Forest, Trees, Etc
I’m back from self-imposed exile, if only for a moment, just because I cannot wrap my mind around Jezebel’s response to the concept of the Quirky Aggressive Female archetype, as invented by Lauren Bans (who is also a founding member of my book club!) Lauren writes:
Signs You Are A Quirky Aggressive Female:
#1.) You do drugs or you like talking about how you do drugs.
#2.) You use unique, half-witty, half-annoying sayings like “Dudesies!”, “For YAYs” and make jokes about “Rim Jobs” because you are so cool with your sexuality.
#3.) On dates, rather than awkwardness, you manifest your wants/needs/insecurities through aggressive lines like “So when are you going to kiss/fuck/lick my C???
To which Jezebel’s Sadie Stein replies:
I’m guessing you’re probably not going to discover, upon taking this quiz, that you are a QAF. Because the thing is, I’ve never actually seen any character besides Olivia Thirlby’s character in this movie who pulled all this nonsense.
I know it can be kind of hard to make a distinction between yourself as a writer and your publication as an entity, but, like, really? Sadie Stein might not do any of these things, but if Jezebel the blog were a person, she would do all of them! And while not all of the blog’s editors have cultivated a QAF pose, the site as a whole totally encourages this sort of behavior. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but a little self-awareness might be nice.
