The Rise And Fall Of The Girlboss Meme - Katherine Dee

She fails at dating, but who cares? She's doing great at her career. She doesn't need a man, but she's gonna sleep around like a man anyway. She's, like, not afraid to admit she, like, farts. You know, you know, this is like a very specific sort of girl that was, like, really sort of popular in the 2010s. They had a manic episode and spent $18,000, but who cares because, you know, they're a product manager at Facebook. (laughs)

Do you think that you're a pickup artist?

(laughs) No. (laughs)

You recently released a podcast where you considered that you might have been a pickup artist all along. And definitely some of the insights that I've seen you write are unusually incisive, I think, about the dating world. Where have they come from? Why have you taken such an interest in attraction and mating?

Um, well, so I have sort of a weird romantic history. I, uh, I got married very young and then I got divorced, and so my first real time on the dating market, I was already in my late 20s. Um, and, like, I've, it was like a crash course. And I be- it was the first, um, I don't know if relationship's even the right word, but my first sort of foray into dating was so humiliating, I became, like, autistically sort of obsessed with preventing that pain. (laughs) Um, and I was like, "I, I can't ever feel like this again." Um, because I really felt like I was, like, 14, um, but I was 27, and it was just, it was, like, the worst.

Does that-

And I think that's what motivates me.

Yeah, does that suggest that there's a, some time and attention that everyone needs to spend kind of breaking up, and making up, and learning those lessons, and that it doesn't come really as a byproduct of maturity or age, it comes as a byproduct of the amount of times that you've done it?

Um, I mean, I think you just have to have the, you know, requisite emotional intelligence. I don't think that (laughs) um, practicing on people al- like, that's also not, I wouldn't recommend that either, um, because, you know, you become jaded, right? And that's (laughs) that's the, that's the flip side. There's such a thing as too much experience.

That's definitely true. Two years ago, you predicted a coming wave of sex negativity. I think that you were absolutely on the money with that, although it's maybe moving a little bit more slowly than you might have thought. But I think that you're absolutely spot on. Why did you think that that was going to happen?

I started noticing, um... So the way I do my predictions is I look at where journalists are paying attention, um, because I really do, I still believe in legacy media and institutions. I feel like they guide the conversation. And a lot of my predictions are about media conversations as opposed to, like, on the ground behaviors. Um, and so one of the places that journalists scrape stories from, um, at least when I wrote that, I don't know how true that is now, is Twitter, right? And it was very trendy to be, um, sex skeptical. Um, sex negative might have been the wrong term, um, but I was, I mean, it's a very slipshod blog post. I was like Cassandra having visions when I wrote it. (laughs) Um, it, it was, a lot of young people are very sex skeptical. Um, and you know, it was also, we've kind of run out of gas on sex positivity, so you want to generate clicks. So it's like, how is the media conversation going to move and where is the zeitgeist gonna move? Um, so it kind of just made sense for the pendulum to, to swing. Like, you know, when we're at the point where Teen Vogue is, like, the right way to, you know, introduce your cannibalism fetish in the bedroom, right? There's, like, so many things wrong with that sentence. (laughs) It's like, you can only go bad, you can't, there's no, you can't go further than that. (laughs)