Laissez Faire Femininity

No one told me “Anatomy of a Fall” was about autofiction. I went to see it innocently over the long weekend because my roommate had said it was good. Although they had every other kind of expert in the courtroom, they did not, interestingly enough, have an expert in literary theory. They were reduced to bickering over whether autofiction is actually reality or fiction. Unfortunately for me, I have already covered this issue in depth.

I haven’t bought anything this weekend because I am anti consumerism (and mostly shop secondhand anyway). The only thing I really want anyway is prohibitively expensive, even with the sales. I daydream sometimes about what it would be like if I came into money, what I would do with it. The only thing I know with certainty is that I would pay off my debt, firstly, and then secondly, go out and buy a lot of Nensi Dojaka. Almost nothing else has the kind of hold on me that Nensi Dojaka does. It’s all effectively lingerie but with the confidence of real clothing. It has the playfulness of Vivienne Westwood, the ephemerality of vintage La Perla, the girlishness of Miu Miu, the sexiness of all those baddie clothing brands they market on Instagram that inexplicably cost like $400 an item.

I recognize this may sound like hyperbole but it is undeniable that since launching in 2019 Nensi Dojaka has taken the world by storm. Virtually every celebrity of the moment has worn one of her pieces in recent years. FKA Twigs wore it in a major GQ profile where she described her allegations against Shia LaBoeuf, Zendaya wore it to the “Dune” premiere (a movie she was barely in), and again in a Smartwater ad campaign where the custom blue dress was dyed to exactly match the water bottle’s logo. Kylie Jenner wore it in an ad campaign to promote “Glow,” which is fancy water with electrolytes in it. Kendall Jenner wore it to the Met Gala afterparty, Bella Hadid wore it to the 2020 VMAs, Emily Ratajkowski wore it to the Tribeca Film Festival. Rihanna, always the coolest of all celebrities, wore it on a night out with Asap Rocky, who wore that Pleasures t-shirt that says “A girl is a gun.”

Dojaka is 29, originally from Albania, and based in London. The Financial Times described her earlier this year as “redefining sexy dressing for the female gaze.” Emily Nussbaum wrote that the idea of the “female gaze” has become “blunt from overuse, particularly with its essentialist hint that women share one eye.” But if there is something compelling about the vision of femininity and sexuality that Nensi Dojaka offers, besides the sheer intricacy of her layered garments, it is maybe their combination of delicacy, function, and sophistication. She incorporates playful, girlish touches—the heart ornaments, the bows—as well as hints of rope bondage in the endless straps and lace up tights. But what I particularly love about her designs is that she never strays into coquette territory, which has in recent times become a dominant visual modality for gesturing at femininity, sex, power, desire.

What is a “coquette”? According to TikTok, it is “someone who wears bows and listens to Lana Del Rey.” Harper’s Bazaar called Sandy Liang “Supreme for the Downtown Coquette.” Dazed describes the coquette aesthetic as an offshoot of “nymphet tumblr,” a blogging community rife with pictures of glamorous bruises, heart-shaped glasses, and copies of Lolita. The coquettes I follow online wear ribbons and bows, yes, but they also promote a girlish, quasi-mystical type of femininity. They eat “girl dinners,” they have vintage candlesticks, sometimes they’re vaguely Catholic. They’re more My Year of Rest and Relaxation than Lolita. They lie around at home and dream of an ahistorical Victorian life where women had nothing to do but wear frills and go pick flowers in wicker baskets and eat jam. They must have jobs but you would never know about it. They do really, really love Lana Del Rey.

Although some would call Simone Rocha coquette and although sometimes it is, to me it’s more weird and creative and fairy-like. Sandy Liang is solidly coquette. Her clothing, which I often find charming, is also remarkably bland. Her hair bows, which retail for hundreds of dollars, are virtually identical to any knockoff you could get on Etsy. Her grey suiting mini skirts look like vintage school uniforms. When I tried on the ribbon puffer, which I was briefly obsessed with, I was surprised to find that it was all polyester and obviously not designed in any serious way for cold weather. I guess a coquette never gets cold.

