💄 HOW I LOVE BEING A WOMAN… 💄

and other types of joy worth fighting for ✿𑁍❀

Luce here: you’re all getting a treat today! I love this piece of Bel’s so much that I decided you all deserve to fill your cups with it this morning. If you love this and want MORE, you can get No News Is Good News every Sunday by becoming a paying supporter 𓆩♡𓆪

There’s a buzz going around on TikTok at the moment that we have to talk about.

It’s an audio excerpt from the Netflix show Anne With an E (based on L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables), that goes:

“What’s wrong — what is it?”
”How I love being a woman!”

It’s mixed against the backdrop of Hozier’s song Would That I, had 237.1M views (and counting) and is reflective of a much bigger fever:

Joy becoming a cultural event.

Luce Tok’d about this beautifully here, and we spoke about it a bit on last week’s Culture Vulture episode, and it’s a culmination of all these dizzy, bright, feminine things in pop culture colliding in such a big way, that we’re hauling ourselves out of our homes and heads to make the most of it.

People are dressing up to go to movie premiers (read: Barbie and its pink wave), they’re creating earthquake tremors from the Eras tour, sweeping the world with feather boas with Harry Styles, and they’re even filming the nondescript, imperfect soft and fun moments of their life and making them the main event.

A recent New York Times article by Michelle Goldberg described all of this, in the wake of Greta Gerwig’s chart-topper as “a palpable longing for both communal delight and catharsis” for women. It couldn’t be truer.

I write a lot about female friendship here because, to me, they’ve been both the most cathartic tonic and mainline source of joy for my entire 31 years of life. They’re how I know I’m good and alive and that this complicated world is worth living and trying for. They’re soft, funny, flawed, and, most of all, celebrate the invisible mundanities, tremors, and elations of what it’s like to be a woman in the world. All of these feelings feel inextricably bound up in this ~ moment ~.

What strikes me so much about these pop culture events in time — or even ‘monoculture moments’ (many people wondered whether the Queen dying was the last of them) — is that they make us feel so good, so alive, so connected in a sea of sweaty or popcorn-eating strangers, that we want to take it further.

We want to dress up, make signs, make films, and even forge friendships entirely based on the feeling they give us. Put short; they make us want to exacerbate joy because, after all, at the worst of times, it can feel so hard to come by.

And this kind of pink, sparkly kind of joy, you ask?

A stock photo looking real life snap of some chill girl hardcore JOY

It’s always been framed as a frivolous and inherently girly thing, the same way talking about our feelings or liking cute shit on the internet has. I love so much that this is starting to shimmer across all genders, all sexualities, and all experiences of the world, no longer limited to the bedroom floors of teenage girls hot glue gunning jewels to A2 pieces of cardboard declaring their love for who they’re about to go and see. Sure, it’s how it started, but I think where it’s going is somewhere really profoundly new and exciting.

The girl and joy era is also colliding with mainstream masculine culture. I’m noticing so many things about men I’ve never seen before, like two podcasting dudes talking about what they love about women in ways that don’t reference AT ALL how they look (though there are still plenty of them that do the opposite). Guy mates at concerts slinging their arms around each other’s shoulders, singing loudly. Men in meetings finally looking us in the eye when we’re speaking and acknowledging our ideas as though it’s not a service to society or a giant revelation. I love thinking about how much of this has changed during my time being alive. And yet, these wins frighten me sometimes about how small they are in the grand scheme of things.

I know gender is fluid and complex and complicated, but I don’t think this conversation is about ‘now they’re (men) finally catching up with us (women)’. I think it’s about finally giving everyone permission — and a place — to unlock what’s been typically classed as feminine joy reserved for teenage girls who are yet to be battered by the world.

Because being a girl (I’m cis, I’m vanilla, I’m straight, I can only talk to this experience) is messy. It’s messy and romantic and a fucked up constant negotiation with what you think and feel and how you’ve been told to be.

I also come from a line of women who never got to take full flight in their lives through virtue of their class and their gender, and I think this struggle robbed them of their ability to access such emotion. Since I realised this, it’s become my deep personal quest to get as much of that back as possible.

Because if I was to tell any young person, it would be this: joy is the best tonic for pain. Don’t question it when it comes. Know it will pass. Open yourself up to get it back again.

Bel
xox