Internalized Sexism & Embracing my own Femininity

Oh, teenage girls.

So passionate, so creative and smart, so tenacious, so driven and inspired by the books, movies and art they love and the role models behind the objects of their adoration, but so, so, so… easy to make fun of, because those positive attributes that define parts of their identity are translated by society as rabid, naïve, childish, obsessive and vain.

If you like Billie Eilish, you’re a basic, fake depressed emo girl.

If you like K-Pop, you’re a rabid fangirl who only cares about their looks.

If you like Twilight, you’re a brainless girl with the most abhorrent taste in the history of pop culture.

No matter what you like as a teenage girl, society will always find a way to dismiss it as worthless and to find something wrong with it, or rather with you as a human being, which they will make sure to inform you of: your gender. Because what’s more pathetic and deserving of ridicule than being a passionate teenage girl, especially one who has stereotypically feminine interests?

Now, I’ll admit, as a teenage girl myself, I have privately scoffed at other girls for their interests and tastes in pop culture, but it wasn’t until I got into K-Pop that I realized the harm of what I was doing. That is when the full extent of this problem entered my consciousness for the first time.

Indeed, this culture of demonizing and trivializing teenage girls has bred internalized misogyny in young women that may lead to or feed into their “I’m not like other girls” mindset among many other issues that are detrimental to them as well as their female peers.

 Even before I was aware of this teenage-fangirl-hate bandwagon, there was a time in my life when I went through that phase as a little girl, as I’m sure many other girls did. I always insisted that I was strictly a “tomboy,” I looked down on “girly” things like romantic movies/novels and skirts and the colour pink (shoutout to Jimin in the Spring Day MV for showing me the light that is the magnificence of pink for the first time in my life), I would turn my nose up at One Direction fangirls for their vain obsession with pretty boys, basic stuff like that that I stupidly thought elevated me above the “other girls.”

My sister and friend have also mentioned to me about how they similarly grew up with this internalized sexism that caused them to be ashamed of their own femininity. As my friend put it, “I wasn’t allowed to be a girl when I was a kid. I was taught that it’s shameful to be a girl and that girls are useless and can’t do anything. And that’s probably why I fell into such a deep depression when I started growing into my femininity as well.”

For context, this conversation came about when I told her about how I was starting to get more into dresses and how I felt that I was growing into my femininity as I got older, which she related to.

Of course, I can’t speak for all teenage girls since everyone is different, but this is my personal experience with my femininity.

For me, it’s not that I wasn’t allowed to be a girl or taught that it’s “shameful” to be a girl per se – in fact, the traditional roles of girls were strictly upheld and enforced in my household, which probably reinforced my resentment and contempt toward my gender/femininity – but it’s more so the significance of it in a blatantly sexist culture that ingrained in my mind this idea that being a girl, especially a very feminine one, is inherently inferior and worthless compared to the priceless value of boys and the role of masculinity in society.

This belief crept its way into my unconscious and prompted me to try and reject the traditional concept of femininity. So I put other girls down in a twisted interpretation of self-empowerment that may have possibly been used as a defense mechanism against my deep-rooted inferiority complex which was/is intrinsically tied to my gender. I eventually realized everything that was wrong with that toxic mentality as I got older, and thankfully I’ve grown out of it as I slowly began embracing my newfound sense of femininity.

On the other side of this internalized sexism, there is the “shortcoming” of not being “feminine/womanly enough” by society’s standards, which means that being a naturally more masculine woman or “not being like other girls” do not nullify the struggles of being a girl in modern society. If you genuinely enjoy stereotypically male interests and hobbies, then you are a “try-hard fan” only doing it to get attention from guys or for some other superficial reason. Just like if you prefer media and activities mainly targeted for or associated with a female demographic, then you’re just a “basic bitch.” There is no true “winning” in this cesspool of misogyny. You’re either too much or not enough. It seems that society and media fail to realize or acknowledge that women are, in fact, multifaceted individuals. Shocking, right?