Sandy Liang is not obviously sexy. It’s a blend of childlike and severe. Like something Jane Eyre would wear at her repressive Victorian orphanage. Its sexlessness feels almost oppressive. On TikTok, you scroll through endless pictures of women in generic tennis skirts, pale from a lack of sun, wearing Dakota Johnson bangs, invariably bruised legs (probably from iron deficiency like mine) rising above white socks and Mary Jane ballet flats (cute, excusable) or Mary Jane pumps (horrifying, inexcusable). Sometimes they are wearing thick, opaque white tights and little shrugs that resemble Natalie Portman in Black Swan and absolutely no other ballerina you’ve ever seen. They post memes about stalking their love interests and crying a lot and being too delicate for the modern world. In defense of Sandy Liang though, most coquettes cannot afford her clothing. Instead, they tend to wear a combination of Brandy Melville and online fast fashion brands that sell Miu Miu knockoffs. On a fancy occasion they will wear some kind of floral Reformation dress. All this clothing, aggressively tacky and marketed exclusively towards thin white women, suggests the tensions the coquette sustains.

In The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman, the narrator, a newfound convert to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of individualism, tries to proselytize to two young edgy influencers dressed in frilly pinafores like “sexy Halloween nurses dredged up from the East River.” She wins them over by insisting on Rand’s total contrarianism and commitment to individualism. She is not alone in this project. Brandy Melville has also used its baby tees and floral dresses as a vehicle to market libertarian thought to young women. Brandy Melville previously had a diffusion line called J. Galt, after a character in Atlas Shrugged, and is also legally affiliated with three different companies called variously Bastiat USA (after libertarian economist Frédéric Bastiat), Thomas Aquinas, Inc. (apparently a darling of libertarians), and Laissez Faire, Inc. (I think that one speaks for itself).

Like the ideal libertarian, the coquette is deeply individualistic. She exists outside of society. Her fantasies and presentations of womanhood and the economic conditions that support her lifestyle are deproblematized and framed as immune to political critique. This is not to be confused with third-wave “choice” feminism. The choices of the coquette are prescribed. Although they are ostensibly sexy, it is the sexiness of being passively looked at it, rather than an active presentation. They’re by girls, for girls. They pretend they can’t see that men might be looking.

This illusion of a hyper-feminine space that is largely constructed around appealing to the desires of men is basically the core conception of the romance novel. Romance, a wonky genre, that spans everything from historical fiction to rom coms to pure erotica, is the staple of TikTok’s book community (BookTok). It spans outward into other parts of TikTok also. One popular fitness influencer with nearly 750,000 followers, who advocates for syncing your fitness and lifestyle routines with your natural menstrual cycle (uninhibited by birth control), recorded a video of herself where she says, “my life started to significantly improve when I stopped reading self-help and started reading smut. I’m not talking about Colleen Hoover, I’m talking about smut.”

The sound was picked up by several successful BookTokers, including @xenatine who promotes romantasy (romance/fantasy, including myth retellings, and relationships with non-human beings of any kind like aliens or vampires) and dark romance (a blanket genre that encompasses any troubling content like glamorized abuse or sexual violence often described as “morally grey”). It was also reposted by @coralies library who also seems to skew towards dark romance. In a video about Butcher and Blackbird, a cannibal romance which is notable for its incredibly inventive and far-ranging trigger warning list, she switches from her awed face to the first line of the book which is about serial killers liking to kill (cannibal romance). In another video, which I saw because people got mad about it online, she shows the dedication of a dark romance book: “To the girls who fuck the villains. Open your mouth wide and take it like a good girl.”

It is a common accusation leveled at romance reading that it is simply the consumption of porn. Although that isn’t true of all romance, which as I said, spans a wide umbrella, it is obviously somewhat true of erotica. The dedication above is obviously the unfiltered lexicon of porn. Unlike mainstream porn though, erotica tends to get flack both from anti-porn feminists and from highbrow non-romance readers who are angry that smut is being consumed in literary form. Although many critics of romance adamantly defend the right to explore potentially offensive or misogynist forms of sexual fantasy and desire in literature (and in porn), they are put off by its manifestations in erotica.

