READER DISCRETION ADVISED: I SAY “FUCKABLE” A LOT

Hi, I’m Lilith. If you’re a man, or anyone really, who shrivels up at the word vagina, perhaps this isn’t the article for you.

This is not a tasteful discussion of female beauty and standards of desirability. Booooooo. Go read an academic journal. This is about looking at yourself naked and thinking, Oh, Jesus Christ. Is that what we’re working with?

So if words like vagina make you uncomfortable, exit's over there. If female body hair sends you into cardiac arrest, Godspeed. If you think women discussing their bodies crudely is “unladylike,” I have absolutely devastating news about the remainder of this publication.

By the end of this, I’m hoping we can all be a little less fuckable together.

On Me, the Unfuckable Lady™:

If I could describe myself in one word, it would be repulsive.

I know. Repulsive is a little dramatic. Ugly would’ve done the job. Unattractive would’ve been more polite. But repulsive feels more accurate to how I grew up.

I’m actually pretty okay with my face currently. I can take a good picture. I know my angles. Put me in flattering lighting with a little makeup and, fuck it, I might even call myself pretty. But repulsive is an old word in my head.

Before I knew what sex appeal was, before I understood what the male gaze was, before I had the vocabulary to explain beauty standards or misogyny or any of the other big words, I understood something much simpler:

Boys did not want me.

There was no single afternoon where I looked into the mirror and screamed I’M UGLY! while mascara dramatically streamed down my cheeks. I just began to notice.

My hair, my smile, my nose.

Ohhhhh, the nose.

My nose became the enemy.

I hated it from the side. I hated it when I smiled. I hated the way it looked in photos. I hated catching it accidentally in mirrors. I hated other people’s noses for having the audacity to not look like mine.

So at sixteen, I got a nose job.

An age where I couldn’t legally buy a drink, rent a car, get into half the clubs I now go to, or confidently tell you what I wanted to do with the rest of my life — but apparently I had accumulated enough wisdom to conclude that this nose absolutely had to go.

And for a little while, I think some part of me genuinely believed I'd beaten the system. Congratulations! The face has been renovated. We can finally stop construction. Everybody pack up your shit, we're done here.

Eventually I grew up, grew into my face, learned how to do my hair, figured out makeup, developed a style, and arrived at the realization that I was no longer outrageously ugly.

I’m kinda cute. This should have been fantastic news.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten about the rest of my body.

My body has never been particularly interested in cooperating with whatever version of womanhood we're supposed to be doing right now.

I am not short and petite. My legs are big and muscular. My back is broad. I have body hair because, devastatingly, I am a mammal. And my chest has remained impressively committed to doing absolutely fucking nothing.

And this is where pretty and sexy started becoming two very different things in my head. Because eventually I could admit that my face was pretty. I could look in the mirror and see a girl who wasn’t half bad. But being pretty didn’t necessarily mean I felt sexually desirable.

I could be pretty with clothes on.

But underneath them was still the body I had spent years regarding as some embarrassing little secret. Like eventually someone would unwrap the packaging and realize they’d been scammed.

Great face! Cute outfit!

And underneath?

Oh. Ohhhhh.

That’s unfortunate.

I had effectively gone from worrying that my face was repulsive to worrying that I was a butterface’s lesser-known cousin: the butter body. Everything looks pretty good, but her body… yikes, sister.

And maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Actually, hey.

You.

Yes, bitch, you.

Are you Unfuckable™?

Take our convenient little quiz!

Is there some part of your perfectly ordinary female body you've been informed is simply devastating for the male libido?

• Maybe you've got a stomach. (Fucking horrifying.)

• Maybe your thighs touch each other. (Thoughts and prayers.)

• Maybe you've got cellulite, stretch marks, hip dips, rolls, scars, acne, arm hair, leg hair, pubic hair, back fat, a flat ass, saggy boobs, tiny boobs, huge boobs, boobs that point in whatever direction they damn well please.

• Maybe your nipples aren’t the right size.

• Maybe your hips aren’t wide enough. Maybe they’re too wide.

• Maybe you’re fat. Maybe you’re too skinny.

• Maybe you’ve even committed the grave offense of having genitals that look like...genitals.

Oh god.

Your labia don’t look like the ones in porn, queen?

Have you considered feeling fucking terrible about that?

I wish younger me burned my push-up bras in the backyard, stopped shaving my legs, drew FUCK THE MALE GAZE across my stomach in Sharpie, and liberated my sad little tits from the patriarchy.

Absolutely not. I wanted in. Oh my god, I wanted in sooooo badly. If fuckability was the game, I was going to play it.

Which brings me to perhaps the hardest-working soldier in my adolescent campaign for sex appeal: the Victoria’s Secret Add-2-Cups push-up bra. I wore the absolute shit out of those things.

Two additional cups? Fantastic. Make it four. Give me six. If God wasn’t going to give me tits, Victoria had my back.

Around eighteen, I decided bras were the enemy. They were uncomfortable. They were annoying. I barely filled the damn things correctly anyway. Why was I spending my entire day strapping two foam cups onto a chest that clearly had nothing there?

Fuck it. No more bras.

Free the nipple!

Female liberation!

Smash the patriarchy!

And yet, when I took the bra off, I also had to look at myself without it.

Without boobs to balance my body out, I became hyperaware of how wide my rib cage looked. How shirts fell straight down instead of catching somewhere around the chest. How certain dresses seemed designed around the assumption that there would eventually be a pair of tits arriving to fill out the top.

I couldn’t manufacture cleavage every morning and quietly pretend God had been a little more generous with me. You could see the broadness of my chest without two cute little boobs sitting there to soften it all up and make it read the way I wanted it to read: feminine, delicate, sexy.

Instead, I would stand shirtless in front of the mirror and think my torso looked unfinished. Like somebody had started making a woman and gotten distracted halfway through.

And that was the cruelest part of ditching the bra. It wasn’t really that other people could finally see my chest. It was that I could.

On You, and Finding Your Unfuckable Trait:

Hey, you.

Yeah you, you sexy little unfuckable thing. Come here. We’ve spent enough time talking about my body. This is getting narcissistic.

Woman, man, nonbinary person, whoever you are: welcome. I love you, my beautiful unfuckable people. Pull up a chair. This is a safe space for the chronically, tragically, beautifully Unfuckable™.

Now, tell me: what’s wrong with you?

No, seriously. What’s your thing?

Maybe you’re a woman with leg hair. Devastating. Maybe you’ve spent half your life dragging a razor from ankle to crotch. Maybe your mom handed you a razor. Maybe you stole hers. Maybe you nicked your ankle and bled all over the shower while performing your first sacred ritual of womanhood: removing evidence that you are a mammal.

Maybe hair isn’t your thing. Maybe you’re fat. Maybe you’ve got a lower belly. Maybe you’ve got back rolls. Maybe your arms jiggle. Maybe your thighs spread when they hit a chair. Maybe you’ve spent years sucking your stomach in so instinctively that you don’t even notice you’re doing it anymore.

Maybe it’s your boobs.

Maybe they’re huge. Maybe your nipples are larger than whatever nipples you decided women were supposed to have. Maybe they point outward. Maybe they point down. Maybe pregnancy changed them. Maybe weight loss changed them.

Maybe you spent your adolescence thinking, Well, at least men like big boobs, only to discover there is apparently a subsection of the internet prepared to inform women with big boobs that theirs are too saggy, too veiny, too low, too whatever-the-fuck.

And maybe you’re like me and there’s just…not much going on.

Hello! We’re family now.

You and I right now, totally.

Maybe every swimsuit with built-in cups feels like you’re not fit for it. Maybe you’ve learned which necklines create the suggestion of cleavage and which ones expose the horrifying truth that underneath your clothes there is simply a rib cage.

Maybe it’s your vulva.

Oh, yes. Apparently we’re reviewing that too.

Maybe you’ve stood naked in front of a mirror and wondered whether your genitals are pretty enough.

There is no part of a woman’s body too small, too private, too mundane, too completely irrelevant to escape evaluation. We will find it. We will invent an ideal version of it. And then, praise capitalism, somebody will eventually sell you something to fix yours.

