mary kate olsen, the soft butch hero of my childhood

 The other day, I saw a tweet that said "always the mary-kate, never the ashley :///" I was immediately furious, because: what is this Mary Kate slander??? Mary Kate is obviously the better twin! I then realized that the "obviously" in that sentence was doing a lot of heavy lifting, and maybe other people didn't have such strong opinions about former child star Mary Kate Olsen. Luckily, it doesn't have to do the heavy lifting alone, because I'm here to defend Mary Kate's honor as the tomboy soft butch hero of my childhood and the superior Olsen Twin (rest in fucking pieces, Ashley). 

Like a lot of 90's bitches, Mary Kate and Ashley kind of dominated my childhood. Their movies, books, dolls, clothing, and even makeup lines (?? why did they have this) were everywhere. My absolute favorite piece of MK and A content were the 'New Adventures of Mary Kate and Ashley' mystery books. For the uninitiated, these were cheap paperback books in which the Olsen twins had a detective agency and would solve mysteries such as "who is stealing ice cream from the ice cream store?" or "who keeps turning out the lights at the mall slumber party?" In hindsight these scenarios are incredibly low stakes, but as a child I thought they were the hottest shit possible, and also deeply terrifying. I distinctly remember becoming too freaked out by a Halloween story and hiding it under a bunch of other books because I was too frightened to finish it. Mary Kate was always my favorite twin. Ashley was pretty and liked boys (ew) but Mary Kate would never betray me like that. She was clumsy and loud and somehow always caused issues during the mystery solving, but she looked great in cargo shorts and I had to stan.

Obviously, Mary Kate Olsen isn't gay (*lady bird voice* that we know of yet), but in a pair of twins who consistently played foils for each other, Mary Kate somehow got shoehorned into being the "tomboy" character. She was the one who wouldn't wear a dress, who wore a backwards baseball cap (still the peak of gay, in my grown adult estimation), and who wanted to play basketball with the boys. Consider as evidence the 1999 film Switching Goals. The movie title itself sound like a weird euphemism for homo and/or bisexuality, like when I was a kid and my dad would say, "she looks like she wears comfortable shoes" (side note: ???). Mary Kate plays Sam (gay name) who is a "tomboy" (gay) who is incredibly good at soccer (gay) and has weird daddy issues (...). Emma (Ashley, obvs) is big feminine, loves lipstick and boys, and is also forced to play soccer against her will by their weird dad (what's his damage..?). They decide to switch soccer teams so Sam can absolutely slay at soccer and make their dad proud of Emma, and Emma can go flirt with boys and get Sam a boyfriend because Sam is too conceptually stressed out by boys to do it. I could not write a better closeted lesbian plot if I tried. She's "too scared of boys to flirt" and makes her sister do it because she doesn't want to? She "loves soccer"? This is the Abby Wambach origin story. You cannot tell me that Mary Kate Olsen is not a young lesbian in this movie. I refuse to hear it. Thirteen year old me being forced to put on makeup and pretend to care about if boys thought I looked pretty deserved this role model. 

 

(This is the movie cover. You can tell which one is ashley because she is wearing a jaunty hair clip)

Underneath it all, Mary Kate's characters had something that I related to and longed for, something I couldn't quite explain. Something about her loud clumsiness, her long sleeved shirts under t shirts (why did we ever stop rocking this look), and her layered flannel spoke to a part of me that I couldn't quite pinpoint, that I felt but wasn't yet ready to confront. That was what kept me coming back to read the same mystery books on repeat and watch Switching Goals over and over again even though I thought the soccer storyline was kind of a snoozer (sorry Abby Wambach). When I saw Mary Kate, I saw myself, saw something about who I wanted to be, and because of that, I'll always be ready to go to bat for her.

The Olsen twins were there during all my best childhood memories (sneaking books into hourslong church meetings, reading them in the car and vomiting because I got carsick, etc). Whatever your experience with the Olsen twins, whether you were a Mary Kate stan or were living for Ashley's fun short sleeved cardigans (this look I think we can leave in the past maybe??) I think we can all agree on one thing: the dad in Switching Goals doesn't deserve rights. Fuck that guy.