The ‘sad
girl’ has always been deeply embedded in our art and literature. Viscerally
expressing their sorrow through music, fiction, paintings, and poetry,
progenitors of the sad girl movement include Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, and
Virginia Woolf. In 2014, LA-based artist Audrey Wollen developed Sad Girl
Theory, which proposed that enacting one’s own sorrow is a form of feminist
resistance against the patriarchy. “I think that a sad girl’s self-destruction,
no matter how silent or commonplace, is a strategy for subverting those
[oppressive] systems,” Wollen writes. In doing so, this makes the implicit
violence of womanhood visible, “implicating us all in her devastation.”
Today, it’s
hard to escape the countless artistic reimaginings of “sad girl
self-destruction” and women’s rage. Although some fiction – including Ottessa
Moshfegh’s cult novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Ti West’s Pearl – playfully
satirise the self-indulgence of the genre, testing the limits of our empathy
for badly behaved sad girls, other recent entries into the sad girl canon fail
to embolden the genre’s potential political efficacy. Once intended as a
meaningful reflection on the trials of womanhood, many sad girl stories today
are borderline trauma porn, creating villainous caricatures of men and leaving
us without hope. Because of this, the last few months have seen a wave of
debate sweep through certain corners of the internet, asking the vital
questions: do sad girl narratives keep us stuck in a state of perpetual
victimhood, or are these tales necessary and brave? And in 2023, are these sad
girl stories even still necessary?
This
discussion was partly sparked last month, when writer Isabel Kaplan published
her article, ‘My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer’,
in the Guardian. Response to the article divided Twitter – while many thanked
her for writing it, writer Rachel Connolly suggested that the piece falls into
the trap of celebrating “not female honesty ... but female abjection.” In
response to Kaplan’s piece, writer Moya Lothian-McLean called for the
deconstruction of “romantic victimhood”, whereby scorned women relay the
intricacies of their heartache via social media. Her response piece offered a
keen insight as to how the sad girl hivemind has begun to manifest in the
digital age.
Online, a
sense of camaraderie surrounds the purportedly slighted party, encouraging
countless other women to pile in with similar experiences and their
condolences. In turn, Lothian-Mclean argues that these “sweeping generalities”
about romantic relationships help to reinforce rigid gender dichotomies; man
and woman, villain and victim. “Constant romantic victimhood ignores an ugly
truth: that patriarchy might ostensibly benefit men – even while poisoning them
in a myriad of ways – but it is upheld by all genders,” she writes. “To forever
be an injured party restricts us from confronting that but also prevents
personal development.”
The appeal
of sad girl stories is obvious: these narratives give a voice to the previously
unsayable, typifying the frequent but ‘not that bad’ kind of harm women are
often exposed to in relationships. But as noted in Eloise Hendy’s article, ‘How
sad girls with bad boyfriends took over the internet’, alongside a greater
cultural awareness of abuse and trauma theory, we’ve also developed the
tendency to apply this language to situations “that – while undoubtedly
upsetting – are both consensual and more complex than a strict division into
the roles of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ allows.” Reflecting on the divided
response to Lothian-McLean’s piece – which saw some users accuse her of being
an abuse apologist – Hendy suggests that “feminists should work from the belief
that men, and the patriarchal society that privileges but also devastates them,
can change.”
That said,
there is power in taking accountability for our own pain. The 2020 television
adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People – a contemporary contribution to the
sad girl genre – inspired a collective grief as we watched Marianne Sheridan,
played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, tearfully recall the shame of keeping her
relationship with Connell (Paul Mescal) a secret in school. He asks her: “You
mean the way I treated you?” to which Marianne tells him: “Yeah, and just the
fact that I put up with it.” There’s a reconciliation between the two as
Connell accepts his cruelty, but in a sentiment similar to Lothian-McLean’s
piece, Marianne recognises her own part in choosing to endure it.
Many of us
who date men yearn for closure and an apology we will likely never get, so it’s
satisfying to see this conversation unfold on screen. As Normal People follows
Connell’s struggles with mental health issues and his eventual recovery, his
character escapes the fallacy of the one-dimensional villain. More importantly,
Rooney’s work explores how to forgive and make amends.
