On being a girl
Forget delta for a second. Remember #metoo? Me too
Spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen the new “And Just Like That” series and care about being surprised, be forewarned.
“Okay, the Friday night uniform has been donned,” says my spouse Janyce, newly changed into her sweats and sliding by the Christmas tree in her socks.
“Don we now our Friday apparel?” I say.
It’s 5:42 and I still have my computer open on my lap in the living room. I’m sitting facing my bird window, which has now gone completely black. Only the reflection of my face and the holiday lights shine in the glass.
“Jesus, it’s quarter to six,” says Janyce from the kitchen. “How the hell did that happen?” I can hear a squeaking sound as she pulls the stopper out of the bottle.
“I hope that’s my Manhattan being made,” I say.
We’re getting ready to watch the new Sex and the City remake on HBO Max. I know I’m going to hate it and watch it anyway, relaxing into the familiarity of these characters that I have binge watched through reruns many times.
Janyce and I would ask each other the same question during those days holed up in the house nearly two years ago. “What do you want to watch tonight?”she’d say. “I want a repeat of something mildly entertaining that doesn’t require anything from me,” I’d say. “Well, I think that means ‘Law and Order’ or ‘Sex and the City,’” she’d say. The episodic girlfriends comedy would usually win out.
“Do you have a napkin?” says Janyce, tossing me a cloth one before handing me a plate with three slices of mushroom flatbread. We’re sitting side-by-side on the couch with our feet up, making comments as we watch. The show is not so good. It’s not completely awful, either. I can relate to some of it. And we both see where the story lines are going to go, already, after 10 minutes. But I’m suddenly feeling old and angry now.
“What did she do to her face?” says Janyce.
“Facelift, I think. She has Mary Steenburgen’s face now,” I say.
I’m angry because these aging female actors in their 50s need to look 20 years younger not so much for themselves, but according to long-held cultural beauty standards. If you want to keep working in Hollywood, you go to these lengths to alter your appearance. That is, if you are a girl. My friends and I (many of us in our mid-50s, too) actually do talk about our graying hair, and about whether we are keeping it natural or coloring it, just like Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte. We actually do exclaim about the “bad” act of ordering french fries at lunch. If you are girl. We actually do talk about how we used to look.
Just yesterday, one of my college girlfriends forwarded me a picture of all of us only 10 years earlier “God, we all looked so incredible,” she said. Implied in that statement is a wistful commentary on how we all look now.
To be fair, I wasn’t constantly yelling at the TV. I already like one of the new gender non-binary characters and hope that Cynthia Nixon and Sarah Ramirez have a thing. If I was writing this series, I’d go there. And also to be fair, I came to the couch mad already.
Earlier in the week, my friend Roger sent me a link to a wikiart page with a list of art movements, genres, and styles. I was very excited while perusing the page to see that there is also a section with short films. I’m a big fan of the micro story, the two-paragraph poem, the 12-minute blog post. There is power in brevity and the short film is probably my favorite art form.
Today, I watched one beautifully filmed and lyrical short film again. It’s about an ordinary Tuesday in the life of a teenage girl in Istanbul. There’s not a woman on the planet who can’t relate, who doesn’t have a story that resembles this. Even my spouse Janyce, who fully owns her non-binary identity, has a story like this from her days of being a girl. This film is the real Sex and the City and totally worth twelve minutes of your time.
I’m angry, too, because I also read an old Refinery29 article on the “me too” movement’s history timeline and realized that we’re not really making any progress.
“I can’t believe they killed him off in the very first episode,” I say.
“Nobody wants to watch Carrie Bradshaw as a happily married middle-aged woman,” says Janyce. “I think they have plans for her with that guy they’ve foreshadowed a couple of times in the booth during her podcast.”
“You really can write this stuff, ” I say, giving her a little jab in the side.
We finish our flatbread and our glass of wine and both of the two newly-released episodes in the series. My anger has subsided somewhat, but I’m still feeling some of the grief from the storyline mixed in with the grief of realizing another winter season spent mostly on the couch and staying away from crowds of people.
And then there is that ever-present lingering grief—not always so noticeable in daily life—but it comes back to me in moments, triggered from a television show, or the passing comment from a longtime friend, or a beautiful short film, one that captures a feeling so artfully, with only a few bits of dialogue, and the sweeping motion of a hand-held camera. The internalized trauma of being a girl.