Creepy girls have feelings, too
on doja cat and rediscovering your rage
Hello, no taste nation (is this something?)! This week’s installment is a guest post from friend and former comrade-in-late night Sanya Dosani, who wrote this very funny essay on love, heartbreak and the cultural creepy girl. Please enjoy! xx
When I heard Doja Cat’s sexy disco-pop “Say So” last winter, my first thought was: this song sounds the way kissing a girl feels. The soft, breathy vocals shimmer over a funk-inspired beat that grooves you up higher and higher and higher until you’re dizzy and gasping for air.
Catchy as it is, the song didn’t really take off until teens made it a TikTok dance challenge. It was perfectly poised to go viral with simple moves that very literally matched the lyrics:
Didn't even notice,
no punches left to roll with
You got to keep me focused,
you want it, say so
A punch, a body roll, then hands forming a camera lens focusing. Find me one teen girl in America who didn’t at least try that. Doja herself did the dance too – in her official music video, featuring the TikTok teen who choreographed it.
Since then, “Say So” has only gotten more ubiquitous, becoming a staple of Doja’s exhausting number of live (virtual) performances this year. Eventually, she must have gotten bored of it because she started remixing: There was the electro-extraterrestrial version at the VMAs and the ode to Roxy from the musical “Chicago” at the Billboard Music Awards. But my favorite is when she went full goth metal at the MTV European Music Awards.
You really should just watch it, but I know you won’t, so let me walk you through it.
First, she crawls out of a screen like the creepy girl from The Ring into a field of … white flowers??
Looking like Evanescence’s creepier but also somehow hotter little sister???
And then she and a couple of extras from Buffy the Vampire Slayer proceed to rock so fucking hard for the next three minutes that watching this performance should count as having an exorcism.
Honestly, you really should just watch it. I’ll wait.
Done? What did I tell you? So good.
You know when a vibe hits your particular frequency so precisely that it just kind of lodges into your body and you wonder if scientists created it in a lab specifically for you? That’s what watching this video is like for me right now.
Look, The Ring was the first horror movie I saw. I was 12 and it ruined my life. But even as I was terrified of her, I always felt a kinship with the stringy-haired Samara. Maybe it was that we both had a very dramatic axe to grind with the entire planet. Or it could have also just been the long, black stringy hair.
Culturally, we love a creepy girl. Well, we at least love watching her from afar, especially when she is destructive and violent. We assume the creepy girl doesn’t care if we like her – she hates us anyway – and is deranged enough to protect herself. Wednesday Addams and her delightful penchant for homicide. The cute twin sickos in The Shining. The little brainiac on that Netflix chess show who arrives at an orphanage at the tender age of nine and promptly gets addicted to tranquilizers. Iconic.
For young me, though, the creepy girl was more than a spooky spectacle. She was an alternative to the other varieties of girl I saw on screen – Valley, cool, manic-pixie-dream, etc. The creepy girl offered me membership to a club that didn’t make you hide your primal dark emotions – vengeance, rage, hatred. You relished them. And most relatable of all, it often had nothing to do with boys: I spent zero percent of my adolescence seeking male attention.
Instead of exploring my feelings and desires through sex or romance, I watched other people’s experiences secondhand through art. As a brown girl, a Muslim girl, a creepy girl in suburban Ohio, it didn’t occur to me that I could actually be the object of desire – and the aughts’ pop culture did nothing to contradict that.
I moved to the East Coast after college, but my skepticism continued well into my twenties, when replacing thirst with a thirst for knowledge (zing!) just made me really good at my job. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. There weren’t many high highs, but there also weren’t many low lows.
Until … the Bad Man won. The 2016 campaign and election was a painful, very personal rejection by almost half of the country and a betrayal by many childhood friends and neighbors I thought cared about me. My breakup with America sent me down a deep hole of depression that it took me almost two years to pull myself out of. I marked the end of the healing process with a viewing of the video of the Evanescence classic, “Bring Me To Life” – a true creepy girl banger which is still on my running playlist to this day.
The ethos of this new era was clear: knowledge is bullshit. The laws had changed, truth was relative, lol nothing matters, etc. Time for a new me, too. I would just like to be a thirsty bitch now, please! But I was too dumb to understand how to actually do that. I thought it was enough to be hot and chill and the rest would just follow. But I had no fucking idea how to tell a guy how I felt … or to know how I felt … or even feel anything at all. I’d had some intense crushes years ago, but now I was just numb all the time. My sexual experiences were anti-climatic and emotionless with guys I barely knew, let alone cared about. I wondered if sexuality was like a muscle, where if you didn’t use it for too long it would just atrophy.
The person who truly “ripped my flowers out,” as Soccer Mommy would say, was a fellow creepy girl. It took me a while to see it under her Cute n’ Fun exoskeleton, but I’m convinced that’s what drew us to each other in the first place. At this point I was so dead inside that I just wanted to feel anything – even PAIN – and having sex with a girl who “isn’t into girls but just thinks you’re really sexy” is an excellent way to self-destruct. Ten out of ten, I recommend.
