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FUCK POLITENESS
GEORGIA: It’s all about avoiding the Feeling. You’re familiar with the Feeling. It’s the regretful, upset, disappointed feeling you get after someone says or does something particularly shitty and you’re so taken off guard that your politeness instincts take over so you just ignore it or go with it or kind of shut down. And then later you imagine all the awesome things you could have said or done—all the perfect angles1 that you could have kicked that person in the shin—and then you’re awake at 3:00 A.M. totally mad at yourself for not having said/done/kicked them. The epitome of fucking politeness is learning how to act in the moment, instead of wishing you had later.
But for women, it’s so much more than that. The politeness that we’re raised to prioritize, first and foremost, against our better judgment and whether we feel like being polite or not, is the perfect systematically ingrained personality trait for manipulative, controlling people to exploit. We ignore a catcall and seethe inside instead of telling the guy to fuck right off. We don’t blow off the dude at the bar who’s aggressively hitting on us. And we find ourselves in uncomfortable or straight-up dangerous situations that we absolutely do not want to be in and sometimes don’t even know how we got into them. All because being rude is so much harder and scarier than being staunch.
Georgia’s Take on Red Flags and Riot Grrrl Courage
Little girls are taught to be polite, to smile pretty and sit up straight, to be nice and accommodating. And then those little girls turn into grown-ass women who’ve spent years being polite to the detriment of their own wants, needs, and safety. Having been one of those little girls who was taught those rules myself, I’m fucking sick of it. So how’s about we kick things off with some thoughts on one of our favorite Murderino battle cries: “Fuck politeness.” Fuck the way we were socialized. Fuck the expectation that we always put other people’s needs first. And while we’re at it, fuck the patriarchy! Yeah, I said it.
But fucking politeness is so much easier said than done, and it’s taken me years of practice to even start getting the hang of it after a lifetime of being nice.
In July 1998, about a month after my high school graduation, I escaped the confines of my cloyingly suburban hometown in Orange County, California. I graduated by the skin of my teeth. So much so that when the principal handed me my diploma onstage, he gave me a shit-eating grin and said, “Who’d have thunk it?” Through clenched teeth, I did what I was taught to do: I smiled politely as I accepted my hard-won diploma.
I’d been dreaming of being done with public education and escaping all its bullshit rules since I got detention for yawning too loud when I was in kindergarten, so the dream of college was one I was happy to have neither the academic nor the financial resources to obtain. Instead I moved forty-five minutes away to the sprawling, gritty, insane world that is Los Angeles.
LA had always felt like my real hometown. And not just because I was born there, but I have real roots there. When you live in a transient city like Los Angeles, you tend to meet a lot of people at comedy parties who moved here from wholesome Midwest towns to pursue improv classes, and they can’t even fathom that someone would not only be born in Los Angeles but actually raised there as well; you get asked where you’re from a lot. My answer is never simple, mostly because saying I grew up in Orange County feels off, like the feeling of sitting in the back seat of your own car. My heart is from Los Angeles and I sprang from my mom’s womb in Los Angeles (ew), but I didn’t grow up here.
My great-grandparents had emigrated from Eastern Europe to the still-farmland-studded neighboring outskirts of Los Angeles called Boyle Heights, along with a ton of other Jewish immigrants in the 1920s. Later, my grandparents on both sides owned businesses in the equally Jewish-laden Fairfax district, a butcher shop and a barbershop, and my parents went to high school together at Fairfax High on Melrose Avenue. (My once favorite street for vintage shopping.) (More on that later.) But back to the summer of 1998 when I moved into my sweet grandma’s midcentury duplex in mid-city where my mother had grown up and I signed up for beauty school.
After eighteen years, I was finally free! I was a grown-up, goddamn it! And I was confident my chutzpah and tenacity would get me through anything. Eighteen-year-olds are stupid that way.
To pay for beauty school classes, I got a job waiting tables at a cute little breakfast spot in Santa Monica that specialized in various pancake situations. Being a waitress always felt like such an “adult” job, and I loved it immediately despite the country theme that made wearing overalls an employment requirement. Nobody looks good in overalls. Except maybe Chrissy Teigen, and even then she’d be like, “Fuck this shit.”