It took me a while and I’m still learning to embrace it, but I’ve come to the realization that I don’t have to choose to fit into a specific box – rather than a “tomboy” or a “girly girl,” I can simply like whatever I naturally like and just be me, instead of forcing myself to act like some stereotype perpetuated by society.

So, going back to the account of my personal growth – one of things that led to this big change was K-Pop. Yup, those “manufactured groups of pretty boys and girls who dance to cheesy songs.” Or more specifically, becoming a fan of K-Pop and coming across in-depth online discussions about this subject within the general K-Pop fandom that was brought to the forefront as a response to the rampant prejudice against the genre and its fans.

Now, I know that many K-Pop fans unfortunately do live up to their reputation of being rabid, immature and loudly aggressive, but it’s incredibly unfair to lump all fans together and ridiculous to generalize millions of people across the world (and this applies to fans from all types of fandoms, but here I will be using K-Pop fans as a prime example). People don’t discriminate against a whole group of football (soccer) fans for the actions (football hooliganism) of the fanatical, vocal minority. You don’t hear people generalizing them as “crazy teenage fanboys.”

The same goes for fandoms of media directed toward a male demographic or traditionally associated with males (gaming, comic books and superhero movies, etc). I don’t see the same gendered generalization and discrimination, at least certainly not to the extent of female-dominated fandoms.

As a BTS ARMY, I’ve noticed that whenever people criticize or hate on BTS, there are many fans who will step up to debunk those criticisms/misconceptions and to maturely explain all the things that make BTS special, authentic artists far above “another generic boy band,” such as their positive message and creative freedom – we want to show that, no, we don’t just like them because of their looks. While this is absolutely a classy way to combat hate that does actually work sometimes, it stills begs the question: why? Why is it that we have to somehow prove ourselves to others? Why do we have to try so hard to justify our passion and validate the object of our love to ignorant, often hateful critics? The only answer is that it’s because our worth as “teenage girls” and just women in general is challenged if not outright dismissed in the first place, every single day – because small-minded people who parrot classic diatribes like “BTS is overrated/completely manufactured” or “[insert any other popular young artist] make bad overrated music for 14 year old girls” will not let us enjoy what we want in peace.

While it is important to note that BTS does in fact have a diverse fandom of all ages and backgrounds, that fact should not be used solely as a defensive argument against the “teenage fangirl” narrative to prove the validity of their music, because even if they do have a young female-dominated fandom, that absolutely does not decrease the quality and value of their work. Fanboys of rock bands or video games or anything of that nature aren’t pressured to prove themselves or to earn external validation for what they enjoy, so why can’t we let women and young girls enjoy what they love without questioning it?

“Fake Depressed” Teenage Girls

What exacerbates this whole teenage girl hate bandwagon is when its perpetrators rub salt on the wound by directing personal insults at both the fans and their idols as well.

And that is what drove me to write this piece in the first place, namely the case of Billie Eilish. I was watching several videos of Billie Eilish on YouTube, and on each comment section there were at least two or three top comments calling her “fake depressed” and insulting her fans as “fake deep/depressed 14 year old girls.” This is not me making big of petty hate comments on the internet, because the fact that even Billie acknowledged it shows that it is a real problem.

It’s gross because first of all, they’re not only attacking the typical characteristics of the teenage girls which are their gender and age, but also their mental/emotional state.

The use of “fake depressed” as an insult and an excuse to belittle someone underlies why so many teenagers are reluctant to be open about their own mental health issues, because it’s treated as a joke by others. These people don’t know Billie or her fans personally, so who are they to say that she and her fans are “fake depressed”? It’s quite dehumanizing to devalue the significance of her entire work simply because of that and to reduce her, both as an artist and a regular teenager, and her fans to “basic fake depressed teenage girls,” as if those girls were not real human beings worthy or capable of real emotions simply because of their age and gender. Whether they are “faking” it or not, it’s wrong to use that to attack a demographic of people who are at their most impressionable, vulnerable, and confused phase where many of them likely are depressed in real life and dealing with other serious problems of their own.

