002: Bad Taste

Or, An essay about Online Girlhood: A Coming of Age Story.

In my senior year of college I had to design the front page and table of contents of a fictional magazine for one of my editorial design classes. Mine was called Classymag. The table of contents listed a profile on the Breadface Blog,:“This girl sets the mood with colored lights and some synth pop to smash her face into some bread. And y’all like that?” It included a ranked list of every Prince movie from Under the Cherry Moon and Graffiti Bridge and a profile of Trisha Paytas headlined, “A Very Sad and Pathetic Afternoon.” The magazine’s tagline was: “So bad, it’s better” and it was the culmination of everything I ever got from and wanted to give back to the media that raised me.

When I was a teenager in the 2010s, I was visiting the Rookie website three times a day where I learned about Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides, graphic novels like Ghost World, and everything the Art Hoe Collective was up to. I was learning about intersectional feminism online and anti-imperialist struggles in school (I had very cool teachers). In the Girl Internet of Rookie and Sad Girl Tumblr I found the words to describe how girlhood was a privilege afforded to the white woman-in-the making; how as an actual girl, I never felt like one because I was never granted the kind of protection-worthy innocence my white peers seemed to ooze out of their pretty pink pores.

Today, I still partial to girlishness, excess, mess, spillage, slippage in everything I read, watch and listen to. I am embarrassingly vulnerable to Orion Carloto’s power as an influencer, the drama of medieval mysticism and perfumes that smell like rotting flowers. This year, I watched Real Housewives of Atlanta from top to bottom (New York, Beverly Hills and Vanderpump Rules are already notches on my bedpost) and about a dozen 1970s vampire movies with unconvincing fake blood. It's likely that Enya will be my top artist of the year on Spotify. Is it saccharine? Melodramatic? Exaggerated? Obscene? I want it.

In “bad taste” I saw wild, different and stimulating kinds of artistic expressions that, to me, exercised the kind of politics I was building for myself: Old RuPaul’s Drag Race, John Waters, Todd Hayne’s Velvet Goldmine, Marina and the Diamonds, the abject art on the Juxtapoz website, the British show Misfits, punk and hardcore music each had their own way of challenging the very hierarchies that repudiated my personhood, my body, my intelligence, my sexuality, my love, and my spirit as othered, less-than, impure, or even malignant and, therefore, dangerous.

So I get defensive, especially around people who think they are above “trashy” media like memes or reality television. I get off on anything that reveals how superficial and boring those snobby attitudes really are. I live for the moment when proponents of “good taste” are exposed as the hollow and unintelligent readers they’re so terrified of being. Not because I think trashy entertainment is especially noble, it definitely isn't. But because the things these snobs use to signal their alleged superiority are often just as commercially-driven, self-serving, thoughtless, and un-artistic and any of the Housewives franchises.¹

I love watching the whitened sheen of fear, or, at the very least, discomfort, wash over the imagined faces of all the hipsters, prejudiced teachers, and Harry Potter-pilled liberals that once alienated me. By embracing girlishness, melodrama, hypersexuality, kitsch, grossness, tackiness, sentimentality, and all the things that felt native to me and my otherness, I push the conflict back onto those who maintain these hierarchies to feel good about themselves.

When I think about why I care about taste and what it means to me, I recognize this near-spiritual attachment to culture. I don’t just find myself, I make myself through these encounters with film, art, memes and moodboards. For better or worse, in defending “bad taste,” I am also defending my own othered existence.

bow at a bar.

Online, taste expressed becomes an aesthetic. Every click, save, like, repost, send, library and profile articulates a self that comes together into an aesthetic called “You.” As fragmented and incongruous and incomplete as any person can be, some semblance of continuity emerges through what she does or does not like.

