The apparent passing this week of Shit Girls Say — a satirical Twitter account-cum-YouTube-sensation written by two Canadian dudes — struck me as particularly premature, though. Approximately one-third as annoying as nyan cat and twice as inventive as feminist Ryan Gosling, Shit Girls Say looked like it might have real staying power. The premise is exactly as simple as you’d think: 140 characters or less of too-real musings on friendship, romance and low-cal brownies, most often served with just-right helpings of passive aggression and/or whininess. Sample Tweets include: “What if we did a bake sale?”; “Love you like a sister!”; “Dark chocolate is really good for you”; and, out of obvious necessity, “Rude.”
Buzz gradually built for the Twitter account, and so followed a short series of (presumably ongoing) YouTube shorts that catapulted the meme to near-Rebecca Black levels of ubiquity. Then, faster than you can say “orange mocha frappuccino,” the inevitable happened: everybody else caught on.
In a matter of hours, Shit Girls Say gave way to Shit Asian Girls Say gave way to Shit Armenian Girls Say gave way to Shit Black Girls Say gave way to Shit Black Gays Say — and here, I estimate, we’ve reached the ultimate jumping of the shark: Sh*t Homophobic People Say, which is basically just a depressing string of sound bites from the likes of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann on the sneaky little devil that is the gay agenda. (Also, note the asterisk — once you’ve been censored, you know the fun is over).
One little nugget of redemption in this deliberately unfunny bastardization of the original? It gives us an excuse to revisit that recent anti-gay campaign ad of Perry’s — you know, the one where he’s dressed like Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain.
I have to confess that the reason I’m so sad to see the meme’s impending fade into irrelevance is that, frankly, it hit a little too close to home. I’m not a girl, but the Twitter feed reads like a transcript of some of the more asinine questions I’ve asked of friends, or coworkers, or the universe: “I don’t snore, do I?”; “Are you busy tonight?”; “How is mercury not in retrograde right now?”
I can only hope that in its inevitable disappearance — barring a book or sitcom deal, a la Shit My Dad Says — the reminder to switch up my smalltalk will somehow live on, whether through watching those three famed YouTube clips or searching my browser history to relive the glory days. (Just kidding — who does that?)
