In Rebecca Liu’s article for Another Gaze, “The Making of a Millennial Woman”, she describes the cinematic archetype of the Young Millennial Woman as “pretty, white, cisgender, and tortured enough to be interesting, but not enough to be repulsive”. This type of woman may make some big mistakes, but she does so with tact. She may have some unconventional sex, but it’s often made to seem like she’s been swept into it by a male partner. She still knows how to look pretty smoking a cigarette.
We know, perhaps too well at this point, of the “dissociative feminist” hot mess archetype in cinema. This character type is along the lines of the titular Fleabag, or the masochistic Marianne of Normal People, and they’re discussed in a constant discourse loop. They’re simultaneously adored and loathed, analysed and avoided.
So what should we make of the women who are “hot messes” in ways that are less glamorous, but also less tragic? What about female characters who yearn for superficial nastiness and kinky sexual interactions?
Call this alternate archetype of modern sexual womanhood the Girl Pervert. Girl Perverts do not function under the neat self-flagellation of the Fleabag Era. Instead, they are intentionally, deeply, and oftentimes desperately into the erotic, nasty, and strange – and oftentimes only view it from a distance. For Girl Perverts, sex is the beginning and the end. If they’re lucky enough to be having it, it’s not with the most charismatic dreamboat, it’s usually with guys who are well within the Girl Pervert’s slightly odd social league.
Girl Perverts include the unfuckable lesbians of Bottoms. They include Judy Gemstone of The Righteous Gemstones who, to her delight, has a husband that begs her to “save her piss for his chest.” They include Enid and Rebecca of Ghost World, two probably-virgins who constantly insist they would fuck almost any man just because they like the way that sounds coming out of their mouths.
Girl Perverts can be lecherous weirdos who cross boundaries, but more often than not they’re harmless, useless, giddy horndogs. They yearn in the privacy of their bedroom for sexual trysts with the off-putting comedian they see on the graveyard slot of TV, or the cheerleaders at school who won’t give them a second glance. Girl Perverts are aligned with the type of perversion sketched out in Domino Club’s “good writers are perverts” manifesto, which posits that the best art tends to come from self-indulgent “perversion” in its most basic sense: the feeling of being too into something, sexual or otherwise.
“Art like John Waters movies and Audition scratch the icky and sexy part of their brains.”
In the context of our Girl Pervert Cinema heroines, it alludes to their earnest way of living. Take Enid of Ghost World. In one scene, she flagrantly drags her older “nice guy” friend (with vague sexual intentions) into a sex store. With glee, Enid coaxes him into buying her a latex mask. For her, going into the local sex shop and purchasing something is funny, lame and awesome all at once. She is gloriously earnest, but her reaction is off-putting to the quiet lurkers of the store. Enid is too much of everything they privately feel. She’s perverse in her open expression.
But this is simply how the Girl Pervert really is. They lack blushing bride tendencies. They know exactly what’s going down at all times, having read about it while trawling the depths of fanfiction sites, or by taking and retaking the BDSM Test online. The idea of sex — so built up and beautiful and disgusting in their head — is often hard to follow through with, because it just doesn’t have the intensity of what they have fantasised about for so long. Girl Perverts watch John Waters and lick their hungry, campy, excess-oriented chops. They perhaps accidentally giggle or squeal through Audition or the gnarlier bits of a Park Chan-wook marathon. Art like this scratches the icky and sexy part of their brains.
Joanna Arnow’s latest film, The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed, is a major contribution to the Girl Pervert canon. It follows Ann, a monotone, mid-level corporate worker in Brooklyn who’s only ever at work, visiting her parents or partaking in kinky relationships with men. Sometimes Ann’s Girl Pervert lifestyle bores her, like the time when she dons a pig nose and masturbates on a new partner’s apartment rooftop. But when she’s in a better mood, kneeling by the couch of a man who purposefully ignores her, the lifestyle once again becomes a source of delight. Ann’s BDSM interests ebb and flow not because it’s shameful or tragic or wrong, but because it’s a normal part of her life subject to the same level of waning interest. Unlike the sexual tragedy brimming under the sex lives of the Young Millennial Woman, Girl Perverts like Ann do not fret about what their sexual proclivities mean about their self-worth.
The Girl Pervert tends to live in a way that feels more tangibly aspirational. Rebecca Liu remarks that the Young Millennial Woman turns relatability into a performance, they are “more beautiful, more intelligent, and more infuriatingly precocious than we are in real life”.
The Girl Pervert’s occasional freaky win, then, feels attainable. Their ideas about womanhood, performance and sex are often simplistic: Judy Gemstone’s definition of carving her own path as a woman is “wearing regular woman panties where the string goes up my crack, having tits, and doing sex”. The tragedy they feel is not tied to how messed up the world may perceive them, but instead how they are waiting and ready to be little freaks, if only someone would just ask them to be. Society often leaves them to, as Enid succinctly puts it, “go crazy from sexual frustration”.
What if instead of being detached and depressed — worried if we’re acting “right” as girls, women, people, artists, and sexual beings — we instead earnestly embrace the Girl Pervert way as a release valve? While the dissociative feminist millennial archetype hums and haws about whether or not they are performing “correctly”, the Girl Pervert isn’t worried about fixing the little freak within them. After all, they just want to fuck and laugh and play. What’s the harm in that?