Other
offerings into the sad girl genre include fellow Irish authors Naoise Dolan and
Megan Nolan, both of whom are releasing their second novels this year with
Ordinary Human Failings and The Happy Couple respectively. Nolan’s debut, Acts
of Desperation, chronicles how one woman’s relationship becomes a site of
sacrificial masochism before ultimately rejecting the construction of her own
victimhood. In Dolan’s Exciting Times, TEFL teacher Ava is far more sardonic
about her undefined relationship with Oxford grad and banker Julian. There’s a
brutal self-awareness to her narrative as she accepts this is not a loving
romantic relationship, but instead one where she never quite knows where she
stands.
There’s an
element of frustration in both novels as the young protagonists form
attachments to men who leave them unfulfilled. But perhaps here lies the skill
of the well-done sad girl novel – it poignantly captures the contradictions of
pursuing romantic relationships where we are consciously mistreated and
neglected. While Rooney’s novels offer the scope for men to redeem themselves
and seek forgiveness, Dolan and Nolan choose to explore the complexity of the
modern heterosexual landscape and the logic that compels us to stay.
Perhaps the
future of sad girl art isn’t writing it off altogether. Instead of viewing
these stories as deliberate attempts to disparage all men, we must reframe our
understanding of them as writers’ attempts to have their pain validated and
honoured in a way they might not otherwise be. In the spirit of bell hooks,
perhaps we just need to ask ourselves how we can be truly accountable for the
harm we cause, and how we can forgive, heal, and know when to finally walk
away.
In defence
of sad girl art. By Katie Tobin. Dazed, January 16, 2023
Being a
young woman is traumatic. Especially if you’re a smart young woman, or a
creative young woman, and especially if you have relationships with men. These
relationships are sites of trauma. Pursuing them leaves you wrecked. To repair
yourself, the first and most essential step is to tell your story. Speak your
truth. Disclose all the ways that the world – and the men in it – have harmed
you. This is a political act. This is a feminist act. At least, this is what
the most popular personal essays of the last few years have taught us.
Think of
the swathes of first-person, “confessional” stories by women that have gone
viral recently. Less than a month ago, The Guardian ran an essay headlined “My
boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer”. In it, the
American author Isabel Kaplan relays how her then boyfriend was threatened by
her keeping a journal, and then by her literary success. She rails against the
way he spoke “mockingly about the glut of novels about women and their feelings
as well as the way women speak about feelings in general”. She writes that he
called this phenomenon “militarised vulnerability”. She compares herself to
Nora Ephron, a literary hero of his, and describes her as “the patron saint of
militarised vulnerability.”
Essential
to Kaplan’s piece is the notion that this personal story of her broken
relationship is not simply about her and her ex, but emblematic: a case study
of gender roles. Kaplan explicitly states at one point that “the ability to
bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and
gendered skill”. She continues: “Most women I know do it regularly. They bend
until they’re pretzeled and then blame themselves for the body aches.”
In 2019,
another viral essay – this time published in The Paris Review – charted
remarkably similar territory. Like Kaplan’s essay, CJ Hauser’s “The Crane Wife”
revolved around a broken relationship, the denial of a woman’s needs and
desires, and a woman teaching herself to deny her own needs and desires. At its
heart is a story from Japanese folklore of the titular “crane wife” – a bird
who tricks a man into believing she is a woman by plucking out all her feathers
every night. “Every morning,” Hauser writes, “the crane-wife is exhausted, but
she is a woman again.” For the author, this folkloric and forlorn avian
trickster acts, like Nora Ephron in Kaplan’s piece, as another patron saint of
militarised vulnerability. It is the guiding spirit of the essay, helping it
move romantically from the individual and specific to the general and gendered
universal. “To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work,” writes
Hauser. “She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.”
In both
cases, the general response to these personal stories of pretzelling, plucking,
aching and self-erasing was adulation. Across the internet, women were quick to
bestow contemporary buzzwords onto the pieces: “Necessary”. “Brave”.
