No seriously girl, it is so confusing
I can’t stop thinking about this song. Anytime I get it out of my head it manages to creep back in. It’s now to the point where I’m referencing it in conversation so you know it’s real. I told a joke about it and while it was admittedly very funny, it took me aback. Why is this song sticking with me so much? The obvious answer is that I am in fact a girl and I do find it often very confusing. There are so many social rules that come with womanhood and they are all unspoken. You are just supposed to know what they are and understand that it’s unacceptable to violate them. Oh and if you ever think for one second you can openly enforce or even just publicly acknowledge the rules, you will quickly find yourself on the outs. Or worse, in a weird, years long non-beef that you can put out of your mind for most of the time but something happens to remind you that it’ll never be resolved and you feel a dull ache where your friendship should be.
I’d say the first rule is that you can’t be jealous of other women. Well, you can’t show it. You need to be happy and gracious and excited for other women always and everyone around you has to know it. You can kind of tiptoe around it in some instances but it has to be expressed as a personal fault or lacking. Example:
“Wow, I love your hair. It’s so strong and healthy. I only hope that one day I can get my split ends together so I can have hair like yours.”
If you self deprecate and preemptively take blame for your jealously, you can express it as much as you like. Most people are much more receptive to jealousy this way. However, the punishment is always mandatory and most women have learned by now that it’s better to punish yourself before anyone else does. You can ensure a softer hand that way. This applies even if those same people who would be appalled at your jealousy, pit you against each other. In “The girl, so confusing version with Lorde”, the pre-chorus references the fact that the media compared the two early on in their careers, commenting on their similar hair and assigning them a shared trajectory of competition. Even though the artists themselves likely never intended to be competitors, they were pitted as rivals and it’s normal to see your rival succeed and start thinking, “Well what do they have that I don’t?” It’s natural to play the role you were given, especially when your livelihood is dependent on your participation. This happens to average women too. Our shared similarities are exploited to make us compete with each other and though we fight it, we falter anyway. Think of a woman you’ve ever been jealous of and tell me you can’t name 5 things you have in common with her right now. I actually dare you.
The second rule is that you must be a “Golden Girl’s Girl”. No matter how you feel about a woman or what she’s done to you, people around you have to feel like you like her. This is regardless of your true feelings. If you dislike her, whether you think it’s justified or not, in public you can’t let that show. Even when gossiping with your friends, there is a limit to how much you can express your dislike. The room has to always be read. I don’t watch Love Island but I watch every TikTok about both the UK and US versions that come across my for you page. One thing that always sticks out to me is the contradictory expectations of the fans. This is a show in which people compete directly for “love”, sequestered in a gorgeous villa for weeks. The show also tends to hone in on the stiff competition between the women, who are often made to steal men from right out under other female contestants.
As you can imagine, this involves the typical backstabbing and manipulation that comes with a normal reality competition show, but with the added touch of the genuine heartbreak that comes with matters of the heart (people really develop feelings on this show it’s wild). It is then baffling to think that a big part of the show are the “friendships” that evolve among the women in the cast. So much so, that you can’t hope to win unless you establish seemingly close relationships with the very women you have to compete with. You have to smile in the face of the woman who happily took your man and hope the audience believes it enough to vote for you. In fact the two women above are currently being lauded as the best friendship in the villa, even though their first interactions are of one stealing a man from the other. You would be completely within your right to dislike the woman who partially (the real villain here is that detestable man they were pitted against over) ruined your relationship. But according to the rules, you wouldn’t be a girls girl and that’s unacceptable. Punishable by social death, amplified by the millions of viewers at home.
Beauty is less of a rule and more of a curse, but a rule nonetheless (at least for our purposes). To maintain access to certain jobs, friends, opportunities, and partners, women have to remain beautiful and conventionally so. The woman of today has to aspire to looking untouched by time or illness despite aging or being sick. Has to dress in a way that keeps up with current trends and is pleasing to the eye but is still unique enough to distinguish her from the next woman. In certain circles, women are expected to get surgery along with their degrees, lest their accomplishments be erased by an ugly face. In our culture specifically, we are inundated with beauty from girlhood. Our entertainment centers looking beautiful. The heroes in our shows have their beauty constantly remarked upon as virtues. We watch them win because they are beautiful, even more so if they manage to be beautiful without having to strive for it. On the surface we can acknowledge this as the misogyny that stains our society but in practice this is something we hold ourselves to and it is so embedded that no outside party has to do the work of enforcing this rule. We do it ourselves.
To bring it back to the song, Lorde states that a big cause of the disconnect between her and Charli are the feelings she felt about her own appearance and body. So much so that she was afraid to appear in pictures with Charli. I like to believe that she is acutely aware of how she would be compared to Charli and how her “lack of beauty” in comparison could lead to further damage to her self image. Not to mention the nonsensical bullying that befalls all hyper-visual women online. It’s also easy to see how these unrealistic expectations placed on women can lead to all manner of misunderstandings. When you add in the unspoken competition women are subjected to, it’s no wonder they had to work it out on the remix, more of us will probably need to.
There are so many unspoken rules that hang over our heads as women and it makes existing as a woman perilous and fraught. It also tinges our relationships with other women, making it impossible for us to really know each other. We exist at the core of these immense personas that we use, in vain, to reach out to each other. But since it isn’t real, we miss each other entirely and have to rely on own imaginations of who the other woman is. It sucks but I don’t see why it has to be that way. Lorde and Charli XCX have done something truly incredible here and serve as an example for all of us. They have acknowledged the miscommunication between them while centering the true cause of the breakdown, the pressures of being a woman and how it makes just existing so baffling. Queens, I hope we can all learn from them going forward.
Stream BRAT. Thank you!