Proof That Girls Are Better At The Internet Than Boys

There is this enduring, annoying stuff about how girls don't use the internet as much as guys. I don't know if that's true. I do know that girls are so obviously the unchallenged vanguards of the internet, so clearly the winners of such a flexibly temporal space which suits the frantic micro-obsessions and macro-expressions of girl life so exactly that it must be, like, so embarrassing for men in their 20s.

Is starting here too obvious, you guys? Do I even get into it?

Twitter is second only to Tumblr for girl-posi-ness. Girls are way more interesting tweeters because it is essentially a colloquial, verbal medium—those bursts! Those hot, tiny bursts!—and it rewards the sentimental, the thoughtful, the curious; less so the factyness and downward, inward boastyness of boys. Like, I love you, boys. I love boys so much that I'm worried about it sometimes. But I have a secret list of Twitter must-reads and other than my tightest guy friends it is aaaaaall ladies.

I think the real-time realness (uck, sorry for that) of Twitter (fashion, too) is what will ultimately save women from aspiring to and disproportionately appreciating the creative work of men in music, film, art, and literature. Basically, Twitter shifts attention and energy away from a paradigm of pop culture or whatever that is just fine and totally great but in no way girl-cohesive and toward a scary-amazing sphere of girlgirlgirlgirlgirl with no middle-men being like "Yes but is it sexy."

This is a half-and-half situation, because: 1) Tumblr is where girls are king! Of every space on the internet, this is the one where a girl free-for-all exists and is being built up like a theoretical magic castle; where the dust of 90s nostalgia lives; where you can do the most intense learning about girl lives (and girl-hero lives) because of the instant, unedited access to kind of whoever; where the pro-ana shit and the model shit and the whatever else is there but has nothing on the moody self-direction of what Tumblr essentially is.

2) I fooled you before, with that Drake quote. The rest of what he said was "Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they're just taking these images and living vicariously through other people's moments. It just kills me. Then you'll meet them and they're just the biggest turkey in the world. They don't actually embody any of those things. They just emulate. It's scary man, simulation life that we're living. It scares me." Me too. Totally.

The WORST! Why did we let this become such a thing that nobody has to go to a store anymore? It's super nice to see clothes on the internet screen, where you can make them all big and not be oppressed by a fashion editor's version of what Isabel Marant should be like, but buying something without putting it on your particular girl-body is a crime of capitalism or something.

The actual worst. Every one of us is implicated in it, too, because no matter what it's offensive: pretty-on-purpose poses are dumb; straight-ahead all-smiles security-pass-style retreats from the ego-strokes of good angles are dumb; photos of somebody else entirely (like, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose picture is my current Facebook profile pic) is dumb. The only way to win is to not have a photo, but that's so Dada as to be an entire statement. I fucking hate Facebook. You know that part in the opening credits of How To Make It In America where a blonde girl has her hair over her face and sunglasses on? It's not her or anyone's fault but I want to murder that whole aesthetic one hundred times. Murdering an aesthetic: Dada! See???

Ew, this is for boys.

Don't care, shouldn't care, but I get that not everybody has a father who gets irritated when you are pushing for a compliment and is like, "For Christ's sake, Kathryn, you should get a 95 in English. Stop talking." Which really is a perfect storm of kindness and cruel expectations necessary for quality self-esteem. But then, like, too much of my internet time (23 hours a day I guess? That's low-balling) is infected with girls complaining about what other girls think of them on the internet and definitely responding with a pointless culture of self-censoring apologies and over-carefulness and disclaimers and other things that make me so sleepy. It's like, girls largely refuse to be offensive but then also refuse not to be offended by stuff that doesn't matter. I don't really know what to say about this because "It doesn't matter" doesn't work and also because when given an opportunity to shut down, box up and return some retarded comment or post or whatever made by someone whose ideas I don't like and feel smarter than, I probably will. This is unresolvable right now.

By Kate Carraway

Originally published on our (insert familial relationship here) website, VICE, where you can read more about how girls are running the Internet.

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