On Female Arrogance:
A Totally Fucking Immodest Proposal

All little girls want to be strippers.  Oh no, wait—I don’t really mean that.  I meant that little girls want to be princesses.  Actually, what I mean is that it’s the same thing.

    The bildungsroman is my personal favorite literary genre.  Had I to choose one, I would take this literary form, and write it and only it, forsaking all others, for as long as myself and the genre should live.  The word in German—as the form is of German origin—translates roughly to mean “novel of personal development,” and follows a protagonist’s journey of personal, emotional and/or spiritual development from childhood to maturity.  As a woman, I have no literary precedent for the bildungsroman tradition.  The genre has existed, historically, in part as parable for aristocratic men to learn through exemplary stories how to “become men.”  Of course, this literary genre becomes exponentially more interesting when it is turned upside down and fucked in every available hole, as, for example, Laurence Sterne does with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, or as the modernists did with a whole slew of works, or as I’ll be doing here in terms both of feminism, and of being a really, really hot girl.  Traditionally, and even when satirized or taken apart, the genre has existed in service of the “manhood” narrative, figuring the journey to manhood as ritual, ordeal, and ultimate conquering triumph.  One of the millions of reasons Patti Smith’s seminal album Horses—an album that sounds like nothing more than the best sex you’ll ever have; the kind of sex that just might actually kill you but would be totally fucking worth it if it did—was possibly the most revolutionary thing in rock and roll since Blonde on Blonde is that Horses is a female bildungsroman narrative, an unprecedented and therefore revolutionary entity.

    With the advances of the twentieth century, particularly feminism, women no longer have any reason not to take traditions such as the bildungsroman and make them their own—to claim empowering possession of such “male” forms in precisely the manner of conquest that’s too long been considered singularly archetypal to men.  Problematically, however, rather than simply doing so and being empowered by it, women—specifically women in positions of power in academia—instead choose to complain about the primacy of works of total fucking inarguable necessity-to-any-of-us-who-matter-truly-understanding-ourselves-ever, which, yes, were written by white men, and to attempt to have these works thrown out of the canon.  Rather than conquer and possess these traditions, they somehow get the idea they can eradicate them.  This is idiotic.  Every time an academic feminist says James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man should be expunged from the canon because it was written by a white man, an angel gets set on fire.  Seriously.  If we intellectual women really wanted to combat all the ills about which feminism is so damn good at complaining, we would use these available texts to enable us to our own genius (a fantastic example of this kind of revolutionary canon-conquest, as opposed to canon-revision, is the total genius playwright Suzan Lori-Parks, who is a woman and black [hell, I think she might even be a lesbian; if she were disabled, she’d totally be the first kid on the block to get bingo], yet acknowledges Faulkner and Joyce as her major influences, and writes plays admittedly based on and influenced by canonical white-male literature, such as her adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, which is entitled Fucking A.  Suzan Lori-Parks is, by the way, totally on my People I Would Fuck at the First Possible Opportunity List [hereafter, “Fuck List;” I will attempt to keep vigilant running notes on my extensive Fuck List throughout my work on the site—Stay tuned!]).

    The point is, there’s no earthly reason anymore that women shouldn’t have access to the bildungsroman narrative, as they should to a million other empowering traditions that have been, in the past, associated exclusively with masculinity.  We should in fact be empowered by existing examples of the genre, and be empowered by the fact that their male authorship does not prevent us from being empowered by them.  The wheel was invented by a man, and, according to myth, Prometheus (a guy) brought everybody fire, and Newton invented modern physics, but you don’t see women refusing to make use of or believe in any of these entities.  If women don’t take advantage of, and make use of, those things to which men are entitled and of which men have possession, then we have no right to complain about male entitlement.

    The female bildungsroman narrative should exist, and proliferate widely, and we should choose to make it specifically gendered feminine.  The other mistake women make is to assume that, if we’re to empower ourselves by co-opting and making our own traditionally male narratives and devices, we must necessarily take a male role.  This is as stupid as women desexualizing themselves in order to be more powerful, and every time a woman thinks it makes her powerful to deny her sexuality, three angels get set on fire.

