If I didn’t have a vagina, though, I could be Jack Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson. Hey, remember Hunter S.? He was crazy emotional all over everything, and while people DID call him crazy, some passionately loved him anyway.
The odds are heavily in favor that he would have gone to a loony bin if he’d been born without a dick. The female equivalent of Kerouac did. And then she flung herself out of a fourth-story window because she was no longer allowed to write. It was considered unfeminine. There are definite parallels to certain situations that arise to this day, is what I’m saying.

(*which is to say, over 23)

Genius observation, and ever so true. It evokes an exchange from the Bob Dylan movie by Todd Haynes! About how maybe the whole projection of nonchalance by hipsterlike people is perhaps just a defense mechanism to make them look cool! And incidentally about the fact that Bob Dylan was pretty much of a d-bag.

Personally, I try to express emotions that I feel, because the other option is not as healthy for me. But that tends to get me branded as crazy. I’m not sure why, entirely. Maybe it forces people to confront my humanity.

I think that point of that vacant stare is to allow the naive viewer to project onto that person whatever emotions they, the viewer, wants them to be having. Hence the popularity of such actors, lady or otherwise, over actors who can project highly specific emotions (also called “better actors”). Hence also the unfortunate popularity of such individuals in the dating lives of kind tenderhearted souls.

(Word to the young: if your love object seems so cool that they are UNRUFFLED BY ANYTHING, assume that they are in fact VERY DEEPLY RUFFLED ABOUT MANY THINGS BUT EXISTENTIALLY AFRAID TO LET IT SHOW. Because, as the Buddhists say, life is suffering, and anyone who doesn’t show it is hiding it, and you have to ask why.)

However, this explanation (blank faces reflect our desired back at us) does not at all invalidate your point, given that, as long as we continue to live in a sexist culture, the use of men’s faces (and bodies) as blank screens on which to project the viewers’ fantasies will remain, relatively, an EXCEPTION while similar use of women remains, unfortunately, the NORM.

”On the other hand, I was always a quirky and cynical girl (with odd bouts of wit and Troubled Artistry) and *that* was never seen as charming or sexy…it seemed to me that people saw those characteristics as adorable in guys but weird or boring or depressing in girls.”

True facts, to which I can personally relate. Indie boys, especially quirky cynical witty and/or troubled indie boys, don’t always like those same traits in girls. Or even any traits at all. Many of them like stony-faced, dead-eyed, emaciated waifs who occasionally crack sardonic one-liners before retreating into a disinterested haze. Sometimes they substitute ”sweet and random” for ”sardonic” and ”perky” for ”disinterested.” For the first archetype, see Kristen Stewart. For the second, Zooey Deschanel.

When these boys are reminded that they are talking to or drinking with or fucking a real live girl who has real live opinions and feelings, whether by her anger or her laughter or her words or her leg hair or GEZUS CHRIST her facial expressions, they get weirded out and retreat. I think those guys secretly wish they were fucking a RealDoll that has Nico’s face and a Karen O haircut.

This is probably because a lot of modern ”indie” guys are actually middle- to upper-middle-class white guys who grow up surrounded by decidely un-indie guys who beat up sensitive guys and jerked off to Maxim or to anime. Some actually were those guys, before they realized how popular Conor Oberst was with women.

Viewed through that lens, it all becomes much easier to understand. Also much harder to get dates.