A Case for Playgirl Spring

Still pursuing feminine agency

Mar 23, 2024

The legacy of the male writer is an enigma because it always comes with Godlike reverence.

If you don’t believe me look at Kafka.

I love Kafka’s concepts. I love the wonky surrealism that’s always a little sad. I don’t love the writing, the words themselves.

But I find his legacy fascinating. He is remembered with this strange fanaticism. As an anxious man who didn’t want to be famous. Who didn’t want his work read, who was just so talented that he couldn’t help but become a literary star. No one talks about the fact that he actually really wanted to become a famous writer. He even made an under the table deal to place in the first writing competition that put him on the map. No one talks about his incredibly weird porn collection or the fact that he wrote the same romantic letters to multiple women, even when engaged.

He is a male writer.

But he’s also, just a guy.

What does the woman writer have to do to be remembered as a writer with the same reverence and respect? We can talk about Plath. Woolf. Morrison. Does she have to be surrounded by some air of tragedy? And even so, her sadness is clouded by this aestheticization that makes her work more of an idea, more of a feeling rather than her body of work. How often do we think of The Bell Jar separate from Plath in the same way we can paste and tear Fitzgerald to and from Gatsby? Why is Gatsby the novel of its age, while The Bell Jar is considered a sad psuedo-memoir?

I’ve written a lot about gender and sexuality and writing dating here, and I’ve taken some steps back to work on some longer more serious projects, but I feel this screaming inside of my head sometimes. The only writing mentor I’ve ever had that I’ve respected and has given me actual good advice is a woman (a wonderful one). Because she doesn’t tell me how to write. She doesn’t tell me what words to put down or what shape to give them, but she acknowledges that I have my own thoughts, my own feelings, my own ways of looking at the world and that I know exactly how I want to portray it.

I think of Eva Hesse a lot lately. I’m obsessed with her legacy, because she made art because she needed to and wanted to and she did it in any form with any materials that called to her. She is a real artist.

I think a lot about Madame Bovary and Breakfast at Tiffany’s too. They are these two works that have created lasting iconography for women and womanhood that have been adopted by women, even if they are written by men. I have this 60s paperback of Breakfast at Tiffany’s that calls her a “playgirl” on the cover. Perhaps because men come in and out of her apartment. Perhaps because she’s 18, meandering around New York with an ambiguous past. I really latched onto the world “playgirl” in a similar way I was attracted to the word “hoyden” last year. Faulkner used “hoyden” to describe this version of girlhood that had not yet been corrupted, some way of feminine existence before even becoming aware of a forbidden fruit. I would like to think that last year, with “Hoyden Girl Summer,” we exercised some sort of reclamation of Hoyden.

And this spring, I’d like to reclaim playgirl in the same way.

To be a playgirl is to enjoy your life.

To be a playgirl is to be the agent in the decisions you’re surrounded by, not the subject.

To be a playgirl is to work on art instead of going on a date you probably won't enjoy.

To be a playgirl is to go on a date you will enjoy and think about your own interpretations, your own senses during it.

To be a playgirl is to be vulgar, if you want.

To be a playgirl is to be silent, if you want.

To be a playgirl is to want, to decide, and to act.

You can do anything you can imagine yourself doing.

I was at the gym a few weeks ago and saw this man recording me. I was fuming. I imagined myself confronting him, and realized that if I could imagine myself doing it, then I could do it. I did.

To be a playgirl is to reject advice from people (especially men ) that you don’t admire and/or don’t agree with.

To be a playgirl is to pursue your own hopes, dreams, and desires. Hopes that exist without the possibility of other people accepting or rejecting you because they exist in your own soul.

On my way to my mentor’s apartment once, this guy texted me

“Do you ever feel like Holly Golightly?”

By nature of being avoidant and a little flighty, I think I get romanticized by men in this way.

The anwer is no. Because Holly Golightly is a character in a book narrated by a male protagonist, written by a man, who also ends up sad, alone, on the tail end of a miscarriage with a man who deserted her, as she flees to a different country to escape a legal mess that men got her into in the first place (the book is very different, see?).

I’m not Holly Golightly.

I am my own person.

A real life playgirl of my very own, on my own terms, in my own mind.

And you are your own person with your own desires and the ability to act on them as well.

So act.

Happy playgirl spring.

HOTLITERATI.COM