Thursday, October 1, 2009

#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.

10 comments:

  1. "Superficiality, according to Florida philosophy, is only bad if you’re ugly.."

    TRUE! All the fuglies in SF love to hate the pretty girls! Nothing wrong with looking gorgeous and flaunting it...

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  2. Yeah, but, isn't there a conflict between this post, which exhorts girls to dress sexier, and a previous post about the crappy weather we have(today excluded)?

    Agree with the Florida thing tho - it's scary down there. I watched network TV for the first time in a long time(usually watch cable) and man, things have changed. Pretty trashy stuff(was watching Cougar Town) Could not imagine that being on when I grew up in the 80s.

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  3. SF women pretend they have more to offer and don't.

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  4. SF women = purchased classy.

    FL/Southern girls = more often trashy.

    It's also a money thing. SF/Chicago/NYC/LA...women spend on clothes and buy brands that don't even exist in the South.

    Southern girls, often naturally prettier, just can't afford to dress expensive or classy. And just don't know anything else besides A&F, Hollister, & Spring Break Destin.

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  5. i'm quite partial to the phrase "say no to ho" especially when getting dressed. as a girl that likes to hang in sf, i aim for classy--even if its a version of classy that says biker chick rock n'roll glamour. i like to tart it up on weekends, but by definition, tarting up means that the vast majority of the week has me decked out in 100% virgin wool tailored to perfection in three piece suits.

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  6. Um, you want legs and boobs? Haven't you ever been to the Folsom St. Fair? Girls with little X's on their nipples.... just one of the reasons why I love SF!

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  7. Are you quite sure those were girls?

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  8. I stopped reading after the first paragraph....I would love to see what the guy who wrote this looks like....what a character he is probably gets turned down all the time sounds like a bitter betty to me.

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  9. Normally I find your persiflage to be quite entertaining, but this post proves you to be just the kind of dolt you would rant about for an entire page. I've lived in SF, NYC, and FL and I can certainly tell you that Florida is not the originator of trashiness. Granted, there are trashy places in FL, I'm not denying the fact. Yet every alleged "Florida philosophy" you surmise could be used in an argument against LA. You even bring Kim Kardashian into your argument; who lives where again?

    And all of these people who've determined what a trashy place Florida is probably stayed at some Daytona Beach motel they no doubt saw featured on MTV's Spring Break because they're too middle class to even know about The Breakers or Worth Avenue. And one guy is seriously comparing the entire "scary" state of Florida to an episode of Cougar Town? I used to get annoyed when people across the country would think my life was "like, so, like The Hills" because I lived in California. Yet here are people from the city I was defending being just as ignorant...

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  10. If you want to get laid easily then Florida is your best bet. Women here really know how to have fun.

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