Ah Serena

Serena van der Woodsen is incandescently beautiful, exceptionally kind, and, in the end, it has to be said, somewhat boring.

Any time you find a someone trying to be dismissive about another person, you can be pretty sure that other person has got something and that goes double when you find a woman writing dismissively of another woman. The above is Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker and the target of this attempt at dismissal is a fictional character named Serena van der Woodsen from the novel series Gossip Girl.

The whole Gossip Girl thing is a bit of a joke: wealthy New York girls from socialite families with Dutch names? As hackneyed clichés go that is about as pure an example as you will ever find. But notice also this self-description from the novel's narrator:

We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party.

Land lines? Whatever for? More importantly though, doesn't this sound like an inflated account of pretty much every middle-class girl today? Every middle-class girl has her cell phone, a private bedroom, tons of clothes, leisure time to shop, shop and shop some more. There is a luxury in projecting this rather ordinary kind of girl into an still-gilded New York society because this over-blown fictional exaggeration makes them more interesting than the girls we know all too well from everyday.

And into this scene we can introduce the too-golden girl that everyone is supposed to not like. Except we do like her and that is the interesting thing. This became especially true when the novel was put on television. People, particularly men people, took to liking her. Serena is not unlike Roger Sterling or Alex P Keaton in that she was created as two-dimensional character who was supposed to be just a foil for other characters but turned out to be too important to remain two dimensional

And I'd suggest that a big part of the appeal that she has developed is because she has the qualities that most men really seek in a woman.

Before I begin, a really important caveat, I won't even pretend this is fair.  Okay, if you have that, let's go with the qualities that make her attractive:

• Effortless grace. Hey, I said it wasn't fair didn't I? That said, every guy knows grace and beauty aren't effortless. But it is the ease and grace of presentation that impresses us.
• Sexual potency. She's going to be good and you can tell.
• She intimidates other women without trying to intimidate other women. Nothing will perk up a guy's interest in a woman quite like seeing that other women are a little frightened of her. Particularly—as is the case with Serena—if other women accuse her of using sex to get what she wants when there is no actual evidence to suggest she does.
• She has been pretty discerning about who she sleeps with. To be her guy would be to join a small and exclusive club.
• When it comes down to choosing between the guy and her best friend forever, the BFF gets the shaft. No guy looking for love wants to be coming in second place to some BFF somewhere. You don't like that? We don't care.
• She does not put a whole lot of effort into her clothes.
• When things don't work for Serena, she goes looking for new friends and new activities.
• She is not morally perfect but she is morally good.

There you have it.