Girls and Secrets

Girls are the havers of secrets, and I don’t mean in an anachronistic locked pink diary/LiveJournal/Tumblr/
private Instagram account kind of way, but that too. Just like everything else horrible, the worst, dirtiest, scummiest bits of human life tend to be both experienced by women and known by women. This is some Stonehenge ancient wisdom solstice shit. Anytime a Normal gets into it about “girls” and “secrets” it always comes down to “Girls are jealous of everyone” (false) and “Girls will hack your Gmail account” (false; only monsters and children would do this) and “Girls just want X” or “Y” or “Z” as though there is one singular act or item or idea we need to be happy. If it were that easy, we would have all ascended to all-day-bong-hitting blue-skied fairydom by now.

Also. Everybody tells me their secrets, and I keep them, but MY big secret is that it’s not because I’m so rock-solid about anything, it’s just that I am half-retarded and fully preoccupied with like anything and everything else and just fucking forget.

GIRL CODE

Guy Code is this mysterioso phenomenon of wingman-ishness and not fucking each other’s sisters and probably other things but TBH I’m pretty bored of guys as a whole right now. I don’t understand anything you say to each other, and I saw this ad for football on TV last night and I’m just pretty weirded out, I guess. But, at any rate, most guys seem to agree, at least, on what they do and don’t do, thus, a code.

Girl code exists too, y’all, but because girls are more complicated, the static “code” aspect doesn’t actually work. (I’m back to saying “y’all” in protest of Connie Britton playing her Friday Night Lights character on the tedious network soap opera Dallas, I mean Nashville, which we should just call Dallas anyway, like, you know there was a network meeting where they were like “If we can get that Niagara Falls-style head of hair on our show, it won’t matter that Hayden Panini is there too.”) The problem with girl code is that all of its directives are contingent on your particular girl subculture, and those directives are rarely understood in the same way, because few girls who didn’t spend their adolescence and Teen Anger years together are fully in the same subculture. Like, it is in other girls’ code that you must really care about engagement rings, like, must and really, so when that girl code is applied to me and I inevitably break the girl code because in my subculture’s girl code I am increasingly and correctly anti-impressed the more objectively impressive an engagement ring is. (I mean, I like diamonds; I don’t like gross replications of dowries in their new form as boring life rules. Please don’t show me your ring, y’all.) And yet, in my girl code, which could be subtitled “Me Before D,” one doesn’t eventually start dating a guy they initially met in my bedroom. So those are just some examples. Obviously talking about this stuff is out of the question, too.

JUST FUCKING OVER IT

Girls are still squishy romantical fluffy kitty-kats about The Future of Our Lives and how they will be totally ideal and fulfilling. I endorse it. There is no logical, mathematical reason why your life can’t be perfect. But for a lot of straight girls the archetype of The One has been removed, either occasionally or mostly, from the imaginary scenario; when I think about that singular person, who is supposed to be tall and white and medium-smart and supportive but not really (look, I didn’t make him up, TV did), it sometimes makes me auto-assume instead how it’s going to suck to get divorced. By the time you are 30 I think you just know too much? About men, about the demands we make of men, about humanity, about work, about sex, about what happens in almost ev-e-ry marriage. Like, I know a lot, a lot, a lot of love, and I love love, but I only admire one actual marriage, the kind where you legit stare at each other for 50 years. So any fantasies about eternal, heteronormative/trad coupling are totally compromised and confused, even if they linger.

Instead, my recurring fantasy is more like having one actual The One who is your person and who you probably never sex with (having 20 years of verisimilitudinous and hot-wet sex dreams about them is better anyway) but who goes with you to every place, and then a real sexy dude, and possibly a wife-type, and then all your friends and maybe a little swarm of babies who maybe you birthed and maybe you didn’t. It’s like a less nerd way to be poly, I guess? Almost everything about the shifting demographics of relationships and families is really interesting to me, and while I read anything and everything about it I do not relate to almost anything anyone says in a book about Having It All and the End of Men and Women Are a Thing and Sexual Scream-Voodoo For Lasting Love or w/e. However, in terms of very basic life experience… I don’t imagine what I have been told to imagine. Maybe this is a “not yet” situation? Maybe there are boys who will cut up apples for your kids and fuck you like illegal performance art? I do imagine talking for hours in the front seat of a car, not touching, and then getting off to it alone for like six hours. But you can’t like say that.

TAYLOR SWIFT

There is no distance or irony between a girl-person and Taylor Swift. As a person/character/artist, she is a cartoon (no one is that tall; no one’s hair goes that way and then that way and then that way again), which makes it easier to take her not seriously at all but also DEAD FUCKING SERIOUSLYYYYYY. I can’t even get into it too much because I got the go-ahead to devote a full Girl News to just Tay-Swee. Even on this new song where she sounds like Tori Amos plus a Powerpuff Girl, there is some Salem,-Massachusetts-at-Halloween psychic energy transmitted from her to iTunes to you. She’s just inside us at this point.

