manufactured identities
Earlier today I was doomscrolling and I came upon a video that was pretty standard Filipino humor: lip syncing to a classic karaoke song about how some other girl is going to snatch up the guy you've got your eye on. What caught me, though, was that the description of the "other girl" was near-perfectly applicable to girls I actually knew in real life, down to the hair and makeup and outfit choices.
Even though it was just a jokey Tiktok, nothing too serious, it still got me thinking: is it not exactly wrong to say that everything is all the same? Are we all just slaves to trends? Are we all living tropes, to some degree? How else would that Tiktoker get those acquaintances spot-on?
I felt really rude thinking about those girls while watching that video, even in the privacy of my own head, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. How much of me is just built on whatever my Pinterest algorithm feeds me? How much of my identity is manufactured by the unfathomable machines behind the scenes of our everyday lives?
I know this isn't a productive line of thought, and that I probably need to do actual research to think about it more. Maybe I just need to stop thinking about it at all. But I just can't stop wondering. How much of me is molded off an "aesthetic," repackaged and commodified and sold to us online, tailor-made to feed on our hopes and dreams and insecurities? Am I a "clean girl" just because I like my makeup on the simpler side? (All those terms. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable: so many boxes to put us in. A fun box is still a box. Are you deer pretty? Office siren? Dark academia core?)
And what about my clothes? An ex-friend once told me, rather convolutedly, that I dressed "basic." So what? Is that a problem? Do I represent the ills of a fast-paced, capitalist society whenever I get up in the morning and choose to wear blue jeans and a simple shirt? What about when I step out dressed head to toe in black? Do people look at me and think, well, there's a girl who only mindlessly follows trends?
But don't you get mocked for being different, anyway? And how long can we all be different before we start being the same again? Basic bitch, pick me girl, whatever. Are we all just rats on a wheel, cows to slaughter, damned if we do and damned if we don't? Why do I care so much, anyway?
Be who you are, they say. I'm trying, but it's so hard to strip away the layers of gloss, painted over and over by a lifetime of, well, all of this. I don't know. I haven't got the time or energy to think about all of this when I'm trying my best to just get my degree and get on with my life. But isn't that a damn shame, not having the time or energy to think about this? What the hell, really?
Maybe people care too much about a woman's every move. Maybe we all move in fear of being embarrassed. Maybe it's a bunch of concepts I don't fully understand yet. Margaret Atwood: You are your own voyeur. I should go read Foucault.