It is a strange time to be a woman…or a man…or neither. In a moment when lifestyle-mogul Martha Stewart is calling herself “the original fucking tradwife,” scientists are quantifying toxic masculinity, and queer people continue to challenge and upend the binary, gender roles are both more fluid and enforced than ever. Of course, whether the labels “man” and “woman” are inherently oppressive is an age-old question, but the stakes right now feel sky-high: A growing number of states have banned gender marker changes on legal IDs. The question of whether trans and nonbinary people can have passports that reflect their gender identity has reached the Supreme Court. And the Trump administration is investigating a middle school with a coed cheerleading team. Where does this leave people who are either deeply aligned with or unsure of their identity? In Gender’s New Era, we grapple with the paradigms and explore what gender means right now.
A loud restaurant. Uptown. East side. The waiters are all wearing tuxes. We order a bottle. I’m in a black dress, skintight, very short. Lamé blazer, a runway piece that debuted when I was still a child. He’s in his suit. He tops off my glass. The walls are all wood, with hanging paintings of Italian farm houses. We are seated at a square bistro table with bentwood chairs.
This happened when I was 28 years old, in the absurdly early stages of a relationship. The women around me all have their skin pulled back. They are fawning over their husbands. They are drinking white wine and crossing their legs. They are reapplying their makeup, checking their appearances in their compact mirrors. Our waiter takes our order. “You’re in the middle of the action,” he says. “Best table!”
This is a moment from the recent past where I have felt the most like a girl, a girlfriend. A girl in a sea of girls.
It was never obvious to me how one is supposed to be a girl, in the classic sense. As a child—I think I was 4 years old—I would sit on the sink of my grandmother’s bathroom. “You apply the foundation first,” she’d say, “and after that comes the blush!” She did it on herself, showing me how she blended it. Then she’d do it on me. “Beautiful,” she’d say. “So beautiful!”
My grandmother was a woman who, in the midcentury, did all of her shopping in a Céline suit. My grandmother was someone who once drove her cherry-red Triumph at a speed that led to its inevitable destruction. It quite literally burst into flames. As a child, I thought being a girl was being just like her—a little blush, a little foundation. You do the shopping in your sports car and your suit. You wait for your husband at home.
I tried to shape myself in her image. I wore calico sundresses and patent leather mary jane shoes. My hair was cut into a bob by a woman who did it in her garage, to the tune of pop music. She held up photos of Katie Holmes printed in tabloid magazines and said to me, “This is who you look like, girl!” I told the ladies at school my dream was to be a professional rock climber, a summer camp counselor, or a novelist, in order of preference. I thought about being a girl in black-and-white terms, as I suppose many young girls do. There was a set of rules, girl dogma, that made it simpler for me: A girl wears a dress. She coats her lips in something sweet. She crosses her legs. Her bicycle is pink and it has blue and purple tassels at the end. She picks a boy and that boy is her main priority.
In the years after my childhood, I dabbled in all of the usual rebellions. I shaved different parts of my head. I bleached my hair blonde and dyed my bangs pink. I threw my body into amplifiers at punk shows. I got so stoned, I passed out in a supermarket on the outskirts of the idyllic small town where I attended college. I crashed my car, with a girl I had a crush on sitting in the passenger seat. We were both fine. I got kicked out of at least three different bars in Paris, France. A boy fingered me on a park bench in a heavily trafficked part of Brussels, while it was raining. A few months after college, I sold raffle tickets at an auction for a charity, and at the end of the night, a man 10 years my senior asked me to follow him outside. He pulled my hair so hard, my scalp hurt the next day. I told myself I wanted this. I told myself I wanted all of this. This was an era when I thought I was living my life in such a pure and different way. That I had distanced myself from the rigidity of being a girl by living such an interesting and fucked-up life. But then something changed.
Culturally, we are living in a girl moment. And now that I’m an adult, there’s something especially seductive about the rigidity of being a girl. It feels very scientific again. It feels good to lean into the artificiality of it all. To be a little bit plastic. Right now, it doesn’t seem so bad to be like Addison Rae, singing about boys and money and clothes. Or Sabrina Carpenter, who is getting her hair pulled by a man in a suit on the cover of her new album. It doesn’t seem so bad to be so sweet. To opt for an extremist heteroptimism instead of its inverse.
And I don’t think it sets women back, to play the role of the blonde in the headlights, the perfect girlfriend. In fact, I’m frustrated by the idea that it even has to be subversive. I’ll grant that it’s a little controversial, in a moment where it is so particularly fraught to be assigned female at birth. Why does it have to be?
The key, I think, is self-awareness. To feel like you have autonomy over what you’re doing. That there is something fun about being a little bit retrograde. It makes me feel like I’m in a video game to play the role of girl, girlfriend, whatever. It can be like this: Girl gets all prim and proper. Girl removes the necessary body hair. Girl puts on the necessary frock. Girl intuits what her man wants. Girl is what her man wants.
What I’m trying to say is you have to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. What I’m trying to say is that women sometimes want this in a way that isn’t pathological.
At least for me, exploring the aesthetics of rigid femininity came in a period when I started to become more confident. Being a girl felt less threatening to me. It started to feel fun. It became my favorite game. It didn’t feel like something I needed to rebel against, at least not actively. I was entering an intense creative period. I was starting to become successful for making art. I wrote a novel about a girl who is so good at playing the part of girlfriend that she straight up gets dumped. I no longer had the impulse to shave different parts of my head. I became interested in the idea of dressing in a way that was appealing to men. I became interested in being in romantic relationships that weren’t mutually destructive, relationships that were happy.
But while being a self-aware girl can be fun, you can still really get hurt. It can still be scary, scary, scary. And that’s the risk you’re going to run. I’m saying this because I’ve gotten really hurt, and I knew exactly what I was doing when I got hurt. (People—and girls—with agency still get hurt.) There was something that happened to me recently. It happened with the man from the restaurant with the Brentwood chairs. In our relationship I played the part of girl and I think it might have been the best performance of my career yet. And by this I mean I watched myself being a girlfriend, like I was watching myself on a stage. In a black box of a theater. I was kind and pretty and sweet. I was almost never myself, and I knew exactly what I was doing. I let myself become diminutive. I let my thoughts slow down, and I let myself become more soft-spoken.
I consented to all of it and I had agency in everything. I was a perfect little hologram. I don’t regret anything. Because that’s my favorite thing about playing girl: allowing yourself to love and be loved by men and seeing what the fuck happens. Letting yourself roll the dice. To be like Helen and wail at the walls of Troy. That is what it means to play girl. That is the trickiest part of the whole charade. Allowing someone else into that fantasy, knowing that you might get really, really hurt. And then knowing that afterward, you’re going to be okay. Because you will be. Because you already are.