    We should take ownership of powerful male traditions such as the bildungsroman narrative—the concept of identity-creation as a heroic, intentional journey—and we should prove wrong the men and the women who claim that anything specifically and exclusively gendered feminine, from pretty clothes to Barbie dolls to femme fatale sexuality to lipstick to pregnancy to ornamental beauty to being a stripper, makes us weak.  Female empowerment should combine the traditionally male devices of identity and power with specifically female actions and indicators, and the combination of these two is perhaps a way that feminism can stop stabbing itself repeatedly in the face.  It is also exactly what I intend to demonstrate in the following Theory of Revolutionary Female Arrogance.

    And, therefore, I give you:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Really Hot Girl in Fuck-Me Heels

I have always been jealous of strippers.  I wasn’t a little girl who mutilated her Barbie dolls; I dyed the blonde Barbies’ hair red and made them act out pornographically Chekhovian lesbian dramas in fantastic outfits, and I did so until I was way, way, way too old still to be doing so (actually, I still do this now—it’s just that now it’s called “having a burlesque troupe,” and I get written up in the Village Voice for it, instead of mocked by the other little suburban kids).  Eventually I learned that no-one would ever be my friend if I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t want to be a princess, and that women would be unceasingly mean to me, even in middle school, if I couldn’t disguise the fact that I wanted to be a stripper.  I learned about feminism, and about all the things that would make other women hate me if I did them, and I got female friends, and when people noticed I was really, really, really fucking smart, I learned quickly how that meant I would be defined, in the same gesture, as Not Sexy.

    So the age of twenty found me living in New York in the stupidest stupid monogamous stupid relationship ever, standing on a corner on the Lower East Side, waiting to meet some stupid prude faux-feminist female friends, and staring at the window of the bar across the street where a really hot girl was dancing in nothing but red fringe, and very little of that.

    I couldn’t stop staring.  I must have looked like a choirboy who’s stumbled into a dirty movie house.  I stared and stared.  She shook her ass and the red fringe flew and fuck she had a great ass and there it was, in the window facing the street for everyone to see, as if it were just that simple, and you could present your body to the world like a passport, rather than having (as I had so well learned) to declare it as though it were an undergraduate major.  She turned around and was covered only by two red-fringe tassels, which I didn’t know at the time were called pasties.  In the best utilization of gravity available in this world until someone figures out how we can fly, she shook her tits so artfully that the tassels spun smug, delighted revolutions as her tits bounced.  I was devastated.  It seemed she could do whatever she wanted, because she was certainly breaking every rule for women I’d ever known, and she appeared both perfectly happy, and entirely powerful.  I had no idea what it was one did to be allowed to be this kind of woman, but it felt about as possible as married men and particle physics and everything else that fascinates me either because I can’t have it, or don’t understand it.  I stood and stared and was devastated and was still devastated when my friends arrived and talked about how the girl in red fringe was a whore and they couldn’t and wouldn’t ever do that—and I wanted to say “I would! Pick me!”, but I didn’t.  For one thing, I was the smart girl, and I knew, as though it were elementary science, that this meant I wasn’t sexy.

    A year and a half later I was about to turn twenty-one, it was winter in New York City, and I had just broken up with pretty much everyone, including the stupid boyfriend and the faux-feminist friends.  It was one of those moments in life when you’re so lost and so fucked that all at once, like a blank piece of paper at eight a.m. on a day when you have nothing to do, absolutely anything and everything is possible.  And at this singularly potential moment, I walked past some tiny boutique in Soho and saw a pair of heels in the window.

    When I say pair of heels, by the way, the literary-essayistic medium just falls down and shits itself and then dies of its own insufficiency.  The phrase “pair of heels” would be an entire aria if this were being written as opera rather than essay.  As it’s not, I’ll describe them.  Yes, I’m going to describe some shoes in great detail now.  If this makes you want to stop reading, I advise you to refer to the above photos and imagine me getting fucked while wearing the heels described.  I will continue with my feminine bildungsroman.