And apparently, we really will buy it.

Beauty Standards Below the Belt:

Between 2012 and 2017, the number of labiaplasties performed in the United States increased by about 217%, according to statistics attributed to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. One review of those figures reports more than 10,000 procedures in 2017 alone.

We weren’t satisfied with making women insecure about the parts everybody could see. No, no. That was beginner shit. Face, stomach, thighs, tits, ass — we’d already covered those. Eventually the beauty standard had to crawl underneath our underwear and ask whether perhaps our labia could be hotter too.

Like, oh my godddddd.

Can a girl have anything?

Apparently, not even her fucking vagina.

And obviously, people seek labiaplasty for different reasons. For some, it addresses physical discomfort — irritation, tugging, pain with exercise or sex — not simply appearance. Research on patients seeking the surgery has documented those functional complaints alongside aesthetic concerns. I'm not particularly interested in sitting here and declaring which individual person's surgery is sufficiently feminist or medically justified. I would be a massive hypocrite anyway.

And I think this is where we have to talk about porn.

Because, respectfully, porn has rotted our brains.

Most of us grow up seeing thousands upon thousands of women's faces. We know noses come in different shapes. We know boobs come in different sizes. We know thighs can be thick or thin because we encounter different bodies simply by existing in public. Genitals are different. They're private. You're not exactly walking through Target getting a peek at the variation of everybody's vulva. So when porn becomes one of the few places where people repeatedly see naked bodies, those images can carry a ridiculous amount of authority over what we come to understand as normal.

Please, leave the poor vagina alone. She’s been through enough.

So, You’re Unfuckable. Now What?

Okay. By now, you’ve identified it.

Your Unfuckable Trait™.

Congratulations!!!!!

Now what?

Seriously. You’re unfuckable. Someone, somewhere doesn’t like your body. Maybe several people! Maybe there is an entire subreddit of people who would look at you and collectively decide nah. There are probably many people alive right now who would look at my flat chest and think it is the least sexually appealing thing imaginable.

Okay. They’re still my tits, sorry.

Shameless plug. Sorry!

They’ve survived every padded bra, every weird swimsuit cup, every dressing room meltdown, every moment I’ve stood sideways in the mirror wishing there was just a little bit more there. The poor things weren’t even doing anything wrong. They were just being my boobs.

And maybe that's where I'm starting to find something genuinely lovely about being unfuckable: the traits that fail to make us universally desirable are often the same traits that make us recognizably ourselves.

Because what happens if I finally correct every Unfuckable Trait™?

What if I get the implants? Narrow the waist. Remove every hair. Smooth every wrinkle before it arrives. Inject this, cut that, bleach something else. What happens when I’ve successfully removed every feature that might make somebody somewhere find me unattractive?

Do I win?

Does a little banner fall from the ceiling?

CONGRATULATIONS, BITCH! YOU ARE NOW UNIVERSALLY FUCKABLE!

Of course not.

There is no universally fuckable woman. She does not exist. We invented her, photoshopped her, surgically modified her, put her in porn, put her on our For You pages, and then collectively wondered why our actual human bodies don't look like her.

I’m currently trying to find the words for my main argument. About how you should learn to accept yourself, all that. And my brain has one main answer to that:

WHO CARES.

Oh my god, seriously? WHO CARES? I mean, I care, but also, I don’t care, at all! I wouldn’t care, if the world hadn't convinced me otherwise. I didn’t pop out of the womb and cringe because my body sucked.

Would I care if nobody had told me to?

Would I hate my chest if I had never learned what breasts were “supposed” to look like? Would you hate your stomach if you had never seen thousands of flattened, posed, edited stomachs presented as the default? Would you shave your legs if you’d never learned that female body hair was disgusting? Would you have ever inspected the symmetry of your fucking labia if nobody had suggested there was a preferable look?

Self-acceptance doesn’t have to mean looking in the mirror every morning and thinking, Holy FUCK, I am gorgeous. Look at this divine feminine vessel. Every roll is sacred. Every hair is beautiful. My cellulite is art.

Maybe it’s just: Whatever.

I think I've spent so much time trying to graduate from I hate my body into I love my body that I completely ignored the wonderful third option of I have other shit to worry about.

Nobody has to fuck you. You don’t have to grace the cover of Playboy. And thank god for that.

Hailey Bieber (adjective)

/hei-li bie-ber/

A term used to describe literally anything after Hailey Bieber has been seen within a five-foot radius of it. Once an ordinary object, it is immediately rebranded as cooler, cleaner, more expensive looking, and somehow a necessity.
“Did you see Hailey Bieber’s sushi recipe?”
“Yes girl. I’m literally making the ‘Hailey Bieber sushi’ tonight.”

Let me start off this article by saying I love Hailey Bieber. Not in the Pinterest aesthetic queen way, though God knows I also have that board saved, but in the way that a woman who has been victimized by her own skin problems can love another woman who seems to have solved skin as a concept entirely.

Rhode's Glazing Milk is the only thing that has kept my dry ass skin from crackling off of my face in the summer heat, and I'm grateful this is the product TikTok shoved down my throat. I've seen her in person at Coachella, standing several feet away from me while I tried very hard not to stare, and I can confirm: her skin really is that good in person. Her smoothie is my go to order at Erewhon, I have accepted the twenty one dollar (Jesus) price tag as a tax on my own susceptibility to marketing, and sue me I guess, because I will order it again tomorrow.

Yet I am, shockingly, not the only person on this earth who seems to like Hailey Bieber. It seems like just about everyone is trying to bottle her cool girl essence and spray it like a perfume. I get it. I am the target demographic for Hailey Bieber.

HB has helped pioneer, if not single handedly build, the "clean girl aesthetic": a look characterized by minimalism, and a hyper curated version of "effortless" that requires, ironically, an insane amount of effort. The “clean girl” prioritizes a disciplined kind of wellness that reads as dewy skin, slicked back hair, and a life that appears organized even if her car is a hot mess.

Mrs. Bieber is the one who made eating sushi in a face mask look so cool, who invented “pizza toast,” who gave us the iconic little lipstick holder built into the back of a phone case, and who made “glazed skin” into a goal that women are desperately chasing.

What makes Hailey Bieber a case study in marketing, and not just a very pretty girl with good genetics and good lighting, is that she stopped being a person who happens to be famous, and started being a brand. And she did that on purpose, with a level of precision that most marketing teams would absolutely kill to understand, and can't seem to replicate no matter how hard they try.

Every single thing about her, the slicked ponytail, the "glazed donut nails," became something other women actively wanted to become. And that, right there, is exactly why her company Rhode works as well as it does: she’s selling people a shortcut to being her.

The Algorithm of Cool

(Writer’s note: writing about the Hailey Bieber sushi face mask extravaganza influenced me to DoorDash sushi. It’ll be here in 30 minutes.)

There is a very modern phenomenon where a famous person does something completely unremarkable, and within a matter of hours, said unremarkable thing has been turned into a full blown cultural moment. Hailey Bieber might be the single best living example of how that mechanism works, because at this point it genuinely does not matter what she's doing, it only matters that she's the one doing it.

She does something small and low stakes, someone screen records it, and by the following week there's a TikTok trend, and usually a product tie in, which means the actual event of "Hailey Bieber did a thing" and the marketing campaign that follows it have become indistinguishable from each other in real time.

This isn't unique to her, because this is just how virality works now for anyone with enough cultural influence. What makes Hailey Bieber different is how consistently, and how fast, it happens to her specifically, like the algorithm decided she's a more efficient trend-generating machine than most of her peers.

Which brings us to the aforementioned sushi video. There wasn’t any product placement, just a woman eating dinner in a face mask minding her own business, and that complete absence of trying is exactly what made it blow up the way it did. The internet has been so hungrily aiming for the ideal of effortlessness that it will manufacture significance out of the most mundane footage available, so long as the right face is attached to it.

The face mask sushi industrial complex. What the hell, sure.

