Quacks in the Digital Veneer
(ed. note - yes, this is a re-post...but I liked it. Not quite a "greatest hit" per se, but it's not a bad idea to save in here the more interesting things that come out of other places I've been known to blog, especially when I have phases of extensive trouble coming up with blog topics in either forum...but original content SHOULD be coming to Bitty Soda soon, I think.)
A few weeks back, I was introduced to the wondrous wonderfulness that is Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey by Something Awful, via friends on LiveJournal. JMPP is ever so wonderful - she's slim and young and gorgeous and well-traveled and owns her own business and men everywhere want to date her! Just ask her and she'll tell you all about it. She claims to be an Objectivist, but for a Randroid, she seems a little excessively caught up in how favorably she compares to the rest of the world, and how much better she is than your average girl.
But annoying conceited people are everywhere. That's not an Internet-unique phenomenon. The Internet-unique phenomenon is the "exteriorally reformed geek." By geek here, I don't mean savvy, technically adept, Elvis Costello-listening, Wired-reading chicness. I mean geek in the other sense. No, not the chicken-head-biting sense either. The OTHER other sense. The sense of the social outcast with the shyness problem and the awkwardness problem and perhaps a touch of the hygiene problem.
A lot of us girls grew up smarter-than-average and chubby and picked-on. We had a harder time making friends and settling into a rung on the high-school pecking order. Our arch-nemeses, either real or imagined, were the flocks of catty popular girls who were pretty and thin and got all the boyfriends. In the usual progression of things, we'd grow older, grow into our bodies (or at least grow comfortable with them), leave the catty popular girls behind, and generally live our lives having evolved past the ugly duckling phase. Not everyone sheds the weight and gets a makeover, and not everyone loses that insecurity (in fact, nobody ever loses it completely)...but one way or another the awkward phase lifts and adulthood settles in. We let go of the desire to compete in those arenas. We learn more easily that the kind of validation those girls got isn't the only currency in the world. The transition is rough, but swanhood awaits.
But people my age hit adolescence around the same time something else hit the world - the ability to talk to strangers without meeting them face-to-face. With that ability also came the ability to connect to smaller and smaller subsets of people based on a common interest or similar intelligence level. It also heralded the ability to find romance, or at least suitors, with a few IM sessions and the swapping of your most flattering photo.
You would think, given all that, that the Internet makes it easier to get out of Ugly Duckling mode. It doesn't. If anything, it's harder. You never have to seek validation from within if you can get it from 50-100 sad men writing to your personal ad or posting comments in your blog. Awkward teen girls the world over have found, in the Internet, a land where there is a reasonable facsimile of popularity to those who want it. And so they have learned to crave the same attention online that their more popular peers received in real life.
And that's when you get your Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passeys - the catty, attention-whoring, hypercompetitive hybrids that incorporate all the insecurities of the ugly-duckling geeky teen girls and all of the cattiness of the beautiful popular teen girls that got all the boyfriends...and virtually nothing of a mature adult.
The insecurities that she carries over from her "overweight and ugly" phase still come through loud and clear. She may be comparing herself favorably to all of humanity in this blog post, but she's really comparing herself favorably to the pretty popular girls who got all the boyfriends when she was 16. She's still stuck in THAT comparison, and she is very anxious to prove to everyone that she grew up and became much better than they will ever hope to be. As Sharon put it, "she wants to be the most popular girl in school so she can reject all the boys that rejected her."
And so do most of her readers. Note that of her comments, about two-thirds of them are women trying to one-up her - "I'm thinner than you, my IQ is higher than yours, I get 1000 responses to my personal ad, I would have done X where you did Y, I have a boyfriend and you don't, and I don't need to go trumpeting about it in my blog in front of God and everyone." If they're not saying that literally, then they're implying it with their weak attempts to psychoanalyze her (much like my own weak attempt here). And the final third is made up generally of men who think they've found a reformed-geek kindred spirit and hit on her, thus further fueling her posts about how men unworthy of her won't leave her alone.
Sure, the Internet has helped a lot of people. I would venture to say that this same desire for validation coaxed yours truly out of her shell somewhat. I'm not even saying I'm immune to the disease that Ms. Passey has. Hell, look at me - I'm subtly trying to come off as more evolved here. Okay, it's not subtle at all. And I don't actually even think I am more evolved. But I don't need you all to pat me on the back for being more attractive than I was in college and occasionally being attractive to men. I figure this was something I was supposed to do - self-betterment and all.
