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Girl World is the unseen parallel dimension where women wage a forever war between shifting alliances in a John Connor-less dystopia. Men are mostly oblivious of this horrorscape, though they occasionally pick up on hints of it, puzzling to their girlfriends, "Huh, she said that in a weird tone." Girl World's many feuds, for the most part waged via "little comments," include the ancient Blondes vs. Brunettes, the post-Title IX Sporty Girls vs. Girly Girls, and the brutal Thin Girls vs. Curvy Girls. One of the most fraught wars of Girl World is Women Who Write About Women's Stuff vs. Women Who Don't Have Weird Hangups, because the former category has a near monopoly on magazine feature wells. The most important feature of Women Who Write About Women's Stuff is that they are trolls. This week's top troll is Katie Roiphe, who argued for Newsweek that all this equal rights for women stuff has made women more interested in getting beaten up during sex. Behold, Roiphe's quick movement through the stages of troll.
Girl World Troll Phase One:
The troll's goal is to maximize emotional outcry with the simple thesis, "Heads up bitches: you think you know but you have no idea," and then "prove" said thesis with a personal anecdote or bit of pop culture. That was the tactic of the Daily Mail's Samantha Brick, who earlier this month sought and received the outrage of the English-speaking Girl World when she wrote how hard life is when you're pretty:
If you’re a woman reading this, I’d hazard that you’ve already formed your own opinion about me — and it won’t be very flattering. For while many doors have been opened (literally) as a result of my looks, just as many have been metaphorically slammed in my face — and usually by my own sex.
Brick's proof was that one time a female neighbor didn't wave at her on the street, and a different neighbor said it was because she was fat and Brick was thin, and that another time a boss thought Brick was flirting with her husband. But Brick is certainly not the first Girl World troll. Another example might be the entertaining, insightful, thought-provoking essay about porn written for The Atlantic last year by Natasha Vargas-Cooper, who argued that porn reveals even the sweetest boyfriends love watching extreme penetration YouTubes because they are programmed to want to humiliate women. ("Armed with a 'Take Back the Night' pamphlet, we were led to believe that, as long as we avoided the hordes of date rapists, sex was an egalitarian endeavor… This is an intellectual swindle that leads women to misjudge male sexuality, which they do at their own emotional and physical peril.") At one point, her essay seems to suggest that her single bad date is concrete evidence of a nationwide anal sex crisis.