“Relatable”. “Forget your zodiac sign,” one viral tweet declared, “tell me
which passages of The Crane Wife you immediately screenshotted to show your
therapist.” In many ways that tweet is a neat summary of the modern woman these
essays seem to speak to and speak for. She is drawn to narratives that explain
and categorise her personality, experiences and emotions; she is Extremely
Online; she goes to therapy; she satirises and valorises therapeutic jargon in
equal measure. Most importantly, she connects with other women through mutual
emotional pain, along with the shared understanding that “men are trash”.
Over the
last year, a handful of critics have begun to unpack and unpick this mode of
confessional writing, and the model of contemporary womanhood it espouses. Most
are themselves millennial women in the creative industries – the very group
that should, supposedly, relate to these depictions of smart and successful yet
endlessly subjugated, self-effacing girls. Instead, an increasing number are
calling for an end to this overly simplistic depiction of gender and
relationships.
In August,
journalist and author Rachel Connolly criticised Hauser’s essay collection, The
Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays. Connolly wrote of the collection’s tendency to
elide subjectivity in favour of “sweeping generalities that don’t quite ring
true – particularly in statements about the way women are and how they act, and
hence the form heterosexual relationships tend to take.” Connolly returned to
this topic in a piece for Slate a fortnight ago, suggesting that the trend for
essays like Hauser and Kaplan’s applauds “not female honesty ... but female
abjection”. In a patriarchal society that delights in and demands women’s
submissiveness, abjection is, as Connolly notes, “a highly prized commodity”.
Writing in
The Guardian, journalist Moya Lothian-McLean also denounced contemporary
culture’s taste for narratives that frame relationships through the reductive
roles of victim and villain. Labelling this genre “romantic victimisation”,
Lothian-McLean wrote that these stories are also built on “sweeping
generalities ... regarding the way men are and how they act in romantic
relationships”. In these contemporary confessionals, if women bend and pretzel,
men insult and neglect. Essentially, the one-size-fits-all “bad relationship”
story requires a portrayal of men as inherently selfish, unfeeling and abusive,
in order to construct an image of womanhood as selfless and long-suffering. How
exactly is this gender essentialism brave, bold or politically radical?
Another
piece of personal writing published in The Guardian this year revealed the
regressive core of many modern personal essays. The piece, by journalist Phoebe
McDowell, spun around her “shock and confusion” at her then boyfriend’s
revelation that they are trans. In her first-person account, the experience of
someone coming to terms with their own gender identity is somehow transformed
into a kind of spousal abuse. Throughout, McDowell not only centred her own
experience, but misgendered her ex-partner and displayed a clear anger and
revulsion for their transition – going so far as to wish infertility on them.
“If I can’t have his baby, then no one should be able to,” McDowell wrote. This
is where the reductive gender essentialism at the core of these popular
personal pieces truly leads: to a transphobic moral panic that relies on
imagining cisgender women as uniquely and innately vulnerable.
Because
this kind of confessional narrative is so popular, attempting to criticise or
dismantle it can be thorny. To discuss them at all, it feels necessary to make
clear that these are not stories of abuse. Yes, they tend to be stories that
involve a romantic partner cheating, lying or being dismissive and casually
unkind. They are stories about bad relationships, where at least one of the
people involved feels unsupported and unloved. But they are not, despite how
they are often received, “#MeToo stories”. In this era of trauma and testimony,
these things seem to have become conflated. This was decisively proven when,
after the publication of her Guardian article, Lothian-McLean was condemned as
an abuse apologist on social media. Her apparent crime? Simply suggesting that
feminists should work from the belief that men, and the patriarchal society
that privileges but also devastates them, can change.
