The Myopia of Youth

Consume or be consumed

The Sunday Letter #47

The tweet started out innocently enough: “the thing about taylor swift is that she so perfectly encapsulates through her lyrics, the interior lives of women. It’s why we all can’t stop listening. We’re all saying, “wait you felt that way? we were all feeling this way?” a user named Emily wrote on January 19. 

It was the second part of the tweet, however, that launched Emily into main character territory: “do men have someone like that?” 

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“Oof…” I replied to a friend who shared the tweet with me. Maybe it was a case of an in-group joke reaching the wrong crowd, or maybe Emily was just trolling with a classic use of discourse bait. Unsurprisingly, the tweet has been viewed nearly 3 million times in two day, not unlike the “ADHD influencer” who tried to claim that neurotypical people do not have inner monologues. After all, Twitter loves a good case of one group vastly oversimplifying their perceived superiority over another group, with no sense of the irony.

“I just like the implicit suggestion that men don’t have interior lives at all,” my friend wrote. I was about to blame the myopia of youth for the statement; don’t we all remember the intensity of believing you were the first to ever feel your emotions so intensely?

In The Virgin Suicides, when one of the Lisbon girls ends up in psychiatric treatment, the doctor asks her, “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” “Obviously, Doctor,” Cecilia replies, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

But then I clicked on Emily’s profile and realized that she was not, in fact, a thirteen-year-old girl, but a 32-year old woman and mother of three whose Twitter bio describes her as an “argumentative antithetical dream girl.”

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If there was one trend that was seemingly everywhere in 2023, it was girls. From bows and ribbons to “Taylor Swift and Barbie,” Isabel Cristo writes in The Cut, “there she was on the front lines, blonde and newly empowered but still, definitely, always girl.” The girliffication of trends has fully hit a fever-pitch, with phrases such as ‘girl dinner’ to ‘girl math’ spreading to seemingly every corner of the internet. Some argued that it was all just a marketing strategy, while others argued that the trend offered women an escape back into the simpler, pre-feminist realm of girlhood. Isabel Cristo argues, girlhood “is an opting out of the whole calculation, a low-risk way to participate in mass cultural femininity.” Or, as Emmeline Clein writes, it’s repackaged bimboism, with a tradwife bend.

In other words, welcome to postfeminism.

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In Tiqqun’s 1999 Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, they argue that the ultimate tool of capital is the “living spectacle of the Young-Girl.” The Young-Girl, as they conceive of her, is not a specific person; she is not even always young, or female. She is both an untouchable entity and a ubiquitous phenomenon. 

The Young-Girl craves commodities because through them, “she sees herself, only more perfect.” She never creates anything other than herself, over and over and over again. She “can only seduce by consuming,” and yet she is defined by the imperialist violence of her “delicate emptiness.” She will never truly be full. She is all-powerful, and yet insignificant, because she must always be defined by her own infantilization.

A tool of the Panopticon, The Young-Girl offers ultimate proof of capitalism’s chokehold on our lives, and yet we want to become her anyway. We choose complicity, becoming active participants in our own surveillance and punishment.

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25 years after its initial publication, Theory of the Young-Girl remains remarkably prescient, with influencers now serving as the corporate mirrors through which the Young-Girl forms her identity. “The Young-Girl is part of the new lifestyle-police,” the writers argue, “making sure that each person fulfills his or her function, and sticks exclusively to it.” The Young-Girl is risk-averse; she doesn’t engage with other people, but rather with their cumulative qualities amassed into the specific character or social situation “in which one is supposed to conform no matter what the circumstance.” Alienation, but make it aesthetic.

In Majuscule, Emmeline Clein wrote that “Pleasure, facilitated by purchases, replaces any fuzzy feelings fostered by a community of fellow women for both bimbos and tradwives, and it’s this will to ownership that unites them.” Here we see how the Young-Girl may naturally evolve into the bimbo or the tradwife. Perhaps their escape into an “individualistic, fatalistic mindset” might be how they grin and bear the realities of patriarchy and capitalism, “but it does nothing to make life less miserable for women as a class.”

Left / Right

“Every day when I get into school at like 7:45 a.m., everybody comes over to me like, ‘Oh my God, I like your Stanley!’” a 13-year-old named Dahlia told The Cut recently. ‘Stanley Cup fever,’ as The Cut calls it, refers to the mass-hysteria surrounding the $50 drink tumbler, particularly amongst young girls, and the “cup-based social hierarchy” that’s infiltrated elementary schools as a result. Having a knockoff version is a no-no, as is not having one at all. 

This sort of pressure is not new, nor is the question for parents whether to give in or to teach their child about trends and peer pressure.

“I wouldn’t say any of them are actually my friends,” Dahlia told The Cut about her newfound popularity. “They only talk to me in the morning when I’m holding my Stanley.”

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In Wired, Alex Quicho writes, “The angel-bimbo girl-swarm gives voice to something collectively experienced and soon-to-be historical.” We’ve subconsciously processed recent events through general disassociation; what we’re left with is a cultural consciousness that understands itself entirely through consumption.

