searching for female complexity - by Jodi - heart ethic

Around this time last year I was very sad. The insanity of what happened acquainted me with the fact that life will always still look tame from the outside. I went to school, studied for my classes, then came home and lifted. Eventually I began listening almost exclusively to The Smiths and Radiohead and No Party for Cao Dong. My style turned monochrome. On TikTok they called this the female manipulator aesthetic. It’s a riff on the male manipulator trope: if a man listens to Weezer and his favourite movie is American Psycho, run. The allure of the female manipulator: she knows herself and wants to wear her complexity, then obscure it under layers of contradiction so that only people perceptive enough to detect her neuroses are worthy of accessing her rich inner life. Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote

Around this time last year I was very sad. The insanity of what happened acquainted me with the fact that life will always still look tame from the outside. I went to school, studied for my classes, then came home and lifted. Eventually I began listening almost exclusively to The Smiths and Radiohead and No Party for Cao Dong. My style turned monochrome. On TikTok they called this the female manipulator aesthetic. It’s a riff on the male manipulator trope: if a man listens to Weezer and his favourite movie is American Psycho, run. The allure of the female manipulator: she knows herself and wan