Why I don’t have a problem with ‘Shit Girls Say’

As a feminist, I’ve had a lot of people ask me what I think about ‘Shit Girls Say.’

“How do we feel about this?” a fellow leader of the feminist discussion group on campus asked me in an email, attaching the link to the dreaded girl video.

When I first saw the title of the video and that it was a man dressed in drag for humor purposes, the eyes rolled into the back of my head. Not. Again., I thought to myself. My short answer has been that I think it’s funny. On a gut level, I didn’t have a problem with the video, unlike others online. But I didn’t feel like I could explain why. Let me take a whack at it:

The humor in SGS comes from the stereotype of middle/upper-middle class white women speak. As it is shown in the video, white girl talk is equivocating, overly polite, circular, and soft. So, it isn’t so much that SGS is making fun of the words rather than the tone by which it is delivered. This is a distinction I feel I need to make before proceeding to defend its honor.

While the response Shit Girls Say Tumblr, providing thought-provoking quotes all by women, is a quip I can appreciate, it totally misses the boat, and here’s why: SGS is not about the content, it’s about the delivery. SGS isn’t suggesting that women can’t put together thoughtful, intellectual statements. Instead, SGS is poking fun at the way white women punctuate and deliver their language. I think this is best captured in Episode 1, when the girl concurrently says, “could you, like, turn it up a little bit?” and “could you like turn it down, a little bit?”

We need to be able to laugh at ourselves. There’s no harm in SGS, and we poke fun of white men in the same way, via countless ‘bro’ culture videos, etc. Criticism for criticism’s sake gets us nowhere and detracts from the issues that are really at hand, pervasive, institutional patriarchy that I’m just not seeing in SGS.

… I know, right?!