The Rizzlers and The Rizzled

Rizz is one of the many words of our online generation. The New York Times recently defined it as “someone’s ability to flirt with and attract a potential love interest.” Short for charisma, the term is relatively new, and when I first heard it floating around the Stuyvesant hallways, I found it to be very cringey. However, the more and more I heard it, the more I found myself using it when quoting others or conversing. Now, with the help of targeted internet algorithms, the usage of slang has increased, pervading everyday interactions. Though some words and phrases become irrelevant after a few months, others end up in the dictionary, contributing to the ever-evolving nature of the English language. While this linguistic evolution is interesting, we also need to consider how new words reflect existing societal structures, and the rise of rizz calls for this deconstruction.

These past few months, many of my female friends and I began to notice a pattern. When we were talking to one of our male friends, guys from his sports teams and classes would call him “rizz god” or say “W rizz.” It is generally acknowledged that anyone can have “rizz,” regardless of gender identity, yet these instances seemed to reflect a cultural emphasis on straight-male rizz. Seeing one guy talking to a couple of girls clearly indicated to these passersby that the guy had a talent for talking to women, enough to earn the title of “rizz royalty.” Though lighthearted, this response is odd for a few reasons. First, it is strange that talking to women is regarded as a skill, considering they make up half of the population and, to my knowledge, do not speak a different language. Secondly, it places an uncomfortable and unrealistic heteronormative expectation on the interaction in question. My friend group continued to experience this until it came to the point where we had to avoid our male friend’s friends in the hallways because, though it was funny, it never ended.

I soon learned that this phenomenon is not exclusive to Stuyvesant. When walking to the Chambers Street subway station with two of my friends (one girl and one guy), a man working at the Marines recruiting center nearby popped his head outside the door and called out to my friend, “Hey rizz god, how old are you?” Though he did not successfully recruit the said “rizz god,” this interaction presses a more concerning question. Why are we, the girls, being “rizzled,” and the guys, doing the “rizzing”? It dawned on us that, though seemingly harmless and silly, the conjugations of this brand new word reinforce gender roles that have always been present: men chasing women while women themselves remain passive. This posits a misogynistic dynamic where men yield more power and agency. In turn, women are commodified into appendages of a man’s status.

Take Helen of Troy, for instance, who’s rendered in Greek literature as the docile object of the Trojan War. Even though Menelaus definitely did not have rizz (maybe some militaristic rizz?), the point still stands. This ideology continually manifests itself in our contemporary culture through characters like James Bond and his throngs of “Bond Girls” or music videos featuring attractive women for the sole purpose of making the male artist look cool. This ideal, known formally as the Casanova trope after a famous 18th-century womanizer, has been used in Hollywood for decades and even capitalized on in advertising. One example is the early 2000s AXE Body Spray campaign with the tagline “spray more, get more” and a ridiculous commercial featuring thousands of women running across a beach towards a man spraying himself with the product. In reality, the womanizer ideal is far from the truth. Men and women speak to each other all the time for non-romantic reasons, and even when they do flirt, women are not helpless to this “all-powerful straight-male rizz.” Yet, with millions of young men consuming this over-sexualized idea of masculinity, heteronormative and sexist worldviews are passed down from generation to generation.

Gender roles are enforced upon children from a young age. Teacher and parent biases influence them to fulfill gendered expectations at school, in extracurriculars, and at home. This eventually impacts our view of friendships and interpersonal interactions because it becomes natural to want to spend more time with people of our own gender. This can be incredibly restrictive, first and foremost for non-cisgender people in terms of gender identity, but also when socializing. My younger sister, who is in her second year of preschool, plays almost exclusively with other girls in her age group. Even in high school, predominantly male or female friend groups are prevalent and often reinforced by single-gender sports teams. Even as mixed-gender friendships form, subtle differences and heteronormative dynamics remain. Our society contributes to sexist norms by not talking about them, which results in harmless words like rizz upholding gender divisions and stereotypes. I’m not suggesting that we collectively cut out rizz from our vocabulary, but the next time you call someone a “rizz god,” ask yourself if you’d do the same for a “rizz goddess.”