The idea to make a piece of work revolving around an interactive questionnaire first came to me a while ago, and I have been struggling to think of how to execute it in the right way. I want to talk about identity, the internet, the identities we adopt on the internet, the identities we see, the categories we subconsciously place on people when scrolling through their Instagrams, the human need for categorisation and being part of a group. This last point interests me thoroughly, as it connects back to our primal instincts: as cavemen, living in packs was the only way to ensure survival. It guaranteed you a mate and safety - those left on their own had a severely diminished level of security and would most likely be killed or starve to death. Although somewhat irrelevant now (the risk of being mauled by a wild animal is highly unlikely in today's urban world) our minds still act in this way, basing our behaviours and decisions off the idea that if we don't fit in, we will die. Therefore, becoming part of a group turns into a life or death situation, and not being able to define ourselves concerns us.
From this, I began to think about personality tests such as the Myers Briggs test, which files each person down to 1 of 16 personality types.

I thought that trying to determine a person's personality was too vague and I'm not sure it would be as easy to add a satirical tone if it was hard to define whether I was seriously categorising people or not. I want to make this more relevant to my previous work, incorporating social media and personal identities. 

I searched online for articles and videos about the different types of Instagram Girl, and unsurprisingly found sexist responses that were eager to portray most girls online as vapid and self-obsessed. If a girl takes too many selfies, she's narcissistic and thinks too much of herself, however if she is beautiful then she's your future wife. 

                                       

This video by (ironically narcissistic) Gabriel Conte both infuriated and intrigued me. It's curious that he, and many other people (mostly male), feel that they are in a high position of power, to tell a girl what is attractive and what is not, what he likes and what he doesn't. He is telling girls they are self-obsessed when he is self-obsessed enough to put himself on a pedestal and paint himself as the gospel, looking down and pointing at the girls he doesn't deem good enough. For generations women have been categorised from the perspective of and for the convenience of the patriarchy. If she is not a housewife then what is she? She is a businesswoman, cold and important. If she is not a businesswoman then what is she? She is a carer of others, perhaps a mother. If she is not a mother then what is she? She is a 'free spirit', wild and exciting. But really there's no freedom there, she's only allowed to go as far as her admirers can see, she can only run to the end of the road, because they want her to be fun but not too fun, unpredictable but still controllable. Today we are the artsy types, the clever ones, the sluts, the young mums, the older mums, the Kardashians, the gap year girls. On social media it all comes to the one point, that underneath all the labels we are still the desirable girls. Your Instagram Wife will cook you dinner, she'll run away with you, she'll stay in bed with you, she'll paint her nails and contour her face for you, she'll be natural for you, she'll skate, she'll smoke, she'll meditate, she'll rave, she'll give you anything and be anything you want. The notion of females being complex human beings, diverse and impossible to generalise, is too much for some to understand. Because after all, it's easy to advertise something if you're aiming it towards one group, you can sell low fat yoghurt to the fitness girl, and beauty blenders to the makeup girl, and pretty bikinis to the travelling girl.  It's easy to find yourself a Wife if you know which flavour you like. 

Gillian Flynn explores this idea brilliantly in her book Gone Girl, particularly in this extract: 

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)” 

Over Facebook I posted a status asking people to comment what they thought were the 5 types of Instagram girl. Interestingly, the only people that commented were girls, but in my opinion the has to do with the facts that most of my friends are girls, and my friends that are guys were probably too worried to post their opinions in case it started a Facebook feminism debate. 

From this research I am going to attempt to organise the 'types' of girls into 5 groups. I would like to create accounts for each 'type', with myself adopting the traits of that girl in each account, which I could then use in my final questionnaire piece. 

Hannah Black wrote an essay titled 'Hot Babe', exploring the social media girl phenomenon and commenting on its transparency. [https://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-hot-babe/]

'The counterpart to the slave who has flesh but no body (Wilderson), she has no flesh, only a body. Her body is not made of flesh: It is a collection of parts, a collage, a series of images. In her, functions of the flesh disappear and reappear as erotic or repulsive absurdities: two girls, one cup; 2 million girls, one body.'

After reading this essay, I was inspired to write my own piece, like a stream of consciousness captured online.