FREEEEEEEDOM

Because tampons, pads, and condoms are industrialized and chemically created bodily accouterments, a lot of girls don’t use them. Just, don’t. Did you know that? Are you sicked out? Don’t be. The whole cliché thing of girls’ bathrooms being suspicious wonderlands of period products is just kind of nicely unfulfilled, like a prank on the CVS or whatever. I found this out after years of carefully recording the lessons of sex education in my various school-blue cahiers when I sat behind this scary, white-blonde-witch on the bus home (I mean, months later her weird friend showed me how to smoke cigarettes, but this was all before I had been properly Rayanne-d) and she told this guy Adrock (guess who he looked like) (guess who every 1996 Canadian teenager looked like) that she doesn’t wear pads, because “I just let it flow!” and I don’t remember but I’m sure I choked on my own oxygen right then. Anyway, sitting on a plastic pillow or inserting a bleached cotton stub or being fucked with a rubber tube are what you’re “supposed to do” but a lot of clean underwear and rigorous pre-sex STD testing (inclusive of paper copies) and monogamy are good if semi-secret options and ideas around the cunt-industrial complex.

NOT CARING

Like, I will not be spending any of my minutes on or with Violentacrez (watching or reading stuff about him and them, generally, is spending your minutes with him/them, in an important, shivery way). I think Adrian Chen is a brilliant dude but be fucking sure I didn’t read his Reddit story, and never will.

Whenever I think about how I have actually never been able to hear guys talk to each other without a girl around, I feel like a cold, frayed electrical wire who needs to put on six pairs of neutral-color cashmere socks all at once and right-quick.

RETARDED SECRETS

Some girls do stuff, like, refusing to follow someone on Twitter because it’s “embarrassing” but then they will sometimes look them up freestyle and read their last zillion tweets, as if THAT amount and style of effort is not way, way, way more embarrassing? Basically “being embarrassed” is the most embarrassing.

PRETTY/UGLY

Most girls don’t look a certain way. Like, a particular, consistent way. Most boys do look a certain way, because there is less stuff to move around and rearrange on a boy. I just mean that it’s academically interesting how muchany girl can vary in attractiveness given PMS schedule, time of day, horniness, season, Froot Loop breakfast, recent sex, etc. etc. etc. I like it, though, because it proves we are magickckck.

I HAVE A CRUSH ON EVERY BOY

“Arrowed!” “Ow! My skin!” (2002 was a gross time for me but the internet was like fun.) There is like a 10 percent margin of error with this, but almost always, girls can imagineer their way into a physical attraction for a guy given like two minutes of opportunity, and then we can play out a whole relationship like a boring dramedy in about six minutes. Why? I don’t know. And it doesn’t mean that any girl is going to give any guy less of a total shit-eye if he asks her out, but it does mean she’s already daydreamed, in detail, a serious fight about what to do on Saturday afternoon and then had blistering makeup sex and then ordered too much Indian with him.

HEROIN

Or whatever secret gross thing you do that you literally don’t tell anyone about ever. I’ll go ahead and posit that every single girl has a sex, food, drug, or alcohol habit that not one other person knows about. Not one! Magical thinking a la “It’s just a tiny bump” or whatever can go a really long way.

OLDNESS

Obviously my cortal frontex (Do you know what I mean, by that? Because I do not. I obviously typed “cortal frontex” with my muppet hands and without consultation from my conscious thoughts… I have a vague sense of what phrase I was trying to get at there, but I don’t so much know… And my friend Justin just explained to me that I only inverted “frontal cortex” so I’m probably not seeing the results of my various 1990s pink-mountain-bike related brain injuries just yet. Yet.) understands that “youth” is desirable and something to want and like. But that’s all relative. I’m 31, and between the ages of 27 and 40 you are either officially old or officially young depending on who you’re talking to. But, recently your/my/our internet crush Karley Sciortino posted a thing called “Late Twenties” about how Iris Apfel (crushhhhhhh) told her to stop dressing trashy, not because of “trashy” but because the means to the same ends are better approached with a more elegant mien. I mean, do whatever you want, but isn’t it totally nice and pleasing and comforting to know that there are ways in which youth and age are Inception-ed? And I mean this: I was so much older five years ago.

TELEVISION

Currently I have TV with all the channels. What that means is that I am supercomputer over-informed about the ways in which TV is actually and was probably always (when I was not allowed it or didn’t have it, for the first 30 years of my life) this stupid. Every show is about people who are not fun or nice, and every show has at its center a secret, kept or told, and the slow paper-wheel-turning consequences of that secret. I mean, is Gossip Girl actually the most intelligent long-form parable in the culture???? You guys!!??

BEING DICKED

Yes, every joke about how guys need to know where the clit is at is true, and I genuinely feel for all of the Yellow Wallpaper ladies who spent their lives clawing at some kind of sexual satisfaction that was supposed to be there and wasn’t, but, consider, that there is also a pre-and-post orgasmic sexual concern of just being contentedly occupied by a quality dick. Like, even though the clitoral orgasm is the planted-flag of boy-girl intercourse, when girls are thinking about potential sex, they aren’t thinking about that. They’re thinking about a cute boy, and a cute boy naked, and about being dicked by a cute boy, and about just being dicked. Don’t tell, though.

Previously - What Girls Hate. Haaaaate.

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