Controversial as they may be, “aesthetic friendships” are based on the premise that your aesthetic is supposed to tell the world who you are and those with similar aesthetics are supposed to share your values. But that’s now how it works, which is why tensions bubbled up again when the show notes for Sandy Liang’s SS25 show made the rounds on Twitter. Somehow the show notes triggered a debate about what it means for grown women to wear girly clothes. Some wondered if it’s infantilizing while a loud and consistent chorus of “i’m just a girl” posters seemed to struggle with the idea of critical thinking. I thought we were all playing with hyperfeminine aesthetics as a way to push back against, not give in to the demands to perform a certain kind of femininity. But Rian Phin’s intervening tweets reminded me of how much things changed since I first pledged my loyalty to all things girly:

“ribbons and bows now = you’re smart enough to be on trend and know the ribbons and bows trend

in 2010s = you’re smart enough to critically engage feminist literature and understand patriarchal oppression or at least perform like you do for the acceptance of smart women lol.”

The weirdness of the Sandy Liang show notes reminded me of how delicate our systems of signs and aesthetics really are. In the lifetime of a 30-something, the bow can go from infantilizing to subversive and from subversive back to infantilizing. This is why aesthetics are shoddy foundations for community, because we all use cultural signifiers in different ways and what they mean is relationally determined. You alone do not decide how your girly outfits are perceived.

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In 2020 I noticed a slew of online creators, aesthetics, niches and trends that shared a distinctly hyperfeminine bend. In an essay for Lux Magazine I explain how I thought these “girl trends” could offer today’s youth a model for a truly countercultural girlhood, one that could have gone even further than the one from my teen years. One specific feature of the New Age Bimbo subculture I feel most commentators missed, or refused to acknowledge in good faith, was the creators’ overt criticism of intelligence as a virtue. All the bimbo’s I spoke to were keenly aware of how intelligence and attractiveness are “flimsy constructs that are regularly wielded against femmes, people of color, and neurodivergent people.” The whole premise of the New Age Bimbo was that brains and beauty are qualities, not virtues. I also mentioned the femcels of late 2021, who led with a similar clarity of conviction when it came to naming all the ways in which looks do matter, even if we wish they didn’t. These are example of countercultural communities that nurtured nuanced conversations about privilege, systemic discrimination and gender before coalescing into legible aesthetics.

Today, we’re all totally familiar with, if not overwhelmed by, Girlhood™. At some point between Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour and the Barbie (2023) premiere it all melted down into a regressive version of the JustGirlyThings Tumblr. An eerie White Girl Supremacy of blushy cheeks and baby skin emerged in all her demure cutesiness as a chronically online proponent of choice feminism, girlboss worship, and gender essentialism hiding behind “i’m just a girl” memes.

In the last year or so, aesthetic trends, microtrends, and “cores”—as a whole— have shed any clear sense of distinction. Nearly thirty years into the commercialization of the internet and we zoomed past the phase in which we could come together as self-recognizing collectives or communities because that was never its purpose. We now mostly exist as masses and aggregates with evanescent histories. This development, these blurring delineations, these interchangeable trends and their emptiness of meaning, is the culmination of the omnivorous consumer culture that makes all social media use a mix of marketing and identity-building. In their mainstream success, cores and aesthetics look like they spawned out of nothing as plug-and-play marketing campaigns. And popular thought reflects this delusion through its assumption that aesthetic trends were themselves nothing more than raw material for or byproducts of IRL trends. But as Digital Fairy’s Rukiat Ashawe summarizes, “aesthetic trends are chronically online trends.” Online aesthetics are the overflow of a wide range of online activity and they index recurring themes that motivate our many online expressions.

The Girl Internet didn’t just disappear after the headlines flatlined. The Girl Internet is a rash on the dermis of the social media, living off the flora of its own skin. While the swelling is down, a few bumps remain, pink and tender.

