Cosmically Worthy: When Did Being 'Girly' Become an Insult?
‘Men like it, and so it must be cosmically worthy’.
This is the lament of Amy Dunne, in an early draft of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. She is criticising what to her appears to be the pointless conventions of American sports culture, and how in her eyes, the only reason people are expected to see ‘the poetry in sports’ is because it is something that predominantly men enjoy, and thus, is instantaneously granted cultural significance and authority.
And although Amy Dunne is, by absolutely no stretch of the imagination, an entirely level headed person, nor someone who anyone should model their moral convictions on, she does prompt an interesting question. Why are things associated with masculinity instantly given credibility, and conversely, those associated with femininity rarely given the same treatment?
There is very little cultural credibility to be gained from enjoying things conventionally associated with femininity. Being interested in stereotypically girly media is, at best, considered bland or boring and, at worst, an indication of intellectual shallowness.
Hobbies, music or media that are traditionally associated with masculinity seldom carry such negative cultural baggage. For example, a man who can rattle off decades of football statistics is a passionate enthusiast, whereas a woman who can recount every single episode of Love Island is obsessed with mindless gossip. The nuance of The Hunger Games themes of class inequality, authoritarianism and propaganda, often gets overlooked, due to its primary audience being young women. Saying you like pop music, a genre whose main patrons are women, is seen as a sign you lack taste, or that you ‘don't listen to real music’, as if Sabrina Carpenter was some mass hallucination. Curiously, oftentimes, women who engage in more masculine coded hobbies or interests, are seen as more interesting for it, or at the very least, less insipid or superficial. Of course, this is not to say women in male dominated spaces are immune from ridicule or being undermined, but it is interesting to see that distance from stereotypical expressions of femininity can confer more cultural credibility.
Even the language used to describe stereotypically effeminate interests is condescending: 'trashy TV', 'chick flicks', 'guilty pleasures'. Each term comes with the implicit reassurance that even though you possess poor enough taste to enjoy such things, at least you are self aware enough to be adequately embarrassed about it. In fact, often in said ‘trashy’ shows, a visual shorthand for a character being ditzy or airheaded will often be them dressed in a profusion of pink and glitter, or tottering around in high heels, establishing her as vapid comic relief before she has even opened her mouth.
And this is not to say that male dominated media is inherently better or worse, or should be looked down upon. Nor does every piece of media predominantly consumed by women deserve artistic acclaim. The point is enjoying something traditionally feminine should not be an intellectual liability, any more than enjoying something traditionally masculine should be an intellectual achievement.
Ironically, however, women possess a great deal of cultural capital. NielsenIQ estimates that women influence between 70 and 80% of all consumer spending globally, wielding an enormous degree of commercial power. Furthermore, women undoubtedly powerfully shape pop culture. For example, the Beatles rose to stratospheric prominence, largely due to their devoted and predominantly female fanbase. Critic Sasha Geffen notes, ‘Without Beatles girls, there's no Beatles’. Their fanbase was so fervent the phrase ‘Beatlemania’ was coined to describe this phenomenon. However, the Beatles having a female fanbase was often what led the media to criticise and undermine their artistic capabilities. Publications like the New Statesman mocked their ‘pathetic girl fans’, other critics like Douglas Gillies hypothesized that their appeal diminished ‘as the IQ rises’. The same female fanbase that was pivotal to the bands success was used as grounds to ridicule it. The inference that can be made from this is, that although women have the ability to make something popular, their endorsement seldom carries enough power to make it respected. In fact, it usually has the opposite effect.
This cultural conundrum seems to all be a symptom of a much larger issue. The problem is not simply what books, movies or music society has deemed as largely respectable, rather, to a continuous pattern where association with femininity seems to diminish the perceived value of anything it comes into contact with. If one were to call a girl a ‘tomboy’, it would be a neutral descriptor, however, to call a boy a ‘girly’ would be considered, to a great deal of people, insulting. Why is a girl adopting traditionally masculine traits perfectly acceptable, whereas a boy adopting feminine ones a sign of weakness, or somehow degrading? Perhaps then our cultural understanding of taste is not about what we really like, but what we think of the people we associate those interests with. If being compared to a woman is seen as an insult, what does that say about our perception of women in general?
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