“I’m every woman, it’s all in me”: the ‘it girl’ as a limerent object
(part i) of a mini series exploring the politics of the 'it/cool/hot girl' through the lyrics of Chaka Khan's 'i'm every woman'
Corporations using vague ideals to bait us into buying shit we don’t need isn’t a new thing. Even since the time of original ‘it girl’ Clara Bow1 in the 1920s, they’ve been leveraging her popularity to sell us things - mostly hats in Clara’s case. They know that archetypes like the ‘cool girl’ are effective and addictive marketing fodder because they are unknowable and ambiguous. They are both static and free, elusive and contained, quantifiable and unknowable, poised and effortless, attainable and unattainable.
In this way, the ‘it girl’ inspires a cognitive, as well as physical and emotional experience similar to relationship limerence.
“Limerence is a state of involuntary obsession with another person. The experience of limerence is different from love or lust in that it is based on the uncertainty that the person you desire, called the “limerent object” in the literature, also desires you. Since limerence is the desire to be desired, it is a cognitive, as well as physical, and emotional experience. As the focus of limerence is whether or not the object of desire reciprocates the feelings, rather than actually falling in love with the person, it is almost always one-sided.”2
Limerence needs a cocktail of want and uncertainty to exist in the same way as ‘it girl’ does. If the ‘it girl’ became in any way knowable or fallible, they would cease to exist because flaws are certain and human, and a limerent object - by definition - must be uncertain and idolised in order to inspire limerence.
The limerent object - like the ‘it girl’ - also triggers in us a “desire to be desired”. In relationship limerence we’re motivated by the desire for reciprocated affection, while the limerent fixation with the ‘it girl’ is driven by a craving for reciprocal validation. We desire her because her desirability gives us an assurance that if we emulate her traits, we are/can/will, by proxy, be desired (more on how this exponentially affects queer womxn in a later issue, but for now, we’ll keep it simple - if we think she’s hot and want to be/sleep with her, we want to emulate her).
What’s so dangerous about today’s ‘it girl’ is that she’s no longer once removed by the brand of ‘celebrity’. Instead, the rise of influencer culture and the way celebrities now favour narratives of ‘realness’, means that the ‘it girl’ is now our ‘best friend’, ‘girl crush’ and ‘mother’. She can take up host in any mere mortal unknowable enough to allow a mystical narrative to form around them.
The particular brand of ‘just a girl’-like-us-micro-influencer is one of the most sticky, because her highly curated, laboriously achieved ‘it’-ness is being marketed (ad nauseum) under a very convincing illusion of effortlessness and naturalness. We assume, because of the sheer quantity of 'girlies next door’ succeeding at presenting themselves as ‘that girl’ online, that they are somehow the norm or majority as opposed to a cleverly marketed ruse.
More on this in the next installment:
“Anything you want done baby, I’ll do it naturally”: The perils of the ‘effortless’ narrative