What we talk about when we talk about nail polish.

by Emma Winsor Wood

What is “girl talk”? As a child, it was synonymous with everything I said, which was often interspersed with many “likes” and delivered into the ear of a BFF via my clunky white landline. Girl talk was synonymous with everything I said because I was a girl, and even if I was reading Shakespeare, I mostly wanted to talk about horses, fairies, Titanic, identical twins, and the Spice Girls. It was simply my life.

But then my body changed and girl talk changed with it: both became more defined.

Just as I ceased to be a child, but rather a girl on my way to womanhood, girl talk stopped serving as a blanket term for whatever I said, and started, instead, to mean nail polish, boys, clothing, physical flaws, make-up, and bras. This new girl talk fed my adolescent insecurities (the skinny friend saying she “can’t eat that cookie”); fostered the consumerist impulse (shopping!!), which in turn earned materialism a top spot in my youthful value system; generally giving rise to the kind of jealous and judgmental attitude that comprises the evil core of the teen girl stereotype. Which is to say girl talk began to resemble the insipid chitchat lampooned so successfully in Mean Girls, and, more recently, in Chris Lilly’s satirical portrait of a privileged teen girl, Ja’mie: A Private School Girl. It was also fun. Talking about body hair and diets was another form of make-believe: we were pretending to be adults.

I am now struggling to define what “girl talk” means as a post-collegiate young woman—an adult. Sometimes I feel like I speak two languages: girl talk and adult woman talk. The latter might (and often does) include boys, clothes, grooming, and gynecology, but also encompasses books, current events, random existential fears, and the ins and outs of a new project at work. Girl talk, on the other hand, remains confined to the world of Mean Girls: it consists of nail polish just like those from Glitterbels, statement necklaces, OkCupid, and new exercise plans. It is the teen girl’s idea of what women talk about.

In her essay “If You Sprinkle,” Sloane Crosley recalls a truth-or-dare board game loosely based on L.E. Blair’s Girl Talk book series. While the game consisted of many moving parts, including fake sticker zits, its primary instrument was a plastic arrow that could land on one of four categories: Marriage, Children, Career, and so-called “Special Moments,” like shopping. After a new girl with two mommies joins the game—about whom Crosley and her friends have been instructed to ask nothing—Crosley writes, “I wished I could spin an arrow and it could land on a new category called Reality.” With this sentence, Crosley illuminates the central problem I have with girl talk: it encourages us as girls and, later, women, to turn away from reality—to escape into a world where problems are reduced to questions like Is this handbag too bulky? and Does this shirt make me look fat?. It encourages us to remain teenagers.

Let me pause for a moment to say: I do not want women to conform to an outdated, male-centric idea of the world or censor themselves based on traditional notions of what makes a topic worthy of our attention. I am glad that sites like Into the Gloss, Rookie, and Hello Giggles have created space for teens girls and women alike to talk about things that matter to them in a thoughtful and nuanced way—things that include but are not limited to beauty, health, and lifestyle. I am glad that we have shows like Girls, Parks and Recreation, and The Mindy Project with complex and multifaceted, yet emphatically girly, female protagonists.

The problem with girl talk, in its most basic and superficial form (we could say its “adolescence”), is that it is not thoughtful or nuanced, complex or multifaceted. Talking about nail polish, handbags, and love handles is a habit that has been ingrained in us, via board games, books, and commercials, since childhood. And all the time we spend talking idly—“idle” being the operative word here—about nail polish, handbags, and love handles is time spent not talking about something else. We all recognize that teen girl talk is insidious and potentially destructive, more frequently driving girls apart than bringing them together—so why would it be different for adults?

The spring issue of Porter includes an article by Joanna Weinberg called “The New Power Sisterhoods,” about the “feminine alliances” being forged between powerful women within and across all industries. In spite of ongoing media attention on the “mean girl” dynamics among women at the workplace, Weinberg paints a rosy picture of the corporate life for women—one of “sisterly solidarity” between the likes of the famously-prickly Anna Wintour and Hillary Clinton as well as fashion-industry competitors Miuccia Prada and Donatella Versace. Weinberg concludes, “It is clear that women are uninterested in mimicking masculine behavior in their working lives. They are actively building a new corporate culture that blurs the personal and professional, from transparent networking to children’s playdates and the nail bar.”

I agree: women are actively trying to build a new corporate culture that does not mimic masculine behavior, and their relationships to each other in the workplace provide the foundation for this process. But Weinberg’s essentialist playdates-and-nail-bar conclusion, which implies that women are “girl talking” their way to the top, is misleading. I can guarantee that Hillary Clinton and Anna Wintour never met over a playdate or at a nail bar, and I am sure that, while they can empathize over the difficulties of dressing for a media eager to scrutinize their every outfit, they are not chatting idly about skirts and sweater sets when do they meet.

Reality bites. We all need to escape sometimes. I just have to believe there are better modes of escape than girl talk—modes of escape that take us back to the imaginative play of childhood, rather than the cruelty of adolescence; modes of escape which do not lead us, as women, back to the question of How do I look?, the one that, 24 years after the publication of The Beauty Myth, continues to constrain us.

Emma Winsor Wood is a poet and freelance writer. She writes the Women and Words column for TheRiveterMagazine.com. You can find her on Twitter @EmmaWinsorWood.