REAL REVIEW: THE GIRLISH GIGGLE

I “reviewed” the girlish giggle for Real Review Issue 12, released in May 2022

When a female member of the Royal Family giggles, it’s front page news. Kate Middleton is trying to hit a golf ball on the homepage of Britain’s most-read tabloid, dissolving into giggles as she misses the mark, a princess puddle one might swim about in while a small crowd politely watches. Princess Anne, the fun one, is meeting topless male models at a London Fashion Week presentation and is reduced to giggles, giggles she struggles to contain. Even a former giggle of the Queen’s, brought forth some two decades ago, has trended as news. Pages like @WeirdHistoryPix re-post the image, in which the late Prince Phillip is reported to have “caused the Queen to giggle” with a “prank.” Actually, the origin of the heartwarming moment was a freak swarm of bees, more My Girl than your highness. (The giggle in question is later deemed a “hoax”.)

Boys don’t normally giggle, unless they’re being disappointing. In a latter season episode of The Sopranos, Tony witnesses his teenage son A.J hunched in front of the computer in his bedroom, instant messaging with a friend and enthusiastically laughing at whatever is on screen. Tony tells his therapist Dr Melfi that his son was “giggling like a little schoolgirl”, and how he hates him.

In a WhatsApp sent to a friend recently, I ask if she has managed to articulate her desired terms with the man she is dating. 

Yeah he came over

I just giggled

And fussed with his hair

I am weak!!!!!

These unrelated giggles are all evidence of the loadedness of the term, one which is seen as the unwitting noise of the nervous, shy girl who, even in womanhood – and potentially, manhood – may lie threateningly in wait, under the surface. The giggler, as suggested by the emotions that collect around their giggling, is understood to have lost a degree of control. A giggle is like a blush: spontaneous at the expense of self-undermining. That must be why the British public like the idea of our most privileged public figures giggling; perhaps rude, but economical, it’s an accident derived from fear and embarrassment. 

Or is it? To giggle is also to articulate a kind of loss of control that is implicitly contained – worse, contrived. Masters of self-presentation, that women in the royal family might “let out” a giggle says something about how they might employ tropes of hyperfemininity to appear less powerful, which actually, in this context, feels like its own kind of threat.

Release valve or pressure point, the girlish giggle is at the very least a contradiction: because if it is a kind of bursting forth – an overspill, an explosion – then why are women always described as becoming smaller when it happens?

If an all-girls school, like a British tabloid, is an arena of cruelty, then the giggle is the sound of its braying crowd.

I attended an all-girls state Grammar in a median-size town in Essex known for its former status as the Roman capital of early Britain and for the fact that the warrior Boudicca once sacked it. Appropriately the school was a Coliseum for those particular kinds of feminine cruelty that occur when girls who are highly academic, and highly insecure, spend seven years moving between the same cluster of demountable buildings. 

At lunchtime, we would run around giggling. The feeling was always one of wanting to break through bounds – the flatness, the dullness, the fact that our large green field was circumscribed by more green fields, but what lay beyond that? We would congregate wherever it felt a stake could be claimed, like on a large concrete circle that was on the playing field, where we lay on top of eachother.

Other times, we would giggle as we ran away from another girl who was out-of-fashion that week. At first, they ran away from me, but later, I did some running too. (The residual guilt means these are moments that replay in my dreams still).

We giggled at teachers. A particular kind of giggle was reserved to deploy vindictively on other young women, those teachers who were fresh out of graduating their educational colleges and who could not have been more than 22. With them, we were hyenas; with older males – I hate to say it – we were respectful.

Our girls’ bodies were in sync and it was dreadful. Waves of bodily language would transmit in the halls, in the classrooms, or on the musty coach seats which transported us across more flatness from our satellite villages and towns at 7.30 in the morning and back again by 5pm in the evening.

One day, one of the girls – who was developing faster, who had a flat face with freckles and who knew more boys on the outside – decided to stick out and lightly bite her own tongue whenever she smiled. Her post-Orthodontic teeth were very white, and very straight, and her lips were glossed. The other girls learned to do this, too. Poking through crystal grins, their small pink tongues looked pointed and snake-like. 