On Twitter, a user named anna writes, “I think what I want to find with philosophy is an explanation for why experiences of art seem to constitute my life rather than just ornamenting it.”

Shit You Should Care About argues that when the pressure to consume intersects with the pressure to be productive, even hobbies must become monetized. There is no longer room for pleasure for its own sake. “I know there’s a resurgence in reclaiming ‘girl’ and ‘girlhood,’” SYSCA writes, “but I don’t think it needs to come at the expense of us being seen as non-serious people who are only put on this earth to look good and buy things.”

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To Tiqqun’s point about how capitalism has engulfed every aspect of social life, Freya India argues in favour of taking a step back from documenting everything. While the desire to document and preserve memories is not new, Freya argues that the impulse to share them widely with strangers is, to the detriment of future generations. 

Of course, social media companies have a vested interest in keeping us obsessed with documentation, from Instagram and TikTok, to Goodreads and Letterboxd, to MyFitnessPal and period-tracking apps. Our pleasure-reward centres just can’t keep away from another chance to track and understand ourselves.  But the proliferation of information at our fingertips has had the inverse effect on our attention spans, with the cultural trends bending towards speed and spectacle over proper standards of journalism, as Madison Huizinga recently argued.

And while the fear of forgetting may be artificially-inflated by the abundance of apps to help us keep track of life under capitalism, those fears are also not entirely baseless. Once our data is digitized, it is both no longer entirely ours, nor is it entirely safe from disappearing completely at the whims of Google or Meta. It’s no longer just a fear of forgetting, then, but a fear of being forgotten as well. No wonder so many of us are trying to be reborn into childhood, to reset our mortality. The pressure to consume and be consumed, to be seen as something worth remembering: a desire which requires being palatable enough for consumption as well.

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But, just in time for the girlhood train to finally peak before hopefully running out of steam, along comes The Mob-Wife Aesthetic. Apparently the opposite of the stealth wealth, clean-girl, coquettish aesthetics of yesteryear, the mob-wife represents “a flashier, more glamorous take on dressing that screams ‘loud luxury.’” But is the mob-wife just another version of stay-at-home girlfriend trend; i.e. just another identity formed around a man’s career? According to Glamour, the TikTok user who helped popularize the trend noted that the mob-wife “is a boss in and of herself… It’s an attitude. It’s an aura.” Dare I say, a girlboss?

In Vulture, P.E. Moskowitz writes how the character of Carmela Soprano on HBO’s The Sopranos was a revelation for their gender identity, a realization which faded with repeated viewings. 

“Carmela is a woman trapped in her circumstances — if she leaves Tony she will lose money, her friends, her lifestyle, her family — but she is mostly trapped in a cage of her own psyche, constantly battling her own expectations of herself, her desire to raise a family and provide for them, and her desire to feel an individual freedom made impossible by those things.”

While a mob boss’ wife, Carmela is also “the embodiment of a womanhood that many, cis and trans, yearn for, against their better instincts: one that replicates the infantilized yet secure state of the suburban housewife, where we can be both victim and perpetrator, but mostly have our agency taken away from us.” Consume or be consumed.

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But in the race to the bottom for the project of Young-Girlhood, in which youth itself is colonized, society must simultaneously covet the Young-Girl while also lamenting her behaviour in attaining her status. Young-Girls must fear death while also constantly endeavouring to cheat it. TikTok goes to war over whether Gen Z is ‘ageing worse’ than millennials, while ten-year-olds facing a lack of third spaces develop a dependency on afterschool trips to Sephora to coat themselves in anti-aging creams. 

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In a recent interview in The Atlantic about the human capacity to keep time, Becca Rashid notes, “I’ve always wondered if this sort of compulsive documentation—these habits we have around writing down what happens at any moment in time—is actually about the fear of losing time, and our impulse to, you know, want to control it.” In reply, Sarah Manguso says, “I felt this kind of maybe pathological anxiety that if I lost those memories, if I lost the memory of the emotional weather of the day, I would be losing some essential part of myself, this essential part of my life.”

I tend to connect stories and memories with emotions, and I have a very vivid memory of being a child and thinking to myself that I never wanted to lose the sense of how hard it was to be young. There was, of course, joy in being a Young-Girl, but I always looked forward to feeling like a real grown-up, someone who both remembered the shame of being misunderstood by adults but also offered a greater sense of understanding to young folks in turn.

Nowadays, I’m trying to consume with an eye towards being able to share in return. To reach out to the world and say, I’m just trying to understand.

This week’s recommendations

Miri in Hobart Pulp: “He likes my shoulder blades and hipbones, the hard ridges on my body that protrude from the softness.” Rebecca Boyle on motherhood and the moon: “To experience matrescence is to excise part of your heart and hold its tender flesh up to the world.” Rayne Fisher-Quann on how grief obliterates time. Leslie Jamison, fellow prairie woman, on the birth of her daughter and death of her marriage: “Being an adult meant watching many possible versions of yourself whittle into just one.” Shon Faye on memoir-writing: “Once it is written, it is written. Every book is an extract of something that was much greater and grander before the writing happened.” Jael Goldfine asks where feminist media goes from here.