I wrote about performance culture and the manufactured self:
'if a girl is not a polyglot, does she still make a sound? does she still impress? does she still matter? I was always taught no.'
the whole ‘i’m just a girl’ ‘explain palestine but for the girls’ thing is just a way for privileged western women to disassociated themselves from any adult moral duty and responsibility. they’d rather just be complacent in their ignorance. it’s lazy and embarrassing. grow up.
the way a woman can’t even post a photo without being accused of being a performative try-hard faux-intellectual pandering to social media audiences omg we need to ban that margaret atwood quote
Being a girl, and learning the world is not for you, it’s like a kind of death. Womanhood is a prolonged dying, starting the day you flower. We rot as soon as we ripen.
wait, if you’re a joan didion fleabag marlboro reds girl, and i’m an esoteric french new wave material feminist girl, then who the hell is flying this plane?
ngl i thought we were all being ironic in our satirisation of hyperfemininity but recently realised a lot of you do actually live in the third person and perform yourself for the watcher’s gaze
excessive blush not in a 2019 tiktok e-girl way but in a marie antoinette rococo revival catherine the great decadent enlightenment winter palace dionysus-esque way
when james baldwin said ‘the place in which i’ll fit will not exist until i make it’ and when fatima bilal said ‘the world is happening in a room i can’t enter’ and when yesenia montilla said “what / do i know about heaven? the / same thing i know about wings, / i can’t have it’
hate when girls do those incredibly staged “what’s in my bag” pictures like they’re carrying around a full bottle of tom ford lost cherry and a didion paperback at all times
lonely not is a gross loser way, but in a romantic muse tortured genius esoteric starving artist no one understands me better than everyone else sorta way
don’t know how people are misconstruing this as being against simplifying information. i’m not saying you need to get a copy of edward said’s orientalism and write a hundred page dissertation on peace in the middle east. just don’t flaunt and aestheticise your own ignorance
why are some people more invested in celebrities’ reactions to the palestine/israel conflict than the actual conflict itself. imagine watching world events through the lens of being able to cancel some d-list actor who hasn’t had a gig since 2017. you are not real people
don’t have the time to vocalise all my thoughts on this right now but last month i wrote about my own relationship to performance on my substack, here’s a link for those interested:
when florence welch said ‘being clever never got me very far’ and when alexander solzhenitsyn said ‘there’s a lot of cleverness in the world but not enough kindness’ and when franz kafka said ‘how about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense’
being twenty and idle, somehow living both beyond your means and below it, pissing away your inheritance and stuffing your brain with philosophy in an attempt to become the most insufferable person there is. what a time to be alive
believe it or not, when talking about palestine my first thought isn’t “how do i make this kind and palatable? how do i say this with a smile on my face?” i’m not trying to be a joy. a woman doesn’t always have to be.