I Think About This A Lot
Slut eras, thong culture, and the lasting feminist legacy of Manny Santos
Everything important happens to girls in their teens. That’s something I remember thinking when I was growing up. I felt drawn to the cataclysmic energy clinging to every teen girl broadcasted on my television screen. A few still come to mind: Lizzie McGuire at 14 standing up against misogyny and demanding that you sing to me Paolo. Christina Aguilera at 21 (but commercially 16) telling me to get a little unruly, wanna get dirrty. Mia Thermopolis at 16 inheriting a small European country and an entire glam team in the process. Britney Spears at 19 bending the patriarchy to her will with each sway of her belly button jewelry.
These girls were the center of my universe and held the pop culture landscape in a chokehold. They felt like more than just celebrities and starlets, but girlhood deities. I worshiped at the altar of their low-rise jeans.
Symbolically if there was something that could link these girlhood goddesses together—that could unite the Disney Channel and the stages of TRL and the posters lining my bedroom walls ripped straight from an issue of Tiger Beat—it would be the thong. That slip of underwear that haunts parental nightmares and incites riots amongst the confines of middle school dress codes.
The girls of the late ‘90s and early 2000s wore their thongs like weapons: pushed up aggressively above hipbones, jutting out the backs of their jeans, iridescent in rhinestones. I remember adults trying to make thongs a symbol of promiscuity, of garish sexiness, but that’s missing the point of it. To us, to the girls who claimed them, it was a symbol of coming of age, the liminal space between girlhood and womanhood.
To wear a thong was also an act of rebellion. A way to challenge authority and ourselves. It was often the first thing you bought for yourself by yourself (while your mom was powerwalking through the adjacent JC Penny trying to track you down). It was the first secret you kept, the first bit of self you thought to protect.
Of course, there was one girl in particular whose use of the thong continues to take up a permanent residence in my brain. Picture in your mind’s eye this little slice of hell: a place called DeGrassi High. And the girl? Manny Santos, a whale tail prominently displayed over her low-rise jeans, walking a middle school hallway like it was a goddamn runway in Paris. I think about that whale tail a lot.
For those of you who spent your childhood not blood-oath bound to watch The N network every waking moment you weren’t in school, let me educate you. Manny Santos was one of the main characters of The N’s biggest teen drama: Degrassi: The Next Generation. The show followed a slew of teen and pre-teen kids as they navigated life in suburban Canada. You know, the same twisted streets that birthed Drake.
The Degrassi School, a den of sin masquerading as an educational building, served as the backdrop for whatever horrors the writers’ room decided to inflict upon their characters next. The students who attended Degrassi High dealt with issues the likes of which would not even be used as torture in a hell realm. On any given day these kids were having boners in math class, being bullied, being put into comas by their abusive boyfriends, shoplifting, becoming Patient Zero in a blowjob chlamydia epidemic, surviving school shootings, finding out they were manic depressive—or worse—pregnant, being date raped, knifed, the subjects of revenge porn and erectile dysfunction and eating disorders. The amount of strife these well-behaved, middle-class children were facing was unprecedented. And at the center of it all was Manuela “Manny” Santos.
Manny’s storylines were practically Shakespearian in their nature. She went from innocent Care Bear to the most sexually active character on the show. Before she was a sophomore she had already experienced teen pregnancy and teen abortion. Later she would get kicked out of her house, her boobs would be revenge-porned to half the graduating class, and she would date a Canadian rockstar. And these are just the plotlines I can vaguely recall. Her fashion moments had equally as much screen time. The impact her hats, hair risks, and navel exposure had on our cultural landscape cannot be understated. Her whale tail did have its own narrative arc, after all.
During the moment that has taken up a permanent residency in my brain, Manny is going through every girl’s right of passage: the slut phase. In the hopes of getting a soccer player’s attention (where all feminine downfall begins) she gave herself the makeover of my adolescent dreams. Gone were the loose-fitting, full-coverage, pink-tinged clothing of her youth. In its place: skin-tight, low-rise denim, an off the shoulder, cropped kimono-sleeved top that showed her bra straps, for some reason a newsboy cap, and, of course, the aqua bedazzled thong, prominently displayed above the barely-there waist-line of her jeans.
The moment she stepped into that hallway life as I knew it ceased to exist. The boys she sought to impress stared agape, saliva falling in slow-motion from their mouths. The other girls looked on in a state of horrified jealousy. And me? My face was pressed so close to the television screen I went cross-eyed. She was 14 and her underwear was hanging out of her pants. The foundation beneath my feet shook. It was giving couture. It was giving activism. It was giving raw female rebellion.
At the time of the episode’s release I was 11 and, as Britney Spears so eloquently put it, not a girl but not yet a woman. All I needed was time, a moment that was mine, whiiiiiile I’m in between. Manny Santos was that moment in time, the bridge between girlhood and womanhood, her aqua thong the yellow brick freaking road through adolescence. I watched her strut her stuff and thought she did what I did not have the courage to do: own her change.
