the first girl blogger
i'm your peepaw, and I think you're gonna be a girl online
discussed:
🍬 how to make art after you’ve been doxxed
🧸 blind box gender reveal parties
💾 the first girl blogger
Hey girlfrieeeeeeeeeend.
I’ve gained a few lovely readers on here from posting really unhinged things to substack’s version of twitter a.k.a. “notes,” so if you’re new here HI WELCOME <3
This newsletter like a fanzine of girl culture and nostalgia. Every other week I pick a few relevant items of girl culture past present (and future?) to bring to your attention. I write about art, TikTok bullshit, fashion, ancient YouTube finds, music, my VHS collection, and so much more. Sometimes I have something deep to say, sometimes I don’t. Think of me like an archeologist of cool girly trash.
I started this newsletter because I am currently writing my second book and it’s all about the history of girls’ bedroom culture. I’ve spent 10 years researching everything from 1990s zines to 2000s teen films (and got my doctorate in the process), and now I’m ready to write a book that actual people will actually read.
If you’re interested in getting a behind-the-scenes look at my writing process, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber for just $5 a month! And you’ll also get access to the full Internet Bedroom archive if you want to go read all of the back issues.
Ok enough self-promo…on with the newsletter!!!!
obsessing: Qualeasha Wood
When I was in college and very broke, every Thursday night, I would catch a bus downtown and wander around The Art Institute of Chicago because it was a free thing to do that would put me around cute art boys. And I’m pretty sure if I had seen Qualeasha Wood’s “Clout Chasin’”, which the Art Institute just added to their permanent collection, it would have saved my goddamn life.
There is no artist I know working today that is tackling what it means to be a girl online with more dexterity than Qualeasha. After a chance encounter and selfie with Faith Ringold (RIP to the GOAT), who was best known for making these elaborate narrative quilts, Qualeasha changed her major from children’s book illustration to the fiber arts.
Her tapestries, produced on a digitally-controlled loom, collage together all manner of digital detritus, weaving fractured selfies into nasty trolling comments, error messages, and emojis. “Clout Chasin’” in particular narrates Qualeasha’s experience being doxxed by a follower, and most of her work deals to some degree with being a Black girl in the digital space, surveillance, privacy, and the fractured worlds we live in online.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the words and images we put online. We produce and upload endless images of ourselves, endless scrolls of words (like, have you ever texted your ex before?), but we are no closer to understanding ourselves. And often, others take what we put online and they warp it to suit their ends, so that we are no longer writing our own stories. IDK IDK IDK but when I look at Qualeasha’s work, I’m like, ok that’s how we can process all this. This is how we can heal.
watching: blind box gender reveals
I’m sure we have all seen those gender reveal videos where prospective parents (who for some reason always look like they’re 16 or 17 years old) and their family members peer into the camera dead-eyed and guess what the gender of the unborn child is going to be. These videos are my own personal uncanny valley, and every time they come across my FYP, I get something of a jump scare.
Blind Boxes are a lot like babies in that you never know what you’re going to get. And so the girls have started doing gender reveal-style unboxings. Honestly, I could watch these on a ten hour loop.
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There is just something deeply soothing to me about watching the girls on TikTok genuinely lose their shit over blind boxes while also pretending these unboxings are gender reveals. I love it and I would like someone to take me to the mall right now so we can do this.
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remembering: Sadie Benning
Ok girls, sit down. It’s time for history. The history of the first girl blogger. Or, rather, the first girl vlogger.
I’ve been deep in the weeds researching Riot Grrrl and zines and stuff for my new book. And while I was doing this, I was reminded of Sadie Benning, who is the first girl vlogger IMO.
(Ok a couple quick cavates here:
first, Sadie is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns and, although they had not yet identified as nonbinary when they were creating the work I’m writing about here, I am going to use they/them too because that’s what they use now.
so when I say “girl” here, I am absolutely using it in the nonbinary sense as opposed to the strictly gendered sense. I think girlhood can be a space that is not gender-exclusive, and I’d be happy to write about this more in-depth or talk to some folks who identify as nonbinary about their relationship with girlhood as a concept/space/time that they access for a variety of purposes/reasons. lmk.)
So, to understand why Sadie is so important, you have to imagine a time where very few people had a camera. Sadie started working at age 15 when their dad — who was also an experimental filmmaker — bought them a Fisher-Price PXL-2000 (a.k.a. PixelVision) camera. It was the late 80s and they started making these films about their everyday life from their childhood bedroom. They often used the limitations of the PixelVision camera — like its inability to properly zoom or its poor image quality — to replicate this sense of intimacy and isolation that they felt growing up as a queer kid in a straight world.
It’s hard not to look at these movies Sadie made in their bedroom now and not think about the hundreds or thousands of girls and queer kids in their bedrooms filming themselves talking to a camera and uploading it to YouTube or TikTok or Instagram.
Sadie treated their camera as their own personal diary, recording and capturing their life in this super intimate way that a lot of people had never seen before. Their work was even more notable for, at the time, giving people a picture of what a queer girlhood looked like — at the time, Sadie identified as a female gendered person and a lesbian, and there was just no archetype in media for that kind of a person.
Sadie started exhibiting their films in galleries almost immediately and was actually featured in the Whitney Biennial in 1993 when they were just 19. Somewhere along the way, they linked up with the girls helming the punk feminist movement known as Riot Grrrl (which I’m not gonna get into here but let me know if you want a special issue about Riot Grrrl), and they started showing their films at girl punk shows alongside acts like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile.
They actually would late collaborate with Bikini Kill front-woman Kathleen Hanna as a co-founding member of the art pop punk group Le Tigre, whose music is absolutely everywhere online. The first Le Tigre album cover is by Sadie and that’s them in the lower right hand corner <3
Anyways, you can watch most of Sadie’s films here and they’re really worth spending some time with, especially if your brain needs a break from the endless scroll.
That’s all I have for you grrrrls this week! I’m working on the next book update and who knows, maybe I’ll drop an essay about girlhood essays soon (if I can find these alleged girlhood essays). Thank you for reading! Thank you for supporting! Double dare ya to tell me about the girl art you love in the comments <3 <3 <3
xoxoxo rachel moss
i love using 'girl' in a nongendered context!! i feel like it's fun, it's flirty, and brings a certain type of innocence that is more about freedom and enthusiasm for expression/existing
Ditto on making me hip to Qualeasha, now obsessed.
And my favorite femme artist (for almost 20 years now) is most definitely China Adams, a conceptual artist that makes the viewer question ownership of one’s body, all in a really irreverent way.