for misunderstood girls who care for unloved things
why we girls are drawn to morbid things
I was ten years old, fingers curled around the bars of a rabbit’s crate at the downtown shelter. I peered in on tip-toes, vision bathed in the warm pink fog of my Luna Lovegood glasses. Crossing one foot over another (I wanted to feel like a ballerina, a sport I was much too uncoordinated for) to see inside the whole row. A whole row of white rabbits without their pocket-watches, twitching and cowering in the corners of their crates. They all looked identical; stark white fur and beady red eyes. When I asked, why do they all look the same? the woman told me, people don’t like the look of these ones. We get a lot of them.
Growing up I was terrified of everything. At three, my parents took me to the doctor because the black television screen paralyzed me. I believed, apparently, that I’d be sucked up into it. At six, I developed such an intense fear of dolls that I couldn’t go into a toy store unless I kept my eyes glued to the floor. Funny how no matter how I quivered I’d always find myself looking up.
The feeling of fear is magnetic, seductive, addictive. From the toy store to the empty hallway of the movie theater to the back of a strange man’s car my craving followed me. It didn’t have to be overt fear, even; just the feeling found in seeing something uncanny, unnerving, that feels as wrong as it does intriguing. I remember at age eight flipping through a book of deep sea creatures with my toes, one eye shut. When I’d come to some hideous thing - some angler fish or prehistoric shark-like abomination - I’d recoil and flip quickly. And then I’d flip back. If you asked me back then, I’d tell you I was terrified of these creatures. But I also knew everything about them, and I begged to watch ‘blue planet’ just for the five minute segment that featured them. “Ew!” I’d cry, and then I’d crawl across the floor to the tv and inspect every gnarly crevice and haggard breath of these monstrous things until my heart was pounding through my chest. To show interest in things that were fearful and ugly and strange felt forbidden back then. A little girl can be a tomboy, but she isn’t supposed to like these sorts of freakish things. Girls are supposed to be squeamish and simple.
As I grew I felt less and less shame for my morbid interests. I conquered whatever fear and/or shame I felt for my fascinations by choosing to love them completely, to find beauty in them. The best way to stop fearing the monster in your closet is to become its best friend.
A little girl can be labelled a lot of things; snobby, ugly, loud, troubled. I was pegged as weird and annoying growing up. I have always been a bit too opinionated and a bit too intense and (more than) a bit socially inept. I wasn’t hated, but I felt like a ghost without a home. Even surrounded by half-hearted friends I knew something about me was off and I knew I couldn’t fix it and I thought I would always be the last rabbit left at the shelter.
So I guess that’s why I always felt some kind of kinship to things that scared me, that made me feel strange. All the things I once feared as a little girl I now hold close to me. I collect the dolls left on the shelf and go to visit deformed taxidermies from the Victorian era. I fill my home with antique erotica and creepy old postcards and dead bugs and jarred specimens. I will be their friends if no one else will. Some will mock them and sneer at me but I think the duckling sleeps so sweetly in its jar. I think it’s beautiful that someone loved a thing so much they wanted to preserve its hollow body for remembrance.
Besides, Isn’t it good that I can be made to feel something at all, looking at a creature or a photo or a film? Even if that feeling is a wave of uncertainty or a nervous ball in my stomach? Shouldn’t that feeling be reveled in; isn’t there something so uniquely evocative about it?
I’ve come to find that there are women everywhere who love strange things, who see beauty and love in creatures and objects discarded as creepy or ugly. Maybe it’s this fascination with our fears we experience as girls, or the power we gain when we find something lovely in them. Maybe it’s the kinship we feel for small things that are so needlessly treated with disdain for being odd. What makes a porcelain doll creepy where a Barbie is not? Her clothes are more ornate, she is rich with history, and yet she’s left to rot in the dirt-caked aisles of a midwestern Goodwill. She ought to be loved.
I spoke to several of these women about why they are drawn to morbid and creepy interests. One spoke abut the value of collecting items with a nostalgic, hand-made quality rather than a factory-issued sheen, giving them a unique history to connect to.
There’s something about the unloved and strange objects that feel private. And as much as I love things that other people love too, it can feel overwhelming in some ways because the knowledge that something is being thought about a lot by many people almost feels social in a way? But being around something that is not at the forefront of everybody’s mind gives you the sense that you’re alone with those thoughts and feelings. And it definitely feels special. But additionally, it feels unexplored. And that’s so enticing. Like there is some mystery behind these things that nobody has or wants to touch which is really exciting and a little unsettling sometimes. But then there’s this flip side to it where the “exclusiveness” of the interest amplifies the awareness of the few other people that might enjoy it as well. So you sort of have this imaginary bond with the other people who presumably also share this interest.1
Another friend spoke about her passion for preservation of dead creatures and taxidermy; describing it as something not macabre, but honoring and appreciative of life.
I love giving life to the unloved things! Especially when it comes to taxidermy, I feel that all creatures should be honored even after their time of perceived “usefulness”. That little turtle I found squashed by a car and desiccated from the summer heat is now so so loved and cherished in the gilded frame he deserves!! The tomato worms I unintentionally let pupate lived a full life! They flew around my room for two or three weeks and eventually passed, and I poured much love into preserving them in glass. They live on!! They have more purpose and more love to give!2
The experience of womanhood is inherently grotesque on multiple levels. Girlhood comes with body horror; and women in their mystical thinking must find beauty in it, must embrace it as something divine. Perhaps we identify with grotesque and misunderstood objects for this reason. Everything feels taboo and wrong to a little girl. Innate sexuality and desire and hunger and anger is accepted in boys but immediately - quietly, but profoundly - assigned as taboo in girls. Every natural impulse feels disgustingly thrilling. My most vivid memories of childhood are those of delicious, heart-pounding fear (self induced, whether I’d admit it or not). Next to those are the writing of hidden love letters and masturbating in my locked bedroom as silently as I could and finally getting the courage to yell when I was angry. I look at the wet specimen of a coiled snake, gawked at by each passing customer, and I suppose see myself floating somewhere in that formaldehyde.
Perhaps girls are so drawn to this dichotomy of girlish creepiness as it revels in both the beauty of femininity and the destruction of it. It subverts the expectation of femininity as predictable and squeamish; but rather something fascinating and off putting to the easily weirded-out. It evokes the same feeling as the first foray into a subtly liminal space or discovery of a sharp-toothed deep sea creature or collection of deer bones in the woods as a child. It evokes uncomfortable feelings but it’s beautiful if you know how to look at it. It provides another example of women connecting to their nature in a way that is more feral than elegant in the male gaze. It is a brand of femininity for the girls who grew up lonely and scrounging in the mud, girls who lined their windowsills with beetle corpses and reveled in making others squirm. Sometimes there is nothing more powerful than seeing loveliness where others find fear.
Anya, crysta1ita on Instagram
Kimmy, bunnybisou on Instagram
So many insights, and so much here that is relatable. Beautiful writing as always.
I think I am in love