Imagining a World Where Onionskin Jeans Exist... It's Terrifying

When reading Super Sad True Love Story I spent a majority of the time imagining this not so far away future and what it may look like. Whenever an author sets a story in the future and is dealing with new technologies they tend to describe things very carefully so as to give the reader a clear vision of the technologies, fashions, etc. that they have invented. However, Gary Shteyngart seems to go out of his way to not describe his technologies and settings very clearly. In some ways, this makes the novel feel as though it is closer to this time period than further from it. In sick ways, things that are happening in the novel are only slightly different from things happening now. In fact, I don’t think Shteyngart ever alludes to a particular time period for this novel . I’m not 100% certain if this is true or not because Shteyngart’s future is blending in with some of the science fiction I’ve read which always seem to stress the time period that it they are set in. However, my gut tells me that Shteyngart wouldn’t give a time period for the book because that increases the immediacy of its issues.

This may seem like a silly thing to have stuck with me, but I can’t get the Onionskin pants out of my mind! Shteyngart certainly approached the fashion of the future from a perspective that both disgusted and fascinated me at the same time. As mentioned above, Shteyngart almost skips over the description of this lewd future styling, mentioning it briefly in passing in the first correspondence between Eunice and GrillBitch. It took me until Lenny practically drooled on himself while he described them in his diary to realize that they were transparent. But doing back to the teen between Eunice and GrillBitch, I’m realizing that it may point out one aspect of change that Shteyngart does seem to highlight, though still not dwell on too long. It would seem that in some ways Shteyngart portrays the internet as having made women sluttier. On several occasions he goes out of his way to depict this “Fuckability” rating, and while this disgusts me, what really scares me is that it’s so potentially possible. I think of my little cousins, and I remember when they first got Facebook pages. Even though they had family like me as friends, they would post the standard “I’m so hot” profile pictures (taken in a mirror of course) at 10-11 years old. I want to make it clear that I am not calling my little cousins sluts, but I am simply pointing out the fact that the mindset among young women that they must be sexy is practically subconscious now. Every generation finds certain levels of exposure less and less provocative and more appropriate, so who is to say that in a few years transparent clothing won’t be the new craze.