#25 SF Guy-Girls vs. The Florida Female

European girls can be slutty, because they’re verbal, confident and culturally complex, but American girls can’t, because they’re from Florida.

Something happened to America sometime between the advent of air conditioning and the day Kim Kardashian got popular. Florida went from the least to the second most populated Southern state and it went from white cracker, feral hoggy swamp-land to corporate sponsored titty show. And while this was taking place, somehow, without really even trying, Florida imperialized, smash and grab style, the definition of what it meant to be an attractive female in America.

The rest of the country has not received this kindly. The rest of this country does not like Florida, at least not what Florida stands for even if we do not precisely know what we mean by that. There is an amorphous but widely popularized sentiment that all the fake boobs and fake tans and spring break style hedonism violates, in some vague way, our dignity, our sense of the home-spun, hard-working, humble life. Florida seems to embrace without reservation the most basal aspects of the human condition. Florida seems to self-consciously celebrate trashiness.

At the same time everyone knows Florida has won. Florida has achieved the final expression of egalitarian democracy, where people are judged entirely upon the merits they were born with or paid for with a summer maître d'ing at PF Changs; it is pure free enterprise, designed to appeal to a society which buys images and emotions before character and language, which is every society that ever existed.

Superficiality, according to Florida philosophy, is only bad if you’re ugly, which is totally unfair and presumptively ad hominem, the kind of theory that is born from a playground maturity level but that, like the chorus of Mim’s “This Is Why I’m Hot” (because you’re fly?), defeats logic and sense every single time. Deep down we all f*cking know that as brainy and complex as we aspire to be, in the end, even if the depth and breadth of our intellect is so extraordinary as to inspire a fatwa demanding our death, even if we ascend to be Salman Rushdie, arguably one of the greatest intellectuals of the modern era, once we achieve this, we’ll be chasing the skirt of some leggy tart half our age.

Publicly, at interviews, coffee shops, castle dinners in Elsinore, etc. we may be mannered, noble, even snobby, but when we don’t have to pretend anymore, when we’re in our sacred, private, most vulnerable place, when no one’s watching and all contrivances are dropped - when we’re in the bathroom - we’re nose deep in US Weekly. We’re not thinking on the possibilities that inhere in the human condition; we’re thinking, “Kelly Clarkson is kind of fat.”

Florida’s confirmed position is that girls take all the stuff they normally do in the bathroom - judge others, judge themselves, give illicit BJs, scream at their boyfriends, scream at the mirror, cry hysterically - and take it to the town square. Let boobs, Brazilian waxes, Jägermeister vomit, and orgasms be a girl’s personality center piece. That’s hot.

By contrast San Franicsco’s confirmed position is that we are a proud, equal society where men and women are taken seriously. In the divergence of the two philosophies lies the rub: if a theoretical SF girl seeks to flash a little feminine allure, it doesn’t make her a cretin, not actually, not by some imaginary universal or absolute measure, but it does create a problem of perception. It can be confusing. The reigning American aesthetic gestalt that Florida has generated puts parameters on how visual statements can be interpreted. It’s not that no American girls can be simultaneously sexually provocative, witty and self-aware but that vast majority aren’t - the vast majority are vacuous, self-centered narcissists, at least as far as we can determine from The Hills, The Simple LIfe and the ex-governor of Alaska.

And since the denizens of San Francisco are as susceptible to stereotype as anyone else that means that when that theoretical SF girl dons on a tight top and a short skirt suddenly people are calling her Donut Hole or Blow Job Brenda. They start saying she lives in a basement with a coke dealer and offering her roles in reality TV shows.

Hence, SF females (a scattering of honeys from Serbia and Turkey aside) don’t aim for sexy in their dress or carriage. They aim for anti-Florida. They are reserved, borderline haughty in demeanor and fashion themselves in one of three looks: the always vogue “I run Iron-Mans” guy-girl look, the cluttered Hipster, or the famous and very popular “SF black”, where you cover up every square inch of your body but are still fabulous because the fabric is black and black is daring and sexy, right? Not right. Boobs are sexy. Legs are sexy. Black is just a color. Black is what Batman wears so he can be stealthy. When Bruce Wayne wants to impress the ladies he wears a tank top.

But such are the effects of culture: they work us on the sly. Imperceptibly, incrementally, like frogs in a pot of heating water, our brains get boiled. We truckle to illogical but popular tastes, like triathlons, pegged pants and claims that witches float in ducking-stools. And so it happens that Kim Kardashian is soulless and horrible for humanity yet somewhere deep down inside we now believe that degenerate b*tch is sexy. We sort of think that’s what our girlfriend is supposed to be like. And SF women resist this, which is both eminently reasonable and totally unalluring and most importantly, one more reason there are no girls in San Francisco.