The ‘or’ fallacy
‘Choice’ is simultaneously a freeing and burdensome word. To have a ‘choice’ implies a sense of agency but making a choice suggests selecting something as a consequence of not selecting something else.
'Choice' is a concept that is inextricably linked with the human experience, today we seek to unpick it with specific regard to the implications of 'or' that are imposed on the 'teenage girl' experience. This isn't to disregard the severity of the word 'choice' from a feminist lens (because it is indisputably a serious concept,) but rather to examine the consequences of deceptively lighthearted decisions in the teenage girl world.
To Try or Not to Try? That is the question. If you try then you are 'desperate,' 'pathetic,' and 'needy' for trying. If you don't then you're either lazy or 'desperate,' 'pathetic' and 'needy' for your artificial attempts at sprezzatura (because no one 'really' isn't trying.) The degree of trying you expose yourself to is always discerned as calculating and meticulously unpicked by those who themselves are navigating the unknown terrain that disguises itself as 'effortless.'
The point? Perhaps all questions that girls are forced to ask themselves, at some point or another, circle back to the fundamental question of 'to try or not to try,' the choice which doesn't feel like one. The answer? I don't know, but I'll guess. Perhaps the answer asks us to turn to David Foster Wallace's essay which heralds the 'New Sincerity.' He writes about the new generation of literary rebels who seek to embrace sincerity and emotion, disregarding the postmodern tendency to roll one's eyes at such displays of vulnerability. Perhaps the answer asks us to be 'vulnerable,' to try and acknowledge that one is trying, to dispel attempts at 'effortless,' and instead embrace the grit and determination which breed effort, to be sincere. Stop pretending you 'woke up like that.'
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