“What I think is tragic is there’s that kind of short window of time when you’re young, where you’re carefree and authentically yourself and you’re not insecure yet,” India stated. “Now those anxieties are starting way earlier, and girls in particular aren’t getting time to just enjoy being a girl. Like, if you’re a girl on TikTok who’s categorizing herself and having a sad girl summer, that’s not a childhood to me. You are branding and marketing yourself before you’ve even had time to just not be self-conscious.”
I obtained to fascinated with the work of Lauren Greenfield, whose 2002 images e-book, “Girl Culture,” I learn in school. It was groundbreaking on the time for its arresting, gritty portraits of American girls towards the backdrop of the garish client tradition of the early aughts: A woman scrunching her face in dismay on the sight of her breasts in a dressing room mirror, women glammed up like ladies in magnificence pageants, women at quinceañeras, woman athletes, women at an consuming dysfunction clinic, women at promenade. In some methods, the portraits have been a visible manifestation of a decade of labor by students like Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown, who first introduced women’ faltering sense of self into public view in the course of the woman energy period of the 90s. However Greenfield’s portraits zeroed in on the juxtaposition of women’ internal ideas and their outward expressions — an “unhappy symbiosis,” because the e-book’s introduction put it, between their psychological wants “and the superficial, narcissistic content” they have been consuming.
Twenty years on, what’s the state of that symbiosis? Ladies’ psychological wants appear to have solely grown extra difficult, fueled by a far larger swell of content material. However was all of it superficial, narcissistic? I’m not so certain.
I didn’t see Taylor Swift or Beyoncé in live performance this 12 months, however I talked to among the women and girls who did. Ladies who described the experiences as transcendent, magical, sacred and divine, a form of “collective uplift,” as Stephanie Burt, the Harvard professor who is teaching a new class on Swiftology, put it. “I put it up there with my wedding night,” my good friend Smita Reddy instructed me, of attending a Swift present together with her daughter. A couple of minutes in, her 9-year-old turned to her and stated, “Mom, I don’t feel like I’m alive.”
One of many variations between when Greenfield’s e-book got here out and now’s the extent to which ladies are the first inventive drivers behind a lot of the tradition women are consuming — which may be why it appears to be talking to so lots of their lives so powerfully. Peggy Orenstein, the writer of “Girls and Sex,” who has been writing about women for 30 years, likened these experiences to a “release valve.” “It’s such a complicated world, and girls and women feel such pressure,” she instructed me. “Maybe Barbie or Taylor offers a release from the pressures of mental health and give you this moment where you can just live the fantasy or relax or be seen or feel like you don’t have to be seen or just watch the damned movie.”