People forget that this space between girlhood and womanhood is not a kind one. It’s a space when you’re somehow both nothing and everything—and yet always, always you’re a body. At least that’s how I remember it being for me. One day I woke up and I wasn’t Ryanne anymore; I was Ryanne and her body, which was never, ever cooperating. It was “under height and overweight” if you listened to my pediatrician; “fat” if you listened to the girl on my swim team who made it impossible to undress in a locker room; “revealing” if you listened to my sixth grade teacher who would have preferred I detached my torso from my body entirely lest it interfere with a neckline. Sometimes it felt like a curse. To not be distanced from my body, to always be in conversation with it. And yet, at the same time, it was distinctly not mine. I didn’t own it. It was what everyone else said it was.
Lacan has this theory about when we first learn about the self, of when we first take ownership of our bodies. It’s called “the mirror stage.” Basically, its the moment when an organism establishes a relationship with its reality. For humans, it happens when we’re babies. Ever seen a baby stare at itself in the mirror? Ever wonder what they’re looking at? Well, as it turns out, they aren’t just shitting their pants. They’re actually “reconcil[ing] the distance between the image of the self and the experience of the self.”1 They’re having a crisis of identity. They can see themselves—look, there’s a baby drooling in the mirror—before they connect that image to their own experience—look, I am the baby drooling in the mirror. That mirror stage is that point of connection, that moment where the reflection becomes them.
Melissa Febos has a similar theory about girlhood; that is when girls first learn about the self, when we first take ownership of our bodies. Recognizing ourselves doesn’t just happen by glancing in the mirror. It happens through which gaze we’re doing the glancing—and that gaze is often socially constructed. It’s not an actual reality, but a collaboration of reality, a hodgepodging of fantasies and expectations and gender norms.
And then of course we're bound to that image, that reality, seemingly forever. To quote Fuchs: “once grasped by the other’s gaze the lived-body has changed fundamentally: from now on, it bears the imprint of the other; it has become body-for-others, ie., object, thing.”2 Basically, your sense of self and your understanding of your body isn't based in reality. This is me raising my arm; this is me smiling with my lips. Your sense of self and your understanding of your body is based in a reality that others confirm is true. This is me raising my fat fucking arm; this is me asking for it with my lips. This mirror stage, Febos’ mirror stage, is that point of connection, that moment when a girl becomes her body and all the narratives inflicted upon it. And when has she ever owned the rights to that?
I think that’s what felt so revolutionary about watching Manny strut down that hallway. She hadn’t yet grasped her own image. She didn’t belong to anyone but herself. The day she debuted the whale tail, she shed her parent-approved sweatshirt like a snake outgrowing its skin. “Wanna hear my mission?” she’d asked in the episode. “I want to be hot. Not cute. Not adorable. Hot.” I had never seen a girl be so sure of herself. So unafraid of what her body could do. She looked like power incarnate. Her thong just a siphon, a means to channel power and crumble worlds.
Later, of course, the thong would be her downfall. Apparently you can’t be slutty and be happy—not even in Canada. Her reflection in the mirror stopped being Manny—actress, charmer, friend, goof, beauty—and became the thong and all that it symbolized. She finally grasped her own image and it was Slut. Manny would go on to become the most sexualized character on the show, her physical body the center of most of her story lines and a weapon the writers used against her frequently. And yet in this moment, she controlled the narrative. Her body was hers entirely.
The thong—and Y2K culture in general—is back in a big way. Sometimes I watch the girls of Gen Z and I’m horrified by what I see. Once a girl came into my office hours wearing some sort of spandex contraption that was shorter in length than my period panties. Another girl came to my 8AM English class in a bra top, nipple rings on full display. Jesus Christ, I thought, this is a space for learning! Where the fuck are your clothes? This thing that fills me with horror at 31 is the same thing that filled me with awe at 11. What melted my brain before (underwear! above her jeans!) steels my spine now (underwear!!! above her jeans!!!!). And I can’t pinpoint where that shift happened exactly. When I started letting fear of the “imprint of the other” control the reality of my own reflection.
I forget that in its purest form thongs, slut eras, all of it, are supposed to be for us. It’s for the girls. It’s supposed to be a moment of rebellion or independence or agency or whatever the hell we want it to be. It’s a moment, maybe the first moment, where we try to rewrite the narrative. Where we try to create our own image. I think that’s why the thong persists. Why each generation has its own renaissance. Manny Santos led hers with a whale tail and a hot agenda. And you know what? I would still follow her anywhere.
Febos, Melissa. “Mirror Test.” Girlhood, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 50.
Febos, Melissa. “Mirror Test.” Girlhood, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 60.