Later on, the communal anxiety expressed itself in jittery legs, most visible in assemblies where girls of a certain age group could sit on plastic stackable chairs while the younger girls splayed on the linoleum ground (standing up revealed a film of dust on nylon pleats). An entire front row of the older girls would sit with one leg crossed over the other, the leg on top dancing its little dance, the broken-down ballerina pumps slicing the air at a clip.

Like dance-trends performed across generations, these movements came and went, but the one constant infection in these years was the sound of giggling – which, as there were no boys around other than male teaching staff, only happened in groups, and was very loud.  

Thing is, seeing as there were no boys, I am now realising I remember the giggle as more of a cackle. 

*

‘Who knew what they were thinking or feeling? Lux still giggled stupidly, Bonnie fingered the rosary deep in the pocket of her corduroy skirt, Mary wore her suits that made her resemble the First Lady, Therese kept her protective goggles on in the halls—but they receded from us, from the other girls, from their father, and we caught sight of them standing in the courtyard, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut, looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched.’

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides is the cultural textbook for the words that are used when teenage girls are being closely observed and interpreted by boys, and men. Unlike at my school of girls, there are schoolboys, and their perspective serves as the book’s narration, adults sifting through the evidence of girls they once loved and probably still do. They observe the Lisbon family from their safe distance, obsessively chronicling every action – and scratching away at the every thought and motive – of the girls who used to live across the street; a distance that is especially safe as it comes from the viewpoint of being alive and talking about people who are dead. 

More than the book, it’s Sofia Coppola’s film version of The Virgin Suicides that a generation of schoolgirls hold close to their chests like an A3 folder. For us, that group of blonde girls in white and grey school uniforms exist forever in a Corinne Day-lensed eternal summer, and in our harddrives.  But what the director does with Eugenides’ text at once feels like a true adaptation and a departure; Coppola has performed, I later realised, a trick on us average, dream-filled schoolgirls. You watch the film, and you think she’s telling a story about how girls see themselves – you identify with the sisters, with their knick-knacks and ditsy pintuck florals, their tendency to gaze at the sky. But really, you are seeing them as the boys’ gaze sees them; as the years go by, I started to wonder where my own aesthetic tastes began and those I witnessed through the lens of this film ended, and I wondered who they belonged to exactly.

In the end, The Virgin Suicides is much like a girl’s giggle: maybe it never existed without the boys’ perspective, at all. 

Eventually, the sound of our giggling migrated online. 

On MSN Messenger, customisable names were punctuated with the giggle as filtered through the internet, and it emerged from the other end sounding something like a gurgle. My chat boxes displayed the production-design of the times: the pink neon-topped skyscrapers of the Killers’ Hot Fuss record art, transmitted from some distant Chinese megalopolis. (Still possessing some screengrabs of these chat-boxes, I find I can say this with certainty). Our display names were filled with rainbow and star emojis which punctuated carefully-crafted statements of intent to laugh: lolz, lollerz, tehe, lololol. From today’s standpoint, with its attendant pristine social media, it’s a mode of communication that looks unbelievably, and miraculously, a real mess. 

When giggling between girls became contained to these chat spaces, it transformed into something more performative, the styles of expressing laughter morphing as our adolescence progressed. Was “lolz” even a giggle?

Probably, yes. After all, these were spaces where there were – finally – boys, too. They encroached. And if we “still giggled stupidly”, it was also for them. 

At sleepovers, we would pile before a blurry webcam lens and giggle at boys on the other end with bad skin and immature personalities. We knew about two of them, the runts of the local boys school litter, which I guess says everything you need to know about my own social status. These webcams didn’t have microphones: you had to look at yourself being looked at, and type at the same time. The timing was always off; everything was out-of-sync. But it’s where that idea of presenting ourselves online for the eyes of an actual, but mostly imagined, male audience really began. Where the giggle becomes a performance.

Later, around the time I finally had a boyfriend – a relationship forged on the chat application and also, publicly, on a Facebook Wall – I changed my MSN Messenger name to read, simply: claire*. The asterix leading, who knows where. 

It’s only when you start to listen out for the giggle that you realise how, without a patriarchal architecture to identify it, it doesn’t really exist.

For one, beyond its inherent lightness, a girlish giggle doesn’t have a specific sound. You might think you can “hear” a giggle, but in reality it can only be defined by its perceived reason for coming-into-being. In that sense, a giggle is more usefully understood as a fetishized object, a receptacle containing all kinds of stereotypes about young girlhood. (That’s why, these days, one never admits to letting out a giggle unless one is putting oneself down).