Writing for
The New Yorker in January – in an essay that went viral – the critic Parul
Sehgal described the dominance of “the trauma plot” in fiction and non-fiction,
and that “to question the role of trauma, we are warned, is to oppress”. She
cites writer Melissa Febos, who suggests in her book Body Work: The Radical
Power of Personal Narrative that anyone sceptical of trauma narratives is
replicating the “classic role of perpetrator: to deny, discredit and dismiss
victims in order to avoid being implicated or losing power”. The problem is
that wider culture’s newfound knowledge of trauma theory and the language of
abuse has led to this being applied to situations and relationships that –
while undoubtedly upsetting – are both consensual and more complex than a
strict division into the roles of “perpetrator” and “victim” allows.
Millennials have been reared on the intertwined ideas that “your trauma is
valid, your feelings are valid, your experience is valid”, and “the personal is
political”. Yet the radical roots of these tenets seem to have congealed into a
single script that lumps in all sorts of relationship angst with abuse. An easy
line is then drawn between villain and perfect victim – the one that bends like
a metaphorical pretzel and plucks like a mythic bird.
It also
does a disservice to the complicated and varied nature of trauma and abuse to
applaud these narratives. Because if someone’s experience – or their reactions
to that experience – deviates from the script, they tend to be dismissed. Just
look at Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard this year, the
actor suing his former wife for damaging his reputation by alluding to domestic
violence in their marriage in a newspaper op-ed. Hordes of people flocked to
mock and discredit Heard’s testimony, despite the vast amounts of evidence in
her favour and Heard having already won a UK lawsuit that found it to be
“substantially true” that Depp could be referred to as a “wife beater”. In the
view of many online, Heard did not perform the role of the harmed woman to
their expectation and liking.
When
“relatability” is the dominant rubric used to judge and praise contemporary
writing, and when much of it revolves around women’s capacity for trauma and
degradation, it should make us question the kinds of suffering we are meant to
sympathise with. Why, for example, are so many of these contemporary sad girls
and unlikeable women conventionally attractive, young, cisgender and white?
Does clinging to a narrative of perfect, pretzelling victimhood help to conceal
structures of power that, in fact, give these women considerable influence and
personal agency?
Ultimately,
the prevalence of the tortured white girl trope in contemporary culture suggests
that sadness and suffering is what makes these women valuable, interesting and
worthy of attention. That the traumatic confessions of pretty, young white
girls are lucrative. Looking at the book deals and semi-influencer status
conferred on the viral confessional writers of the modern moment, it seems
“militarised vulnerability” is less accurate than “monetised vulnerability”.
What is clear is that it’s a trend that, going forward, needs far fewer patron
saints.
‘Brave’ and
‘necessary’ or just plain regressive? How sad girls with bad boyfriends took
over the internet. By Elouise Hendy. The Independent, December 29, 2022.
There is a
genre in ascendancy at the moment that I’ve labelled “romantic victimhood”. Content
that falls within this category – ranging from literary screeds to TikTok
confessionals – only ever characterises the players in two roles: villain or
victim.
The villain
is always a man. It is usually a man in a relationship with a woman, although
sometimes it is a man dating a man. Nevertheless: man = villain. The victim is
his romantic interest. They recount his behaviour, with the benefit of
hindsight, and detail upsetting incidents, usually ones where they felt
slighted in some way. These are typically imparted in the register now employed
to describe a harm, which combines sombre, stark delivery with therapeutic
jargon. The harm is not anything as easily categorisable as outright abuse, or
sexual assault. It is a hurt, perhaps one of many, that have added up to create
an ultimately “bad relationship”.
A
universalising narrative regarding gender – identified by the writer Rachel
Connolly – runs through this type of work, characterised by “sweeping
generalities [...] about the way women are and how they act”. Those who find
themselves in romantic partnership with men take on the passive, feminised role
of victim, whether female or not. They endure, then escape.
The flip
side of this, of course, are the sweeping generalities we see presented in
popular media, regarding the way men are and how they act in romantic
relationships. Men, we are told, are out to intentionally suppress, humiliate
and belittle those they are involved with because: patriarchy. There is little
interrogation of how these patterns of behaviour operate, or why they might
exist in the first place.
Instead,
they are presented as fixed and irredeemable elements of masculinity, which is
synonymous with patriarchy. All hurt inflicted by a man is abuse on some level,
these narratives imply, and all men will hurt you; ergo all men are abusive by
nature.
