Great comment, I was also trying to think through this. My experience of it was more in the aughts but it was absolutely still in play, specifically regarding male gaze (peak manic pixie dream girl era, direct line to “cool girl.”) It brings to mind this piece I read recently through a links and recs rabbit hole, and very much identified…
Great comment, I was also trying to think through this. My experience of it was more in the aughts but it was absolutely still in play, specifically regarding male gaze (peak manic pixie dream girl era, direct line to “cool girl.”) It brings to mind this piece I read recently through a links and recs rabbit hole, and very much identified with: https://therumpus.net/2017/08/03/mimesis-of-girlhood-in-three-acts-featuring-bright-eyes/
Anyway … there are different ways of enforcing conformity or performing, and they can also come at a personal cost, and I’m not sure “hyper femininity” is actually so much worse than others? Potentially more expensive and time-consuming, I guess, those seem plausible, maybe worth singling out.
Thinking through my comment more. I mean I guess obviously the difference between these older aspirations/archetypes and rushtok is … the vast exponential shift in the scale of visibility and audience, no matter what type of “cool” you are. So yeah ... I didn’t mean to suggest there’s nothing distinctive about rushtok or that all things are the same as all other things have always been. But as someone else said, treating feminized pursuits with curiosity and respect is a strength of CS! So although my comment kinda feels like a tangent rereading it now, I was sort of reminding myself of the value of pausing to consider common threads, vs just kneejerk writing all this off as strange, alien, or sad, just because it’s of a different generation and with a different presentation.
Great comment, I was also trying to think through this. My experience of it was more in the aughts but it was absolutely still in play, specifically regarding male gaze (peak manic pixie dream girl era, direct line to “cool girl.”) It brings to mind this piece I read recently through a links and recs rabbit hole, and very much identified with: https://therumpus.net/2017/08/03/mimesis-of-girlhood-in-three-acts-featuring-bright-eyes/
Anyway … there are different ways of enforcing conformity or performing, and they can also come at a personal cost, and I’m not sure “hyper femininity” is actually so much worse than others? Potentially more expensive and time-consuming, I guess, those seem plausible, maybe worth singling out.
Thinking through my comment more. I mean I guess obviously the difference between these older aspirations/archetypes and rushtok is … the vast exponential shift in the scale of visibility and audience, no matter what type of “cool” you are. So yeah ... I didn’t mean to suggest there’s nothing distinctive about rushtok or that all things are the same as all other things have always been. But as someone else said, treating feminized pursuits with curiosity and respect is a strength of CS! So although my comment kinda feels like a tangent rereading it now, I was sort of reminding myself of the value of pausing to consider common threads, vs just kneejerk writing all this off as strange, alien, or sad, just because it’s of a different generation and with a different presentation.