‘When the Young-Girl giggles, she’s working,’ state the collective Tiqqun in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl in  1999 (They also ascribe her laughter as ringing “with the desolation of nightclubs”, which makes less sense). Much like The Virgin Suicides, there was a time I lived and breathed this text, as translated by the poet Ariana Reines. But I completely missed the point. Theirs is not a theory for young girls, after all, it’s a theory of young girls. And among the mish-mash of headlines of women’s magazines combined with philosophical battlecries about modernity, are just the same old assertions of girls as mere reflections of a male order. (As Nina Power writes in her 2013 review/take-down of the book, even if Tiqqun claim to be actually writing about the state of patriarchal subjects right down to the Pope himself, “the book is precisely not called ‘Theory of the Wizened-Pope’.”) The statements of Preliminary Materials can only be read, for me, as an argument about actual girls enacting “the masochism that has long been taught to women, which makes them cede the signs of power to men in order to recover, inter­nally, the certitude that they possess them in reality.” In other words, it’s the book-length equivalent of saying a girl is giggling instead of saying she is laughing. Tiqqun’s presentation reads, today, like that of a professor in a movie who has dinner at a colleague’s house while their teenage daughter lounges in her bikini outside, giggling – he imagines – at him. (Her shininess is attractive to him, and repulsive). Or like a version of Legally Blonde wherein the film’s events are narrated by the incredulous Harvard admissions dean, rather than Elle Woods.

A recent development in reclaiming these high-femme, girlish aesthetics – the kind that Tiqqun so viscerally despise in this text – has arrived with the unlikely return of the term “bimbo”, an identity teenage girls are reclaiming as their own in the 2020s. Long understood as among those aesthetic choices of femininity defined and produced by patriarchy, to be deemed a bimbo is a state of girlish womanhood, not womanish girlhood: that is, to be regarded as “an attractive but unintelligent or frivolous young woman.” Writer Marlowe Granados has responded to the trend by grounding the term in its actually subversive history. After all, “to define the aesthetic choices of femininity as a trap set by men feels deceivingly easy.” Referring to the characters brought to life by Marilyn Monroe, she writes of their frivolity and naivety as a carefully-calculated performance. “In cinema, the gold digger, dumb blonde, and the bimbo all walk the same line, concerning themselves with sexuality, beauty, and commerce—wielding all to their advantage.” The girlish giggle is one tool of many employed by such women when it comes to men – but for other women, the ones who really know, the bimbo’s giggle is really the bimbo’s laugh (the latter decidedly being the title of Granados’ essay on this topic).

In this way, in womanhood, the giggle can still enact a kind of girls’ code even while it irrupts inside the world of men – an all-girls’ school we continue to attend well in our adult lives. Because whether the giggle is uncontrollable, or deliberate, in service to patriarchy, or in service to nothing at all, the point is that it belongs to the girls we used to be. Or, the girls that we might still be. 

*

These days, the girls are really cracking up.

It’s like Anais Nin said – when one pretends too long, the entire body revolts. Along with its rise as the adolescent portal of choice, a lineage of teenage girls have emerged on TikTok who are uncontrollably howling and convulsing into phone screens. An antidote to the platform’s unmoving doll’s faces and see-sawing limbs, these girls have double chins and rolling eyes. They are fizzing over with laughter; the earth trembles, your phone shakes. 

This time last year, a trend emerged that felt like a crescendo of all those seismically laughing girls. In the “Girls Laughing Duet” clips that crept across the app, a clip posted by @hi_bre depicts two teenage girls holding drinks bottles (which isn’t really important). They look deadly serious, before suddenly bursting into raucous laughter. The clip has become the basis for a style of prank in which other teenage users pretend to their parents or grandparents that they want their friends – in actuality, the pre-existing clip of Bre and Mia – to meet them over video call. Naturally, the parental figures’ moods change when they see two teenagers laughing uncontrollably at them.

That the clip has become known as two girls laughing, not giggling, says what you need to know about girls these days, who alternate between seeming solemn, raging and hysterical. Listening to them, I can’t help but feel we’re finally able to see the giggle for what it always was: just one way of saying that the girls are laughing. And yes – they’re laughing at you.