I clipped this photo because it reminded me of a particular night during my high school years in Tulsa. It was the night I quit being A Girl, and I remember it vividly. I'd been lying on my bed, thumbing through a copy of Mademoiselle magazine. Back then, I consumed hag mags with the open-mouthed mindlessness of a True Believer. My questions about what I saw were only two: Do I look like this model? If not, what do I have to do to look like this model? Actually, at the time, I looked a lot like the girl pictured above, thanks to my savage bouts of anorexia and Kabuki make-up habit.
But on this night, something was different. For the first time, I noticed that my treasured Mademoiselle mag was crammed with godawful ideas. Mind you, I desperately wanted to believe every lousy notion between the covers, crappy or not, so that Girl Happiness would be mine. And the hag mags defined Girl Happiness as a shiny assortment of adjectives like thin! pretty! flirty! But for the first time, I was starting to notice that all the clothes cost too much, the models were too skinny, and every issue's theme was a self-improving replay of And You're A Slob Too.
My faith shaken but not toppled, I turned to another article called Teddy Bear Tricks. "Teddy Bear Tricks", it seemed, were a collection of shitty ways to manipulate your boyfriend. It listed a bunch of pointless lies and mean little actions described as flirting. I remember reading the whole thing, then thinking, If I have to do bullshit like this to be a girl, then I quit. And I quit that night. I didn't announce it, and nothing changed outwardly, but I quit wanting to be A Girl. What I would be instead was uncertain, but I knew it had to be better.
This is on my mind, after reading a post where the writer noted that what she really disliked about Sarah Palin was her being A Rules Girl. When I read that, I thought Aha! The Rules(TM): Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right: by Ellen Fein, Sherrie Schneider. In 1994, when I thumbed through that retro little screed, it was a compilation of all Teddy Bear Tricks since 1945. There they all were, those familiar do's and don'ts. "Make him chase you!" "Don't return his calls!" "Never go Dutch!" I'm sure it got into the nitty-gritty stuff too, like sending yourself flowers with a sentimentally-inscribed card, disappearing suddenly to take mysterious phone calls, leaving your perfumed panties at his place etc. etc.
Yeah. I think Sarah, with her winks and wrinkled-up nose, might be a Teddy Bear Trickster herself, a denizen of that place where every sentence is a marker on the road to Mr. Right or the White House, depending, and where every action is a lie.
Since she heaved into view, I've been trying to make sense of Sarah Palin's disarranged repetitive syntax. Some of it is clearly recognizable from beauty pageant contestants: I feel like we should strive to promote world peace everywhere. Some of it, like the aggression disguised as perkiness, is pure Teddy Bear. Some of it is, as Meghan O'Rourke writing for the XX Factor in Slate noted, a kind of deadly biz-speak:
Sarah Palin reminds me of a character in a George Saunders story. Saunders writes brilliant short stories about characters trapped in the American DreamTM. They are workers at theme parks or Hooters-style restaurants, mummified in corporate-sponsored "flair" ... They speak in the same style of substanceless perk. They are to humanity what MSG is to flavor... Palin is, of course, far more successful than many of Saunders' characters...She buys into a whole vocabulary of signifiers that often don't signify very much, and she scaffolds that lexicon with winks, smiles, and carefully mimed gestural reinforcement. All politicians employ empty rhetoric...But I don't know that I've ever seen one employ superficial language with such a sense of palpable enjoyment at her... mastery. And just like Saunders' characters, she refuses to show vulnerability or hesitation, deploying rapid-fire prepackaged phrases like a missile shield... She loves to say "maverick" and "zero-base" and to recount how she once "quasi-caved" on an issue but didn't "compromise."
I've been known to quasi-cave myself, Sarah, but at least I wasn't a goddamn Girl when I did.
But on this night, something was different. For the first time, I noticed that my treasured Mademoiselle mag was crammed with godawful ideas. Mind you, I desperately wanted to believe every lousy notion between the covers, crappy or not, so that Girl Happiness would be mine. And the hag mags defined Girl Happiness as a shiny assortment of adjectives like thin! pretty! flirty! But for the first time, I was starting to notice that all the clothes cost too much, the models were too skinny, and every issue's theme was a self-improving replay of And You're A Slob Too.
My faith shaken but not toppled, I turned to another article called Teddy Bear Tricks. "Teddy Bear Tricks", it seemed, were a collection of shitty ways to manipulate your boyfriend. It listed a bunch of pointless lies and mean little actions described as flirting. I remember reading the whole thing, then thinking, If I have to do bullshit like this to be a girl, then I quit. And I quit that night. I didn't announce it, and nothing changed outwardly, but I quit wanting to be A Girl. What I would be instead was uncertain, but I knew it had to be better.
This is on my mind, after reading a post where the writer noted that what she really disliked about Sarah Palin was her being A Rules Girl. When I read that, I thought Aha! The Rules(TM): Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right: by Ellen Fein, Sherrie Schneider. In 1994, when I thumbed through that retro little screed, it was a compilation of all Teddy Bear Tricks since 1945. There they all were, those familiar do's and don'ts. "Make him chase you!" "Don't return his calls!" "Never go Dutch!" I'm sure it got into the nitty-gritty stuff too, like sending yourself flowers with a sentimentally-inscribed card, disappearing suddenly to take mysterious phone calls, leaving your perfumed panties at his place etc. etc.
Yeah. I think Sarah, with her winks and wrinkled-up nose, might be a Teddy Bear Trickster herself, a denizen of that place where every sentence is a marker on the road to Mr. Right or the White House, depending, and where every action is a lie.
Since she heaved into view, I've been trying to make sense of Sarah Palin's disarranged repetitive syntax. Some of it is clearly recognizable from beauty pageant contestants: I feel like we should strive to promote world peace everywhere. Some of it, like the aggression disguised as perkiness, is pure Teddy Bear. Some of it is, as Meghan O'Rourke writing for the XX Factor in Slate noted, a kind of deadly biz-speak:
Sarah Palin reminds me of a character in a George Saunders story. Saunders writes brilliant short stories about characters trapped in the American DreamTM. They are workers at theme parks or Hooters-style restaurants, mummified in corporate-sponsored "flair" ... They speak in the same style of substanceless perk. They are to humanity what MSG is to flavor... Palin is, of course, far more successful than many of Saunders' characters...She buys into a whole vocabulary of signifiers that often don't signify very much, and she scaffolds that lexicon with winks, smiles, and carefully mimed gestural reinforcement. All politicians employ empty rhetoric...But I don't know that I've ever seen one employ superficial language with such a sense of palpable enjoyment at her... mastery. And just like Saunders' characters, she refuses to show vulnerability or hesitation, deploying rapid-fire prepackaged phrases like a missile shield... She loves to say "maverick" and "zero-base" and to recount how she once "quasi-caved" on an issue but didn't "compromise."
I've been known to quasi-cave myself, Sarah, but at least I wasn't a goddamn Girl when I did.
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