The clip turned into a wave of recreations almost immediately: girls filming themselves in the exact same mask, the exact same sushi, hoping that if they nailed the setup closely enough, some of whatever coolness she has might rub off on them through sheer proximity to the format.

“Trying to match Hailey Bieber’s aesthetic by wearing a face mask and eating sushi,” one girl captioned. “Hot girls know how to eat sushi in a face mask like Hailey Bieber,” another wrote.

And if you know anything about me from my previous work, you already know exactly where I'm about to go with this, because I have never once in my entire life been able to sit quietly through the internet's endless appetite for sorting women into a "hot girl does X" or "cool girl does Y" framework. Cough, hot girls hit curbs, cough, I’m just a girl, whatever — an entire genre where a category of womanhood gets condensed into one behavior, as if femininity were a checklist you could complete. (Shameless plug: I’ve already bitched about this in a previous article.)

What's actually happening isn't really about sushi, or face masks, or even about Hailey Bieber specifically, it's about the fact that an enormous number of young women have been algorithmically trained to understand their own womanhood through the lens of whichever trending figure currently holds the most cultural momentum. What’s trending has to double as proof that you belong to the “correct" subgroup of girl.

One Selfie is Worth a Thousand Commercials

Here’s where I get technical. Miss marketing major here to ruin the fun.

In May of 2025, e.l.f. Beauty announced it was acquiring Rhode in a deal valued at up to a full one billion dollars, structured as roughly eight hundred million dollars paid up front in a mix of cash and stock, plus an additional potential two hundred million dollar payout tied to how well the brand keeps performing over the following three years. A billion dollars, for a skincare brand that hadn't even hit its fourth birthday yet, in an industry that is famously saturated with awful celebrity vanity projects. Rhode went from literally nothing to over two hundred million dollars in direct-to-consumer net sales in under three years, using only about ten products total, with essentially one marketing asset carrying the entire operation: Hailey Bieber herself.

This acquisition tells you exactly what a "personal brand" is worth in the modern day; as part of the deal, Bieber stayed on as Rhode's chief creative officer and head of innovation. E.l.f. wasn't only buying the products, the formulas, the packaging, or even the loyal customer base that made the sales numbers possible in the first place, they were buying her. Her, as a marketing asset that has to keep showing up, keep posting, keep existing publicly, for the brand's value to hold steady over time. You cannot separate Hailey Bieber's face from the thing that made the deal worth a billion dollars, so the deal doesn't even try to separate them.

Rhode reportedly became the number one skincare brand in earned media value, which means organic, completely unpaid exposure: people talking about it, posting it, without a single dollar of ad spend making them do it. Rhode is a brand that has become so fused with one person's identity that attention just happens to it, constantly, for free. And that's the whole thing I keep trying to say in different ways throughout this entire article: you cannot buy earned media, no matter how big the checkbook is, you can only be the kind of person other people want to talk about without being paid to. And for brands, that particular skill is worth up to a billion dollars.

The Rhode Effect

So here's where I'm supposed to wrap this up with some line about media literacy and celebrity manipulation and how we should all log off and go touch grass, maybe throw in a stat or two to make my analysis seem professional. And look, I could do that. I have the vocabulary for it, I go to school for this, I could absolutely produce a very stuck up closing paragraph if that's what you wanted from me today. But if I'm being honest, I’m exactly the kind of person I'm currently critiquing, I’m exactly the kinda girl who leans into what’s trending, who cares about her own personal aesthetic of various navy blue and white clothing. I'm writing this with a twenty one dollar smoothie I bought on purpose, with Glazing Milk sitting on my bathroom counter, having read every single word of my own essay, agreed with every single word of my own essay, and still not wanting to stop consuming what’s currently cool.

I can explain, in detail, with sources and a marketing degree I'm currently paying an obscene amount of tuition for, exactly how a billion dollar acquisition happened because one very specific woman managed to turn her own face into a marketing department that never clocks out. Yet, the answer is pretty simple: cool girl does cool thing, the people yearn for coolness, they replicate said coolness. And the OG Cool Girl™ reaps the benefits.

The "clean girl aesthetic" was never really selling effortlessness, it was selling the fantasy that you could be the exception, the one girl who does it "naturally," who wakes up glazed and dewy and organized without trying, when the entire economy built around this exact aesthetic proves that nobody does it naturally, not even Hailey herself.

I don't think Hailey Bieber is a villain in any of this, if anything, it makes her one of the most competent brand strategists currently working in any industry. If there has to be a villain in this story, and I don't think there necessarily does, it's the machine underneath all of it, the one that decided a long time ago that "being looked at" is the most valuable currency a woman can generate. She just happened to be the one who figured out how to run it better, faster, and more profitably than literally anyone else currently alive.

So yeah. I love Hailey Bieber. I'm also fully aware that I've been marketed to repeatedly, successfully, and with my full consent. Sue me again I guess, one more time, for old times' sake.

Unless you were me, who did not have one as a child and instead waited until the console was culturally irrelevant, then purchased it with my own adult money twenty years after its release, hoping that playing Wii Sports would somehow heal my adolescent trauma. Spoiler: it did not.

And it was exactly as good as I imagined. Nothing hits quite like realizing your childhood dreams revolved around playing fake tennis alone in your bedroom instead of becoming an astronaut or something.

It was marketed as connection, which makes it feel completely opposite to basically every app sitting on your phone right now. Most of what we use is designed for you to be alone, even if it pretends it’s about connection and seeing what your friends post!

Wii Would Like to Play (2006), a Wii advertisement targeted towards families.

It also outsold its competitors by a stupid amount, selling over 100 million units in its lifespan, and easily demolishing the competing Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, who were fighting for the top spot of the seventh generation of consoles. (The Wii U, however, is a different story, a story which is a valuable lesson on how not to do marketing.)

As I thought about the Wii, I was forced to remember that there was, very briefly, an era where technology was actually designed to connect people. The 2000s internet wasn’t perfect, but it was, at the very least, trying to be social in a way that feels almost naive now. Like a Wii Sports bowling ball being chucked right at MySpace’s metaphorical head.

Platforms like Facebook and MySpace were built around interacting with people you actually knew. Facebook was originally designed as a place to stalk your classmates and bother people for no reason, now it’s a place where I watch my grandma fall for AI pictures of golden retrievers, and get friend requests from random distant relatives I didn’t know existed. MySpace let you customize your page with music and graphics that were honest to God an eyesore, and it felt more personal than anything we have now. It was like dumping your entire personality onto the internet and hoping someone gave a shit.

The Social Network (2010), a movie revolving around Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook.

There was always an element of wanting attention, obviously, because humans have been attention seeking since the beginning of time, but there was no real incentive to it. Nobody was getting paid to post, and no one was turning their daily life into monetizable content. As someone studying and working in marketing, I miss the days where you could just post whatever you wanted. Instead, my work has become content calendar planning and obsessing over getting the right shot. TikTok has become the new meta for advertising yourself, and unfortunately I have to bow down.

The internet once felt like a place you went to hang out, and that’s a luxury that the newer generations have lost entirely. There’s no more Club Penguin, or Neopets plushies in every store, or aesthetic Tumblr blogs, or flash games that give your family computer a virus.

And maybe that’s why looking back at something as stupid as a Wii felt so weirdly emotional for me, because it reminded me that technology didn’t always feel like this constant pressure to be interesting and likable. It used to be fun with no strings attached. Imagine that!

Where it Goes Wrong

Back in the day, internet virality used to get you on Ellen.

If something went viral, everybody knew about it. Charlie Bit My Finger, David After Dentist, Chocolate Rain, Nyan Cat, were things that everyone talked about. The people in the videos would end up on talk shows, or maybe even the news, getting asked what it was like to suddenly be famous because their little clip somehow became the thing everyone on earth was talking about. Charlie Bit My Finger alone has over 889 million views now, all for a less than one minute clip of what is, self explanatorily, a child getting his finger bit by his brother Charlie.

The internet felt smaller then, which meant virality felt bigger. When something took off, it was being shown to everyone. Now a TikTok can get two million likes and I’ll have no idea it even exists.