There are a lot of different valid issues to examine here. I do not think the purity of the literary canon is one of them. While there are plenty of legitimate analyses of the publishing industry and its swing towards very commercial, mass market fiction and the accompanying anti-intellectualism and prioritization of profits, the moral panic about women reading softcore porn is almost always in bad faith. Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex that “Crucial to anti-porn feminism is the thought that porn itself doesn’t just happen to result in women’s subordination: it is itself an act of subordinating women […] For that to be true, porn must have authority.” Inasmuch as porn often stands for sex education, Srinivasan acknowledges, porn does have some kind of soft power. But investing porn, of the visual or the literary kind, with the authority to subordinate women or real literature or anything else, seems like a fundamental misconception of what it does. Porn, writes Srinivasan, offers “the pleasures of ego-identification.” It allows for projection. We assume that porn or that video games will corrupt our minds in a way that say, watching slasher films will not, because both mediums encourage the viewer to enter the story. But this also rests on the assumption that adults, unlike children, cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction. That exposed to wish fulfillment or the vicarious pleasures of some kind of unaccustomed power, we will cease to accept the real conditions of our life.

This anxiety is not new. In a 2014 New York Times article, Margaret Cohen is quoted as arguing that From the late 18th century through the middle of the 19th, “women were considered to be in danger of not being able to differentiate between fiction and life.” Emma Bovary is notably affected by romance novels. She expects her life to be more glamorous and more passionate than it actually is. It is also a story about the condition of modernity. Mario Vargas-Llosa writes of the novel in The Perpetual Orgy: "In Madame Bovary we see the first signs of the alienation that a century later will take hold of men and women in industrial societies (the women above all, owing to the life they are obliged to live): consumption as an outlet for anxiety, the attempt to people with objects the emptiness that modern life has made a permanent feature of the existence of the individual."

What is more interesting then about the problem of romance reading is how much it encourages a specific kind of consumption and marketing, often via TikTok. Much erotica, like 50 Shades of Grey or Butcher and Blackbird, was initially self-published, before being picked up by mainstream publishers. It gains popularity via aggressive online marketing, encouraging readers to identify with a particular subgenre of books but also of associated self-presentation. This kind of novel is mediated through the performance of reading. It’s like a pyramid scheme for books. This is obviously a problem inherent to self-publishing but not exclusive to it. It is not accidental that coquettes so often read (or at least appear to read) My Year of Rest and Relaxation, one of the few novels categorized as “literary” that has done numbers on TikTok. This aesthetic is also all about object fixation, about consumption, about alienation.

What is specific to romance readership and coquettes and other feminine-coded sub-identities is their dual alienation: both from modern capitalism and from the problem of womanhood. Even if Flaubert identified on some level with Emma’s disillusionment, she clearly could be nothing other than a woman. This second kind of alienation is what attracts vitriol and scorn. Although the presentation and self-description of coquettes often tracks neatly with the tropes of romance novels, it lacks any specific agency. It is visual, intended for passive consumption. It is when women describe the world in this stilted, inane, fucked-up vocabulary proper to romance erotica that they get a backlash.

“The connection between sex and reading is well-established,” remarked a recent New York Times article. This narrative also reproduces certain tropes of gender. Women, who primarily read romance and upmarket fiction, seek out men who read because they are kinder and more emotionally intelligent. Invariably, the men only read nonfiction (or David Foster Wallace) and are disdainful of women’s reading preferences. Worse still, they do not read at all. Love dies in illiteracy. But the reality is that most people simply do not read at all. The state of literacy in the US is appalling. Books are mostly purchased by women and overwhelmingly by highly educated women. So if the choices are these: is reading a lowbrow, poorly written, and indulgently escapist book better than reading nothing at all?

All I can say is that as someone who has been obliged to read large quantities of self-help at work for several years now, I think most people would probably be much happier reading smut. That speaks more to the state of self-help though than anything else.