A Note on the “Shit ___ Say” Meme
When I first watched the original “Shit Girls Say” video, I didn’t get it (much like this lovely blogger here). Not only does this style of humor strike me as lazy and boring, it seems like another cheap strategy to perpetuate stupid stereotypes about women - excuse me, girls. White, middle-class, cis-gendered, able-bodied straight girls. One of the things that bothers me the most is that the “girl” the title references is played by a man in drag. Here, drag is used not to challenge gender stereotypes, but rather its very power is weakened to sustain them. Because who, exactly, is mocking “girls” if not men? Certainly women have watched this video, laughed, maybe at themselves and maybe at other women, but it’s important to recognize that we are watching a man dressed as a woman, which presents an automatic mis-identification that reinforces the distance between the “girl” you see and the lives of real-life women (which can be hugely successful when used subversively). But instead what occurs is an implicit taking-up of the male gaze through the power relationship presented by a non-marginalized person re-presenting a marginalized person’s acts or experiences. These gestures ultimately compose the signifying system which reinforces & polices gender.
A lot of cultural ephemera perpetuate stereotypes of women as vapid, silly, and ditzy, but materials like this are particularly dangerous not only because they present themselves under the guise of harmless comedy, but because they both encourage and exclude viewer identification. The more you laugh with the joke, the more of a “girl” you are; the more you identify, the more you can also lay claim to the privilege of protection that assimilation and association gives in our society. And if you don’t, well, maybe you’re not a girl.
Fortunately, this video has been fueled a number of radical spin-offs, including “Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls,” “Stuff Cis People Say to Trans People,” “Shit People Say To Native Americans,” amongst others. These videos are genius precisely because they perform what they are subverting. What I mean by this is: not only do they mimic the original video’s structure, but those featured double this act of mimicry by literally speaking their oppression. So, specifically in the case of “Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls,” comedian Franchesca Ramsey is obviously wearing a wig, just as in the first video, but she is reversing the oppressor-oppressed dynamic created in the original “Shit Girls Say”. What is actually being said (“Is your hair real?”), which the viewer is to imagine emerging from the mouths of many, become linguistic repetitions and self-conscious masquerading that emerge from a source: not of essentialized “girlishness”, as with “Shit Girls Say,” but from racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. This is exciting to me because, like the Microaggressions project, it opens up dialogues about the everyday kinds of privilege that people confront as told by the people who experience it. Cool shit.