A video can pull numbers that would’ve made the internet collectively shit itself ten years ago, and now it just lives in some weird corner of TikTok. It’ll show up on your For You Page, you’ll laugh, maybe send it to a friend, scroll away, and then forget it ever existed. Everything is viral and nothing is viral.

We’ve replaced shared cultural moments with a constant stream of algorithmically delivered ultra-niche-micro-influencers that appear in your life for three days before being immediately replaced by someone else.

You weren’t optimizing everything for the algorithm because, quite frankly, most people had no fucking clue what an algorithm even was. You were just posting dumb videos and occasionally getting lucky. Nobody was spending hours researching the best posting time, or whether their content fit a specific niche.

We’ve truly lost the art of the finsta. Remember when celebrities would just post random, ugly pictures that didn’t match their feed aesthetic? Simpler times.

Ariana Grande’s Instagram, prior to when she wiped it.

Even platforms like Vine, which were built entirely around short-form content, didn’t initially operate on the belief that creators deserved to be paid. Which inevitably led to its crash and burn, considering those creators were basically carrying the entire app on their backs.

At the time though, the idea of being a “content creator” wasn’t really a thing yet. YouTubers were starting to become celebrities, and young kids were discovering that talking loudly into a webcam could somehow become a career. Kids inevitably went from wanting to be the president and doctors and instead wanted to become YouTubers. In a 2019 survey, nearly a third of kids (29%) want to be YouTubers when they grow up, whereas only 11% want to be astronauts. Furthermore, surveys from Morning Consult show that over half (57%) of Gen Z aspire to be some form of social media influencer.

Honestly, good for the influencers.

If someone is generating millions of views for your company, then yeah, they should probably get paid.

Because, shockingly, when you refuse to pay the people generating all your content, they leave. Which is exactly what happened to Vine. The app died, everyone moved somewhere else, and tech companies learned a very important lesson: if you want content, you need to incentivize it.

You don’t even need to actually pay people. Just dangling the possibility is enough. The possibility of a sponsorship, the possibility of free products, the possibility of quitting your job, the possibility of becoming somebody.

Posting stopped being about sharing your life and started being about building an audience. Congrats, you’re now a brand. Hope you like it!

When I post something now, there is always a tiny evil voice in the back of my head asking whether or not it will perform well. Whether the lighting is right, whether the hook is strong enough. Whether people will care. Even now, a voice tells me whether or not this article is even worth publishing, if no one will ever see it.

And I hate that little bitch, because that’s not how posting used to feel.

Going online to see what your friends were up to got replaced by doomscrolling through endless strangers you’ll never meet. And somehow, you know everything about them. You know what their apartment looks like, what they eat, their skincare routine, their boyfriend’s name.

And yet, if they disappeared tomorrow, you’d probably forget they ever existed by next week.

“Because they seem just like us, influencers don’t feel like media in the traditional sense. I got interested in the rise of the influencer as a figure unique to this particular information ecosystem, and in their role in shaping public opinion.”

— Renee DiResta, associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

The Death of the Community Internet

Somewhere between the fall of the Wii and TikTok turning everyone’s brain into soup, we quietly lost the version of the internet that was built around community.

It happened so slowly that nobody noticed until it was already dead. There wasn’t some dramatic moment where a guy in a suit walked into Club Penguin headquarters and shot it in the head. Nobody sent out a mass email saying, “Hey, the fun internet is dead. Sorry!”

Technology became more accessible, which should’ve made connection easier. That was the entire promise: better technology, more ways to communicate. Instead, everything became less personal.

When I was younger, going online felt like entering a place. You used your mom’s computer to log onto Club Penguin. You logged onto Tumblr and immediately got bullied by anonymous posters in your ask box. Then you logged off and went back to your actual life.

Now the internet follows you. It’s in your pocket when you wake up. It’s in the bathroom. It’s at dinner. It’s sitting next to you while you’re watching TV. Half the time I’m scrolling TikTok while another show is already playing in the background, because apparently one form of stimulation is no longer enough.

Still, we’re technically more connected than any generation before us. I can text somebody on the other side of the planet and get a response in five seconds. I can see what someone from my high school ate for breakfast this morning, despite not speaking to them since sophomore year.

And yet, I am somehow objectively worse at talking to my actual friends.

I have friends I genuinely love that have been sitting unanswered in my text messages for days. God knows I’m not busy enough to justify it, my phone is practically fused to my hand. Somehow I can spend forty minutes watching a woman reorganize her refrigerator into tiny acrylic containers, but responding “haha that’s crazy” to someone I care about feels like a chore.

You watched people get engaged, you watched people break up. You watched people move into new apartments, then reorganize it meticulously. You watched a woman cry because her husband forgot Valentine’s Day, and another woman cry because her husband remembered it but bought the wrong flowers. Peak entertainment.

Drew Gooden said it best in his video TikTok Hates Your Relationship — in which he talks about the phenomenon of posting your relationship for everyone to see. Silly jokes between healthy couples began to be flooded with comments psychoanalyzing their relationship.

Boyfriend buys you flowers? Post it and let thousands of strangers explain why he’s actually a narcissist.

Get a puppy? Post it and let somebody with an anime profile picture tell you that you chose the wrong name.

Go to dinner. Go on vacation. Buy a couch. Have a baby. Get bangs. Do it! Post it! Go fucking crazy, post it all!

You watched thousands of people live their lives, you just didn’t participate in any of it.

“Marketing researchers categorize influencers based on how many followers they have, and nano- and microinfluencers – defined as those with fewer than 10,000 and 100,000 followers, respectively – often generate stronger engagement than mega-influencers with more than 1 million. Influencers with smaller followings can interact with their communities more closely, making their endorsements feel more credible.”

— Why people trust influencers more than brands – and what that means for the future of marketing, an article from The Conversation.

The Wii Would Hate It Here

Not to keep going back to the Wii, but finally owning one as an adult feels like accidentally going back to a time when technology wasn’t trying to mentally destroy you, and realizing, oh, this is what our technological future was supposed to feel like. Frutiger Aero, and all that jazz.

The Wii required you to be physically present, and willing to look stupid in front of other people, which is basically the exact opposite of how we engage with technology now. These days, we’re all just desperately trying not to embarrass ourselves online, and being vulnerable and (dare I say it!) cringe is the last thing we want to do.

Owning a Wii now is basically digital time travel, back when tech felt shiny and full of hope instead of, you know, existentially exhausting. It just makes the current internet feel even more depressing, because wow, we really fell off.

The uncomfortable part is that this shift didn’t happen to us entirely against our will, because we participated in it, adapted to it, and, at times, actively benefited from it. We learned how to turn our lives into something consumable, and now it’s difficult to separate who we are from how we present.

And maybe that’s why it feels so nostalgic, not because it was perfect, but because it existed before everything started feeling like it was core to our daily lives. Back then, you didn’t need proof that you were having fun. You just had fucking fun.

Now, apparently, that’s not enough.

And that’s what something like the Wii accidentally exposes. Not just that older technology was simpler, or more “authentic,” but that it required a version of you that we don’t really practice anymore. A version of you that’s actually present, kind of cringe, and not being filmed for TikTok.

If we built this hellscape of an internet, we’re also the ones keeping it that way, even though we all know it kind of sucks. The internet changed, but we changed with it, and now the idea of going back — even to something as harmless as missing a virtual tennis ball in your living room — feels impossible.

Written by Anna Bogutskaya, the book explores some of the most memorable women in media, as well as the often visceral reactions audiences have toward them. The women who are a total nightmare to root for, but are a million times more interesting than the bland, respectable main characters we’re all supposed to like.

“Surely we shouldn’t demand these fictional women be aspirational, always, and all the time. Surely women onscreen can be bad people and good characters. Surely we’re beyond thinking of art as an instruction manual for living. And yet—we’re not.”

Nowadays, it’s difficult to watch a movie with a genuinely complicated female lead — albeit, if they even exist at all — without immediately encountering hundreds of reviews dissecting her behavior. A quick scroll through reviews of Gone Girl (2014) had me massaging my temples in annoyance.

