Hephaestus Contra The It Girl: A Manifesto
To the sick girl, queer girl, crip girl, wrong girl, to the girl with stubble in the wrong places, to the fuckup in the non-glamourous way girl, to the actually killing yourself in the oven isn’t aesthetic girl so you decided to live but you look at you now girl just scraping by girl:
You will never be enough to be an It Girl.
You are not Venus on the Clamshell, you were not born from foam, you just were never that fucking ethereal. Your body reminds you of that too often, either in its wrongness or in its pain. You are Vulcan at the Forge and no matter what beautiful things you make it is your leg, your wrong leg, all that limp, that makes it in your iconographic story. Metal things are the opposite of ethereal. They are heavy and real and often literally reflect the world. But trust me if you wear a white lace collar, a Peter Pan collar, the right milkmaid dress, no, they will not forget the leg or the foot that drags, your eternal spondee. The It Girl is effortless and you are all effort.
Scene report: for all the nights you couldn’t be someone else’s scene because you were learning the trajectory of your own nerves, their exquisite complaints and sensibilities. Scene report: maybe you are bad at parties because they are a celebration of the thing you no longer need to be. Scene report: every day I function because I take enough sedatives to kill a horse and my pill bottle has worn plastic hinges. Scene report: maybe it’s you, drawing estrogen up a little syringe, a fine bore needle, as delicate as pearl choker. You’re just delicate all wrong for them; you always will be.
The It Girl bullied you in high school.
Maybe because you looked at her too long. When they say dressing for girls they don’t mean like that if you know what I mean. You got a well of asshole loneliness and the camp the men left over instead. You got an intimacy with the Greek, or with synthesizers, or eigenvalues, or oil paint because your other intimacies were too difficult for the world anyway. You can make the armor for Achilles, but none for yourself. Congratulations, fuckup kid, they write songs about the more palatable version of you.
The It Girl is them selling you the idea of the thing you are supposed to want to be.
You can’t be happy being Vulcan. You should still supposedly want to be Venus, all long Botticelli Dyson Air Wrap hair. If your foot drags you should hide it in tabis or Mary Janes. If you pretend to be young enough, fire of my loins enough, if you put a hairbow and a lollipop on, you can pretend what you lost was all ironic anyway, that you are now invulnerable because you chose a lack of agency. You should be forty-five going on fourteen. You don’t take a clamp and close the links on the chainmail because you are just a girl, so messy, isn’t that charming? Except a hole in chainmail is where you get stabbed in battle in the real world anyway. And that’s not aesthetic enough either.
No matter how much chainmail you make the god of war sleeps with your wife in front of you anyway.
For failing to be the It Girl, and deciding you’re not happy about it in the first place, the whole thing of it, they will try to throw you off Mount Olympus. You will be called a misogynist and you will just not get it what it’s like to have tits and a nice ass, apparently. Even if you do have a nice ass. You can make enough fire to dry the River Scamander at Troy, but you know, if you don’t like the world that also prefers girls like you have tits and a nice ass, if you don’t also manage to do it in a cocktail dress, as if that were your innate and preferential mode of being, trust me, they do not want you. You’re just not marketable.
Being marketable is a trap for the It Girls too. They just like licking the teeth more.
You, you learned something about traps, their spring loaded mechanisms, the way they snap closed without warning and somewhere in a dark forest, a curdled, animal cry. So you don’t love the trap. The hardest lesson wasn’t twenty bellows at once, or being occasionally invisible, or making winged sandals that actually flew. It was learning not to tell the trap it was beautiful, and that you were not the wrong thing for running and running back to all your volcanoes. Mt. Etna is quiet now, but boy you blew the shit out of Pompeii. Everyone should remember that.
Scene report: you write at 3:36 AM because that’s when your left shoulder unfreezes. Scene report: it’s not a discourse, your condition of refusal, because was it really a choice in the first place? Scene report: someday you really will go to a party and you will show your décolletage and instead of the milk white of perpetual girlhood there will just be your keloid scars and that will be awkward. Because you aren’t the aesthetic kind of broken; you aren’t a broken little bird that sells each raised line as the mythos of your own involuntary and perfected brand of a hurt on a book tour.
I keep saying aesthetic. It’s a thing that It Girls are. But you’re not an It Girl, so you get aesthesis instead, all sensation and live wire and perceptible inputs.
It’s not the It Girl’s fault she’s the It Girl, everyone works the trap.
But you, you cast traps in lost wax once, you know their vile forms like the back of your hand. You won’t work the trap like that. You will open its bronze mouth and make it speak. You will undo all the hinges with a Phillips-head screwdriver and an engraver’s burin and a mechanical keyboard and a scalpel. You won’t be standing on the sea, all Botticelli blown-out light, but you’ll be there too, your tenebrous Caravaggio of a life.
To the sick girl, queer girl, crip girl, wrong girl, to the girl with stubble in the wrong places, to the fuckup in the non-glamourous way girl, to the actually killing yourself in the oven isn’t aesthetic girl so you decided to live but you look at you now girl just scraping by girl:
Fuck the It Girl.
Be the lame, sooty-footed god with me instead. You were always too much, and too otherwise, for the wrongly-construed world anyway. Stoke your unlovely furnaces. Make your wondrous automata in the dark.