In the Office Siren and the Hegelian e-Girl I see two such irritated nubs. As fodder for fashion Instagrams and Pinterest boards, the Office Siren is an exemplary online aesthetic rooted in the kind of taste-expressing exercises that underpins so much online activity. As a hyperfeminine imagining of the female office worker — the Office Siren is definitely not a girl. Subtle tributes to fetishwear and nods to pornography’s Hot Secretary and Sexy Coworker tropes charge the Office Siren with the responsibility of turning oppressive corporate jobs into sites of aesthetic jouissance — sleek outfits and shiny hairstyles for chic cubicles. After her peak in the first half of the year, the Office Siren was forgotten as a failed fashion trend and a pop-feminism flop. In the summer, the Hegelian e-Girl emerged on Twitter as a loose collective of philosophy-posters listed on the flyer for a party that never happened. The word salad manifesto came after. Months later she returned to virality in her most complete and realized form: a pristine edition of The Phenomenology of Spirit with a sprinkle of coke.

The desires, dreams, impulses and drives that compel people online to post about the kind of girl or women they want to be, doesn’t go away after the trend cycle gobbles up their latest expressions. People are still posting, liking, sharing; trying to find and become themselves with every click.

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Apart from shopping, all a person can do online with little inconvenience is aestheticize. To turn everything we can into something beautiful, and presumably, meaningful. Even anti-trends like “underconsumption-core” are little else but “the aestheticization of frugal living.” This is how meaning drifts and transgression, along with the liberating potential of bad taste, becomes dulled and weakened. What was once unattractive and pedestrian is given the glossy sheen of moralization (underconsumption-core) or sexualization (Office Siren). What was once shorthand for the gender imbalance in household chores is now the stand-in for the fully-realized woman (the “divine feminine”). The work of being both a woman and a writer is aestheticized as the Literary It Girl, and deflated political passion is styled into “reactionary chic.” 

When it comes to internet cultures, reactionary cross-cutting has obliterated any sense of directionality. The countercultures have lost their primary points of reference. What we have now — in the clean girls, bed rotters, deerposters, trad wives, shitposters and even in the depths Manosphere — is a thick haze of synonymous moods. A generalized ache. A blur of malaise. An amorphous mass of feral disaffection and indifference. Layers of irony that cancel each other out.

From this rot, I notice a more overt effort to aestheticize the abject. On my own feeds memes are creepy and gory, I’m seeing a lot of teeth manicures and claw pedicures. Lorde posted of herself spitting. “The Substance” screenshots are inescapable. It’s all a hum of bed rotting and deerposting. I like all of it. And I need to know I’m not the only one with this instinct to turn these feelings of disgust into something beautiful or ecstatic.

In the book on abjection Julia Kristeva writes about Louis Ferdinand Céline, a novelist whose offensively over-stylized writing is topped only by his vile antisemitism. For Kristeva, his work was “the most daring X-ray of the ‘drive foundations’ of fascism,” intent on capturing “libidinal surplus value” of “horror and suffering.”² In a similar fashion, I see how the generalized mood of large swaths of the internet trades in the libidinal value of “horror and suffering” through various degrees of aestheticization. Making things beautiful or fuckable in order to live with them.

And while reading Susan Sontag’s description of fascist ideals in art, it was all too easy to think of an internet culture equivalent for each of the traits she listed: “the ideal of life as art, [aestheticization of everything] the cult of beauty [looksmaxxing], the fetishism of courage [contrarian trolling, iconoclastic influencing], the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community [fandoms, mob justice]; the repudiation of the intellect [misinformation, “open the schools!”]; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders) [Stay-At-Home Girlfriends and, once again, trad wives].”³

As fascism tightens its grip on our necks I understand the temptation to play along and pretend it's all part of a sexy little game. This type of self-alienation, wrote Walter Benjamin, can reach a point where “it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”⁴

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According to Andrea Long Chu’s Females (2019), everyone is female and everyone hates it. “To be is to be female: the two are identical.” This version of female isn’t sex, nor is it gender. It’s the result of a “psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” As a consequence, “the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force.” Long Chu continues: “This is the root of all political consciousness: the dawning realization that one’s desires are not one’s own, that one has become a vehicle for someone else’s ego.” 

This is nowhere more true than when we are online. To become or make oneself through memes or movies means that we can only feel ourselves fully realized in the eyes of our beholders. Followers, friends, families, algorithms — they witness and structure how our every move coalesces into the aesthetics of “you” I mentioned before. Everyone is a female, especially on the internet. To be female is to know that “you are not the central transit hub of meaning about yourself,” and the deeper you dig into what you think are your desires, ideas and intentions, the more you find someone else’s. The chronic batching and articulation of aesthetics that can be readily assimilated into personalities is the most pervasive manifestation of this urgency to become something of one’s own only to, in the end, find someone else’s fantasies of what a smart, beautiful, successful or lovable person is. Even the Manosphere is part of the Girl Internet. In a forthcoming essay for Lux I wrote about sales influencers like Andy Elliott, who are aggressively committed to being physically fit and financially successful – looksmaxxed and finmaxxed. Their hypermasculinty betrays their desperate efforts to overcompensate for just how face-down-ass-up-fucked like the rest of us they really are. 

Nothing we do online is entirely our own. Nothing about the centuries of technologies that have brought us here — not even language itself — gives us the right to claim that what we do on the internet is the expression or pursuit of some pure or unique sense of “self.” I can only exist as what you decide to see me as and vice-versa. Being —online and off— is relational.

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And so in 2022, John Waters himself proclaimed that “Trump ruined bad taste.” Whatever “bad taste” might have meant to Waters in the 70s or me in the 2010s has been overtaken by louder agents of transgression. “He’s the first person that accidentally had bad taste and it wasn’t funny,” Waters explained, citing Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” 

Trump’s most offensive qualities — his hair, his tan, his gilded bathrooms, the rambling speeches and unmasked bigotry — are all completely un-innocent in their overt displays of excess wealth and narcissism. The same applies to Ambani wedding in India, Bolsonaro’s antics in Brasil and Kamala Harris’s genocidal cackling — none of it is innocent or funny or edgy. It’s all quite intentionally excessive, over-the-top, indulging that self-annihilatory impulse with only slight variations in their degrees of mania, callousness, depression and anger.

In this context, it’s harder for bad taste to have the liberating impact I remember it once had. Bad taste means something else now. What to do in face of this drift, is all writers ever talk about lately: Sally Rooney, ever the Marxist, thinks we need a “radical aesthetics.” Christina Sharpe exhorts us to “commit to the fight for meaning.” This drift, this back and forth slide of the role of transgression in politics and culture is not new. It’s culture in action and historical amnesia at work. The value behind the images, the meaning behind the aesthetics and the substance of the styles are all collectively-determined and, there I go again, entirely relational. Meaning needs to be nurtured, tended to, fed and protected. Having a longview on history, seeing the world beyond our immediate context, might be the only evergreen countercultural strategy.

Online, the Girl is the ultimate relational being. In Females, Long Chu defines gender as “the specific defense mechanism” we develop in reaction to our femaleness and I wonder if I’m thinking of “girl” as the gender that expresses itself in reaction to its exposure so such drifts in meaning. A girl is optimized for relation, primed to not only survive, but thrive, on the internet. Always creating herself with and against the world around her, always moodboarding and aestheticizing. For better or worse the Girl Internet will always flare up and irritate and itch. And I’m probably giving the girl more credit than she’s due because it’s the only way I know how to push, counter, transgress and subvert. 🎀

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🔗: McKenzie Wark on Cute Accelerationism — MiuMiu’s SS 25 show included QR codes to academic texts about life online — from Current Affairs: 11,000 words on why The Atlantic sucks — a YouTube playlist of hard-to-find political films from Palestine, Syria + Lebanon — the Palestinian Film Institute made a bunch of films free to watch online.

1. For example, the NYT Book Review, as laid out by Yasmin Nair for Current Affairs: “Over the course of its long existence, it has shaped literary tastes without any real commitment to appraisal or critique, and it has taken pride in its ability to carry on a tradition of nothingness, no real engagement with books, only an often smarmy, worshipful reverence for (certain) books and (certain) writers.” But if it makes you feel at home at dinner parties go ahead.

2. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror (1982). p.155.

3. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism,”Under the Sign of Saturn. (1980). p.96

4. Benjamin. “Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” p.49