STOP DOING THAT WITH YOUR HANDS
In my head, I’ve always called them “scrappy girls,” which, unfortunately, sounds an awful lot like dirty girls. But they are of a different breed entirely. I could understand (sorta) why they existed in college, but I’m continually shocked to meet them still. Scrappy girls: they’re usually little and they make a self-deprecating big deal out of their prepubescent bodies, they wear sneakers but don’t put them on all the way (they think it’s cute to shuffle), there’s always a bunch of dingy bangles and rubber bands and string around their wrists. They have totally delusional ideas about what men think is attractive. Latent homosexuals are always falling in love with them. They sit cross-legged at parties or purposefully on the floor when there is a couch open and available. They don’t wear makeup even though they should. They’re always eating candy. They have a “perverse unwillingness to glitter by arrangement.”
They believe that, at 23, girls can still be precocious. You cannot be precocious at 23. It’s too late for that, and with each passing day, these habits become more and more grotesque. The grown man to whom I proposed this taxonomy last night agreed. Even he, who admits to being more attuned to speech patterns than physical gestures or manners of dress, has been noticing scrappy girls recently. He described the sensation of walking down the street and seeing ghoulish, aged heads attached to adolescently-clad bodies.
Scrappy girls can be funny and smart, but they are always cloying. When I meet them, I want to force them into a tailored outfit for once; usher them to a set table with good china and white linens; plop them in a chair; check to make sure their feet are on planted firmly on the floor; and watch while they eat something un-cute, like a steak. I want to see them seduce a man with good conversation and self-possession.