A failure
to develop the tools that would allow us to talk about distressing or
unpleasant but consensual sexual encounters means they become flattened and
reframed through the language of sexual assault, of victim and perpetrator. I
see a similar pattern at work regarding romantic relationships involving men.
Both tendencies are exacerbated through the coarse, digitised channels through
which these experiences are often scrutinised.
In a recent
study, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, the writer Katherine Angel argues that
it should be of feminist and political import that so many people are having
bad consensual sex, even when those experiences do not qualify as sexual
assault. The same principle applies here. It’s of feminist concern that many
people dating men find their relationships so unsatisfying. But the solution is
to embrace a truly feminist and multivalent idea of gender “roles” within
relationships, rather than flattening parties into immutable positions of
victim or villain.
“The
labelling of all men as oppressors and all women as victims was a way to
deflect attention away from the reality of men and our ignorance about them,”
wrote bell hooks in the introduction to The Will to Change. The book is a call
to “redefine modern masculinity”; I read it after a recent relationship ended.
A choice stared me in the face: stagnate in my romantic victimhood or attempt
to comprehend “the enemy” – men – better.
Most forms
of feminism, hooks says, have shied away from trying to unpick patriarchal
masculinity, which is just one type of masculinity. Beyond an emphasis on
feelings of “fear and threat” attached to them, men and masculinity have been
ignored as subjects of feminist thought.
The
alternative, of course, is rescuing masculinity from becoming a lost cause
(which hooks thinks can be done via the construction of a “feminist
masculinity”). Believing men are born as patriarchs, rather than made so,
involves a wholesale acceptance of the status quo. It’s not radical, nor should
it be a feature of any supposedly emancipatory ideology. Passivity in the face
of such a belief doesn’t get us any closer to realising a world where the
majority of relationships between men and their romantic partners are built
upon mutuality and respect. As hooks puts it, “men cannot change if there are
no [feminist] blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the
art of loving.”
Neither can
those of us who are not men experience growth if we continue to wallow in the
spiritual impoverishment of the perpetually victimised. Constant romantic
victimhood ignores an ugly truth: that patriarchy might ostensibly benefit men
– even while poisoning them in a myriad of ways – but it is upheld by all
genders, particularly within spaces like romantic partnership. To forever be an
injured party restricts us from confronting that but also prevents personal
development.
Only after
I finally cast off cultural scripts that pigeonholed me as a person things were
done to in a relationship, rather than an actor in my own right who could take
responsibility for her actions, did I experience huge steps forward in
understanding how I related to people around me, and how to improve those
connections.
Broken
relationships are sites of blame; relationships with men will be coloured and influenced
by the system that organises power around gender. But it would better serve us
to start demanding more from current public discussions of these entanglements,
rather than returning time and time again to hyperbolic, romantic victimhood
tropes. It’s not just you; sometimes it’s me too.
Framing men
as the ‘villains’ gets women no closer to better romantic relationships. By Moya
Lothian-McLean. The Guardian, December 11, 2022.
Beauty magazines once taught readers how to use makeup to conceal a recent sobbing sesh. But now, one TikTok trend encourages us to embrace those misty eyes and rosy noses. “Crying makeup,” it seems, is in.
In a clip
that has gained over 507,000 likes, the Boston-based content creator Zoe Kim
Kenealy offers a tutorial “for the unstable girlies” to achieve the look of a
fresh sob even “if you’re not in the mood to cry”.
She starts
with a glob of gloss for “that puffy, soft, lip”, then a swipes red shadow
around the eyes, and finally applies glitter eyeliner all around her face for
some “shine”. “I want to look like I’m pretty crying all of the time,” one
viewer commented. “I feel so pretty after I cry,” wrote another. “I can’t tell
if it’s the eye lashes or red nose.”
Kenealy,
who is 26 and has 119,000 TikTok followers, told the Guardian she was inspired
by two east Asian makeup trends: Douyin and Ulzzang. Both genres involve ample
amounts of blush, glitter and the highlighting the under-eye area for an
overall cherubic effect.