    They were burgundy leather ankle boots in a neo-Victorian design with rounded toes, brass-metal detailing, tiny leather laces up the front, patterned silk lining inside, and four-and-a-half-inch heels delicate enough to kill you, as all the very best heels should be.  I stared at them in exactly the manner I had stared at the girl in red fringe a year and a half previous.  But the usefully catastrophic moment at which my life had arrived that winter changed something.  Instead of standing around with my devastation, I went inside, picked up one of the shoes, discovered them to be on the most insane, nonsensical sale I have ever encountered in New York City, tried them on in the store, fell down at least three times while trying them on and felt while doing so more beautiful than I had ever felt up to that moment, bought them, put them on, wore them outside, fell down at least five more times just crossing the street, and determined that I was going to wear them until I knew how to wear them, and walk everywhere in them until I knew how to walk in them.  And then get some even higher heels, and walk in those.

    By the next fall I was walking around in preposterously high stilettos every single day, had dyed my hair the brightest red hairdye would permit, looked as much like Jessica Rabbit as anyone can outside of an animated film, and wore red lipstick and lingerie-as-clothing, usually over ripped-up designer jeans, to my senior-year classes, in which I sat with my feet up on the table and owned the classroom discussion as though it were tied up with my name branded on its ass.  I knew how to flirt, and how to fuck, and how to do neither of these things if I didn’t feel like it, and pretty much how to charm just about anyone into breaking the rules for me and giving me whatever the fuck I wanted.  I was barely real, and I was actually happy for the first extended period of time in my life.  

    Oh, and also, I was a genius.

    Did my aggressive sexualization of myself turn me into a giggling object with nothing to say?  Did my conscious reinvention as an ornamental aesthetic object make me purely visual, slavishly subject to the male gaze and conscious of absolutely nothing else?  No—it made me the intellectual genius I’d always wanted to be.  In the year after I decided to start wearing high heels, I took eight classes a semester, in an unprecedented course of study that I came up with myself and then talked the English Department into allowing me to do despite its breaking pretty much every rule that had existed previously about course loads.  I received “A”s in all of these classes, wrote my undergraduate thesis on Ulysses, began work on a novel that was subsequently signed by a well-known and highly respected literary agency before the first draft was even complete, and graduated college with two simultaneous, separate bachelor’s degrees, both with Latin Honors.  And I did all of this in four-or-five-inch heels and elaborate lingerie.  I’d always been smart; it had been how I made up for not being sexy.  But once I became sexy, I vaulted right over the pedestrian “smart” into the exceptional “genius” category—because, listen closely:  The permission, the creation of identity as living pin-up girl, and as intellectual genius, was one and the same.  It is one and the same.  The idea that these two things are some intense binary, and that to reconcile them takes some massive act of will, is bullshit.

    But this may come off backwards.  I’m not saying that only hot girls can be geniuses.  I’m saying that geniuses can be hot girls, and are more likely to be hot girls.  One’s genius is only increased by one’s hotness, and vice versa, rather than the two being directly disproportionate, as is generally assumed of women.

    Because everybody likes pop culture, let’s take the example of a favorite childhood cartoon, the much-beloved Scooby-Doo. This cartoon (though I am not for one minute saying it isn’t made of pure awesome) demonstrates neatly the archetypal female-role divide between Hot Girl and Smart Girl.  Velma, the squat, bookish chick in a bulky turtleneck and thick glasses, is the brains of the operation; the one consulting books and doing the research.  Daphne, the willowy redhead in the sexy purple outfits, is vapid monster bait.  The idea proceeds, therefore, that genius girls must all look like Velma, and dumb girls like Daphne.  Nonsensical unfounded logic develops from somewhere to say that to be smart, you must be bulky, squat, and dressed in unflattering clothes.  If you’re hot, you’re a brainless object.

    Of course, although no-one likes to acknowledge this because it gives unattractive people no way to comfort themselves, it works in precisely the opposite manner in reality.  Here, have a visual aid:

    Who is that other girl, you ask?  Is that an actress playing Daphne in a little-known other live-action remake of Scooby-Doo?  No, you dork, that’s Sylvia Fucking Plath!

