As a kid, I would always scoff and deride the other girls who cared about boybands. I was intellectual! I was mature! I wasn’t overtaken by flights of fancy! Nope. Turns out I was– and am– just a massive fucking lesbian.

I considered myself stoic, intellectual, “not like other girls,” because a white boy in a tight-fitting shirt never tempted me to fling my training bra onto the stage. My friends’ walls would be littered with posters of grinning pretty boys with floppy or spiky hair, and I would simply roll my eyes, and make a sarcastic comment under my breath. I read books, I listened to real music, I didn’t care about boys.

I was warned that once puberty hit I would start to fawn over boys (maybe not those particular, vapid pretty boys, but boys of some nature, surely), but I guess puberty has yet to arrive. For in all my life I have not been able to identify any man, they all look like faceless blobs to me–– a product of prepubescence I suppose–– and yet every woman on the street turns my head, catches my fancy, so what’s that about??

It must be because I was just so above the grotesque capitalistic machine that manufactures boybands to appeal to teenage girls and then shames them when they like it. I was just cooler than the rest of those vapid, shallow young girls who were obsessed with boys who would coo softly in their ears telling them how special and beautiful they really were. I didn’t need that! Everyone was the enemy, and dignity was my weapon.

But then again, I’ve seen every single Bond movie (save for Never Say Never Again and Quantum of Solace), and it’s not for the stellar acting and gorgeous cinematography. So perhaps I, too, am the product of a machine, but an errant machine, for it never built me in mind as its consumer, and I’m all the cooler for it.

♦