You can learn one of two things from being an ugly duckling. You can learn how to grow up to be a swan, or you can make yourself into a pretty duck. I'm seeing many fewer swans out there in internets land, and many more pretty ducks, with much louder voices. And the worst types are the pretty ducks who think they're swans.
A few weeks back, I was introduced to the wondrous wonderfulness that is Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey by Something Awful, via friends on LiveJournal. JMPP is ever so wonderful - she's slim and young and gorgeous and well-traveled and owns her own business and men everywhere want to date her! Just ask her and she'll tell you all about it. She claims to be an Objectivist, but for a Randroid, she seems a little excessively caught up in how favorably she compares to the rest of the world, and how much better she is than your average girl.
But annoying conceited people are everywhere. That's not an Internet-unique phenomenon. The Internet-unique phenomenon is the "exteriorally reformed geek." By geek here, I don't mean savvy, technically adept, Elvis Costello-listening, Wired-reading chicness. I mean geek in the other sense. No, not the chicken-head-biting sense either. The OTHER other sense. The sense of the social outcast with the shyness problem and the awkwardness problem and perhaps a touch of the hygiene problem.
A lot of us girls grew up smarter-than-average and chubby and picked-on. We had a harder time making friends and settling into a rung on the high-school pecking order. Our arch-nemeses, either real or imagined, were the flocks of catty popular girls who were pretty and thin and got all the boyfriends. In the usual progression of things, we'd grow older, grow into our bodies (or at least grow comfortable with them), leave the catty popular girls behind, and generally live our lives having evolved past the ugly duckling phase. Not everyone sheds the weight and gets a makeover, and not everyone loses that insecurity (in fact, nobody ever loses it completely)...but one way or another the awkward phase lifts and adulthood settles in. We let go of the desire to compete in those arenas. We learn more easily that the kind of validation those girls got isn't the only currency in the world. The transition is rough, but swanhood awaits.
But people my age hit adolescence around the same time something else hit the world - the ability to talk to strangers without meeting them face-to-face. With that ability also came the ability to connect to smaller and smaller subsets of people based on a common interest or similar intelligence level. It also heralded the ability to find romance, or at least suitors, with a few IM sessions and the swapping of your most flattering photo.
You would think, given all that, that the Internet makes it easier to get out of Ugly Duckling mode. It doesn't. If anything, it's harder. You never have to seek validation from within if you can get it from 50-100 sad men writing to your personal ad or posting comments in your blog. Awkward teen girls the world over have found, in the Internet, a land where there is a reasonable facsimile of popularity to those who want it. And so they have learned to crave the same attention online that their more popular peers received in real life.
And that's when you get your Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passeys - the catty, attention-whoring, hypercompetitive hybrids that incorporate all the insecurities of the ugly-duckling geeky teen girls and all of the cattiness of the beautiful popular teen girls that got all the boyfriends...and virtually nothing of a mature adult.
The insecurities that she carries over from her "overweight and ugly" phase still come through loud and clear. She may be comparing herself favorably to all of humanity in this blog post, but she's really comparing herself favorably to the pretty popular girls who got all the boyfriends when she was 16. She's still stuck in THAT comparison, and she is very anxious to prove to everyone that she grew up and became much better than they will ever hope to be. As Sharon put it, "she wants to be the most popular girl in school so she can reject all the boys that rejected her."
And so do most of her readers. Note that of her comments, about two-thirds of them are women trying to one-up her - "I'm thinner than you, my IQ is higher than yours, I get 1000 responses to my personal ad, I would have done X where you did Y, I have a boyfriend and you don't, and I don't need to go trumpeting about it in my blog in front of God and everyone." If they're not saying that literally, then they're implying it with their weak attempts to psychoanalyze her (much like my own weak attempt here). And the final third is made up generally of men who think they've found a reformed-geek kindred spirit and hit on her, thus further fueling her posts about how men unworthy of her won't leave her alone.
Sure, the Internet has helped a lot of people. I would venture to say that this same desire for validation coaxed yours truly out of her shell somewhat. I'm not even saying I'm immune to the disease that Ms. Passey has. Hell, look at me - I'm subtly trying to come off as more evolved here. Okay, it's not subtle at all. And I don't actually even think I am more evolved. But I don't need you all to pat me on the back for being more attractive than I was in college and occasionally being attractive to men. I figure this was something I was supposed to do - self-betterment and all.
You can learn one of two things from being an ugly duckling. You can learn how to grow up to be a swan, or you can make yourself into a pretty duck. I'm seeing many fewer swans out there in internets land, and many more pretty ducks, with much louder voices. And the worst types are the pretty ducks who think they're swans.
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