Girlhood for July 13th

Oh, hello, there—

Things are actually…going well (!?) for me (!?) both personally and professionally, a welcome change that distracts me from writing super-maudlin Substack essays. In lieu of Real Content (my favorite oxymoron, also my drag name), I’d like to present two quickies for your perusal—observations I’ve made that feel slightly too thoughtful for a TikTok video and not nearly meaty enough for a 4,000 word jeremiad.

See you next month!

-B

1. On The Cult of Girlhood

Here’s the thing about the algorithmic distraction economy—attention and interest are two distinct currencies. They’re often conflated for the sake of efficiency or grift-worthiness (which are, to be fair, almost indistinguishable from each other), but any alt-right podcaster will happily inform you that a knee-jerk outrage stitch pays just as well as a friendly compliment in the comment section. Content creators court eyeballs, not personal investment in their brands or various other modes of cultural production (such as they are).

So, no, not everyone is “talking about girlhood”—the long-form essays that were pitched at the crest of the TikTok girlhood “discourse”, which is to say, *trending scourge*, have simply been filed, edited and published to their requisite homepages. Substack writers follow suit in the hope that clicks garnered will boost their bottom lines. As a matter of fact, at this point in the meme micro-cycle, it’s considered somewhat passé to engage with “girlhood” content seriously, much less “coquette” theories or “trad-wife” analysis.

No one actually cares about yours (or my) girlhood hot-takes anymore, and, more importantly, they never did in the first place.

This online girlhood imaginary, nay, economy, owes its cloying mitosis to a maelstrom of factors, but public misunderstanding of the internet’s function looms large as a leading catalyst. In a fabulous piece for NOEMA titled “We Need To Rewild the Internet”, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon characterize “online spaces” not as “ecosystems”, but “plantations, highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within”.

The twin phenomena of corporate data mining and monopolistic market share have curbed the internet’s natural “biodiversity” with the help of the largest captive user base in history, relying on the optics of self-curation to obscure top-down architectural enforcement by a handful of tech giants. Farrell and Berjon’s findings build on ideas pioneered by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl in her 2023 speech at SVA, “The Algorithmic State is Burning”, which pushed for a social reorientation to communication infrastructure through divestment from “imergy”, her term for the climate-stripping electrical power required to generate AI prompted images and high-resolution video streaming. This notion of “imergy” could also apply to the algorithmic whirr of contemporary publishing culture, where new ideas pose a distinct threat and proliferation, not development, rules as king. As such, the subject of girlhood, better described as the object of girlhood, is rendered a digital hermeneutics, a sparkly gratis for marginally consenting census groups known as…anyone with Wifi. We aren’t really interested in talking about girlhood, in other words. We’re trying to talk about the failure of the automatic self, and we’ve been systematically stripped of the ability to do so.

As such, this mass fetish for “girlhood discourse”, i.e., the adoption of a periperformative online avatar in order to dissect periperformative online avatars for the betterment of Big Data, feels less like a thoughtful topic of discussion than an ideologically impossible dog-toy filled with hard-to-lick peanut butter. We don’t have to be “distracted” because we are all too willing to do the distracting on Meta’s behalf—just look at the idiotic in-fighting over whether or not self-described apolitical influencers should participate in fundraising for Palestinian refugees fleeing genocide. The floral stink of a celebrity costume gala pales in comparison to screen-mediated, antagonistic groupthink.

It’s useful to frame the “girlhood” conversation as a slackened symbology unto itself. Sometimes users are trying to opine about whiteness or patriarchy when they invoke the “girlhood” topic, sure, but most of the time, those who feel fit to throw their hats into the rhetorical ring are trying to touch on utopia with a toolbelt full of insufficient semiotics. In a culture that hates kids but loooooves pedophilia, it’s hard to cleave ideas from the romantic framing of their consumption, but the truth glares forth from every treacly essay or TikTok slideshow glorifying the earnest protection of tender, formative, innocent self, the Jungian theater of ret-conned forgiveness—the girls want to discuss citizenry, the role of the state, the futility of moral authoritarianism.

“Girlhood” is a conversational scapegoat at best and a tide pool at worst—shallow, warm, and only fit to be studied by sticky-fingered children.