“Every character in this movie is absolutely insufferable,” reads one review. “If someone asked me what I don’t want in a relationship, I’d just tell them to watch this movie.”

Under Heathers (1989), a film in which flawed teenagers commit multiple murders, another viewer writes:

“Everyone annoyed me, especially Veronica.”

I’ve seen similar reactions to Jennifer’s Body, Pearl, and about a dozen other films featuring women who are allowed to be something other than pleasant little angels.

You don’t have to like the main girl just because she’s complicated. The first time I watched Gone Girl, my reaction was closer to, "wow, this woman is completely fucking insane," as opposed to actually looking deeply into her.

Amy Dunne is supposed to be manipulative. Jennifer Check is supposed to be selfish. These characters aren’t failures because they possess unlikeable qualities. Their unlikeable qualities are often what makes them culturally iconic in the first place.

But apparently, for a lot of viewers, having an unlikeable main character is just too much for their fragile little brains. Somewhere along the way, the main character was unwillingly gifted the title of role model, even when that was never her job.

Jennifer Check in Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Murder, Cannibalism, and Other Female Hobbies

There was a period where women in film were allowed to be disastrously insane, as opposed to just omg haha she’s sooo crazy! And you were allowed to watch them, not agree with them, not relate to them, and still be completely obsessed with them.

One of my personal favorite examples — a movie that, quite frankly, did not get its flowers until years after its release — is Jennifer’s Body. The movie didn’t flop because it was bad, but because it was marketed terribly. (Leave it to the marketing major to review every single marketing decision made for movies.) It was packaged and sold to straight men as this cheap “Megan Fox is hot” film, which not only misrepresented the film entirely, but also alienated the exact audience it was actually meant for. Eventually, the movie was picked up years later, by feminists and queer women who enjoyed the definitely-crazy-definitely-bisexual main character.

Happy pride to her!

The movie follows Jennifer Check: the beautiful, popular high school girl everyone is obsessed with, and her best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried), who exists in her shadow. After getting caught up in a local band’s ritualistic sacrifice (as one does), Jennifer becomes possessed by a demon. And in order to survive, she begins seducing and eating teenage boys.

Jennifer is not a good person. She’s selfish, manipulative, vain, cruel. But she’s also a victim. The ritual that transforms her is essentially an act of sexual violence, and the film makes it very clear that what happens to her is not her choice. That duality of being both victim and villain is what makes her interesting.

But a lot of male audiences couldn’t grasp that. They couldn’t accept the version of Megan Fox they were sold — a sex symbol, a fantasy — with the version of her the movie actually presented. And that’s where the movie lost people.

Going back to Heathers, it was one of the first films aimed at teenagers that actually looked deep into the ugly parts of high school culture instead of just romanticizing it. It takes the whole “popular girl hierarchy” and pushes it to a place that’s genuinely dark. There are three mean girls, all named, you guessed it: Heather — and Veronica, the new addition.

But unlike Mean Girls (2004) or movies that came after it, Heathers doesn’t stop at social humiliation or petty revenge. Teenagers aren’t only mean to each other, they kill each other. Teenagers aren’t supposed to die in teen movies, and they’re definitely not supposed to be the ones doing the killing.

Not a single character (aside from sweet Martha) is likeable. JD is a complete psychopath. Heather Chandler is a raging bitch. Veronica, our main character, is not some morally good woman caught up in a bad situation. She’s unlikeable as a female protagonist, which feels weirdly rare.

“Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count.”

— Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder).

Heathers isn’t a story interested in teaching you a lesson. There’s no neat resolution where everything is wrapped up in a little bow and everyone learns something valuable about friendship and comes together for a big hug. People die. The school is a complete dumpster fire. Veronica is still an accessory to murder. And that’s part of its charm.

Female characters in these films are allowed to exist free from the pressure of being good. They don’t have to be nice role models who make the “right” choices. They’re allowed to be messy, complicated, angry, selfish, vulnerable, contradictory, and, above all, human.

The Skyler White Problem

“I can’t go to the police, I can’t stop laundering your money, I can’t keep you out of the house, I can’t even keep you out of my bed.”

— Skyler White (Anna Gunn) in Breaking Bad (2008)

Modern audiences have started to consume media through the lens of morality, whether they realize it or not. Instead of asking if something is interesting, or well written, or emotionally compelling, the conversation shifts almost immediately to whether or not the main character (especially if she’s a woman) is morally correct. It’s no longer “was this a good story?”, but “was she a good person?”

And historically, male characters have been given far more room to exist outside of that question. Breaking Bad is probably the most glaring example of this.

Walter White is a horrible person. He makes meth, endangers his family, lies constantly, manipulates everyone around him. He sexually assaults his wife, becomes increasingly violent, increasingly reckless, and increasingly unrecognizable from the man he once was. And yet, he is not the character audiences hate, he’s the character they root for.

The audience appointed villain is his wife.

Skyler White, who reacts quite reasonably to her husband’s actions, is positioned as the evil obstacle to her husband’s drug empire. She’s not the one cooking meth, yet she’s the one people can’t stand.

Part of what makes Breaking Bad so good is exactly that. The writers are able to get us to root for someone who is, by every standard, morally terrible. There’s a reason the show is so beloved, it’s genuinely well written.

But at the same time, there’s an irony there that’s hard to ignore. Why is it that I can watch Walter lie, manipulate, endanger his family, and destroy everything around him, and still find myself on his side — but the second Skyler pushes back, the second she refuses to comply, she becomes unbearable? Why is her reaction to his behavior more offensive than the behavior itself?

Despite aiding Walter in his meth making, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) was a fan favorite, for his good heart and demeanor. Walt’s brother-in law, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), a DEA agent who often abused his power, was predominantly viewed as a righteous and self-sacrificing family man. And yet, Skyler is seen as the true villain, despite being crushed by Walt’s criminal activities, and desperate to protect their children.

Walter White in Breaking Bad (2008)

Anna Gunn, the actress who played Skyler, received death threats and hate mail for the role, because audiences couldn’t separate the character from the person. Memes circulated that read, “Skyler is my favorite Breaking Bad character — said no one ever,” or even, “Why the fuck does no one kill this bitch?”

“I feel like I came to understand what it was, which was just the undercurrent of extreme sexism. The idea of gender roles being so deeply ingrained — it was shocking to me.”

— Anna Gunn

Before Skyler ever becomes Walter’s reluctant accomplice, he lies to her, threatens her, breaks into their home after she’s kicked him out, and, at one point, kidnaps their infant daughter in order to force her back into the relationship. And yet, somehow, she is still expected to be patient. Understanding. Supportive. Grateful.

“She was seen as an impediment to his plans and ungrateful for everything he was doing (ostensibly) for their family, simultaneously a killjoy for Walt’s meth-dealing shenanigans and a hypocrite for helping him be better at his meth-dealing shenanigans. Skyler White was a do-gooder and wrongdoer, somehow at the same time.”

— Bogutskaya, Unlikeable Female Characters

Nobody watched Breaking Bad expecting Walter to be a good person. And yet, the burden of goodness is placed almost entirely on the woman.

She must be a compliant wife, a good mother, and she must do all of this while her husband slowly dismantles their entire life. Women in fiction are expected to hold everything together. Men in fiction are allowed to fall apart.

Women must earn complexity. Men are simply granted it.

The Acceptable Woman

Meet the modern female protagonist.

She’s independent, but not so independent that anyone might actually feel threatened. She’s got goals, but God forbid she ever seem too sure of herself, because then she’s “arrogant.” She’s ambitious, but not in a way that would ever make you clutch your pearls. She wants things, but not enough to risk being called unlikeable.

She is carefully designed to be admired.

And obviously, she’s got a backstory. But not one that actually makes her complicated, just enough to give her a little flavor. Maybe she has childhood trauma, or had a distant parent. Maybe she dated a guy who completely fucked her over and now she “has walls.” Whatever it is, it exists for one reason: to reassure you.

