Ramona Flowers, Archetype of the E Girl or the Death of Modern Love (OG title)
What is an E Girl? Where is the collective sexuality of our generation moving? In her book Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia beautifully describes the recurring pagan forms of desire throughout art and history, Though they are a single desire, they give rise to new forms of these archaic personae. The most apparent of these today is the E Girl. While of course there is an infinite variety of human women who inhabit, and are inhabited by these Personae, there are some clearly identifiable traits.
-An strong sense of (post) modern fashion, so each outfit is a kind of ironic costume
-An infantile persona, very innocent and “babyish” or very mean and tomboyish
-A relative dependency and distaste for men, similar to Femme Fatales in Noir films.
These are not radically new styles, every generation of Americans in particular has had their own popular fads and styles of dress, with corresponding flutters of eroticism and a unique personae. And of course, there was a corresponding masculine personae for every feminine one, punk, New Wave, Goths, even as late as Emo and Scene, none of them suffered the type of one sidedness that is currently underway.
Why then are the young men of today no longer engaging in the wonderful sexual drama that every previous generation has?
I believe the problem is that the modern desiring male, who in memes is often depicted as a Doomer, is woefully incapable of interacting with reality.
He has no sexual personae. Why is this?
He has lost his Soul.
I came to this conclusion while I was at an Anime Convention, offering tarot card readings. I was paying close attention to the way people moved, this may sound odd but you wouldn’t be watching this video if you weren’t keen on my strange observations! But what I noticed astounded me. I could distinguish the literal “presence” or “spirit” of anime based personae in the movements of not only cosplayers, but certain con goers, I could recognize the inauthenticity of their speech patterns, and physical expressions.
I’m sure you’ve all acted like cartoon or film characters at one point or another, this is that game, but on a mass scale. It’s a reaction against feelings of personal worthlessness I think. This is close to the E Girl type, someone who took on an alien form and embodied it, with positive or dramatic results. This is on display in TikTok.
And then in the unfortunate case of the young men, I noticed a particular lack of fluid movements, there was a great shyness and mechanistic rigidity to the way that they move and spoke. While I initially chalked it up to “awkwardness” as I pondered the question I recalled Jung’s description of the Anima as a Dancing Woman. Most men have danced with their Anima, their Soul. This is what produced romance, love, eroticism, and “swagger” or dance. Their bodies are possessed of this Feminine Archetype.
But as I have talked about in several of my videos, the Anima no longer resides in the body of modern men, but in their Technological Matrix. So he is left entirely one sided, it becomes extremely difficult for the dance of sexuality to occur, which in Jung’s view is not simply a dance of bodies, but the dance of the feminine Soul of Man and the Masculine Spirit of Woman.
At this impasse, this loss of Soul, we see a great deal of young men double down, and become deeply misogynistic, or really, loyal unto their two dimensional digital Mother. One they may never escape from. This is the root of a great deal of Doomerism, incels, and the various Pills.
I could not do a video on the E Girl concept without looking at the misogynistic, but truly Punk hit from Negative XP: Scott Pilgrim vs The World Ruined A Whole Generation of Women
I think the song succeeds as punk, and as art, good art is ultimately amoral and should enrage and disgust, that being said, I will turn my eye on their psychological issues.
They are bitter about their own lost soul, and so despise those who still Live. Life was never meant to be cleanly, moral, fascistic and modern. We are meant to live as pagans, animalistic and full of loving passion, and great hate. Negative XP is filled with an ironically Christian distaste for the Sexual Personae.
The question then is how to exit this soul stealing matrix of memetics. How to take your soul back from the countless heat sinks it is trapped in.
I find the answer lies in the body, in performance, in being possessed. In making art. The great dramas of our generation are unfolding, and their records are held in Memes. Remember, Memes Matter.