However, this is simply part of a bigger worldwide problem, which is society’s tendency to invalidate teenagers’ feelings and mental health issues because of the ludicrous belief that we are not old enough to have “real problems” or “experiences” yet. It’s just that girls tend to get the worst of it in general, or at least within this particular context, because this form of ageism clearly goes hand in hand with misogyny which results in the widespread discrimination against teenage girls.

Here’s the thing, I was one of those teenagers who posted the most generic, “fake deep” stuff when I was younger. I may not have clinical depression or anxiety, but from 12 up to 14-15, I was truly so depressed and lonely I would cry myself to sleep multiple times out of helpless desperation, and I would socially isolate myself at home for months on end to hide from people because of my extreme shyness, low self-esteem and growing fear of socializing (which wasn’t exactly taken seriously enough by those around me). I had neither the strength nor the courage to confide in to anyone about my mental struggles, so my only outlet was writing poetry and escaping to the internet (which still is to this day since I’m still suffering from many of those old issues, but I’m in a somewhat better place now). I’ve written my fair share of cringe-worthy emo poetry and low-key attention-seeking comments about my problems online, I’ve had my “emo phase” that now just screams cringey and “fake deep” to me, and based on those anonymous poems and comments alone, I would definitely be labelled as “fake depressed/deep,” but that does not take away from the real pain I genuinely felt or the precious meaning that all of those things held for me at that time.

Oh, and guess what? One of the things that helped me through those hard times was BTS, and it definitely wasn’t their good looks that alleviated my loneliness and emptiness, but their profound lyrics and positive message. Randomly coming across a lyric video of Whalien 52 on YouTube was like a light at the end of one of my many tunnels. It, along with many of their other songs, spoke so strongly to me it was almost as if they knew what I was going through and were personally sending me the message that I am not alone in my pain. I know that sounds super corny, but if one “pretty boy band that appeals to 14 year old girls” can help me and millions of other people around the world through the message in their lyrics, then I’m not ashamed of admitting that I am a teenage fangirl of them. It’s such a ridiculous, redundant “criticism” that only goes to show its user’s immaturity, and the fact that members of BTS openly recognize that and stand up for their fans exemplifies how they’ve made their band as a whole a safe space for a marginalized group of people and why those fans respond so passionately to that in return. They understand exactly what it’s like to be unfairly judged and derided by society and the media, so that creates an authentic relatability and deep emotional connection between the group and their fans, particularly the teenage girls.

Anyway, back to Billie Eilish. The reason I’m telling you my story is because I’m trying to demonstrate how real and serious “teenage girl depressed” actually is. People with low self-esteem and self-loathing issues already have to deal with recurring thoughts that their struggles are invalid or that they are pathetic and weak for feeling the way they do, so throwing those comments at any artist or their young fans, essentially belittling and mocking their feelings and personal problems, can harm their mental health. If there’s anyone who understands this, it’s Billie herself, who had the perfect response that reinforces my point:

“”Bitch, you’re 16. What do you know about that [being depressed]?” Putting aside the fact that that’s about me, which it is, that sentence is like unbelievable to me, that you could say, you know, a 16 year old can’t be depressed, or a 14 year old or an 11 year old can’t, and the thing is, yeah, I’ve been through depression my whole life. It’s something I’ve dealt with, and I know tons of other teenagers have and, you know, kids and adults and elders and YouTubers, everybody has their own emotions and their own problems. “Fake depressed” is never something you should ever say about anyone ever.”

 Teenage Empowerment & Self-Discovery within Fandoms

Another thing people don’t realize about fandom culture is that there’s so much more to it than just pure escapism and vain fulfillment of personal fantasies  – to me, “fangirl” is sort of an identity, a form of creative expression, an empowering outlet and deep connection to kindred spirits who we may have never met otherwise.

