Everything But the Girl
Artifice, metaphor, and performance
Valley Girl is on hiatus for Memorial Day in the United States. We will resume with new essays on Thursday, June 4th. This week’s digest focuses on the Valley Girl’s commodification and how divorced her representation is from authentic girlhood.
An enduring marker of the Valley Girl1 across time and space is that she has often been conflated with capitalism. If you’re talking about her, you are often really talking about shopping or mindless consumption or materialistic frivolity. If the local mall needs renovations, this weirdly gets communicated through metaphors of “facelifts,” “makeovers,” and seeking to become “more attractive.” Where the Valley Girl begins and the American shopping mall ends is a question I have been chasing since the inception of this newsletter; they are often presented as one flesh.
This isn’t an entirely surprising link given how commodified the Valley Girl ultimately was. This artificially constructed girlhood, initially used on the modern marketplace to sell records, had to be performed though extensive makeup, sterile TV sets, and with the awareness of cameras. In 1982, Moon Unit Zappa, the highly publicized then-14-year-old, had to embody the Valley Girl as if cast in a role. A prominent part of this process was not being an actual 14-year-old girl at all, but rather functioning as a teenage girl that the marketplace would recognize. This proved be a lucrative, profitable, and enduring strategy.
Within all these dynamics—performing, profits, products, and press—there wasn’t much room, if any, for the valley girl.2🌴
Does the Valley Girl Need a 'Facelift'?
“Despite national notoriety as a home away from home for the mythic Valley Girl, the Sherman Oaks Galleria faces much of the same competition and pressure that has left malls around the country in the doldrums.”
-“‘Valley Girl’ Mall Seeks a Face Lift,” Los Angeles Times, 1995.
Performing the Valley Girl
“No matter who interviews me, they all seem to think they are the first to ask the dumbest shit, or they forget I have probably been asked this stuff a thousand times already or don’t care.”
-Moon Unit Zappa, Earth to Moon: a Memoir, 2024.
Commodifying the Girl
“The Young-Girl is the commodity that insists on being consumed, at every instant, because at every instant she becomes more obsolete.”
-Tiqquin, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, 2012.
Next week: the robot invasion.
No Valley Girl Office Hours this week to accommodate the Memorial Day holiday in the United States. Office Hours will resume Friday, June 5th for the accompanying piece.
Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.
Lowercase “valley girl” to indicate a female-identified or pangender individual who happens to be from or inhabits the San Fernando Valley.