Sexy Feminist Read: Stuff Hipsters Hate

I’ve learned that if you don’t stand up for yourself and refuse to deal with bullshit behavior, hipster dudes will just continue to do it. One of my friends went on a magical first date with a shiny, perfect-seeming hipster guy. They shared a perfect good-night kiss and he promised to call. Fast forward to a Tuesday evening when, after three weeks of radio silence, he sent a text casually (and sans any apology or hint that there’d been a problem) asking her to accompany him to a party that night. She desperately wanted to say yes (after all, he was really hot and what other prospects did she have?), but I made the point that if she said yes, she’d just teach him that it’s completely OK to blow a woman off for three weeks and then get to make out with her again, consequence-free.

There are similar forces at work when a guy ghosts on a girl after dating for a few weeks or months — most women just let him go softly into the night, which just reinforces his delusional line of thinking that it’s A-OK to end a relationship that way. (Quick sidenote to say that I know hipster women ghost on dudes, too, and that’s equally uncool. I’m just much more familiar with this Disappearing Dude scenario.)

I’ve actually sent kind-but-honest emails along the lines of, “It’s fine that you don’t want to hang out anymore. Just know that in the future, rarely will a girl freak out if you break up with her. It’s a much more respectful option than just quietly disappearing.” If we don’t expect men to treat us like human beings (or, hell, require it), guess what: They won’t.

I think it has to do with biology. Hipsterdom is sort of a state of extended adolescence — instead of settling down with a steady job, a 401K and a four-poster bed from Sleepy’s, you continue living life like a freewheeling teenager, picking up cash on odd jobs, refusing to conform to societal standards of success and still sleeping on an air mattress in an unadorned loft room. While the description applies to 24-year-old men and women in about equal ratios, when you look at 36-year-old hipsters, the men far outnumber the women.Ticking biological clocks must have something to do with it — women at some point feel compelled to get their shit together, give up their dreams of becoming installation artists (or at least stick their noses to the grindstone in terms of making it happen), and “grow up.” Men, who don’t have ovaries, feel no particular compulsion to start behaving like adults until much later. Hey, if the tragic starving artist act is still getting them laid, why move to Park Slope for a premature living death rife with strollers and burping blankets? 

I wouldn’t say that hipsters are defined by being pro- or anti-feminism, but in general they don’t hate feminism. In fact, there are plenty of elements of hipsterdom that appear downright progressive: Women are encouraged to slough off the tiring rituals of traditional grooming, shunning makeup and embracing their natural hair texture; women approach men in bars and rarely sit around on stools hoping a man will buy them a drink, and so on. But if you look at the side of hipsterdom we make fun of in the book, the selfish hater who only cares about him- or herself, you see that it’s not so much that hipsterdom gives women more power, but that everyone in the subculture is jostling for their own superiority.That’s the uber-bleak view. In general, I think it’s nice that we’re all on fairly equal footing (and that I haven’t had to pick up a hair straightener in years). 

We were using an unapologetically sarcastic voice; I think people associate female humor with self-effacement, a teasing, eye-batting wit. The blog’s voice curses like a sailor and never pauses to ask for approval or check how it’s being perceived. We purposely kept the blog’s content itself gender-neutral, but everyone just assumed the blogger was a bitter male in Bushwick tapping at a keyboard angrily. We even got flirtatious emails from female fans.When we pulled off the mask, we got tons of fan mail from women who were absolutely delighted. One thanked us and said our blog had really helped her take a step back from a painful break-up and see the ridiculousness of her hipster ex’s behavior. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do — take the power out of that obnoxious persona who belittles you by hating on [this scene/those bands/your hat/you]. Once you see the folly of the all-consuming hate, it has no power over you. Once people saw that we’re nice girls who smile and care about other people, they were sort of let in on the joke a little more. 

One more-or-less negative consequence of pulling back the veil has been that some readers (virtually all men, as far as we can tell) read our words as though they’re from the mouths of two pathetic, bitter chicks who desperately wish we could find love. One reviewer said the book just made him “feel sorry for” us; another couldn’t get over our “anger” as we “railed” against the poor hipster men we’ve encountered. I think if you read the same book by “Brennan and Andrew,” you’d notice we make fun of the silly inconsistencies and perpetual ennui of hipster women as well as men.

The last negative consequence is a well-known phenomenon in feminism: Men’s way of shutting up a powerful woman is by attacking her looks, either “I’d fuck you so who cares what you have to say,” or “You’re ugly so STFU.” We do a weekly Tech column for CNN.com and they used to show our picture at the top — comments (hundreds per column!) included such wise words as “I’d stick my dick in that,” “I’d do the short one but not the tall one,” “Can you imagine waking up next to that freak?” and “She’d look better with longer hair.” I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that if the very same column had been penned by two dudes, comments would have a bit more to do with the column’s content than authors.

I think the era of the modern-day hipster is on the decline, thanks to media like Gawker and New York magazine insisting we all stop using the word, already. But hipsters have been around for 60+ years, and of course they’ll still exist 60 years from now, just with different clothes and music and stuff. It’d be great if the next iteration of cool kids were a little less obsessed with using hate to demonstrate their smug superiority, but a counterculture has to be counter to the culture at large, so the next group will still be defined by some sort of antithesis.And to the journalists, sociologists, and historians swearing that the era of the hipster is over, and swooping in like vultures to prematurely dissect it: You come sit with me on a bench on Metropolitan Avenue in Bushwick for 10 minutes, and you try to tell me the Hipster is finished. The real fun has only just begun.