Dear Rina, how to be a girl pirate and the failure modes of failure modes

I have a new favorite line—tell me what your copes are, and I will tell you what you are.

I’ll come back to this later. But right now I will start with why women are so neurotic. In America at least, there are a few acceptable female archetypes to strive towards: The homecoming queen, the perfect mom, and the perfect sex kitten. Serena van der Woodsen, Martha Stewart, or Ariana Grande.

What do all of these archetypes have in common? They have different values on the surface, as if they are about completely different things, but each of them aims at some kind of perfection, and a perfection at some sort of performance. Performance at public hair, make up, walking and smiling for the homecoming queen. Performance at having nice children and a nice household for the mom. Performance at all kinds of niche sexual acts for the sex kitten. Not only are all these performances, they are all public performances. And they are all performances tailored to impress some group—the student body, other moms and other women, and single, horny men.

Not only are these all public performances, they aren’t even public performances to please the general public. They’re hyper-tailored for some specific sub-demographic and so are taken to an even greater unreasonable extreme than they would be if aspects were subdued to please everyone. And these public performances aren’t to be a “good student,” a “good mom,” or a “good sex kitten.” The key word there is perfect.

I am not sure where each of these came from—though I have my theories.

But this brings me to the title of this letter—failure modes. If you are merely a “good” mom, under this schema, you are not actually good enough. If you are a pretty girl in high school, but otherwise a “loser,” then you are not good enough. If you can do a split but refuse anal…well…what is the point of you even?

This is real. I’ve met people who are distraught about the above and who have felt these standards define entire periods of their lives. And they aren’t particularly rule-abiding or particularly self-conscious. This stuff runs deep in our social machinery, and there are actual concerns here. If you sleep with one guy and tell the wrong person about it, now you’re a huge whore.

If you forgot to pick up your kid from soccer that one time, nothing happened but Sharon will still tell everyone you’re a shit mom. If you have no kids and work an office job, you’re an uptight she-man. If you do have kids, then you’re a lame housewife who hasn’t made anything of herself. If you have no kids but your boyfriend pays your rent, now you’re a prostitute. If you’re actually a prostitute, well, then if you get murdered it’s not just fair game, it’s funny.

If you’re hot, it feels like you can’t win. If you’re not hot, then you really can’t win, so what’s the point of playing?

I have a suspicion that this is why we have been seeing so many failure modes of female archetypes. Fuck Martha Stewart, let’s wear spikes and be Billie Eilish! Except Billie is a teenager trying to survive. People cannot meet these impossible standards, meeting them partially does not seem to count, and so people enter a failure mode.

Here we see the “fat is beautiful” crowd. The fetishization of clumsiness in Twilight. The cutification and cultification of mental illness on YouTube. We see women saying they hate literally all men, or shaving their heads, or cutting themselves up with extreme body modification, or giving up on any kind of personal development except devising more clever ways of socially justifying their narcissism.

Those are the failures modes, and none of them are good. This is the failure of the current failure modes. When you fuck out of the system, your presented alternatives are extremely stupid and so your short-circuiting out of society leads you to unchecked and limitless despair.

That is not the point of a failure mode. The point of a failure mode is not to just fail, and keep failing forever until you waste yourself in the dirt. Or—worse for its dishonesty, to tell yourself and everybody around you that being a 400 pound alcoholic is a perfectly fine way to live. The point of a failure mode is to catch when something is going quite off, and then to get back to processing as usual. A properly set up failure mode is not limitless failure. In fact, by allowing some failure, it prevents total disaster. It sets a floor on failure, and ideally, a mechanism for bouncing back.

We need better failure modes. As a model, I suggest looking at the failure modes for men. Men also have unattainable standards (James Bond), but they also have failure mode archetypes that do not suck. If you can’t be James Bond, you can be Sterling Archer. If you can’t be Batman, you can be Deadpool. If you’re not an amazing dad, you’re still the decent dad in a flannel shirt throwing a tennis ball to his kid off the front porch.

If society is feeding you bullshit, we have an archetype for fucking out that does not suck: The Pirate.

What does the female conception of the pirate look like? The point of the pirate is that the pirate is not perfect, and the pirate does not meet all societal expectations. But the pirate is also not hopped up on LSD in a dark alley cutting up his own testicles and streaming it on YouTube. The pirate is not nihilistic. The pirate values his life. The pirate has friends and is a perfectly acceptable mating companion. The despair of the pirate has a floor. The pirate meets baseline competence and mental and physical fitness standards—perhaps more so than the average in proper society. The pirate also has a moral code that is at least 70% based on reality and real dealings with people. The pirate is not perfect, but the pirate is good. In fact the pirate, in his endeavor to really think about what is really truly good, may end up being more competent and virtuous than even the best of society.

But the pirate famously has vices. Back to that line—tell me what your copes are, and I will tell you what you are. The pirate drinks his rum. Maybe he has sex, or watches porn, or likes poking pufferfish for fun. Maybe he spends too much time on cards or Twitter. His vices may be intentional choices, or they may be the only way he can get any work done, or they may be entirely pleasure.

He sometimes takes these vices pretty far, and they might not be completely harmless—they may on occasion harm people, but he does not let it actually destroy people or himself. I would not say his life is balanced in the conventional sense, but no single vice tips the scale such that the vice stops being a vice and becomes his life. That is why having vices is actually fine: you cannot get rid of all vices. The only way to fully expel them from your stomach is by redefining them as no longer vices—but as just normal things you are allowed to do all the time and frame your life around. Or even worse—you get used to vice so much that you redefine vice as virtue.

What would be the equivalent of acceptable female vices? Is she currently allowed any? Right now, women are allowed to do whatever they want—all standards have been dropped completely. But the traditional woman does not drink. She does not smoke. She does not have sex outside marriage. She does not watch porn. She is a healthy weight, maybe pleasantly plump without being obese. She smiles a lot, controls her emotions, is not too loud. She creates warmth and hominess wherever she goes. She follows the law. She has sex with her husband without wanting to have sex with anybody else, and she certainly is not a nymphomaniac.

What can the pirate woman do, that isn’t drinking herself into oblivion alone in her house, or burning her boyfriend’s house down, or becoming heroin-chic, to let off some steam and keep herself sane?

The mainstream modes of behavior are either 1. Be a perfect version of either sex object, teenager, or mother, 2. Be whatever the perverted puppeteer men in the media decide is the latest fad for their flesh-puppets (Like heroin-chic), 3. Less common, but be trad.

No wonder we see women just bailing out from trying to fulfill any kinds of standards whatsoever and descend into full self-destructive idiocy, backed by “authentic” and “self-caring” and “all-inclusive” ideology.

We need to give them another credible option to blow off steam, have some fun, and have an aspirational archetype that is attainable without being a total fuck up. And it can’t just be “woman who smokes and jerks off in a public hot tub” or “woman pirate.” The reason the pirate works is because it actually appeals to men’s idealistic aspirations. It actually does serve as a reasonable guide for behavior, like a compass of 80% accuracy.

The traditional companion to the male pirate was the female wench who waits for him to come home. Well—what the hell is she doing in the meantime? Cleaning tables—forever, faithfully? Where is her compass leading her?

I’ll tell you this much. Virtue be damned—I’m not waiting around.