internet princess famously tells us in her post titled standing on the shoulders of complex female characters:
it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of the things they consume, or aspire to consume — and because young women are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined almost entirely by their neuroses, these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public. one girl on your tiktok feed might be a self-described joan didion/eve babitz/marlboro reds/straight-cut levis/fleabag girl (this means she has depression). another will call herself a babydoll dress/sylvia plath/red scare/miu miu/lana del rey girl (eating disorder), or a green juice/claw clip/emma chamberlain/yoga mat/podcast girl (different eating disorder). the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.
Can I suggest a twist to the final sentence? I’m certain the loop closes back in on itself: I want to be seen as the type of person who would wear miu miu because I am [insert personality trait] → I wear miu miu even if I don’t like it because if I don’t I am not [personality trait].
I’m not sure I’m expressing this quite right. I’m trying to say that we’ve decided that personality influences consumption habits, which leads to unnatural behaviour.
Let’s do an exercise. I’m going to name some form of art, game or craft and you’re going to imagine the first person who comes to mind who you think enjoys that thing.
Star Wars
Star Trek
Gilmore Girls
How I Met Your Mother
Call of Duty
Stardew Valley
Jane Austen
K-pop
Heavy metal
Wood working
Crocheting
Did you notice any patterns in who you imagined liked each thing? Did you notice any patterns in the list I created?
On one hand our consumption habits are determined by social phenomena like gender, race, class, which people you hung out with in high school. On the other, anyone can like anything.
I often catch myself forcing myself to like various genres or art forms so that I can present a version of myself to the world that I think is cool but in a disaffected, quirky, intelligent-but-not-obnoxious way. It’s like I’m stuck in secondary school wanting the popular girls to like me. An example? I decided I wanted to get into Arthurian legend, not because I liked Dev Patel in The Green Knight or because I am interested in medieval Britain, but because I thought if I could make it into an obsession of mine people would think, “wow! rusty has such niche but fascinating hobbies. They’re really cool.” I’m reading Arthurian romance Erec and Enide at the moment. I don’t really like it. I think the whole knights fighting thing is stupid. The gender roles are very stereotypical. The prose is kind of dry. And I shouldn’t have expected anything else, because I didn’t do my research! Of course I don’t like it! I forced it upon myself!
I’m not saying we shouldn’t broaden our horizons by the way. This is a message to me and the other people like me who are caught up in the tricks of whatever hellstage of capitalism we’re in, where social media websites are shoving any kind of micro ‘aesthetic’ you can imagine down our throats so we can buy a bunch of stuff we don’t actually need and pretend we’re happy. “You are what you eat,” the old adage goes. And I’m sure you’ve noticed how obsessed we are with the right foods as a result (calorific content, trans fats, impact on microbiome, ultraprocessed, microplastics, sodium). But nutrition is only part of the picture. If I tell you I listen to Mitski but not Lana Del Rey, does that tell you whether I’m kind? What my hopes and dreams are? What kind of rough patch I’m going through?
Just chill. Like what you like. Try new things on and put them back down if you’re not a fan. Log every film you watch on Letterboxd for all to see, or don’t. Start a book and never finish it. As one of my good friends likes to say: you can do whatever you want, forever.