“It’s
inspired by the twinkle in your eye you get after you cry,” said Kenealy. She
stresses the look is just an aesthetic, not dishonesty. “People – mostly men –
have been commenting ‘Amber Heard’ on my video,” she said, referring to the
hordes of Johnny Depp TikTok fans who believe his ex-wife fake-cried on the
stand about his alleged abuse. “It’s a makeup look I wouldn’t necessarily wear
outside. It’s not meant to deceive anyone.”
Misery, or
at least the performance of it, is all over TikTok – probably because it’s all
over the real world, too. In a 2021 Harvard Youth Poll, more than half of young
Americans said they had felt “down, depressed, or hopeless” in the past seven
days.
And in an
era of global wars, rampant racism, an unchecked climate crisis and mass
loneliness, a simple red lip no longer suffices. Instead, beauty trends have
emerged to match the malaise of today. There’s “dissociative pout”, which i-D
called a “lobotomy-chic, dead-eyed” younger sister to the now-passé duck lips
that had 2010s influencers in a chokehold. You can see it in the doll-like online
posturing of Euphoria’s breakout waif Chloe Cherry, or the spaced-out stare on
Olivia Rodrigo’s Instagram page.
Any walk
can be a #SadGirlWalk if you listen to Lana Del Rey and gaze longingly in the
distance. The hashtag, with over 504,000 views, features videos of young women
looking somber while toting iced lattes and showing off their outfits. “Let me
cry to Taylor Swift while walking until I can’t anymore,” one user commented on
their clip.
Fredrika
Thelandersson, a postdoctoral researcher in media and communications studies at
Sweden’s Lund University and author of the new book 21st Century Media and
Female Mental Health, studies online girl cultures and communities.
“In the
current landscape, celebrities and brands want to have authenticity, to appear
real,” she said. “One way to do this is to disclose a diagnosis or reveal a
trauma. It’s literally profitable to show some kind of vulnerability.”
And what if
someone is faking their sadness with faux tears or a phony, far-off look?
“Maybe it
is performing sad feelings, but there is a communal aspect when you realize
that other people feel the same way, and that’s a sort of belonging,”
Thelandersson said. “You can make fun of that as much as you want, but it’s
still kind of hopeful in a way.”
Gen Z isn’t
the first generation to discover oversharing’s louche allure – Gen X icons like
Fiona Apple, Courtney Love and the late Elizabeth Wurtzel all made careers out
of it in the 90s. The writer Emily Gould got her start in the early-aughts
blogging boom, with overly candid entries that often fell in the love-to-hate
category. Emo acts like Paramore and My Chemical Romance dominated 2010s music
charts, with confessional lyrics and a goth-adjacent look of swoopy side bangs
and dramatically dark eye makeup.
Audrey
Wollen, the writer who coined the term “Sad Girl Theory” in 2014, gained
internet fame through her proposal that being sad publicly is a legitimate form
of protest against the patriarchy (though Wollen’s archetype of the chronically
online Tumblr girl was usually implied to be white, thin, conventionally
attractive and independently wealthy).
But this
time around, TikTok’s massive reach (nearly 1 billion users in 150 countries)
is helping the trend spread at an unprecedented rate. “I think some of this is
just teenagers having way too much access to the internet,” beauty writer Tamim
Alnuweiri said. “When I was a teenager, I also stuck my head against the window
and pretended I was in a music video when it was raining, but their version of
this is much more public.”
Kelly
Cutrone, the PR legend who founded the firm People’s Revolution and appeared on
The Hills, The City and America’s Next Top Model, once wrote a book of career
advice called If You Have to Cry, Go Outside. “It taught people how to deal
with their emotions in the workplace,” she said. “It’s pretty sad that sadness
would be a trend. But I have a 20-year-old, and those kids all went through
hell [during the pandemic].”
Cutrone
invented her own term to describe the kids she sees in clubs lately: “nocturnal
romance”. Think “zombie dark angel vibes: half-naked kids who look strung out,
with these weird, gazing stares”.
