Being in something of a shitty mood yesterday, I decided to dedicate my morning not to productive work, but to reading and thinking about, er, Gossip Girl.

The good news is that it worked. I feel much happier now. And the almost-as-good news is that it got me thinking about the Serena/Blair dynamic in a marginally new, broader light.

Namely, that Serena personifies “effortless perfection”, while Blair embodies the frustration that’s really going on inside the young women who invest themselves in it.

I first came across the term in Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, a book I highly recommend to anyone who wants to understand the high proportion of teenaged girls and young women who engage in disordered eating behaviour without technically being diagnosed with an eating disorder, who wants to understand high achieving young women, or who is interested in adolescence and young womanhood more generally.

In any case, Duke University (who seem to run a lot of interesting studies) define effortless perfection as “the expectation that women should be ‘smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular’ — all without visible effort.” Certainly something I clung to from the ages of, say, 16 to 23, and Serena van der Woodsen to a ‘tee’.

What’s interesting about Serena, though, is that effortless as she might appear from the outside, on closer inspection, she really seems to cling to - or at least actively identify with - it as a character trait. Note the offense she takes when Dan (in The Ex Files) or Blair (in The Serena Also Rises) suggests that she might play a role in her own success, that not everything falls into her lap naturally.

The stellar pop cultural analysts at Television Without Pity are fond of writing about Blair and Chuck’s “burlesque” performances, but it occurs to me that Serena’s “effortless perfection” might be her own version of this: something she performs and invests in rather than something she just “is”.