So if she screws up, it’s not really her fault, right? If she hurts someone, don’t worry, there’s a perfectly good reason. Her flaws create the illusion of imperfection without ever forcing the audience to confront anything ugly. Because God forbid she’s actually unpleasant, yikes.

Modern audiences love to say they want complex female characters. They want messy women, flawed women, the worst women you’ve got, please. But that desire merely extends so far. It’s conditional.

Viewers are perfectly happy to accept a woman who is messy, as long as her messiness can be explained. The second a female character becomes irrational without an obvious reason, something changes. Suddenly, she’s not complex, she’s just unbearable.

“Everyone knows that 'complicated' is a code word for bitch.”

— Margo Dunne, Gone Girl (2014)

If a woman is actually, truly unlikeable, suddenly she’s failed at being a woman. Therefore, the narrative feels the need to put her back in her place. To punish her, humble her, to teach her something. Gotta keep her in line.

Which is ironic, because we’re all supposed to be living in this era of genuineness and individuality. Writers have more freedom than ever, more platforms, more everything, and yet all these female leads are starting to blur together.

Compare that to characters like Amy Dunne, Jennifer Check, or Veronica Sawyer. These girls aren’t here to be your role models, and they don’t care. They make decisions that are intentionally hard to watch, and you still can’t look away.

You’re not supposed to watch them and think, “wow, I want to be her.” You’re supposed to be like, “what the actual fuck is wrong with her?” And that’s what makes them interesting. These characters are allowed to exist without constantly reassuring you that they’re still good underneath it all.

Writers know the drill. They’ve seen the backlash, the discourse, the way a single unlikeable trait can derail an entire character’s likeability. So they anticipate it. They soften things, and justify more. And in trying so hard to avoid criticism, a lot of stories end up stripping away the very things that make characters feel real.

Mean Girls (2004)

Let Girls Be Messy

Rewatching movies where the main girl is unapologetically unhinged has made me realize how much I actually miss it. And it’s not that I don’t like “good” female characters, I love them, actually. I absolutely adore Legally Blonde (cough, check my profile picture), and Elle Woods is the kind of character that truly is aspirational. She works her ass off, proves everyone wrong, and somehow never loses herself. I believe that the movie should be mandated viewing for young girls, just so they have someone that they should strive to be.

But not every woman in a story needs to be Elle Woods.

Not every character needs to be someone you want to become. And the more I go back and watch movies where the main girl is allowed to be irrational, or just genuinely hard to deal with, the more obvious it becomes how rare that feels now. When did we decide every female lead had to be so damn likable?

Perfect women, unless executed with the kind of care that requires an actually good writer, are forgettable. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the female lead in half the mediocre movies I’ve watched in the past five years. She was there. She was fine. She was Pretty and Smart and Kind. Cool. Moving on. If your movie is already mid, your squeaky clean female lead isn’t saving it.

In one of my favorite and least favorite movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) — heavy emphasis on the 2010, not 1984 — the protagonist was ungodly forgettable. Nancy Holbrook, played by Rooney Mara (who I already have my opinions on), is flat, uninteresting, and was positioned to us as the artsy perfect type, so original. She was so unmemorable and uninteresting, that the male side character received more attention than her. (Who happens to be played by Kyle Gallner, also found in Jennifer’s Body.)

“I feel like making Quentin the solo [main character] would’ve been better than this version of Nancy, who is easily the worst final girls I can think of,” read one Letterboxd review.

Nobody remembers the Nancy Holbrooks of the world. We remember the crazy girls.

We remember Jennifer Check dragging boys into the woods to eat them alive. We remember Heather Chandler making everyone’s lives a living hell. Those girls felt like real, terrible people, good for them! The obsession with making female leads likable and aspirational has made them completely unreal.

Let women be absolute disasters again! Let them be mean to people who probably didn’t deserve it, let them make choices you cannot defend no matter how hard you try. The second a female character does something truly wild and the movie just lets it happen without punishing her for it, is when she becomes someone you think about after. A character you can’t fully justify is a character you cannot forget, and at some point we have to ask why we’re so scared of that.

Being a young girl right after the fall of the Victoria’s Secret Angel craze and into the Kylie Jenner Instagram era meant my self-perception absolutely plummeted into the gutter by age eleven, fully ate shit, and never recovered.

I knew enough about myself to understand I was unattractive, at least by the standards that seemed to matter. I had a big nose, curse my Greek genes, and there was no version of reality where that nose was going to be described as “button-like” or “delicate.” I had big thighs, love handles, a plumpness to me that felt like hell when your mom is a raging orthorexic, the kind who says “suck in your stomach” as gently as she can, but often enough that it rewires your brain just a little. My hair was brown and curly, which in middle school might as well have been a crime. Girls with straight hair would ask if I even brushed it, not realizing the frizz was because I was brushing it, because nobody had ever told me curls were something you were allowed to keep. I had no idea how to maintain it, so I didn’t. I was flat-chested, still am, and I was not, and have never been, a “sex symbol” — which is a crazy thing to be thinking about at twelve, but whatever.

Now, as an adult, I am blonde, with pin-straight hair. The hair is fake. The extensions cost more than I, as a human being, am morally worth. My nose is fake and has been since I was sixteen. It’s slightly upturned, though not enough, which is the problem with these things — they are never enough. A revision rhinoplasty sits quietly on my to do list like a doctor’s appointment I keep rescheduling, something unavoidable but inconvenient. I started Botox at seventeen, which is objectively insane, and yet felt completely reasonable at the time because everyone online was acting like if you didn’t start early, you would wake up at twenty five looking like a shriveled up raisin. I cannot lift my eyebrows properly anymore. This is apparently the price of prevention, which, by the way, preventative Botox is mostly a myth, but it sounds better than admitting I voluntarily paralyzed parts of my face before I could legally drink. It also gives me a permanently frozen resting bitch face, oops.

I look back at photos of my younger self and feel like I’m looking at a weird distant little cousin I don’t really like, but feel obligated to be polite to at family reunions. Nobody recognizes me. I don’t recognize myself. There is no connection between that girl and myself past ripe adolescent trauma and a similar bone structure that I have been methodically attempting to change.

I became thin in college the way girls sometimes do, which is to say not through discipline or hard work or anything admirable, but by looking too hard at other girls and simply deciding that hunger was easier than existing in a body I didn’t like. It was just smaller portions, skipped meals, and deciding whether or not I should buy breakfast or a new pack of smokes. (I quit, by the way. Another $10 into the piggy bank, yay.)

And really, there’s something deeply uncanny about looking in the mirror and not recognizing who’s looking back at you. There’s something sad about being nineteen and needing money not for food, but for facial maintenance and cigarettes. There’s something odd about having fake teeth, fake hair, fake nose, fake nails, fake eyelashes. At what point do I stop being real at all?

And at what point do I have to admit that I don’t actually know what I look like anymore?

Self Image, Body Horror, and The Cinema

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself.

This is the Substance.

— The Substance (2024)

In media, there’s this unique angle on turning women’s socially engineered insecurities into full blown body horror.

The Substance (2024) is a more recent example of this, a technically satirical film that received high acclaim from critics and teenage girls alike. A woman, played by Demi Moore, is aging out of relevance (which, for a woman, is a fate worse than death), and chooses to take a drug that literally splits her into a younger, hotter, and more “acceptable” version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley.

And as absurd as it is, your brain accepts the premise pretty quickly. For a brief moment, you’re like, wow, that’s crazy, who would ever do that. Then, the absurdity clicks in you: yeah, okay, I see the logic, honestly I’ve considered worse. Which is not a great reaction to have to a horrifying “miracle drug,” but here we are. The Substance is so horrifying because the core concept — that there is a better version of you somewhere just out of reach — is something most women have already internalized.

Demi Moore in The Substance, about to witness The Horrors™

The real kicker of it all is that this belief is not portrayed as delusional. It’s portrayed as the answer to a devastating problem, the exit door to a locked room. What truly makes The Substance disturbing is not the gore, or the shock value, or even the whole body horror angle, it’s the fact that nothing about the movie feels unfamiliar for most women. Whether you’re Demi Moore, clinging onto relevancy via horrifying Miracle Drug™, or an 11-year-old girl pinching your stomach in the mirror, the horror of hating yourself hits a particularly sensitive spot in our hearts.