2. On Charli, Baby

Speaking of girlhood (lol), Charli XCX, a biracial British brunette in her early thirties, has officially elevated her brand beyond the gay club B-list with “Brat”, a hyperpop tour-de-force that soundtracks feminine interiority to the metallic grind of rave beats. The tight, honest concept album has a cyclical structure that revolves on the axis of her own gendered thesis statement—the hedonistic cyber-carnality of drop-out womanhood, replete with transness, insecurity, and existential malaise, can be gorgeous in its most abject state.

A Brat, in Charli’s articulation, is not a girl-boss, a grown-up, or a model citizen, but instead locates a flare for resistance in the maniacally singular pursuit of pleasure— escapist pleasure at that. A Brat, both a pejorative for a girl-child who demands too much and a BDSM term for a submissive who pokes her bear on purpose in order to solicit eroticized punishment, is not invested in the greater good. Political subversion is also not a Brat’s business. Instead, there’s a percolating taste for nihilistic non-participation, more Trainspotting than Taylor Swift, branded in the aesthetics of indie-sleaze, which tracks—from disco to David Guetta, dance-pop revivals are always tethered to recessionary economics. A Brat resists the milquetoast liberal histrionics of optic solidarity, too; maybe she hates other women, or finds them boring, or struggles to identify where “de-centering men” might land her in the entertainment rat race.

The ghost of Taylor Swift, or rather her tall, willowy silhouette, casts a cold shadow over “Brat’s” blaring neon glow. In “Sympathy is Like a Knife”, a relentless, pathetic spiral itemizing Charli’s struggles to socialize with an artist she envies, our antagonist makes naked her ambition to be the most appreciated woman in the room. “I couldn’t even beat her if I tried/ I’m opposite I’m on the other side”. It feels reductive or even sexist to compare the two musicians, but Charli invites the contrast, decorating her discontent with rumbling, pitchy autotune. Charli, too short, too ethnic, too underground for the much-coveted mainstream, is using the language of jealousy to insert herself into Taylor’s professional tier, one defined by its defensive normativity.

Charli is Other, and she knows it.

Still, it’s hard to avoid the similarities between Taylor and Charli, especially when it comes to interview footage or behind-the-scenes content. Despite carefully curated, front-facing gangs of famous female friends, all of their most important collaborators are white men (SOPHIE aside, obviously). Both of their discrete PR imprints are littered with imploded girl friendships, one of which Charli directly addressed on the “Girl, So Confusing” Remix with Lorde, minting the impeccable meme “let’s work it out on the remix”. Both Taylor and Charli, songwriters with incredible vision and middling vocal chops, engage in the meticulous cultivation of anti-aesthetics; the Brat uniform, by Charli’s own admission, is a "wife beater, a cigarette, and a bottle of vodka”. Taylor, on the other hand, prefers to disseminate the insane idea that billionaires willingly wear Aritzia—her self-conscious allegiance to all things “basic” makes her a convenient cypher for an ever-expanding camp of white, Abercrombie-shopping acolytes. If Taylor is “hotel bar”, Charli is basement set—different floors, same high rise.

Charli’s greatest lryical success on “Brat”, however, represents a plane Taylor refuses to visit—one where men remain in the background. “Brat”, while hardly lacking in references to her fiance, George Daniel of the 1975, or sonic contributions from various goofy-looking male producers, isn’t really about love—instead, it chronicles the real-life shit that happens after the happy ending culture tells women is essential to their identity construction. Instead, she wonders aloud over buzzing drums whether or not she should have a kid, she mythologizes the gamine “mean girl” club rat, she ruminates on generational trauma. Even a song like “Guess”, in which she entreats the listener to find out “what’s she got going on” in her underwear, is styled with such high-camp insouciance as to completely negate a sexual charge—if Charli does court a male gaze, it’s a gay male gaze, one that delights in the choreography of feminine presentation rather than the spoils of the heterosexual hunt.

“Brat”, in some ways, is a love letter to the club, that lush Jacobean forest where transformation is always just one bump or beat drop away. It’s only when the lights come on that paranoia strikes and the real world encroaches yet again.

(Author’s note: After seeing this, I bought the Byredo perfume she wears, and it’s 100% worth it.)

Thank you again for reading and subscribing!

-Baubo