Party Favours: Notes on the Intricacies of Female Friendship
I recently attended a party. Several girls at this party were friends. There was no mistaking them for being anything else. In fact, one might go so far as to say that they were best friends. They performed their friendship with the kind of second-skin devotion native to Method actors (Jared Leto’s version excluded here). The evening was lovely as it was fated to be, because everyone – the birthday boy, his girlfriend, and her friends, the best of friends – remained exquisitely in character the whole night. By this, I mean not that they were fraudulent (commonly and mistakenly deployed as synonymous with “in character”), but that they seemed to naturally understand and obey the collective weight lent by their friendship to the social success of the evening.
A fond piece of evidence to this phenomenon ironically involved my ejection from it – girl A, in deep friendship with girl B, sat semi-cozily with girl B and I on a sofa set designed to provide structural relief to drunk people. We were enjoying gin cocktails and inconsequential cigarette silence, when girl A turned to girl B with an urgency I can only describe as cinematic. “Hey, actually, can I talk to you real quick?” The affirmative response followed with such pre-determined assurance and speed, no one could blame me for suspecting this moment to have been scripted. Let us remind ourselves here – I am not Of These Girls. I am Of Other Girls, and so participation in this particular friendship lay outside my socio-emotional jurisdiction. I fumbled an “Oh” of recognition, stood up, and left these girls to a conversation whose substance I can only presume rested on their decade of knowing one another. I walked some paces away from the sofa, and turned around to find them in furrowed talk, their mutual mystery intact.
Another instance – we’ve encountered girls A and B thus far, and there’s a final girl C in this context whom I know well enough that I can feign familiarity among her and her posse. When the three girls found a moment to find each other in the curated haze of smoke and loud talk, they slipped into a bedroom and shut the door behind them. Call it inebriated stupidity, naivete, boredom, curiosity, or something altogether more fitting, but I knocked on the door and entered the room. A and B were engaged in more deep conversation on the bed, while C worked to repeatedly assure her mother over the phone that she was not too drunk to get herself home. My polite violation was met with mildly puzzled looks, and a sense that being liked by a group of girls did not inherently invite access to their most intimate dioramas.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Intuitively and apologetically, I waited five seconds before shooing myself out of the room. I heard the obligatory cries of “No, no, it’s okay, stay!” but I knew better, and more importantly, realized that as one does not meet their heroes for fear that they’ll appear heroes no longer, being privy to the girls’ secret aura in that moment would have nullified my future ability to wonder at it. In the liminal suspension between encouragement to stay, toleration at my boldness, and outright banishment, a gnawing desire to document this phenomenon emerged. I bowed out of the room to join the rest of the disinvited outsiders, but not before I was told to shut the door behind me. Years after high school, an “in” and an “out” were still born.
The sofa and bedroom incidents form the hook of this, my most lustful investigation. When women generate something as simultaneously unremarkable and mystifying as private conversation in the frenetic disco mosaic of a house party, one is mesmerized – by the self-importance, the achievement of intimacy in chaos, the behavioural adornments of whispering, eye contact, soft gasps – the guesswork around what they could be saying as intoxicating as any spirit being served. It has become clear to me over the weeks of chronicling this party that I am enamoured by the transgressive act of insisting on privacy in a hyper-public setting, an act that feels permissible, grand, and oddly expected when carried out by women. Further, I am interested in what this performance does to the social gravity around it – do groups that behave this way disallow the promise of meeting new people, so endemic to attending a party in the first place? Do they inspire and multiply further private-in-public friend groups? I wanted their harmless act to ripple, somewhere, somehow.
Markers of female friendship vary in more ways than is constructive to list – they vary according to definitions of “female” and “friendship”, they certainly vary within and across social situations, personality types, and resulting dynamics. Awareness of this discrepancy is easier achieved in retrospect than in the face of its subject matter. I was trying to navigate a party while also wondering at the choice of each girl’s drink and whether this provided clues as to any hierarchy within the group – was beer a signifier of the passive, happy-go-lucky friend? Was the whisky-drinker canonically perceived as the psycho, the vodka-cran-consumer the party girl? Reductive evaluations aside, I bring up markers of female friendship to punctuate that observing girls at parties serves as only one of many robust landscapes in which to do so and by no means definitively says anything about how female friendships form and proliferate. I simply cherish women and the bizarre public choices they make that render them distant, painting-like, and unknowable.
