Shit Girls Say: Funny or Tired Old Stereotype

I'm not overly familiar with the Shit Girls Say Twitter feed, so like a lot of bloggers I'm not really sure what to make of the first installment on YouTube.

I don't doubt that some girls say things like "Twinsies!" and "Does this make me look like a doily," but honestly very few of these are gendered beyond the inflection and mannerisms. (Men don't question whether they left the door unlocked?) I guess you could make the case that women tend to politely ask for things rather than make demands "Could you get this for me?" "Could you do me a huge favor" According to the Huffington Post's Emma Gray :

And some of the inanities Shit Girls Say considers womanspeak don’t seem very female-specific, even for that tiny sliver of the population — or very funny. Examples include: “I hope I’m not getting sick,” “I have the hiccups,” “True story” and “Are you busy tonight?” Somehow I suspect that men also get sick and make plans with their peers, and do so in pretty similar terms. What makes these innocuous sentences funny seems to be the fact that they’re framed as stereotypically feminine (read: ditzy). To make the phrases seem even more ridiculous, the web series has them articulated in a whiny, sing-songy voice by a man in drag. The whole thing feels like an elaborate, slightly sophisticated take on the dumb blond joke.

I devised a Bechdel test of sorts to see how truly gendered some of these statements are. It's a little unsophisticated, but just prefix everything in the video with "dude":

"Dude, can you do me a huge favor?"

"Dude, what's wrong with my computer?"

"Dude, I had to get up at like, six, this morning?"

"Dude, what's my password?"

Granted, most men don't say "Shut up!" or squeal when seeing someone they haven't for a long time, but neither do most women outside of bad sitcoms, and I think it's fair to say that Shit Girls Say is really poking fun at a certain kind of woman: typically a young, white, upwardly mobile one. What bothers me is not that it's inherently sexist, but that it's obvious and hedges its bets on timeworn tropes of women being scatterbrained, shrill, nagging and incompetent.

And oh yeah, dude, you totally look like a doily.