Breakfast Club (Part 1)

Photo of Mars & Ms.O looming over Anna (Sage, Piper, and a Guest watch excitedly) - Sapphic Slumber Party #11

*Guest Post written by Anna*

The makeover that Molly Ringwald gives Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club is one of the worst onscreen transformations of all time, second only to the makeover that Molly Ringwald gives to her prom dress in Pretty in Pink. Because we can't control what turns us on, I've been fascinated with that scene since I first saw it as an impressionable tween.

I've never identified as anything other than a girl or woman, and yet I still feel such a push/pull with the performance of girlhood. I grew up associating femininity with the worst trappings of patriarchy and capitalism: you have to hate your appearance in its natural state, spend a lot on beauty products and treatments, you have to manipulate your face into something desirable. I was transfixed with the mean popular girls at school who seemed to have effortlessly figured out how to do all that stuff (and also I think I was just into bullies?).

Makeovers, like the kind given at sleepovers, had a different energy than wearing makeup day-to-day. They felt creative, collaborative, intimate; one girl taking another under her wing and saying, "c'mere, let me show you how to be a girl." It was never for public consumption. It was just for us, right there in the bedroom.

(I should say here that I also have not totally claimed the femme identity, since I still date dudes and I don't feel my gender performance is completely divorced from the heterosexual male gaze. But the sapphic slumber parties are their own ecosystems where the real world doesn't exist and we make our own rules and my relationship to my appearance and sexuality becomes so much more expansive, but I digress).

OK NO MORE PHILOSOPHIZING ONTO THE GOOD STUFF

(…to be continued)