Nobody cares for you anymore. You're tarnished and you're filthy.

— Perfect Blue (1997)

And then there’s Perfect Blue (1997), which has been sitting cozy and snug in my Letterboxd favorite films list for years now. (Satoshi Kon, your work never fails to both disturb me and absolutely enrapture me. Rest in peace to a legend.) Like The Substance, Perfect Blue is not about plastic surgery at all, and yet feels perfectly relevant to the conversation around not knowing oneself. It follows a pop idol who transitions into acting, and slowly begins to lose her grip on reality as her image becomes something that other people interpret, consume, and reshape.

While the movie is perfectly and wonderfully done, the true horror of it is the feeling that her identity is no longer something she owns, it’s something that is constantly being negotiated between her, the people watching her, and the version of her that exists in their heads. Perfect Blue makes you start to realize that how you look is not only about how you see yourself, it’s about how you are seen, and in many cases, the second one matters more — whether you like it or not.

Mima Kirigoe (Junko Iwao) in Perfect Blue

There’s something extremely uncomfortable about realizing that your face is not just your face. It’s something that gets evaluated, interpreted, ranked, improved upon, sometimes without your consent, and sometimes very much with it.

The key tie between these films is that they are not the horror-themed exaggerations they’re initially positioned as. Rather, they feel less like fiction and more like a slap in the face. We grew up watching women be edited, and quietly “fixed,” and the saddest part is that it was just presented as normal, like these women simply woke up one day with better bone structure than us peasants and we were all supposed to just accept that it was our fault for being ugly.

Nobody wakes up one morning and thinks, wow, I would love to go under anesthesia and have someone restructure my face for fun. That is not how this starts, even for people who end up doing exactly that. It sure as hell didn’t for me, I hate the doctor’s office, even as an adult. You don’t start with the surgery, you start with the image. You start with the girl on your screen, in magazines, who looks effortless in a way that feels soul crushingly unfair, and you think, I want to look like that, and everything else comes later.

Surgery is not the desire. It’s just the method that eventually makes the desire feel achievable. It’s a lot easier to say this was my choice than it is to say I learned to want this. And by the time you begin to recognize that distinction, to sit there and think, oh, maybe this wasn’t entirely my idea, it’s already too late, because the idea that you could be improved has already settled in your mind. Like a thought that was always yours from the start.

I don't know anything about myself anymore!

— Perfect Blue (1997)

The Illusion of Choice

The most convenient argument in favor of plastic surgery is autonomy, which is great, because it’s also the one that requires the least amount of thinking.

My body, my choice. I chose this. Nobody forced me. Nobody dragged me into a surgeon’s office kicking and screaming. I booked the consultation myself. I sat in the chair. I nodded while a man with a perfect hairline and perfect teeth tore apart my face, unlocked new insecurities I didn’t even know I had. I signed the forms. I paid the bill. I even said thank you.

And at first glance, that argument works. It’s empowering, so yass, girlboss, do what you want, queen. It’s honestly a very seductive narrative when the alternative is admitting you might not be as in control of your own body as you think you are.

Could it be that celebrities themselves are struggling with meeting the very standards they play a role in establishing? (Kylie once said, “I had beautiful breasts […] and I just wish I never got them done.”) We “ordinary” onlookers are clearly conflicted, too. We admire those who opt out of playing the game, while still seeking to emulate those who are at the top of it.

— Claire Cohen, British Vogue, Does This New Candour Around Cosmetic Surgery Represent A Win For Women?

A choice can be voluntary and still be influenced, and a decision can feel personal while still being formed by external influences that you did not consciously agree to. The whole I chose this defense feels a little less slay girlboss than we would all like it to be. It’s like saying you chose to be insecure, which is technically possible, but also not how that actually works in practice.

Like I said, nobody sat me down and said, hey, you should probably hate your nose, it would be really great for plastic surgeons everywhere if you did that. It just sort of happened. It built over time through a million tiny moments that, on their own, did not seem like a big deal, but together created a very clear picture of what I was supposed to look like, and how far away I was from that.

People love acting like plastic surgery is some kind of moral failure, but usually only if they haven’t had it themselves. She’s so unnatural, so fake, unlike me! I’m natural, and better than you, you insecure woman. But tragically, we live in a world where beauty has measurable economic value, where being attractive changes how you are treated. Going from being ugly to fitting a societal standard made me realize damn, it’s great on the other side.

People are nicer to you. They listen to you more. They assume you are more interesting, more worth their time.

There are entire industries built on you feeling just bad enough about yourself to keep spending money to change it, but not bad enough to completely give up. Like edging, but less sexy, because it’s edging your self-esteem.

You are not ugly. Yes, you, the reader, are not ugly. You are just standing next to people who had the money to change, to fit a constantly changing standard.

And I think, on some level, I will probably always resent the fact that I was not born the right kind of pretty, effortlessly pretty. Effortless pretty is the kind of pretty that doesn’t require maintenance, the kind that doesn’t require appointments or budgeting or mentally scheduling your face six months in advance. It’s the kind that gets to feel natural because it is.

It’s the blonde cheerleader type of girl, the girl who dates the football player and wins prom queen, the girl who exists in teen movies as the charming female lead, or quirky best friend. I was not that girl, and I knew that very early on I never would be. Some girls are the after in a before and after photo. Some girls are the before. And if you are the before, there is an expectation that you will do something about it.

basically what i’m trying to convey

Where Does this End?

I don’t regret anything I’ve done, call me a hypocrite. I am not particularly interested in pretending otherwise for the sake of a nice conclusion, like a kids show where all the problems get solved, and everyone’s happy, and learned a valuable life lesson!

Some of it did make my life easier, in a way that is embarrassingly superficial. Some of it did make me more confident, in a way where you can feel the shift in how people respond to you almost immediately. There is a sick thrill in knowing you look good, not because you’ve accepted yourself or whatever, but because you have successfully paid to align yourself with a standard that people recognize and reward without even thinking about it.

As I said, I’d be hypocritical to say plastic surgery is awful, while also turning around and saying beauty standards are real and they’re oppressive AF. It’s very difficult to take a strong moral stance against something you are actively benefiting from, especially when those benefits are reinforced every time someone looks at you a certain way or treats you just a little bit better than they would have before.

I can sit here and talk on and on about exploitation of women’s insecurities and social pressure as if I’m writing a bad paper for my English class, but at the end of the day, I am still the one who made the appointments, still the one who said yes, still the one who looked at my own face and decided it could be improved with enough time, money, and willingness to not think too hard about it.

I can’t fully defend my choices, no matter how many times I run through the my body, my choice argument in my head. I did choose this, in the sense that I actively made decisions that led me here, but I am still not entirely sure it was ever fully my idea. The version of me who bit the bullet, at 16-years-old, was influenced by insecurity that tore me out from the inside.

So yes, I chose this, but I chose it in a world that made that choice feel inevitable, which is not the same thing as freedom no matter how many times you rephrase it to sound empowering.

And the problem is, once you start changing yourself, it becomes very difficult to figure out where to stop. Changing yourself stops feeling like a minor transformation and starts feeling like maintenance, something you would be irresponsible not to continue, like it’s on the same level as performing well at your job or studying for your exams. And the shift from transformation to maintenance is where it gets dangerous, because maintenance is ongoing by definition.

You’re not entirely sure what the end goal is supposed to be, or if there even is one, because if the goal is just to be better, then that goal is inherently unstable. The goalpost moves faster than you can keep up with it, and you are left trying to chase something that was never designed to be reached in the first place.

The question is not just where do you stop, but who, exactly, are you trying to become when you do all of this?

Anyways, this article did lead me to rewatch Perfect Blue, which I was very happy about. You should watch it too. Not because it will fix anything, but because it is good. If you take nothing away from this article, at least take my movie recommendations.