By now, I have used “girls” and “women” interchangeably in describing the group of people I witnessed at the party. I want to believe that this faux pas isn’t one at all, and instead originates from a conviction that girls are taught how to perform friendship early on in childhood, and repeat, refine, and reenact these practices through pre-teen and teenhood, well into adult life AKA the “women” part. This in turn creates a system where performances of adult friendship index prior knowledge of what historically constitutes being a good friend. Add to that the veneer of a party, and images materialize, in all their clichéd truth – holding a friend’s hair back while she vomits, making sure she doesn’t drunk-text a lousy ex, seeing to it that she’s generally having a good time, and that she’s eating enough food to justify blatant alcohol abuse. In this way, female friendship can be understood as a form of institutionalized intimacy whose representations in pop culture, literature, media, and daily life are cemented just enough in the social imaginary, that witnessing them in person can feel like myth come to life.
A quick internet search proposes that myths teach lessons, explain the origins of things, and contain magic. They have other functions but these feel particularly germane to the pursuit of anthologising women who are friends, and deriving from them any romance to be derived. Myths suffer the unique position of simultaneously reinforcing and collapsing logics around them – with drunk girls at a party, it is legend that we all love each other, and also legend, however faulty, that a dramatic fight will ensue in full shrieking glory. I think we are frenzied when confronted with these social myths and left grappling with the ultimate buzzkill – mediocrity – when they fail to sustain themselves over the course of an all-nighter.
“Bonds between women existed long before we fell prey to largely capitalist (i.e. easy, mechanised) ways of expressing and receiving feminist sentiment, meaning that any perception of these bonds as disingenuous or falsely motivated could be considered a product of the times.”
A successful party, by design, divides and conquers its attendees through a tableau of simultaneously occurring activity – dancing, talking, eating, drinking, snorting, rolling, smoking, puking, Jenga. Against such grimy backdrops, women who publicly coalesce appear somewhat godlike and socially superior to those of us too shitfaced to teach lessons, too unoriginal to explain the origins of things, too ordinary to contain magic. Our one saving grace? Myths evaporate as quickly as they appear, and perhaps hold less clarity than we give them credit for.
There exists a luminous, ever-negotiable potency of girls at play, one that renders voyeurs like myself enchanted and evaded. Perhaps this is why we are comforted by performances of female friendship, and why we spent the early to mid 2010s purchasing merchandise splattered in “feminist” slogans – messages of girl power and unconditional sisterhood are most easily digestible when on public display in uncontroversial form. The theatre of perfection holds, we rest easy in the presence of girls who get along, and the shelf life of an uncomplicated activism is extended.
Suppose, for instance, that a fight or impassioned disagreement had erupted within this nucleus of camaraderie at the party. I will venture a guess that such disruption would be read as the antithesis of girl power, a sisterhood splintered and atomised, no matter how temporarily or reparably. When inebriated - for let us never forget the apparatus of party as litmus test - it becomes easy to equate anything other than dance floor hugs and slurred declarations of love as a threat to optimal socialising.
Of course, how lucky we are that female friendship often stands in firm opposition to such overt, boring, unnuanced interpretations, and also to the romanticising of which I am guilty. Bonds between women existed long before we fell prey to largely capitalist (i.e. easy, mechanised) ways of expressing and receiving feminist sentiment, meaning that any perception of these bonds as disingenuous or falsely motivated could be considered a product of the times. Disagreements and spats occur, and are frequently understood by their participants not as the end of the world, but as the expansion of it. When accompanied by gin cocktails and inconsequential cigarette silence, this expansion proves most sublime.
Words: Ankita Sadarjoshi
