Dear Everyone: we should probably cool it with the open letter schtick from here on out, because it leads to phenomena like the “Hey Girls, Did You Know” meme, spawn of the microblogging site Tumblr.
You may be thinking, “And the problem is…? Shouldn’t we be demanding that people respect themselves more? Quit ‘showing off the goods’? Pull their damn pants up? Get off my lawn?” And I see where you’re coming from, I do.
But I’m going to need you to go back and rethink that. Assuming the privileged postion of telling other people what to do/show/wear/bang is kinda sorta not at all better than condescendingly asking them to ‘hold their head high.’ After all, you can’t tell someone to ‘hold her head high’ while you’re standing on their neck, pointing out the respectable closed-toe shoe you think they should be wearing if they don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.
If you’re unfamiliar with the”Hey Girls / Dear Girls” meme, it was kicked off by this image, posted on Tumblr by a male-model-turned-astronaut:
And brilliantly—I daresay legendarily—rebuffed by this:
The avalanche of response-memes to “Hey Girls” are at times amusing, but frequently veer into demeaning, slut-shaming territory.
What interests me about “Hey Girls” is how it seems to be almost entirely perpetuated by young women. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise: girls are no different from boys in that sometimes you really want to knock someone the eff out. But most girls are taught to never actually do that, and so some become pros at relational aggression. This is not news. I saw Mean Girls twice so I’m sort of a scholar.
If you read enough of the memes-begetting-memes-begetting-slut-shaming-placards, what becomes obvious is that many of these girls think they’re doing someone a favor. Some of it is catty, but it’s also clear — from their studied The Daily Show mock-serious faces to the overarching “you are not your hip size” vibe — that every “Hey Girls” poster on Tumblr or Instagram or Facebook thinks they’re being helpful. They think they are offering useful criticism, freeing women from the shackles of…well, whatever they don’t like that said shackled girls are wearing. ”Hey Girls” slut-shamers don’t think what they’re doing is thumbing their collective nose at feminism by being brazen in their attacks on other women AT ALL.
They think they’re being feminists.
The “Hey Girls” shamers assume these other women need their help. They’re irritated that “those girls with their hair and their rock and roll music and their tits out” are making the rest of us look bad. The shamers pity these other women. Which is, obviously, some paternalistic bullshit.
But this kind of behavior isn’t limited to teenage girls on Tumblr, of course. It’s grown-ass women on Twitter, wringing their hands over some poor dear’s internalized misogyny. It’s the morons picking on an Olympian’s ponytail. It’s you/me/everyone we know cackling over red carpet nip-slips that put goods on blast. It’s all of us. And until we teach feminism and tolerance in schools and churches instead of just assuming people pick it up every time we say, “You’re more than your looks,” it will be all of us.
Hey girls, did you know that your personal choices about sex, clothing, make-up, and education are not an indictment of everyone else’s? And that it’s not just boys who don’t get to tell you what to do?
Read More Rex Reed Calls Melissa McCarthy A “Hippo” In Fat-Shaming Review
About Molly Martin