“I'm just a girl in the world,
That's all that you'll let me be.” — No Doubt, “Just a Girl”

I have been using TikTok for an embarrassing amount of time. And yet, it never fails to find new ways to make me feel insane.

The “I’m just a girl” audio plays over a girl explaining that she cannot be expected to know how car insurance works. Another one states that she simply cannot be held responsible for whatever bad financial decision she just made, because, well, she’s just a girl.

The comments were not concerned. In fact, the comments were delighted. Women tagging their friends. This is literally us. The algorithm took notes, handed me another one before I could finish forming my own opinion on the first one.

And I have to be honest, I laughed. I sent one to a friend with zero commentary, because none was needed. I have, at various points in my life, been just a girl.

I put my phone down, and the feeling that followed wasn’t quite guilt for what a bad feminist I was for laughing. Instead, it was the realization that I had just spent time doomscrolling through jokes designed to demean me. That the punchline in every single one of those videos was the same: women can’t drive, can’t think for themselves, can’t understand anything difficult, can’t be trusted with anything requiring more than two consecutive thoughts.

What I had been watching was a collective self-humiliation ritual. We, as women, made this joke. Women enthusiastically offered themselves up as the punchline, and rewrote stereotypes as self-aware humor and feminist liberation, to the point that questioning them feels, somehow, like the unfeminist move. Like you’re the one who missed the point.

The joke initially was supposed to be that these stereotypes were absurd. Yet somewhere between the girl dinners and the hundredth video of a woman pretending she cannot be trusted with a steering wheel, the irony was lost.

"There's no hope for women, there's no hope for women, there's no hope for women.” — Fiona Apple, 1997

A brief history of playing dumb

As I briefly mentioned, at one point, I was fully in on this trend. I have made jokes about my driving, that I simply do not understand how taxes work. I enjoy shopping a little too much and spending my money on stupid things. I really am just a girl!

And I wish I could say I never found it even slightly humorous, because it’s easier to establish yourself as the one who always knew better. I thought it was funny because it was funny. There’s something genuinely relieving about opting out of the pressure of having everything together all the time, even for thirty seconds on a TikTok.

I’m not here to pretend the appeal isn’t real. It is.

The difficult part of it all is that none of the women making this content are sitting down and thinking Today, I will reinforce a harmful stereotype. It’s silly. It’s a bit. There are no malicious intentions, no agenda. Just women making each other laugh for a second, before moving on to the next post.

The problem isn’t the intention, but rather that cute phrasing doesn’t change what’s actually there. Women can’t drive. Women don’t understand money. Call me a buzzkill, but really, what exactly is funny here? What is the joke?

But what interests me more than the joke itself is why it spread the way it did. Why did self deprecation become the main way women online started bonding with each other? Because this is, in some weird screwed up way, bonding. Women finding each other in the comments, feeling less alone in their assumed inadequacies. And there’s something genuinely sad about that when you look at it directly, that the fastest way to build community was to collectively agree that we are a little bit incompetent.

Bimbo, rebranded

The word “bimbo” was never a compliment. Historically, calling a woman a bimbo was not a neutral observation. She’s attractive, therefore she’s stupid, therefore she doesn’t matter. Or bluntly, the world viewed so called bimbos as “dumb sluts.”

At some point between 2020 and now, being a bimbo became a political statement.

That’s genuinely what the argument was, for whatever reason. Bimbo feminism tried to position the reclamation of the word into unapologetic femininity. The idea being that a world which demanded women be exhaustingly competent could be subverted by a woman who acted a little airheaded, and completely uninterested in meeting societal standards.

The part of bimbo feminism that was genuinely interesting was the rejection of the idea that women have to meet the world’s expectations to be “worthy.” Expectations that state attractiveness and a love of pink things make you inherently lesser, and pushing back on that is fair.

But.

There is a difference between rejecting impossible standards and defining stupidity and “bimboism” as a personality. Between saying I refuse to be defined by how useful I am and saying I don’t know how anything works and isn’t that cute.

Which is where it gets ethically complicated. If a woman consciously, freely chooses to utilize incompetence as a personality, is it anyone’s place to tell her she’s wrong? There’s a version of this conversation that reflects on exactly that: a woman being told by other women that she’s doing feminism incorrectly.

Yet, I don’t love that side of this conversation. The world didn’t hand us bimbo feminism because it wanted us free.

It handed it to us because a woman who is busy laughing at her own incompetence has already done the work of dismissing herself, nobody else has to.

The gift of incompetence

Let’s actually look at what we’re working with.

Girl dinner is a plate of random snacks made with the vibe of someone who has fully given up on making a full meal. Hot girls hit curbs defines driving incompetence as something silly and trivial. And, of course, “I’m just a girl”, in reference to the No Doubt song of the same name, is the get out of jail free card.

Individually, some of these are harmless. A woman eating crackers and cheese for dinner is not spreading some anti feminist rhetoric. A woman who has hit a curb is simply, a woman who has hit a curb. Lord knows I’ve hit a few curbs in my lifetime (and maybe a parked car, in my high school days). But we need to look at what they share.

Every single one of these trends takes an ordinary human failing — bad eating habits, bad driving, questionable financial decisions — and reframes it as specifically and essentially female. Not I spent too much money, but girl math. Not I’m tired and don’t want to cook, but girl dinner. What it’s doing is taking universal human experiences and defining them as female inadequacy, then making that inadequacy cute enough to go viral. The implication is that being a girl means being a little bad at things, a little less capable.

Yet, none of these women spreading this rhetoric are villains. The woman posting her girl dinner isn’t trying to set back the feminist movement through nibbling on her Cheez-its. She’s tired and she wants to eat snacks for dinner, and she found a community of women who get it.

But innocent intentions do not cancel out consequences. Weaponized incompetence has existed long before TikTok named it, such as the videos of girls staying in the car for 8 hours while their boyfriends work, which I still cannot fathom. Or referring to any store with tools or car parts as a “blue store,” and stores she likes as a “pink store.”

The real problem is the “cuteification” of it. The transformation of I don’t do that into isn’t it cute that I don’t do that, isn’t it feminine, isn’t it charming, don’t you want to take care of me, since I can’t take care of myself. Dumbing yourself down for laughs costs you a sense of self that exists independently of whoever is currently taking over the issues you’ve decided are simply not your problem.

Your TikTok is a representation of your character. And it is also someone’s teenage daughter’s for you page.

The thirteen year old watching does not have the context to understand the irony, if there even is irony anymore. And content that tells her that being bad at things is cute and feminine and will make her likeable, is going to do something to how she understands herself, whether anyone meant it to or not.

This article is not an argument for taking everything seriously all the time. It’s not a call to abolish girl math or eat a real dinner or stop making jokes about your driving. I am not the fun police, as much as I do love to complain. Community is real, and there’s something nice about finding women who get you. I’m not asking anyone to give that up.

But really, is this so called reclamation of harmful stereotypes actually ours? Does appealing to negative views on our gender serve us?

I know damn well that individual women are not responsible for dismantling patriarchal systems they didn’t build. Yet, someone has to keep noticing those systems exist.

Is the joke still serving you? Or have you been serving it by making yourself the punchline?

I don’t know what the answer looks like for you. Hell, I barely know what it looks like for myself. But I like to think about the women who came before us: the ones who were told they weren’t capable of equal pay, women who fought for the right to vote. The ones who spent their lives proving that femininity and competence were not mutually exclusive, that you could be a woman and still be taken seriously.

And I wonder what they would make of us. Whether they’d get the joke, or whether they’d find it odd that we got some rights and then reverted back to the stereotypes.

The thing is, nobody is coming to take the bit away from you. Despite the fact I spent around 1.8k words bitching about it, I’m not here to preach and call you horrible for reposting these videos. After all, TikTok will keep serving you the content, and the algorithm will keep learning what makes you watch longer.

But you are allowed to be soft and unbothered, and also completely capable of understanding your own finances. You are allowed to be just a girl and also just a person, who is competent and occasionally bad at parking.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You can go back to scrolling now.