[ week 22 | 37 ]
Et in Arcadia ego.
Saturday, 16.51
One wonders what a cute little elfin vending machine for these might look like. —Idly, yes, but still. One wonders. (Lisala sent this along. Blame her.)
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Saucing the gander.
Thursday, 22.57
In a typically ham-fisted manner, the boys of Plastic wonder why it is when you shoot pictures of men the way women are shot every day, they look “creepy,” “gay,” “cheesy,” “faggy,” “gay,” and “just slightly gayer than Dude, Where’s My Car.” —Okay. There’s more going on here than that. But not by much. And I still think an essential point is being missed—and my God, if anyone actually thinks for a moment anyone involved in this photoshoot didn’t know what was going on, or took it seriously... Hee!
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That seeming to be most which they indeed least are.
Wednesday, 23:53
You all know Wendi, or knew her. Some of you liked her a lot. Some didn’t. (Heck, some of you were Wendi. Or still are. Hey. How’s it going?) Susannah Meadows, it seems, knew Wendi, and still has some issues to work out with her.
Meadows doesn’t do a very good job.
(You might want to go read the article, so you know what the hell it is I’m talking about.)
Meadows’ Wendi (of course) is blond. (Sorry: “blonde.”) Her Wendi talks with that breathless constant lilting question mark? At the end? Of every sentence fragment? Like, ohmigod, a Valley Girl? Or a Welshman? Wendi’s sixteen, and has sex. Or at least oral sex. (Wendi’s always been a slut; always willing to go down on at the drive-in—or is it in the parking lot of the mall, these days?) Wendi’s mortified: her midnight blue pickup truck is in the shop, and she has to drive Mom’s minivan to school. Ohmigod. But she wears cool stuff, like shirts and capris, and there’s a chasm between her snug top and her denim skirt that beckons back. (And I’m torn here, between making a joke about the inadvertent fear of yonic power on display in that sentence, or ruminating as how the chasms on display in the photo of good, wholesome gamma girls Jennifer and Reyna must then be chasms of a different order entirely; perhaps these chasms don’t beckon so much as wait quietly, demurely, chastely in the corner.)
And we aren’t entirely sure, but it’s pretty well intimated Wendi does drugs. And booze.
Were it not for the fact that Wendi is so self-evidently a construct, a straw girl, a stalking Heather, I’d suggest she find herself a lawyer and look into suing Meadows for gross character assassination.
Look: yay and hooray for the gains girls have made in the classroom, in athletics, in life; it’s about fucking time. —That articles like this meretricious piece of shit keep getting written perhaps goes a long way towards explaining why it’s taken so long, and how much further we have yet to go. We do not need another type of girl laid out for us, genus and species, like a profile at the end of a Cosmo quiz. Meadows pays at least lip-service to this truth, or (at least) one of the experts she quotes does: “These books,” says William Damon, of—well, we aren’t sure; it might be of Queen Bees & Wannbes, or Odd Girl Out, or Reviving Ophelia—“These books go way beyond what we have data on. They’re playing to stereotypes.”
All well and good, but it turns out the answer to one of the questions posed in the sidebar—“What is left out of books about teen girls”—turns out to be, “They don’t cover the stereotype I’m pushing.”
Which is—hold your breath—the gamma girl.
(Anybody else suddenly go to a dark and scary place, where Dr. Bruce Banner got his green radiation trick to work right, only it works best to lobotomize rebellious, unruly teens? Um, you know, gamma? As in the radiation? Is my geek cred showing again? Damn.)
“It’s a terrific time to be a young woman. They can choose to be whatever they want to be.” That’s Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, another expert solicited for a soundbite, and that sounds great, right? Only it’s quite clear from the article that there are right choices, and wrong choices. Choose right—say no to drugs and premarital sex and alcohol and cliquishness and flashy clothes and flashy cars and beckoning chasms, say yes to church groups and school newspapers and sports and Friday night dinners with dad—and you’re a good gamma girl.
Choose wrong, and you’re Wendi.
(Boys? You’re worried about boys? Well, shit, y’all. Boys will be boys. You know? Ohmigod.)
Props, though, to Jen and Emily and Reyna and Jenna and Carla and the other real enough girls who were written up for this article. Best of luck and all that. And one of these days, one of those lunches, get up and walk over to Wendi over there by the parking lot and say, I don’t know, something. These things are tricky and she’ll probably still blow you off—I mean, let’s not be unreasonable; Wendi can be an utter cooze, and maybe there are reasons and maybe there aren’t, but still, you know? But you never do know; that’s the point. —So. Anyway. If you do get a chance? Tell her I said hi, okay?
