A Manual Nobody Asked For

Claire Gordon made a short video called How To Be A Teenage Girl that works because it refuses to wink. The humor is structural—the earnest instructional format applied to something that doesn’t submit to instruction, that was never a skill set to begin with but a gauntlet handed down without authorship. Watching it as a guy, you’re an outsider at a ritual you were never invited into, which turns out to be its own useful vantage point. The performance was always for everyone except the performer.