They’re
“creatures of the night”, Cutrone added, riffing off Julia Fox, the doe-eyed
fashion darling who’s often seen roaming the streets of New York in low-cut
jeans, Balenciaga bodysuits, and layers of thick black eyeliner. “She has this
posse of girls who come to my events sometimes and they’re quite the it girls,”
Cutrone said. “The it girls are no longer Twiggy: they’re Elvira.”
‘Sadness is
a trend’: why TikTok loves ‘crying makeup’. By Alaina Demopoulos. The Guardian,
October 31, 2022.
Have you
heard of a ‘femcel’ before? Even if you have not, you probably have seen one
some way. If you were obsessed with Lana Del Rey, Melanie Martinez, Fiona
Apple, Mitski, or MARINA before; admired Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita or Ottessa Moshfegh’s
My Year of Rest and Relaxation; felt like a piece of you was lost when Tumblr
died; said that you were in your Fleabag era; and identified as a ‘sad girl’,
then you might want to double check if you are being taken advantage of —
because femcels are coming for you.
The
aesthetic of being sad and longing for toxic relationships is getting
increasingly more glamorized. The idea of female incels started to become
popular during 2014 with the rise of popular artists such as Lana Del Rey,
along with the popularity of the social media platform ‘Tumblr’. The
romanization of femcels is promoting an unhealthy image that is expected for
females to attain and is having an incredibly negative effect on younger and
minority individuals. The comeback of this -core might be further endangering
this youth’s mental health.
Femcel
stands for ‘female involuntary celibate’, in simpler words: women who cannot
have intercourse or get in a relationship, not by choice. The term is related
to incels which are used for females who believe that they cannot attract
sexual partners (mainly males) and feel spite towards anyone who is sexually active.
However, femcels took the incel label and turned appropriated feminist language
to seem progressive. Mainly by not agreeing with the beauty standards of today
and feeling superior to the current dating scene.
In theory,
this sounds empowering but it has taken a darker turn: this discontentment with
regular men has led to many teenage girls desiring toxic relationships with
older men who are not in the regular dating pool of young women. On the other
side of the spectrum, through this ideal, many young females started wishing
death to any male.
Although
many years have passed since the rise of femcels in 2014, this aesthetic became
popular yet again with the femcel hashtag having almost 400 million views on
TikTok. This problematic ‘sad girl’ trend started mainly on the social
networking platform Tumblr with many users sharing pictures of pretty girls
crying with a glass of wine in their hands, images of Lana’s Born to Die album
vinyl next to a Marlboro pack, and quotes that explain how females are so tired
of everything in this misogynistic world.
Yet, these
exact femcels also make pretty misogynistic comments themselves. One of the
best ways this kind of femcel’s mindset is described is through the character
Amy Dunne’s monologue in Gone Girl:
“Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2 because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
This manipulative behavior of acting like a
totally different person and not being true to who you are is nothing that
young females should look up to. Watching a female come up with an undesirable
plan to sexually please a man to end up blaming the man for wanting such a
relationship might give a sense of false social justice. Especially when this
scheming person glamorizes murdering men because they fell for their game.
This whole
psychotic delusion plot of Gone Girl gets presented as a feminist movement that
shuts up ignorant and sexist men. Still, in actuality, Amy just uses men around
her to reflect her dissatisfaction with her own life.
This is
what ‘toxic femininity’ is: adhering to social norms for women so that you can
find your value in this patriarchal society. Femcels proudly embrace these
gender-based stereotypes such as ‘female manipulator’ and spread them across
the internet without being aware of the psychological influence on younger
females.
On an
important note, you might enjoy Gone Girl and the other artists described
previously even if you do not associate yourself with the description of
femcels. It is quite frustrating when the stuff you enjoy turns into a trend or
aesthetic, forcing you to be shoved into an ignorant box. This leads to another
toxic aspect of this ‘femcel’ aesthetic: all of these female artists are being
grouped together and called incels without the intention of belonging to this
category.