    I use Plath here for two reasons:  First, because look at the picture!  She and Daphne look exactly alike!  They must have been separated at birth!  Think of how much each could have helped the other if they had reunited!  But never mind that.  The second reason is that Plath gets a whole lot of undeserved scorn thrown her way due to being the poster girl for the hot-girl intellectual, and the scorn for and about Plath very visibly develops into larger scorn for all hot girls styling themselves intellectuals.

    I use “styling themselves” very purposefully in that sentence.  It’s seen as a pose when a hot girl is really smart and is vocal about being smart.  Part of the mainstream academic disdain for Plath that has become so trendy in recent years is due to the fact that Plath is often the poet of choice for hot girls.  The argument of the anti-hot-girl feminists goes that, since hot girls must be dilettantes, Plath can’t possibly be serious poetry, and the girls reading her are just reading her because her poetry is easy and accessible, and the most useful thing to help them pose as intellectuals.

    Then again, maybe we’re reading Plath because she’s a literary genius with whom we can actually identify.  Maybe we’re sick of having to read only literature by ugly girls who never got laid, because otherwise we’d never be taken seriously.  Maybe we’re reading Plath because she was a fucking genius who did breathtaking things with extraordinarily difficult form.  I defy you to read “Daddy” and not a) feel like you just got fucked (as a film-critic ex of mine used to say about Darron Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, “it’s like being punched in the cock with emotion!”), and b) have the entire poem stuck in your head in exactly the manner of a very successful pop song.

    Because you know what makes people brilliant artists?  Having a whole lot of sex.  I could have been polite there and said “experience of the world,” the way I’m supposed to, but we all know that what I really would mean by that would be “having a whole lot of sex.”  And you know who’s better able to have a whole lot of sex?  Really hot people.  The idea that being hot prohibits one from being an artistic genius is wrong, and is stupid, and moreover, is sexist.  If you think through a list of male geniuses, particularly artistic geniuses, it’s more than likely that you’ll come up with a list of Big Giant Hos, including people such as Lord Byron (come on, you think I got to write an essay for this site without giving a shout-out to Lord Byron?  It’s like our version of an inaugural blowjob), Picasso, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and, you know, a majority of all the male artists who have ever mattered.

    I have spent the last three years desperately seeking a female distaff of this archetype, and have had to admit that one does not exist.  Plath is a great example of a hot girl author, but historical narratives are much, much more willing to immortalize the fact that Plath was unhappy than the fact that she was hot.  And as for female geniuses who were hot and as exultantly prolific in the sexual arena as in the artistic one, forget it.  It looks like I’m just going to have to be the first one.

    But that, in itself, is empowering.  And here we come all the way back around to the template of the bildungsroman genre.  In the same way that women should take possession of this traditionally male form and empower ourselves through the use of it, we should take possession of the male idea that the Great Genius is supposed to be a Great Big Sexy Whore, and is only more awesome for combining the two qualities.

    Of course men, to a lesser, or at least different degree suffer from the same problematic false perceptions, as addressed in 1585’s “The Other N-Word” essay.  Intelligent men are perceived as being intelligent because they can’t get laid.  Male artistic geniuses are accused of having developed the skill because they weren’t able to get girls in any other way.

    But for men, these attitudes reek strongly of high school and stay for the most part rooted in that demographic.  All of the Big Sexy Whore men I know are self-styled geniuses modeling themselves after people like Picasso and Byron.  But I don’t know any other women modeling themselves after the same figures.

    And that’s because men are permitted and encouraged to arrogance, and women aren’t.  And that is why Female Arrogance is what this whole thing is really about (except when it’s about the fact that I’d like to grow up to be, and be immortalized as, the female Lord Byron—oh, and also about my nostalgia for the best shoes ever).  Women complain constantly of something known as “male entitlement.”  Male entitlement may be most culturally recognizable in that by-now-almost-hackneyed problem of how (supposedly) boys always talk more in class than girls, and shut out the girls who might want to talk.  Because men are entitled to their opinion and expression and voice, the popular theory goes, they will talk in class even if they don’t really have anything to say, just because they feel it’s their right to talk, while girls won’t talk even if they have something brilliant to say because, unlike men, they don’t feel entitled to their opinion or the right to speak up, and are furthermore intimidated by all of the entitled men who are yelling things out.