Society throws so many unrealistically high expectations at women, from their physical appearance, behaviour, to everything else, and teenage girls especially are restricted and their voices suppressed. So for many of us around the world the Internet is the one place where we can find even a modicum of liberty in exploring ourselves and the world beyond our real life, as well as forging new friendships and being part of a bigger community which gives us refuge and space to actually be ourselves without as much fear of judgement, to express ourselves through sharing our art and pent-up emotions and opinions with like-minded individuals. Even if it may only be a temporary respite that does not resolve our actual problems, that sense of community and validation is so vital to the healthy growth of adolescents. Especially for those of us who are struggling with mental health and lack of friends or that kind of community IRL, being in a fandom/online community can provide an indispensable source of emotional support and comfort. Of course, there are many downsides and toxic sides to any fandom, but in this piece I want to focus on the good that people often overlook.

Also, when I say that it is an “identity,” I obviously don’t mean that being a fangirl is the only thing we are. It is but an identity out of many that we develop throughout our life, a puzzle piece that helps make many of us complete even as we grow up and become adults – as an example, think of how your favourite artist, or your favourite movie or TV show – for me it was Avatar: TLA and Naruto – or children’s book may have positively impacted you and helped shape your outlook as an adolescent.

When people think or speak of “teenage fangirls,” they do so as if we were one soulless entity, a mass of demonic, hormonal screams and frenzied cries from the lowest depths of Hell. Sure, I admit we can be annoying, loud, aggressive, oversensitive and hard to deal with sometimes, but girls, we… we are a beautiful miscellany of gifted artists, writers, athletes, inspirational students, activists, aspiring doctors, scientists, and various other ambitions and passions, no matter how big or small.

I am but one of those millions of girls, and this piece is only a glimpse into the beginning of my story. I am one of many young dreamers, and my main dreams are rooted in language/literature (primarily English and poetry). To write, to publish, to educate, to inspire. I may not have a formal education (I certainly wouldn’t be able to afford a good one, anyway) or any such official qualifications and privileges as of now, but I’m certainly not going to let those restrictions or society’s standards stop me from using my own voice and becoming the great woman that I dream of being someday. Perhaps I won’t be able to be as successful in those dreams as I wish, I’ll probably lose some, but I’ve been blessed with enough talent and so much passion that it would be a waste not to try and fight for what I love, and I know that I at least won’t be alone.

Alone we may only twinkle faintly like a dim star in the infinite space of the world that is ceaselessly trying to swallow us up, but when we congregate we can make the brightest galaxy in the sky, for indeed we have undeniable strength in numbers that we can use as a positive contribution to society. The world is constantly on our backs trying to rob us of our self-confidence and individuality, but the one thing it can never take away from us is our fierce passion.

As Harry Styles put it best:

“Who’s to say that young girls who like popular music – short for popular right? – have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say. Music is something that’s always changing. There’s no goal posts. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious? How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future – our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going. Teenage-girl fans – they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act ‘too cool’. They like you, and they tell you. Which is sick.”

And so, as a random 17 year old girl on the Internet, I would like to end this piece by asking whoever is reading this of one thing, just one simple, genuine request and reminder: please, try to be more understanding and kinder to teenage girls instead of turning them into laughing stocks and putting them down for mostly not knowing any better or just being the normal way they are, regardless of whatever flaws or differences they may have.

I’m not saying teenage girls can do no wrong, not at all. Just like everyone else we make dumb mistakes and have some faults that are deserving of reprimand. And that is okay, because we are still growing and learning every day throughout our adolescence and beyond that, and what better way to encourage that healthy growth than by patiently guiding them while allowing them to flourish at their own pace, not hindered by any harsh judgements or harmful stereotypes and prejudice? We should be celebrating teenage girls for their pure passion, creativity, raw honesty, and their powerful ability to openly express their emotions the way that makes them feel empowered and better about themselves, allowing them to connect to other girls and grow naturally into mature young women – the future women of this new decade who will lead the following generation of teenagers to a hopefully brighter future.