High Maintenance Women by Lisa Portolan

Author:Lisa Portolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Amelia’s story in context

Amelia’s story and experience on dating apps highlighted some key issues in the high maintenance women’s space. She would class herself as a low-maintenance, chill, relaxed girl. And she worked hard to maintain and perpetuate this narrative, at times at her own romantic and intimate peril. In remaining chill and not establishing parameters for her relationship, she set no expectations, and eventually found herself in a situation where her intimate partner was ‘talking’ (having another intimate relationship) with someone else. She tended to lower her expectations, and accepted a number of bad behaviours without articulating the issue.

In addition, she was quite sure that despite her ‘low maintenance’ ways, the majority of guys would still pick the ‘pretty’ girl. Again, here, there was no safe territory. Chill, relaxed, pretty, low maintenance, high maintenance – they were all critiqued. She was forced to navigate an incredibly slender line, which led to online and personal identity management. She couldn’t really be herself nor could she ask for the things that she required in the relationship to make herself feel safe and loved.

Amelia also raised another interesting paradigm: that of women policing other women in the online environment. Like many of the women in focus groups, she used other women, and groups of friends, to check her profile, write her bio, check her images, and so on.

Feminist scholar Akane Kanai draws on the work of Lauren Berlant, a scholar and cultural theorist, to discuss ‘best friend culture’ within digital intimate publics. Kanai describes how women come to police each other’s practices, creating profiles based on fantasies of feminine sameness. Knowledge, labour and skill are required to craft generic selves through which attachments to a normative girlfriend sameness may be fostered.23 Meaning that to participate within these digital intimate spaces (like dating apps, or Instagram) women had to know the language and behaviour which is endorsed, both visually and narrative-wise. I would argue that commonly within these spaces women act in ‘low maintenance ways’ or self-deprecating ways, reinforcing issues of anxiety, mental health and a feeling of not being enough.

There is a policing of identity which occurs within the women’s space, which weeds out uber-confident women – alpha women, high maintenance women, sexualised women – who are perceived as arrogant, whorish, not displaying the characteristics of low self-esteem accepted and encouraged by today’s society. Women need to be a work in progress, constantly working on themselves, identifying their flaws, to be acceptable. The opposite of your high maintenance femme fatale – the Kim Kardashians of this world.

Ironically, these women are also held up as examples of beauty, sexiness and empowerment. In a double-handed movement, women are told they need to tote the expensive handbag to demonstrate success, and have physical enhancements done (breast, bum and face) to be sexually attractive, yet are vilified at the same time for being ‘plastic’, ‘fake’, ‘up themselves’, ‘not authentic,’ ‘not real’ – all with the aim of meeting the ever-growing expectations of men, who require the ‘chill model’ in a relationship.

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