    But women’s problem is an equal and opposite one.  We’re only supposed to be so good at anything.  Men are taught to get ahead in life by beating each other up and bragging about their prowess at absolutely everything.  Women are taught that bragging is something men do.  I can be as intelligent as I like, and talk about it, as long as I don’t think I’m pretty.  And I can be as pretty as I like, as long as I’m dumb, and I know it.  In fact, I can be any of these things, as long as I don’t talk about it too loud or think I’m extremely pretty or extremely intelligent.  I can embody all the desirable qualities I like, as long as I modify each adjective with “kind of.”  And although you might want very badly to disagree with me on these points, if you’re really honest with yourself, you know that if this essay offended you, it was because you kept thinking “How can she be so fucking arrogant?!”

    I am insanely arrogant, and it is my best quality, and the world would be a hell of a better place if more women would imitate me in it.

    Men are expected to be entitled to, and arrogant about, all the things about them that are traditionally male, from the bildungsroman to fart jokes.  The idea of the perfectly successful man is an extraordinarily arrogant figure who is all the more successful for it.

    Women, on the other hand, have decided that the things that make us uniquely feminine also make us weak.  You may also have been offended by this essay—perhaps in particular the pictures—because you felt I was objectifying myself, and therefore making myself weak.

    Did you hear that?  That was the sound of a whole bunch of angels getting set on fire.  Women’s sexuality is one of the most fucking powerful things in the world.  This is the only actual reason women and men are so terrified of it (and the reason that most men and most women hate women so goddamn much).  The idea that our sexuality will make us weak is a developed assumption with which that moustache-twirling villain “The Patriarchy” and academic feminism work absolutely hand-in-hand to fuck women over and disempower us.  This assumption exists only as a stupid defense mechanism against the collective terror of female sexuality.  Therefore, the fastest way for women to gain power is to be arrogant about our sexuality, or to be anywhere near as proud as men are of Being Giant Sexy Hos or Big Giant Untouchable Objects of Desire, or any other personal figuration of sexual power one might choose.

    The same is true of intellectual arrogance.  This site has addressed, in many other pieces, the importance of smart people being proud of, and aggressive about, their intelligence, rather than apologizing for it in the way our striving-for-perfect-mediocrity society would like all smart people to do.  For women, the idea of being the kind of intelligent that we espouse here at 1585—incredibly brilliant and virulently arrogant about it—exists as an available identity only in the image of the man-hating, ball-busting academic lesbian.   But imagine if women who looked and dressed like pin-up girls were the most arrogant, intelligent creatures around?  Who the fuck would be able to stop us?  The world, I’d hazard, would fall dead at our feet.  And yes, as happens when you’re really powerful and brilliant and hot (and especially when you’re a redhead), a whole lot of people would hate us.  But if intellectual women were empowered by the idea of being extremely hot in a blatantly sexual manner, and related to both things until it became clear, in the popular imagination, that they’re absolutely one and the same, imagine how differently the idea of intelligence might be regarded in our society.

    Because it’s more than that little girls want to princesses; that women want to be strippers; that chicks want to be Lord Byron just as much as guys do.  It’s that everyone—men, women and children alike—wishes they were a really, really hot girl, and wants to do the things that hot girls do.  If “hot girl” came also to mean “genius,” and vice versa, I’ll go ahead and hypothesize that stupidity might be just a little less lionized in our culture.

    But of course, I’m just a girl writing about shoes.  Next time it’ll be even worse.  Next time I’ll be a girl writing about having sex.  Really.  I promise.  At least twenty percent more autobiographical sex scenes.  See you there.

THE END
of
On Female Arrogance

…but Sexa Rubelucia will return
in
Kinky Sex for Social Justice

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