the group chat w/notyrgirls

Hi notyrgirlies,

Turns out that life on the Internet moves much faster than we can write and publish our regular newsletters. Who knew? We’re piloting a shorter, juicier, news- and link-rich format to tide you over between full issues. In the group chat, you’ll get the 411 on what we believe is worth paying attention to and sneak peeks at what’s coming next. 

DEAR DIARY…

Cass has been diving deep into the intimate, embarrassing, revelatory world of diaries for our next full issue of notyrgirls. I asked her to give us a sneak peek:

I’ve only kept one diary throughout my life. It is a little dark blue book with a broken lock, covered in the most random stickers possible. I wrote in it sporadically from April 11, 2001 to December 23, 2004:

I modeled my own writing on the fictional diaries I devoured as a kid and preteen. I documented the people I met, the friends I made and lost, and how life made me feel. Like many diaries before, the pages hold both the real and imagined: things I thought, but did not know; things I invented for myself out of a need for self-confidence and hope (many, many delusions about crushes). As Steven E. Kagle and Lorenza Gramegna write in “Rewriting Her Life: Fictionalization and the Use of Fictional Models in Early American Women’s Diaries”:

“Each entry, coloured by the subjective impressions and conceptions of the moment, becomes ‘fact’ as it is fixed on paper. In this way diarists become mythmakers, creating enduring records that will affect not only interpretations of past and present situations, but also future decisions” (39).

I was making my own myths. No one was reading my diary (I think… god, I hope). But I was reading Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s Two of a Kind: Diaries, the Royal Diaries, and Dear Canada. Each series served its own purpose in the Girl Power era, projecting a particular vision for girlhood (and girls’ place in the political, cultural, social, civic) at the turn of the millennium. Inevitably, we drew from this vision as we crafted our own narratives. And so, “in their diaries,” explains Judy Simons in “Invented Lives: Textuality and Power in Early Women’s Diaries”, “women write scripts for themselves, erotic, domestic, maternal or martyred, that transpose fictional female stereotypes onto their own lives” (255).

Many scholars have analyzed the tension between women and girls’ writing of the self as both an act of ultimate freedom and of conformity. Fiction may take us beyond our wildest dreams. But it might also cloud a bleak reality. 

Dear Diary, are you really a reflection of me? Or am I just a figment of someone else’s imagination?

JAC SPILLS THE BEANS

• Last week, my friend Caty sent me a post asking “why did feminism get replaced with whatever this ‘girlhood’ thing is”. It’s a pithy summary of how so much online commentary about gender may pretend to be consciousness-raising or even (shudder) empowering, but, as we wrote about in our first issue, as girlhood trends multiply, they can also impose ever more restrictive boundaries around acceptable gender identity, presentation, and norms.
  

• While we’re on the topic… for The Guardian, Sarah Manavis asks: “From brats to tradwives: why do we keep putting women into subcultures?” Manavis examines the many examples of micro- (and not so micro-) aesthetic trends that populate our online spaces: tradwives, clean girl, coquette, brat. Adherents often imply–or state outright–that “you’re not performing for the male gaze, fitting long-standing stereotypes around thinness and sex appeal, but actually conforming to these beauty standards in a secretly feminist way”. But Manavis isn’t convinced by this argument, writing that “it’s hard to see how the broader takeaway isn’t a generation of women being cast as weak and vapid, a myth perpetuated by the flawed belief that this illogical messaging will somehow override the dominant aesthetics – which ultimately promote adherence to traditional femininity.”
  
  Manavis juxtaposes the uptake of these trends to the “real crisis for women’s rights and safety” from “a growing backlash to gender equality” to abortion restrictions in the U.S. and ever present gender-based violence. I would explicitly add the threats to trans women to this list, who are the targets of right-wing hate and violence, limitations on gender-affirming care, so-called "parental rights" movements that force trans youth back into the closet.
  
  My two cents: Aesthetics won’t save us. They will never move the needle on gender equality issues. Can we ask for more from our online communities?
  

• The limitations of the aesthetics and beauty discourse are never clearer than during an Olympics year. Always a battleground for those seeking to harden the fuzzy boundaries of gender, this summer has seen boxer Imane Khelif targeted by virulent online harassment following false claims about her sex. (She won gold, anyway.) Sexism and racism intersect here; the fact that Khelif doesn’t conform to normative white womanhood is surely a factor, as Ruby Hamad writes for Al Jazeera.

• I could not get enough of the women’s rugby sevens competition. It was mind blowing to witness the speed and intensity of these games and the skill level of the players. Like many bisexual women before me (...), I am fully on board with Ilona Maher’s TikTok takeover. I love her message that bodies don’t have to look a certain way to perform a certain way, and how she pushes back against the people who believe that you can’t be, say, a proper woman with have broad shoulders–or be an Olympic rugby star and wear makeup. 

• Maybe it’s because I just wasn’t paying attention in previous years, but it seems like there have also been more women athletes sporting makeup/beauty looks in Paris more generally?

• Jia Tolentino has entered the Sephora Tweens chat. What I find insightful about her commentary: she’s noting not only the influence that TikTok makeup tutorials can have on younger and younger girls, but also the normalization of using anti-aging routines, Instagram face replication surgery and injectables at lower and lower ages, creating a loop where “children want to look like tweens, tweens want to look like teen-agers, teen-agers want to look like grown women, and grown women—dreaming of porelessness, wearing white socks and penny loafers and hair bows—evidently want to look like ten-year-old girls” (italics mine).

• Also in the New Yorker, Parul Sehgal’s excellent review of Sarah Manguso’s Liars raises some salient questions that could be applicable to any number of recently published ‘divorce books’, both fiction and non-. I have read and enjoyed many such books—I particularly loved Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife—and I am curious about what the return to these themes indicates not only about contemporary hetero relationship dynamics, but also about how we are responding to the larger forces that influence them.
  
  My theory is that this current (re)surgence is at least partially about the lack of power women feel outside of the home. In the face of this powerlessness, we return to domains where it feels like we can level the playing field. What I love about Lenz’s book is how she uses a blend of memoir, reportage, and historical work to show that the marital problems on display in these books are not (just) interpersonal issues but the result of broader legal, political, and social structures that were always set up to disadvantage the women in these unions. Our victories in the domestic sphere will be partial at best if that’s the only place we pick our battles.

• Vicky Osterweil on the affect shift arising from Kamala Harris’ nomination as the Democratic pick for the 2024 U.S. elections: “Transferring our feeling of joy at fascism's faltering into gratitude and affection for Harris and Walz may feel easy and satisfying now, after all, there's momentum, a massive apparatus of spectacle ready to capture your attention and your affect via rallies, speeches and memes. But the Dems have been just as complicit in producing the crushing despair, hopelessness and violence of the last decade, and we shouldn't offer them the gift of our joy, this little flame of love and hope we've kept alive despite all their violence.”

• Cass recommends: For more on the memeification of the current electoral race, listen to A Bit Fruity by Matt Bernstein on “The Kamalafication of BRAT”. Then, read Fariha Róisín on “The Yessification of Kamala Harris”: “It’s 300 days of the genocide in Gaza and I’m here to remind you that Kamala Harris is not your friend.” 

  

• Women in Translation month: After reading Days of Abandonment in July, and in a feverish desire to absorb ever more Ferrante-esque sprawling, intimate, sharp, dreamlike work, I have picked up both Arturo’s Island and Lies and Sorcery. (Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Ferrante is Elsa Morente-esque?) My beloved has fuelled this fire by gifting me Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts.

What hot takes have been winding you up this August? Are you fully tuned out and in beach read mode? We want to know! Share with the group chat in the comments below: