(no subject)
Guys Only Want The Shy, Pretty Girls
My biggest fear when I drink, where others might go home with the wrong person or get into a fight, is saying something that I will regret. I always wake up after a night out and immediately rack my brain as to what I could have said that I will have to spend the day, if not week, cringing at. It’s just in my nature in general - and more so when I have a few in me - to want to talk, to start conversation, to relate to people, and to storytell. My already-pronounced extroversion becomes nothing short of machine-gun chattiness when things go into Party Mode. And it can often have unfortunate consequences.
When you are the kind of loud, purely extroverted person who wants always to be in the middle of a passionate conversation, you are bound to put your foot in your mouth. You’re going to overshare, to make it seem like it’s all about you in an attempt to relate, to make a joke that falls so flat you can hear people’s stomachs turning. It’s just a hazard of the territory, but it doesn’t make it any less unpleasant to look back on the next day. There was the moment when you said something stupid and then, in an attempt to get back the territory you’ve lost, you proceeded to dig yourself into an ever-more-extreme conversational hole until the other person was visibly looking for a way to get out. Re-living scenes like that the next day are one of the worst parts about being an extrovert.
But when you’re on, you’re on. You can charm a room, make everyone laugh, put almost anyone at ease in most any situation. You’re not afraid of confrontation, you shine in interviews, and you have a knack at getting along with new people. When you are in control of the careening steam engine that is your loudness, there is nothing better.
I was always told that I was a loud girl. I should stop talking so much, stop putting myself where I wasn’t wanted, stop offering my two cents. As you age, being the talkative type tends to prove beneficial in competitive business environments, but most of being a little girl is about being docile, passive, a supplicant. It’s about being seen and not heard. It’s about retaining that perfectly soft, approachable sweetness that only comes with choosing your words with absolute and graceful accuracy. It’s about being the cute little thing that other people want to play with, not the eight-year-old Hillary Clinton who dictates where people are going to play in kickball and tells everyone the dirty joke she learned from her older cousins over the weekend.
“Loud girls are annoying,” classmates would tell me, “It’s like you’re a boy.” I didn’t understand - I wore pink, I was very small, I had long, wavy hair. What about me wasn’t in the most perfectly narrow definition of girldom? Was having a voice, even one that tended to escape me when I would get just a little too excited, really so mutually exclusive with femininity? Was being the leader, the talker, the connecter, really the domain of boys? Particularly at the age where boys seemed more terrified if anything by a female presence, it felt ridiculous to write my girliness off simply because I liked to have my voice heard.
For so long, I believed that, in order to find love, I would have to quiet down. When I would go on dates, especially in those breathless beginnings when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward, I would sweat bullets attempting to clip my speech and only speak when necessary. I would never raise my voice, never tell a bawdy joke, rarely even curse. I wanted to be seen as ladylike, as poised, as the kind of woman that you could be proud of without her ever edging near the territory of your masculinity. It was important to me that I be in control of how “myself” I was, even if it meant I barely enjoyed the date. When I would bring him around my friends for the first few times, they would remark afterwards at how unnatural I’d been.
“You’re just trying to impress him,” they’d say, “You know you’re a lot louder than that.”
I was just trying to impress him. And I realized that the boys who I had tricked into wanting me with a false, edited version of my personality eventually grew weary of me when I became my full, loud self. They would wonder where the charming, airbrushed version of my personality from the first few weeks had gone, and why I was suddenly the one telling the embarrassing story to the whole table at the bar. And I would look over, and see his discomfort, and be overwhelmed with shame. I was that loud girl in school again, the one that no boy would ever like. I shut up.
The first time I went out with my boyfriend, I told myself that I would just be me. I would be loud, I would be strange, I would not tailor myself to be likable - no matter how much I wanted him to approve of me. And we were, the both of us. We laughed, and sang in the street, and told dirty jokes. We talked and talked and talked, tripping over one another to continue the conversation. And it became clear to me, for the first time in my life, that being loud wasn’t ever going to be something I could hide. It wasn’t something that I could suppress under a dozen layers of reserve and propriety and not speaking until spoken to. And it didn’t make me a boy. It didn’t make me a girl, either. It just made a person with stories and energy and a desire to get to know everyone in the world - even if you might tell the occasional bad joke while drinking. And it is worth it to wait for the people who aren’t afraid of a loud girl.
_____
No One Will Love A Loud Girl
Among the qualities which are almost universally considered feminine, a certain amount of poised restraint and delicate softness is usually up there with “pretty” and “smells good.” Women are these gentle flowers, these perfect little pillows of silk and decorative beading which exist to cushion life, to make it more soft and pleasant and nice to look at. A woman, beyond not just talking back, is expected to be a good sounding board for the humor of others - particularly men. We are there to coyly laugh at a man’s jokes, reminding him that he is funny and smart and desirable, rarely making a comeback of our own.
And we can tend to overlook these stereotypes as anachronistic views of what a man and woman were expected to be back in the days when a real-life Don Draper was spreading his misogynistic seed all over lower Manhattan without a care in the world. We can sometimes believe that this point of view has all but disappeared, replaced by a new, more complex love for a woman who is able to speak her mind - and does so without waiting for permission. But one need only be said loud girl just once, feel the sting of someone telling you that it is “ugly” or “unattractive” or “manly” for a woman to curse, or make jokes, or laugh the loudest, to know that this sentiment still exists deep beneath our skin.
One could make the argument that, with the Zooey Deschanels and Mila Kunises of the world, we have begun to turn our affectionate sights towards a woman who is intellectually nimble, who makes jokes and keeps up with the boys in a way that challenges them. But even a cursory analysis of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope reveals her to be acerbic only in a non-threatening, sweet way. She challenges you, but only the way a pillow fight might injure you. She remains soft, warm, filled with girlish interests and hyper-feminine clothing which serve to balance out her more sardonic humor or biting wit. And, as if it were even a question, she is stunningly beautiful and thin.
But for normal girls, girls who just happen to be loud and like bathroom humor and cursing and don’t see any of this as particularly incongruous with the concept of being a desirable woman, it can often feel as though, in order to find love or acceptance, part of you will have to be muted - or at least strongly dulled. No one, it seems, would accept someone who is constantly running at 100 percent, who curses a blue streak or doesn’t take shit or puts their foot down. Who could possibly accept that sense of humor is something to be shared in a couple, not dominated by one party to which the other one is constantly playing the charmed and placated audience? On more than one occasion, I have been told directly that I am “too loud,” “too much,” “too manly.”
What does that even mean, “manly”? Is a sense of humor or the ability to speak up in a conversation a quality we’re really consecrating entirely to the xy chromosome? Does uttering a curse word suddenly take a tally mark from the “woman” column and mark it with jagged urgency in the “man” one? Is there a fixed amount of bold or talkative you can be before you become ugly - and let’s be honest, is it directly proportional to how physically attractive you are? (I’m sure people are much more likely to tolerate a foul mouth or loud laugh coming from a woman who looks like a supermodel.) What a sad little box to put ourselves in as humans, this idea that we can only share a certain amount of our personalities before we become, by default, undesirable. It seems that everyone misses out in this equation, that even if two people genuinely love the other for who they are, there will always be a sense of paranoia that, on the greater societal level, they are not doing something “right.” They are too loud, too frank, too much of a presence in the relationship.
Of course, with time, I discovered that there are people who enjoy women who speak their mind and make their presence known. They think cursing is funny (and even rather nimble when used properly), they enjoy laughing at jokes as much as telling them, and they are not threatened by a female presence who doesn’t just fade into the background to make for lovely, decorative wallpaper. But it is something one has to remind oneself of every day, something that is far from reinforced by the media and society around us. For every person that loves you when you are at 100 percent, there will be two who tell you you shouldn’t talk so loud or say that word. They will tell you it is “unladylike” and expect that it will turn off some invisible switch in your brain that leads you to be so… you.
I only wish that in the movies that pretend to give us a “different” girl or a “loud” girl, that she could really be just that. I don’t need some dumbed-down facsimile of someone who speaks her mind. I don’t need a woman in a little girl’s dress who occasionally says the word “shit” and giggles coyly about it for ten minutes. I want the full brilliance of a woman’s intelligence, her wit, her loud voice and booming laugh and commanding presence. I want more broads, more women who put themselves out there in every shade they come in, who are not muted or shamed into a quiet complacency by the glare of a disapproving romantic prospect. And I want everyone to be able to say they love these women without fear of judgment, because laughing is laughing, and who cares if that trucker humor came from a beautiful woman’s mouth?
My biggest fear when I drink, where others might go home with the wrong person or get into a fight, is saying something that I will regret. I always wake up after a night out and immediately rack my brain as to what I could have said that I will have to spend the day, if not week, cringing at. It’s just in my nature in general - and more so when I have a few in me - to want to talk, to start conversation, to relate to people, and to storytell. My already-pronounced extroversion becomes nothing short of machine-gun chattiness when things go into Party Mode. And it can often have unfortunate consequences.
When you are the kind of loud, purely extroverted person who wants always to be in the middle of a passionate conversation, you are bound to put your foot in your mouth. You’re going to overshare, to make it seem like it’s all about you in an attempt to relate, to make a joke that falls so flat you can hear people’s stomachs turning. It’s just a hazard of the territory, but it doesn’t make it any less unpleasant to look back on the next day. There was the moment when you said something stupid and then, in an attempt to get back the territory you’ve lost, you proceeded to dig yourself into an ever-more-extreme conversational hole until the other person was visibly looking for a way to get out. Re-living scenes like that the next day are one of the worst parts about being an extrovert.
But when you’re on, you’re on. You can charm a room, make everyone laugh, put almost anyone at ease in most any situation. You’re not afraid of confrontation, you shine in interviews, and you have a knack at getting along with new people. When you are in control of the careening steam engine that is your loudness, there is nothing better.
I was always told that I was a loud girl. I should stop talking so much, stop putting myself where I wasn’t wanted, stop offering my two cents. As you age, being the talkative type tends to prove beneficial in competitive business environments, but most of being a little girl is about being docile, passive, a supplicant. It’s about being seen and not heard. It’s about retaining that perfectly soft, approachable sweetness that only comes with choosing your words with absolute and graceful accuracy. It’s about being the cute little thing that other people want to play with, not the eight-year-old Hillary Clinton who dictates where people are going to play in kickball and tells everyone the dirty joke she learned from her older cousins over the weekend.
“Loud girls are annoying,” classmates would tell me, “It’s like you’re a boy.” I didn’t understand - I wore pink, I was very small, I had long, wavy hair. What about me wasn’t in the most perfectly narrow definition of girldom? Was having a voice, even one that tended to escape me when I would get just a little too excited, really so mutually exclusive with femininity? Was being the leader, the talker, the connecter, really the domain of boys? Particularly at the age where boys seemed more terrified if anything by a female presence, it felt ridiculous to write my girliness off simply because I liked to have my voice heard.
For so long, I believed that, in order to find love, I would have to quiet down. When I would go on dates, especially in those breathless beginnings when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward, I would sweat bullets attempting to clip my speech and only speak when necessary. I would never raise my voice, never tell a bawdy joke, rarely even curse. I wanted to be seen as ladylike, as poised, as the kind of woman that you could be proud of without her ever edging near the territory of your masculinity. It was important to me that I be in control of how “myself” I was, even if it meant I barely enjoyed the date. When I would bring him around my friends for the first few times, they would remark afterwards at how unnatural I’d been.
“You’re just trying to impress him,” they’d say, “You know you’re a lot louder than that.”
I was just trying to impress him. And I realized that the boys who I had tricked into wanting me with a false, edited version of my personality eventually grew weary of me when I became my full, loud self. They would wonder where the charming, airbrushed version of my personality from the first few weeks had gone, and why I was suddenly the one telling the embarrassing story to the whole table at the bar. And I would look over, and see his discomfort, and be overwhelmed with shame. I was that loud girl in school again, the one that no boy would ever like. I shut up.
The first time I went out with my boyfriend, I told myself that I would just be me. I would be loud, I would be strange, I would not tailor myself to be likable - no matter how much I wanted him to approve of me. And we were, the both of us. We laughed, and sang in the street, and told dirty jokes. We talked and talked and talked, tripping over one another to continue the conversation. And it became clear to me, for the first time in my life, that being loud wasn’t ever going to be something I could hide. It wasn’t something that I could suppress under a dozen layers of reserve and propriety and not speaking until spoken to. And it didn’t make me a boy. It didn’t make me a girl, either. It just made a person with stories and energy and a desire to get to know everyone in the world - even if you might tell the occasional bad joke while drinking. And it is worth it to wait for the people who aren’t afraid of a loud girl.
_____
No One Will Love A Loud Girl
Among the qualities which are almost universally considered feminine, a certain amount of poised restraint and delicate softness is usually up there with “pretty” and “smells good.” Women are these gentle flowers, these perfect little pillows of silk and decorative beading which exist to cushion life, to make it more soft and pleasant and nice to look at. A woman, beyond not just talking back, is expected to be a good sounding board for the humor of others - particularly men. We are there to coyly laugh at a man’s jokes, reminding him that he is funny and smart and desirable, rarely making a comeback of our own.
And we can tend to overlook these stereotypes as anachronistic views of what a man and woman were expected to be back in the days when a real-life Don Draper was spreading his misogynistic seed all over lower Manhattan without a care in the world. We can sometimes believe that this point of view has all but disappeared, replaced by a new, more complex love for a woman who is able to speak her mind - and does so without waiting for permission. But one need only be said loud girl just once, feel the sting of someone telling you that it is “ugly” or “unattractive” or “manly” for a woman to curse, or make jokes, or laugh the loudest, to know that this sentiment still exists deep beneath our skin.
One could make the argument that, with the Zooey Deschanels and Mila Kunises of the world, we have begun to turn our affectionate sights towards a woman who is intellectually nimble, who makes jokes and keeps up with the boys in a way that challenges them. But even a cursory analysis of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope reveals her to be acerbic only in a non-threatening, sweet way. She challenges you, but only the way a pillow fight might injure you. She remains soft, warm, filled with girlish interests and hyper-feminine clothing which serve to balance out her more sardonic humor or biting wit. And, as if it were even a question, she is stunningly beautiful and thin.
But for normal girls, girls who just happen to be loud and like bathroom humor and cursing and don’t see any of this as particularly incongruous with the concept of being a desirable woman, it can often feel as though, in order to find love or acceptance, part of you will have to be muted - or at least strongly dulled. No one, it seems, would accept someone who is constantly running at 100 percent, who curses a blue streak or doesn’t take shit or puts their foot down. Who could possibly accept that sense of humor is something to be shared in a couple, not dominated by one party to which the other one is constantly playing the charmed and placated audience? On more than one occasion, I have been told directly that I am “too loud,” “too much,” “too manly.”
What does that even mean, “manly”? Is a sense of humor or the ability to speak up in a conversation a quality we’re really consecrating entirely to the xy chromosome? Does uttering a curse word suddenly take a tally mark from the “woman” column and mark it with jagged urgency in the “man” one? Is there a fixed amount of bold or talkative you can be before you become ugly - and let’s be honest, is it directly proportional to how physically attractive you are? (I’m sure people are much more likely to tolerate a foul mouth or loud laugh coming from a woman who looks like a supermodel.) What a sad little box to put ourselves in as humans, this idea that we can only share a certain amount of our personalities before we become, by default, undesirable. It seems that everyone misses out in this equation, that even if two people genuinely love the other for who they are, there will always be a sense of paranoia that, on the greater societal level, they are not doing something “right.” They are too loud, too frank, too much of a presence in the relationship.
Of course, with time, I discovered that there are people who enjoy women who speak their mind and make their presence known. They think cursing is funny (and even rather nimble when used properly), they enjoy laughing at jokes as much as telling them, and they are not threatened by a female presence who doesn’t just fade into the background to make for lovely, decorative wallpaper. But it is something one has to remind oneself of every day, something that is far from reinforced by the media and society around us. For every person that loves you when you are at 100 percent, there will be two who tell you you shouldn’t talk so loud or say that word. They will tell you it is “unladylike” and expect that it will turn off some invisible switch in your brain that leads you to be so… you.
I only wish that in the movies that pretend to give us a “different” girl or a “loud” girl, that she could really be just that. I don’t need some dumbed-down facsimile of someone who speaks her mind. I don’t need a woman in a little girl’s dress who occasionally says the word “shit” and giggles coyly about it for ten minutes. I want the full brilliance of a woman’s intelligence, her wit, her loud voice and booming laugh and commanding presence. I want more broads, more women who put themselves out there in every shade they come in, who are not muted or shamed into a quiet complacency by the glare of a disapproving romantic prospect. And I want everyone to be able to say they love these women without fear of judgment, because laughing is laughing, and who cares if that trucker humor came from a beautiful woman’s mouth?