The experience evoked something off King Princess’ sexy pop album Cheap Queen more than than creep queen Vanessa Carlton’s “White Houses.” Intense infatuation escalated into mutual confessions of love a mere ten days later. I am told this is not an especially uncommon occurrence when two women are involved. I think it has something to do with the moon? I’m not sure. I spiraled into a euphoria that couldn’t be restrained by the inconvenient fact that neither of us wanted to be in a same-sex relationship. Walls I had unknowingly put up years ago had come crumbling down and a tsunami of underused teenage hormones flooded my body. For a glorious moment I wasn’t a creepy girl. I was a pretty girl, a bad guy, your little Venice bitch. Her little Venice bitch, to be exact.
But at the same time, I was finally able to tap into the parts of my sexuality I’d only gotten glimpses of before. Now that I’d made my sexual debut, even unremarkable guys were suddenly irresistible. I downloaded several dating apps and went out with a revolving door of dudes. While I waited for their messages, I scrolled through TikTok and watched the teens dance to “Say So.” I imagined myself as the type of girl who could unironically say “Boy, stop playing, grab my ass.”
Yes, clearly there was also a part of my sexuality that wasn’t for men. But the only person I wanted to explore that with was…much more skilled in the arts of avoidance and distraction, techniques necessary to escape the pain of putting overwhelming feelings back into a box. An immediate new boyfriend helped her keep it moving.
Like Mitski, I glowed pink in the night in my room as I – somewhat confusedly – experienced my first love and heartbreak simultaneously. Sensing impending doom, I desperately tried to cling on to something, even friendship. That was a… humbling experience. I usually have a sociopathic ability to seem fine when I’m not, but that didn’t work now that I was an open wound oozing one embarrassing behavior after another. I wrote poems! I made playlists! There was even an ill-advised short story. But I had just discovered that my capacity to love was greater and more pure than I had ever imagined and I was artistically inspired!
When my cries for help went ignored, I was (naively) shocked. What about our friendship, our connection – or even basic human decency? As it became clear that I would have to navigate my most vulnerable state without the person who left me there, I tried to locate my old standbys, rage and resentment. But all I could find were pain and confusion.
I deleted the dating apps – and TikTok. Soon after, New York went into lockdown and I took shelter in my parents’ home in suburban Cincinnati to lick my wounds in private. I knew I couldn’t shut off the lows without also shutting off the highs, so I rode the waves of pleasure and pain, listening to “Motion Sickness” by Phoebe Bridgers every day for months. No longer a creepy girl, I had mutated into the much-less-fun sad girl. When the worst of it was over, I came back to the city in time for summer.
And then ... the Bad Man lost. I spent the day drinking champagne and dancing in the streets with my fellow New Yorkers, trying to squeeze every last drop of joy from the emotional equivalent of a near-death experience. But really, I didn’t feel anything. Good as the vibes were (and they were very good!!!), they weren’t enough to lift me out of my melancholic fog.
The next morning, when the fun had worn off and all that was left was existential dread, Doja’s overnight performance at the EMAs was waiting for me on my Twitter feed. At last, a vehicle through which to release all the pent up rage.
Growing up feeling isolated and disconnected from my peers, I’d become convinced that I was just broken or damaged. Meeting a person that stirred up those dead emotions within me was a pivotal life experience that I’m not sorry I had. Better late than never. But after she disappeared and the pain subsided, I realized that I had also abandoned someone: my inner creepy girl. But she’s still there, she’s suffering, and she’s angry. Turns out, creepy girls have needs too.
Four years ago, the trend forecaster Ayesha A. Siddiqi tweeted, “In Trump's America aka Bush era redux Hot Topic will come back and American Apparel will start disappearing.” That Biden’s election didn’t inspire genuine, sustained joy is a reminder of what many of us have known deep down for years: no matter who is technically president, we’ll be in Trump’s America for a while.
It’s no wonder, then, that “Say Say” evolved from a sexy TikTok dance into a metal anthem that coaxed out my emo pre-teen self, folding all the contours of my rage – personal and political – into one streamlined, digestible package sold exclusively at Hot Topic. Ignoring the creepy girl may render her invisible to you, but she still exists.
Because eventually, ghosts will cause chaos.
It’s no accident Doja pays homage to The Ring – a classic tale of ghost girl vengeance. Samara’s intense (and righteous) rage over her abandonment and oppression allows her to “burn” horrifying images onto a videotape, killing anyone who watches it in – say it with me – seven days.
The creepy girl has grown up and she’s hot now. Underestimate her power and she’ll hijack your shit like Nicki Minaj’s verse on Kanye’s “Monster.” Try to avoid her and she’ll simply crawl out of your screen and haunt you into insanity. Fuck patience, fuck working together, fuck compasssion. In 2021, we’re gonna psychically imprint our rage onto cursed objects that kill you within seven days unless certain conditions are met.
Well. Now that we’re done with that … wanna see my Renegade?