"I brake for birds. I rock a lot of polka dots. I have touched glitter in the last 24 hours. I spend my entire day talking to children, and I find it fundamentally strange that you’re not a dessert person. That’s just weird and it freaks me out. And I’m sorry I don’t talk like Murphy Brown, and I hate your pantsuit and I wish it had ribbons on it to make it slightly cute. And that doesn’t mean I’m not smart and tough and strong."

— Jess, New Girl

Watching New Girl has actually become kind of rewarding.  My husband and I hate-watched the first couple of episodes and then took a long break because we found ourselves yelling at the TV and rolling our eyes so much that it was kind of exhausting.  But then one night I was channel-flipping and settled into a rerun because hey, I kinda like Justin Long and OH THANK GOD they cut down that awful, awful theme song to be about five seconds long, and it was pretty funny and Jess was far less of a cartoon character and now we’re back to watching the show.

I may have bounced on the couch and clapped my hands and pointed to the TV as Jess said the words above, exclaiming, “Yes!  That’s it!”  Jess, Zooey Deschanel’s character, is an elementary school teacher who has just been eviscerated by Lizzy Caplan’s character Julia, an attorney who previously scathingly told Jess, “Your whole thing with the cupcakes and the braking for birds and the bluebirds come and help me dress in the morning. It’s a great thing. The big beautiful eyes, like a scared baby. I’m sure that gets you out of all kinds of stuff.”  And then Jess delivers the above speech, and I’m nodding along to the TV like one of those antique drinking bird toys.

One of my best friends is essentially Julia—all professional and power-suited and perfectly at ease in the corporate world.  She eats mussels and is a classically trained pianist and wears neutrals and could run for office tomorrow and be taken perfectly seriously.  I love this woman with my whole heart and soul, but sometimes it’s hard to feel like an adult next to her when I’m realizing that I haven’t worn matching socks in ten years and ninety-eight percent of said socks are purple or have pictures of sheep on them.

Three days before this episode aired I was balled up on our bed, crying and insisting to my husband, “But I don’t want a job that I have to go buy new socks for.  I don’t want to have to worry whether painting my nails with sparkly polish is going to undermine my authority, and I don’t want to work in a place where my coworkers won’t put pictures of T. rexes on the door for my birthday.  I don’t want to be a professional.  I want to keep being silly.”

I’ve been spoiled by life in the university.  Sure, I had to maintain some modicum of professionalism, but I was well-respected by my students and peers, enough so that I could use kittens as a running in-class joke or admit to my coworkers that I was wearing an outfit themed around circus animals (elephants) or fictional characters (Peter Pan).  I could decorate my office with the “Wall of Awesome,” a huge collage of poems and film stills and photos of Corgis and pictures of Dead Guy Crushes—come to me, Daniel O’Connell, Irish representative in Parliament, not because you are cute but because your impassioned speeches on the floor are awfully sexy—and have people admire it rather than think it odd or unprofessional.  In the university, nobody thinks twice of the directions, “Her door is the one with the picture of the velociraptor on it” because half of the directions are like that, only with “James Bond” or “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” or “a giant cartoon of Carl Sagan” substituted in.

I suppose there is an argument to be made that I can keep doing all these things at home.  Nobody is going to stop me from doing what I like on the weekends or after work.  Joe does it—he gets home and changes into what I jokingly call his “play clothes,” swapping his blazer and collared shirt for a flannel or a hoodie.  And it is not as though I am totally averse to getting a real-person job.  When I look at my two closest friends—Consummate Professional and Tattoo Shop Owner—I’ll admit that, most days, I’d rather live a life closer to that of Ms. Professional, a life with a regular business-day schedule and desks and set schedules and to-do lists.  But then again, Ms. Tattoo Artist can wear her hair however she wants and doesn’t use words like “consultant” and “core” and can explain her job in less than five minutes.

I don’t know how this managed to circle back to my career anxieties when it was supposed to be a meditation on girliness; I suppose that it’s clear what’s always bubbling under the surface of my subconscious lately.  And I will take advantage of this intermezzo to also admit that yes, I am oversimplifying Ms. Professional and she’s a spontaneous and fun person with a million wacky idiosyncrasies.  She’s just so put-together, though, in a way that I can’t seem to achieve.

But yes, Zooey Deschanel and her ilk and the Manic Pixie Dream Girls almost seem unreal; it’s easy to fall into a love/hate relationship with them and see them as the antithesis of what I should want, to see them as the caricatures they are, as bad for women and emblems of some kind of unachievable male-gaze perfection.  This is what Ms. Professional tells me when we argue about such things, and it is what Lizzy Caplan’s character implies to Zooey Deschanel’s in this episode.  And yeah, the MPDG is problematic and most of the movies about that trope quite simply aren’t very good.  But somehow despite the failures of Garden State or Elizabethtown I still find myself drawn to the MPDG, and I watch the movies that feature her, no matter how frustrating they are.  Yeah, I say, Zooey always plays the same character, but I like that character.  I am drawn to her.  I do not want to be her, and I do not want to rearrange my life to accommodate some notion of What Would Zooey Do?, but I feel a kinship with her, as if at some level I kind of already do those sorts of things.

I am smart and tough and strong.  I bake cupcakes when I am sad and I have a pair of gold sparkle tights and I sometimes braid my hair into pigtails.  I have a rather impressive paper doll collection and my salt and pepper shakers are shaped like birds.  I do not find these things infantilizing—pigtails make me feel spunky and powerful, and paper dolls are interesting and cutting them out is relaxing—and I do not do them to impress anybody else or to get attention.  I do them because I like them.  They make me happy.  And Ms. Professional would never tell me that I am setting back feminism because she knows me and respects me.  But I think she would say that about Zooey or New Girl or what she and I call “cupcake culture.” And I would say, dammit, the point of feminism is to let women do whatever they damn well please, and some of us don’t like neutrals and would rather be third-grade teachers than bankers or lawyers. 

(Have I mentioned that I recently realized that what I really want to do is be a kindergarten teacher?  This is a problem, as I’ve just spent seven years of my life getting degrees that in no way prepare me for that sort of occupation.)

I’m wondering now if I’ve damaged my own argument by subconsciously linking things that mark me as feminine and things that mark me as unprofessional, that I have connected unprofessional with childlike with feminine.  But that is the crux, I think, of the argument: this concept of “girliness” as separate from—or, perhaps worse, the definition of—femininity.  Neither one works.  They both lead to this idea of cupcake culture where a cupcake becomes a symbol of womanhood, a symbol deeply rooted in our perceptions of youth and innocence and a lack of agency.  And that is the problem.  Wearing pantsuits does not make a woman capable any more than wearing a suit makes a man capable.  Perhaps it’s an issue of patriarchy; I’m not sure if that’s a fair assessment or not, since there’s also issues of class and economics at play.  The devaluation of the elementary school teacher in favor of the lawyer is emblematic of so many deeper problems.

And there’s the rub, I suppose: what I am frustrated by in my quest for what I keep calling a Grown-Up Job is the fact that I know that they’re not really Grown-Up Jobs because my job at the university wasn’t a Pretend Job.  I was a teacher.  I had authority and power and I made executive decisions.  I just got to wear Chuck Taylors or elephant necklaces while I did it.  What I am resisting, what makes me cry to my husband in the evenings is the fact that I know that it’s all an illusion, that “professionalism” is just another game I’ve got to play, another costume I’ve got to wear, when really I know what I like and what makes me happy.

I am smart and tough and strong.  And, as Jess would add, “My checks have baby farm animals on them, bitch!”