#GirlsShitToo

The Substance Under the Surface

During English on Wednesday, Ms. Brooks handed back my project reflection with a score of 10/10. "I'm really impressed with your hard work, Dallas. Keep it up!"

I looked up at her in time to catch Valerie smaring at me from down the row of desks. I smiled back.

Then, Alex and I left class together, and I asked him, "So, did you talk to Ms. Brooks about your 'Metal is Better' idea?"

"Yep."

"And?"

"And she says that it will work! With some revisions."

I was surprised, and it must have showed, because Alex gave me this triumphant told you so smile. "What sort of revisions?" I asked.

"Well, she said my idea could be arguable, but not arguable enough. She said something about how you won't usually be able to convince someone who prefers Pepsi to love Coke. But you might be able to convince someone who drinks soda to switch to drinking smoothies. Or something like that."

"What does that mean, though?"

"That means that I'm not going to be writing about how metal is better than other musical genres. But I am going to be doing a project about why Finland is awesome in an attempt to show that the U.S. should try to be as awesome as them. She's really excited about it. She wants me to compare education and politics and all this shit, so I'm gonna have to do a lot of research, but I actually like Finland, so it won't feel like research usually feels, you know?"

I was about to ask how his original topic transformed into this one...but then I realized that, for Alex, Finland was metal. Not only was metal mainstream there, but they were "metal" in every sense of the word — or at least that's what Alex thought. That lucky dude had gotten to go there twice for the previous two summers for metal festivals. Both times when he arrived in Helsinki, he texted me and said, "I found Heaven. It's in Hel!" Although Alex claimed to be straight, he fanboyed hard over metal musicians.

"What's your project called?"

"Inspired By Finland. I wanted to call it Project Claim Finland, but she said that made it sound like a conquest."

"I guess we both picked sucky names. I wanted to call my project Appropriate Masculinity and she said something just like that."

"She also said she wouldn't be surprised if I was 'inspired' to appreciate some stuff about the U.S. through my research of Finland, and that I should 'enter my project with an open mind' and 'be prepared for it to take unexpected turns.'" Alex rolled his eyes like that would never happen, but Ms. Brooks probably knew what she was talking about. (Alex was one of those semi-unpatriotic kids who listened to Rammstein's "Amerika" way too much...but I knew that he secretly loved many of the freedoms that were afforded to him in the U.S., even though he still had to deal with occasional racism.)

"Well, what are you doing for the social media part?" I asked.

"I'm gonna do a Tumblr blog."

"Sweet. What's your first week's post gonna be about?"

"Ugh...it's like, I just finally came up with a topic, and now I have to come up with weekly subtopics."

"I know the feeling," I said, still wondering what my next vlog was going to be about, if it was going to serendipitously come to me like my first. "Make sure to give yourself lots of time. My vlog took like, seven hours to make."

"Seven hours? For a three minute vid?"

"Yep. It was a lot harder than it seems. I wrote a script, then I had to change it into an outline so I would stop reading off it and look more natural, then it still took tons of takes."

"I thought that this was supposed to be easier than writing a paper?" he asked.

"That's what I thought, too."

"Well, crap. I better get home. But I doubt my post will take six hours to write."

Smirking, I told him, "If it doesn't take you five hours to think of an idea."

"I have one," he said, as though he'd been keeping it from me before. "I think I'm gonna compare our music. My week's topic is gonna be that Finland is better because they listen to metal more there."

"Of course they do; they live in the cold and dark for a pretty good portion of the year! But I thought Ms. Brooks said that you usually can't convince someone who prefers Pepsi to love Coke, and so it's not worth arguing..."

"I can try, though," Alex said. "I mean, I can argue that metal lyrics actually make you think, because they actually have substance. I even have support. Remember that study from The Guardian that showed that '80s metalheads are more well-adjusted than people who listened to other genres? I mean Dallas," Alex was getting really excited, "People from Finland care about their ancestral traditions and myths, and they're close with nature, and they're well educated, and this all spawns their love for metal — for dark and powerful substance. They don't just listen to metal; it's their culture. They even have heavy metal worshipping services, Dallas. Heavy. Metal. Worshipping services!"

"You aren't even religious!" I said, astonished at Alex's hype.

"Well, I might be if I could attend metal worship."

I laughed before saying, "Well, I'm totally on board with your project. Finland rules! And lucky us: we don't have to revise a 15-page paper."

"Yeah. We can laugh at Benny when he's going through revision hell."

"Good one!" I said. "Benny's gonna cry when he has to revise a 15-page paper." 

As I said goodbye to Alex and got into my ancient 1999 Hyundai Elantra to drive home, I kept thinking about what he said about metal lyrics having substance. For the most part, I agreed. Yeah, there were some metal lyrics about eating brains and drinking blood. But some metal lyrics were about social anarchy or ancient mythology or dark emotional journeys or dangerous pursuits of knowledge. Metal typically wasn't about binge drinking and women's bodies, like so much pop music was. And while some metal lyrics seemed to be just surface decorations, many of them had a deeper meaning. Substance.

Like Girls Shit Too. I kept getting criticism for it, because it was "stupid." Because "everyone knows that girls shit" and because "why does it matter" and because "TMI." Yeah, girls shit...but that wasn't the point. The point was that girls weren't the unrealistic things society portrayed us as. We were so much more. And coming together to throw that in everyone's faces in such a unique way was pretty fun!

I had thought that Alex's original project idea sounded ridiculous, but now I was thinking that it could be really awesome. Maybe it would be transformative.

And maybe mine would be, too. I really liked my project. I liked the controversial title—the surface...and I liked the deeper message—the substance. I hoped that the Hearsts would like it, too, that they would be able to see into its depths.