I worked the breakfast shift, which meant early morning beach weather, so warm, but overcast and cloudy. It gave the restaurant a cozy, homey vibe, until the marine layer burned off midafternoon and was replaced by that glorious Southern California sunshine that burns brightly despite the smog and exhaust that’re slowly killing us all, a fair trade-off for 360 days of sunshine.
I’d drink cup after cup of burned black coffee, and I became friendly with the cook who took pity on my overcaffeinated and underfed body so he’d always sneak me a huge blueberry waffle with a side of extra-crispy bacon to take home at the end of my shift.
And when I say underfed, I mean it was the ’90s in LA and I wasn’t eating. But truthfully, it wasn’t due to the ’90s or LA, although I wish I could just blame the time and place. Blaming inanimate stuff is so much easier than taking responsibility for your actions! My eating disorder has been a lifelong affliction, even though I didn’t know starving yourself to be prettier was a problem or abnormal until I was much older. I grew up with the typical suburban WASP ethos of: a woman’s job is to make men love her or else she’s worthless, and men only love women who are beautiful and thin and don’t complain a lot. Suburban WASPs don’t spell it out like that, but if you’ve watched one episode of The Real Housewives of Wherever the Fuck, you know it’s basically their motto. So at eight years old, I was alarmingly skinny. The kids at school called me “the Ethiopian.” Hurtful and culturally insensitive at the same time! Kids are so clever!
In my tiny still-forming mind, there was nothing worse than gaining weight. Where did little kid Georgia learn such bullshit? Cut to my mother’s room: She’s standing naked in front of the mirror and grabbing a handful of her soft belly. I’m right there, and she calls herself “fat” with absolute disgust dripping from her voice. I watched her hate her body, and it’s impossible for an eight-year-old not to pick up on that type of behavior. And society was fucking brutal to her because not only did she DARE to have a body with curves, but she was … (looks left, looks right, lowers voice) … a single mother. The nerve! And her socially unacceptable single mother–ness resulted in isolated loneliness that she was told, like all women, to blame on her body.
Consider yourself lucky if you never joined the club of kids from broken homes who had the unsettling experience of being privy to our parents’ dating lives. For most of us card-carrying members, it was our first glimpse of how human our parents actually are, an earth-shattering realization at any age.
My parents divorced when I was five, so I had front-row seats to my mother’s dating life. I’d best describe her style as “I Need to Find a Husband or I’m Going to Turn into a Witch and Be Burned at the Stake.” My mother was (still is) a timeless beauty—she’s also smart and funny—but when she was dating someone, I’d watch her turn werewolf-style from a competent, determined authority figure into this entirely not-her version of herself: a desperate, overly flirtatious, subservient ding-dong for shitty men who’d inevitably dump her and leave her in tears. And yes, this is harsh, but this type of personality-corrupting toxic masculinity bullshit didn’t spring up from within her out of nowhere. She was taught to do this, taught that acting sweet, deferential, and noncombative was her best chance at securing a man, aka happiness.
I watched her cycle through emotionally unavailable single fathers with mustaches and Volvos. They all promised her the world and charmed the crap out of her by being nice to her weird kids: Asher, Leah, and the angelic youngest … me. But eventually all those dads realized we were a hot-mess family of hyperactive neediness that presented itself as a bottomless abyss full of red wine (Mom) and daddy issues (us) (and maybe Mom, but let’s not go there).
And hey, just so you don’t feel bad for her, one of those emotionally unavailable single fathers with a Volvo became emotionally available and stuck around. She’s been with John for fifteen years, and all us hyperactive kids adore him.
When dudes started paying attention to me around junior high, I mimicked the behavior that was modeled to me: egregious availability and an open willingness to do anything for affection. I used to be so embarrassed about how I lost my virginity that I lied about it to everyone who asked, even guys I dated, through my twenties. I always wished I had a sweet, romantic “losing my virginity” story, but that’s just not how things go sometimes.
Copyright © 2019 by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
