“Pick Me Girls” by Sophie Passmann: “It would be pure man-hatred if I read it now”

2024-10-18 17:13:00

Sophie Passmann brings her book “Pick Me Girls” to the stage and plays herself. It’s about eating disorders, unavailable men, and misogyny coming from women. She is particularly hard on herself and her critics.

The piece is about Sophie Passmann, comes from Sophie Passmann and is played by Sophie Passmann. The 30-year-old jokes that she could actually write the review herself. And in a certain sense it is like this: the autobiographical one-woman show “Pick Me Girls”, based on the bestseller of the same name and premiered at the Berliner Ensemble to a sold-out audience, considers itself more than just a feminist stand-up comedy, sociological illumination of the Pick Me Girls phenomenon, but also a self-reflexive evaluation of Passmann’s work to date.

And it is a broad spectrum: the author of books such as “Old White Men”, “Completely Goosebumps” and “Pick Me Girls”, born in 1994, hosts, among other things, the talk show “Neo Ragazzi” and has made his acting debut in the series “Damaged Goods”. So now the transition from books and television to the theater stage.

One could certainly look forward to the evening in two minds. Not everything Passmann attempts – and that’s a lot – succeeds (the literary program she moderated, “Studio Orange”, for example, received a lot of understandable criticism and was canceled after three episodes). But in this case the worries are unfounded: it is no exaggeration to consider the evening directed by Christina Tscharyiski, who has already worked successfully with the very different feminist Stefanie Sargnagel, as the artistic highlight of Passmann’s career.

The audience applauds and laughs for the entire hour and a half and at the end Passmann bows to a roaring room and a prolonged standing ovation. All screenings were sold out in advance, people haggle for tickets on Instagram and there are waiting lists. An early advertisement, but the production is definitely up to par. And a popular success with which the venerable Berlin ensemble follows up its equally brilliant one-man show “It’s Britney Bitch!”, which recently also managed to attract masses of young people to the theater.

A book is the only prop Passmann uses. Even the backdrop, designed by Janina Kuhlmann, remains small. On the stage, in front of a curtain of colorful and glittering tinsel, lies only a huge shell. But not much happens to them. A bright pink “cult” sign appears only towards the end of the applause. In the middle there’s some singing in the background (not by Passmann!), that’s all. Although the author’s photo that adorns the cover of the book “Pick Me Girls” is always talked about, it is never shown, one of many elegant directorial ideas.

Passmann’s work also impresses with its pleasant restraint: no shouting, no outbursts of anger, as the theme and the spirit of the time would suggest, but an emotional state that oscillates between humorous, self-confident and vulnerable, doubtful, with Passmann in a light blue costume that resembles revealing the armor of a superheroine.

Boss girls and champagne feminists

Passmann’s eating disorders dominate thematically. The way she repeatedly demonstrates how she doesn’t fit into pants, as a child not at H&M with her friends, and later while shooting for the cover of her latest book, has a slapstick tragicomic quality. She was not just a fat girl, but also a fat little girl. The story of how she couldn’t fit into the onesie on the ward as a newborn became a running joke among family and friends. He learned early on that it would be better if, while the anecdote was told in his presence, he laughed instead of looking sad, Passmann says.

The author talks about hunger and shivering, and it wouldn’t be interesting if it were about individual hunger and shivering and not about the hunger and shivering of all women. From hatred of all things feminine, which men and women have internalized equally, Passmann draws a line from self-loathing, envy and role models, to girl bosses, daddy issues, to champagne feminists and misunderstood bisexuality. It often hits the sore spot of a society that likes to pretend to be enlightened and feminist, but doesn’t even say hello to a fat woman. Passmann’s examples are rarely too egregious or far-fetched, for example when he talks about a girl who prefers to drink tea at home on her birthday instead of going out for pizza with her parents.

The typical “choose me girl” phrases, with which Passmann illustrates the type of woman she herself belonged to for a long time to please men, seem sufficiently familiar: “I’m not like other women” or “I much prefer to work with them . Men are much more relaxed together.” They are all symptoms of a dilemma: “Men hate femininity, but they need women.” So you have to act like you’re different from other women.

“Pick Me Girls” is more than a feminist reading or a collection of recalled anecdotes. An ingenious dramaturgical trick, for example, allows Passmann to first defend his cover photo to dissatisfied followers (“You’re sitting funny in the book cover photo!”) (“Intention”). Only at the end does Passmann repeat in detail the situation in which the photo was taken, thus cleverly overturning his entire previous argument. The clever production creates ambiguity and ambivalence that was missing from the original book. One of the many successful ideas in the stage version is the omission of the weaker parts of the book, such as Passmann’s questionable statements about his Botox use.

Immunization against criticism

It is the author herself who provides the criticism in most places: the passages of the book are repeatedly interrupted by dialogues that the author has with herself. What remains in limbo is whether the critical insertions are the self-doubts of an internalized outside perspective or the reproduction of real reactions to his appearances and books. Passmann would do well not to mention extremism, obviously misogynistic hate speech or dick pic orgies. Instead, she sighs into the room at all the subtle, probably well-intentioned nastiness hurled at her, especially by fans and women: it’s the “shame” or “really disappointing” comments she makes in her glowing appearance under the feminist microscope.

Passmann constantly interrupts herself, just before she begins, adopting the accusatory, worried and self-pitying tone we know from her book. When he talks about “the men,” he quickly adds, “not all the men,” in a tone that half apes the critics and half gives in. He accuses himself of reflecting on his privileges, of not taking up so much space, and why did he say that three years ago?

This way of anticipating and refuting every possible criticism of Passmann’s person and her interpretation and at the same time brushing aside possible new critics in advance must be appreciated for its intelligence. At the same time, the whole problem of electoral feminism represented by Passmann is revealed here: immunization against all kinds of criticism prevents progress, that is, the competition of ideas.

Sophie Passmann’s evening is a mixture of cabaret, comedy, Ted talks and classic tragedy. He sometimes uses the register of (inverted) old-boy humor a la “Defending the Caveman,” which draws its humor from stereotypical gender attributions (men always forget to shop; they never talk back, etc.). On the other hand, the female revenge genre is played with when Passmann threatens to read aloud the crimes of her ex-boyfriends from a “burnt book” as in “Mean Girls”. If one of them was sitting in the audience and had something against it, they could stand up and say something. The public, still hesitant, dismisses: “No, it would be in bad taste. No, it would be pure man-hatred if I read it now” – Ms.

But things go differently than expected. Instead of arousing collective anger and strength against the men exposed in this way by the public lecture, Passmann calms down with every word, at a certain point he has to lie down and in the end he falls silent. Recapping all the situations in which she made herself small and allowed herself to be made smaller not only helps her gain new strength, but also shows her her vulnerability, all the pain, all the “waste.” The evening finally ends with such a touching moment of silence, even mourning for all the lives not lived, lived differently, lived wrongly. An evening that is at the same time a hug and a tribute to all the women who have become the way they are.