'Pick-me' and 'slut' are doing the same work, and it's not for patriarchy
It's about social enforcement, not sexuality
I’m algorithmically unfriendly because of my subject matter and lack of tribal loyalty, and the only way Substack lets a writer compensate is through paid subscriptions. My gender work will generally be paywalled to reward those who have supported me materially. I’m not a journalist or a professional writer, which is precisely why I can say all this without self-censoring. If you value the work, join my inner circle.
Having been on the receiving end of both insults, I can report that the far more affecting one is from women. One’s in-group often has the greatest psychological power over a person, which is logical because one needs the group for survival. Women casting me out of the group would have had grave consequences in pre-industrial times, and that’s why pick me lands so hard. Despite being half the population, women are in the posture of an out-group in the macro sense, which requires intense in-group policing at the interpersonal level. The feminist discourse on the internet is a great example of this.
I wrote the above satire after discarding an earlier version of this argument, but that essay would have been uninformed and hasty. I’m glad I waited to write the serious thing, and I’m sure I will return to it. It became a satire because it read too much like a complaint. Now, it’s a consideration of the insults as I’ve experienced them.
I also wrote that the male gaze is a form of intrasexual surveillance women deploy on each other. Pick me on the internet serves to delegitimize things a woman says because men happen to agree with it. That is the same (not)logic by which everything to the right of the far left is fascism, anyone can be Hitler, or an inconvenient idea is suppressed because of how it might be used. The truth dies in these conditions. We also know that women are more inclined to support censorship in academia, particularly in the behavioral and social sciences.
Pick-me(isha): the insult as anxiety about male attention
The insult is supposedly about naming a woman who tries to be a certain way to please men, that presumably isn’t how she actually is around women, though I suspect it’s the opposite.
The pick-me girl fashions herself differently from other girls and behaves in an out-of-the-ordinary way, specifically to please men.
The problem is that women are as likely to contort themselves specifically to please women. If you’re new here, I obviously do the latter and rarely have to do the former. Men read me in a way women are unlikely to in the context of friendship, because the type of person I befriend is more common among men.
Pick-me is an all-purpose insult intended to punish a woman who happens to attract attention from men for any reason, whether she’s actually trying or not. I suppose the question then becomes whether the term refers to any available heuristic or if it’s merely describing the type of woman who makes it harder for others to attract male attention, for romantic reasons or not. One of the most hurtful insults I’ve ever received concerns men's behavior toward me rather than my own behavior toward them.
I have often thought about how a woman's social media performance carries a charge, whether she’s trying or not. If she is trying, then organizing one’s life around men's attention seems like a poor way to live (and many are dependent on the male attention economy for their livelihoods). But others still depend on the female attention economy, which also requires contortions. I’m not sure if one audience psychologically affects a woman more, regardless of who she might be talking to. I didn’t start here trying to talk to men, that is for certain.
Just the mere fact of a woman being online means men will look, so the gaze can’t be controlled. Nevertheless, a woman is guilty for it, despite its commodified nature and desirability as status currency for female intrasexual competition. The problem is placing too much of a burden on others for one’s self-concept.
Audience approval, of course, means more to any writer than they’d like to admit. Maintaining a line against flattering the audience must happen in every post, and it becomes tiring. So I sometimes do soften my sentences (really) and often take out more revelatory material. Because my first concern is whether men will misread it, and second, whether women will misread men misreading it. Always the gaze, whether it’s photos or writing. A person’s words can still become portals into their inner world, and writing publicly is a strangely intimate act, especially for women — we have to perform sensitivity; heaven forbid we’re simply clear and precise.
Who is allowed to claim masculine orientation?
The pick-me girl does not disavow heterosexuality to get the proper permits to behave as a male. Masculine personality orientation in female spaces is disallowed for straight women. A woman must not be seen as sexual competition, nor can she present as feminine, and only then can she be herself.
Masculine-coded cognition in a feminine body might be the most threatening combination to other women.