You could also, theoretically, do all of that while subverting a fixed power dynamic. ![]() It’s cute and fun to be plush and pretty, relaxed and harmless, munching on sugar cubes and organic carrots. Making peace with how the odds are stacked against you could be totally relaxing. But, as legions of girls have already expressed, going Prey Mode has its own soft pleasures, not to mention latent advantages. Such an admission of powerlessness is, obviously, why dudes fear it. In a previous piece about girls, I wrote about something I called “tactical passivity”-that is, adopting a seemingly docile persona to achieve a specific goal-touching on the secret allure of “going prey mode.” Sure, to see yourself as a lamb, a calf, a bunny, or a fawn is to identify with being at the bottom of the food chain. Is that all she is: a pretty, defenceless thing with an iced latte hovering nearby in the void? “ This is me if u even care ,” go the comments under a wordless pic, where the deer is dressed in pink legwarmers and AF-1s, a demure little earring and a purse loaded with a Dostoevsky novel. “ Girls when there’s no ibuprofen ,” reads the caption of a viral video, where a tiny fawn tries and fails to stand on trembling legs, so freshly in the world that her coat is still wet with amniotic fluid. “ Me and the girls on our way out ,” utters the collective voice from a picture of three fawns in some long grass. “ I’m so pretty ,” affirm the girls as an entity, from beneath the long lashes of a baby deer photographed head-on. The tottering fragility of a fawn – so Coppola-coded, up there with Virgin Suicides, satin bows, Miu Miu ballet slippers, dog-eared copies of The Bell Jar, and the sickly-sweet scent of just-turned buttercream – becomes a stand-in for the delicacy of girlhood: for perpetual innocence, with all that it denies and licences. Try it yourself: Do you look appropriately conniving when you’re going in for the kill? Irresistibly cute when you want to be eaten up?Īt first, the twinship of pretty girls with doe-eyed deer may seem like yet another traditional gender norm glinting through a memetic surface. A crucial difference: the girlies prized both doe and siren in equal part, because of the knowledge that either play can be useful in the art of persuasion. Same dualism, but with some self-reflexivity. ![]() “ Negative canthal tilt, it’s over for bro,” swarmed the comments, at first in earnest and then as a joke.Īt the same time, a girl-coded trend emerged, encouraging participants to record the difference between their “doe eyes” and “siren eyes”. Self-styled alpha males discovering that they were, according to the fucked-up criteria of physiognomy, closer to feedstock animals became easy targets for ridicule. Earlier this year, an AR filter made the rounds on Tiktok purporting to assess “ canthal tilt ” – bringing to the masses the incel belief that the angle of a person’s eyes revealed inherent predatory or prey-like qualities-and their social fate as a result. ![]() Nobody wants to be a prey animal – right? Docile and vulnerable, her gentleness and lack of bloodthirst is seen as an evolutionary disadvantage, especially when up against the hunter, whose understanding of the world has, ostensibly, been sharpened by his focus on killing and winning.
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