice that the ideal you’re measuring yourself against is a projection, a dream, performance art.

“The Young-Girl wears the mask of her face.”

The worst thing TikTok commenters can say about Kylie Jenner is that she looks old, trying to punish her for having who knows what done, things injected and implanted and then reversed. She says on her TV show: I haven’t done anything except lip filler. The Young-Girl rarely retains her original face, but part of the performance is that she must pretend to.

Beauty is supposed to be easy, effortless, and we don’t like when girls show signs that it isn’t. Nevermind that for most conventionally attractive women maintaining their appearance is a hobby that can consumes an enormous amount of money and time. I’m thinking of Emily Weiss’ 2016 wedding preparation post on Into the Gloss: detox program, colonics, weekly training sessions, microcurrent, laser hair removal, facials, lash extensions, brow waxing. She starts the post by revealing that she spent “a lot of the fall on her back,” and on the actual day she was “was 8/10 happy with how I looked… pretty good!”

Now, a litmus test of how well you understand what’s expected of women is whether you find this over the top, as some Internet commentators do, or incredibly par for the course. A very normal regiment for, let’s say, a 20-something in New York who cares a lot about her appearance might involve: an extensive skincare routine including prescription retinoids, manicures and pedicures, regular facials, Botox (preventative), filler (but not too much), working out three to five times a week, haircuts, highlights, blowouts.

Do you have to do this? Obviously you do not, and many women don’t. But the interesting phenomenon here is how incredibly normalized it is. When your appearance is highly praised and valued by the world around you, you treat it like a job. And most women are taught that appearance is not only social currency, but a form of survival, and a way of guaranteeing a minimum level of respect—think about the way both men and women talk about other women who’ve gained weight, or have unfortunate plastic surgery results, or are simply aging badly. They’re treated as failures: by failing to maintain their appearance, they’re letting all of us down.

I’ve noticed that the older women who go viral on TikTok might have visibly older faces, but they still tend to be extremely thin and athletic-looking. They remain well-maintained. Actually aging normally, from what I can tell, involves gaining a natural amount of weight as your metabolism slows down, cutting your hair short as it turns gray because your hair texture becomes more difficult to manage, and continuing to favor the clothes that you liked in youth instead of remaining up to date with trends. The older women who do well on social media tend to be still hip, still cool, still with it.

A couple years ago S and I pioneered our personal theory of MILFs, which is something like: an older woman in her 40s or 50s who speaks with the mannerisms of a Girl. Think the Paris Hilton baby voice. You’re no longer young, you’re a woman, but you’re still invested in the sexuality, the vulnerability, and the ubiquity of The Girl.

The joy of girlhood

My mom dealt with the ambiguity of femininity by rejecting it. She didn’t wear makeup; she kept her hair short; I don’t remember her being at all interested in fashion when I was a kid, and she never wore clothes that were particularly form-fitting or revealing. Obviously, there is no easy way to ignore the reality of the female body—being objectified, menstrual pain, giving birth—but you can certainly turn your back on many forms of feminine consumption, and that is perhaps a better way to live. I wonder if she hoped that I would be like her. It was not to be: by the time I was six I was staring in the mirror and lip syncing, pretending to be a popstar. My favorite dress was a pink tiered one that made me look like a strawberry. Whatever was being sold to me, I was buying.

Like many little girls, I was obsessed with My Scene dolls, Barbies, Bratz. They modeled a vision of femininity that seemed so exciting and free. They wore cool clothes and cool shoes. I was excited about growing up because it meant that I, too, could have a grown-up body and wear designer dresses and go on trips with my friends. As a teenager, my aspirations transferred to Sex and the City: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, living in New York, the biggest and shiniest urban playground of them all, wearing Manolos, eating at trendy restaurants, complaining about men.

The thing I was surprised to discover was how much the actual experience of femininity was saturated by anxiety. Am I doing it wrong? Am I at the right parties, are my clothes cool enough, do I look good in these pictures, is my hair right, am I a good girlfriend, am I enough of a girl’s girl, am I too needy, am I too bitchy? But there was also a joy, because I felt like I was in conversation with not only all the other girls around me, sharing the same references and dreaming the same dreams, but all the girls before and after me. I think this is why young women get obsessed with female writers like Eve Babitz or Joan Didion or Sylvia Plath, because they articulate models of how to be. And this is why people say girls dress for other girls, because men don’t share our references. I’m thinking of Meryl Streep’s blue sweater monologue in The Devil Meets Prada:

This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you.

You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean.

And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact…you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…from a pile of "stuff."

What this monologue suggests is that turning away doesn’t necessarily mean you can opt out. Negotiation is more viable for most of us than refusal. It’s the tragedy of femininity to have people always selling to you, selling yourself back to you, telling you that a particular purse or pair of shoes are what will enable you to say something True about yourself. But it’s also part of the enmeshed nature of girlhood to realize that we’re all in the ecosystem together, searching for a way to collectively exist.