The e-confessional and the genrefication of the woman

semi-stalking and the last of women as marketable entities

In my pursuit of disproving the not like other girls syndrome, I too succumbed to the occasional categorically 'feminine' move of stalking your boyfriend’s ex, to call it stalking would be too much of a reach, It was a cursory glance, a quasi deep dive maybe, and unlike the biblical mythical jealous woman archetype set in stone by male authors, my motivations were borne out of sheer curiosity, and perhaps a pinch of whatever female socialization is made of. Upon the initial cursory glance, I found out that she too wrote, just like I did and we shared an interest in Margaret Atwood and an aversion to the gendered political landscape, now the nagging feeling in my stomach couldn’t decipher if I was a bootleg version of her or maybe my boyfriend just had a type. The nagging question that had now made itself a home in my spleen requested a deep dive, answers were demanded and sections of the web were disparaged. 

What I discovered was that neither of the options was right, instead, it pointed in a whole new direction. The onslaught of the digital age and the mainstreamification of internet publishing has blurred the once prevalent fine line between the author and her demographic, the demographic is the author now, everyone writes and with everyone writing, the quality of written work is severely deteriorating. I understand that I write this at the risk of being both, a purist and a hypocrite, because of course if and when I decide to publish this e-confessional and put my parade of questionable but acceptable internalized misogyny, I too will be reaping the benefits of accessibility of the internet word rampage, I would still argue that it is beside the point because the point I am trying to make is larger than myself. The intimate process of developing and having opinions in itself has been commodified and marketable to the extent that you could unlock a predefined package of vapid easily digestible opinions at your fingertips, you can browse through the catalog of the woman you want to be and gain access to a curated list of media, content, and PC cultural takes that will allow you to achieve the destiny or make it look like you have achieved the fate of the caricature of the woman you have bought off the rack for yourself. You can be whoever you want to be, you can be the Versace knockoff handbag nifty thrift shop trust fund baby reading Margaret Atwood, or the conventionally attractive skinny radical feminist who reads Plath and loves a fascist. You read the right babitz, live by the infographic lifestyle, parrot whatever the new vapid slogan is on the internet - be it men shouldn’t be making laws about women’s bodies or the latest ahistorical quip on gun control borrowed from the New Yorker's paid subscription.

Whatever it is, if you find your blueprint and believe that you are set in its stone, you will become her, or at least strangers on the internet will believe you are her, and that’s just as good enough because well, this charade of being the next palatable hot girl has little do with authenticity as much as it has to do with what you consider an acceptable, remarkable even ‘genre’ of woman. Rayne Fisher talks about this in her essay, ‘Standing on the shoulders of complex female characters’, she says it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of things they consume or aspire to consume. I identify with this pathology because so much of a woman’s identity has been traditionally reduced to zilch, women find themselves seeking refuge in cultural trends and authors du jour that they believe will speak for and defend them, for once, instead of women having to do it all. The paradigm and the onus thus shifts from the individual to the women, men of fiction, popular culture, and the decadent events of the news cycle to do most of the talking, the fresh out of the oven take that’s been doing rounds on the internet now bears the onus and the burden to carefully signal to a new distinct personality, and this patented genre of women often masquerades as a form of catharsis, digital commodification tricks you into believing that you no more have to read, critically engage, think! when you can simply buy your authentic self, brand new in the store of off-season hauls, now this would be the fix of the century if it didn’t come with the downside, the downside to the mechanical reproduction of the inauthentic digital self is that there exist copies, for every Miu Miu wearing Didion reading handmaid's tale's girl, there exists seven hundred other of them. Now, this shouldn’t pose a problem, there is nothing radically wrong in sharing similar interests, but then again, this was never about simply mutually sharing interests, it was instead about being the IT girl, the girl on the cover of cool girls reading, the substack woman of the hour, the niche prototype, etc the cookie crumbles once you realize, and you will, that the luxury that the internet provides you of putting together your new age trends into one distinct box, the same luxury is provided to everybody else, and in the process of arriving at that exact epiphany, the esoteric withers away and is replaced by the dull, the drab and the counterfeit. 

I know this epiphany so intimately for I have been on the receiving end of it, at the age of seventeen, I was reading extensively and borrowing influences from every nook and cranny of the internet to reproduce my own internal monologue that would cater to the mythical audience that would one day read all of my musings and applaud in astonishment, I was on the cursed site of half baked opinions clutching my pearls at whatever new faux liberal opinion piece that was emerging out of the caves of the two forty characters, I was fully immersed in the waltz of making myself a marketable edible appetizing commodity, a genre basically, I wanted all of those things while reserving the right to be bona fide and my own person - it was a balancing act I believed I could achieve at that age if I tried hard enough and If I pandered to the overarching pedestal, I would establish myself within the purgatory of the main character and it would have all been worth it. Suffice to say, it did not and for that, I am glad. This isn’t to say I have escaped that urge to perfunctorily perform, even as I write this, my subconscious is well aware of the category and the niche, writing this essay will inevitably put me under the roof, and that’s okay. For now, the self-awareness replacing the sedated impulse to sculpt me into Moshfegh's R&R repulsive woman is okay. 

Circling back to the guilty confessional that bore me this written rumination, the answer to the question is neither that I am cut from the same cloth as my boyfriend’s ex nor that she is a better woman than I, it was that - there is too little or close to nothing to decipher of a woman’s personality and character from the orifices of her media consumption, there is simply more to women than the markers, the epithets, and the moving boxes that women often forcefully banish themselves into, the milieu has always made its attempt to squeeze women into tiny corsets and exile them into tinier hampers, and as I continue to make my way in and out of these respiratory hazards masquerading as the type, I see no point in discerning, gutting and disemboweling my sensibilities like raw fish and laying them out on a tray only to juxtapose and reduce them to another.