Especially
now more than ever, we females should be fighting to break away from
stereotypical characterizations and beauty standards enforced by the popular
media and stop labeling each other as expected from conglomerates that profit
from our pain. Yet here we are making fun of female artists and calling each
other manipulative and ugly. The same goes for the ever-so-popular
‘ballet-core’, which also romanticizes having eating disorders and being
beautifully stressed. Luxury brands like Miu Miu and Simone Rocha end up
marketing their products, while teenage girls get a free side of depression by
purchasing their best-selling wrap tops and hyper-feminine dresses.
While being
a femcel takes a lot of pride in being powerful and progressive — in the sense
that you are owning up to your stereotypically negative traits — they are
actually getting manipulated by marketing techniques that promote products that
fall under the aesthetic. Our emotions and taste for art are used to advertise
products to make us feel as if we belong to a community with similar issues.
However,
the femcel aesthetic purely displays white females who are in heterosexual
relationships; failing to be all-inclusive by not displaying people of
different races, religions, or sexuality. The younger minorities are yet again
shown that they cannot fit an aesthetic that is desired by the majority.
Creating these aesthetic trends not only harms individuals by romanticizing
unhealthily slim bodies and the desire for dangerous relationships, but they
enable discrimination and alienation of young females who do not fit any of the
mainstream aesthetics.
The
Romanticization of the Toxic Femcel Aesthetic. By Lara Gunturkun. Medium Magazine, October 1, 2022.
Introduction
— Or How We Arrived At This Juncture…
“Let this
be clear, I’m not a feminist,” said Lana Del Rey in an Instagram post in May
2020, a few months into the first period of COVID- 19 restrictions in the
United States. “But there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and
act like me — the kind of woman who says no but men hear yes — the kind of
women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves,
the kind of women who get their own stories and voices taken away from them by
stronger women or by men who hate women.”
Del Rey
goes on to name other popular female music artists including Doja Cat, Kehlani,
Beyonce, Nicki Minaj, Ariana Grande, Cardi B, and Camila Cabello, describing
the content of their music as solely about “being sexy, wearing no
clothes…cheating, etc.”
While this
(in Lana’s words) “‘controversial post’ that’s not controversial at all”
(notably, she has since deleted her Instagram account) is fairly old news at
this point, I recently watched a Youtube video titled “Lana Del Rey: The
Pitfalls of Having a Persona” by content creator Mina Le. Ultimately, the video
follows Del Rey on a deep dive into her career, discusses the negative example
that she has set for young and impressionable girls over her decade of
activity, and the controversy she has encountered as a female artist who writes
about being submissive, objectified, and, most notably, “glamorizing abuse.”
Not only
that, but Lana Del Rey has contributed to the 21st-century cultural phenomenon
of the Sad Girl, which over the years has branched out into a plethora of
subcultures in media, art, and of course online. If you have ever consumed
contemporary media, you have seen the Sad Girl. Formerly known as the damsel in
distress, the grieving widow, and the traumatized heroine, the Sad Girl can
simply be defined as a girl who is defined by her feminine trauma, heartbreak,
and overall gloomy, grounded demeanor. According to Mina Le, “society’s
obsession with the Sad White Woman” is a culture within itself, making the Sad
Girl a mainstream and well-known figure. Not only that, but the Sad Girl has
proven to have impacted the way modern culture operates and contributes to the
patriarchy more than we give her credit for.
Exhibit A:
Lana Del Rey
In 2012,
Lana Del Rey debuted her album that would place her into the mainstream charts
and influence a generation of young women: Born to Die. The album was and is
often critiqued to romanticize the hyper-feminine stance of needing to find
yourself in someone else, to be delicate and overly vulnerable, and to elude
stereotypically feminist endeavors in favor of allowing yourself to be
dominated in a “man’s world.”
Despite the contradiction to what most would consider being a modern and widely accepted feminist viewpoint in Western culture — the idea that with hard work, persistence, and just a smidge of combativeness, women can succeed and be equal to men — Lana Del Rey’s music appeals to a large audience of women.
In Lindsay
Zoldaz’s Pitchfork essay, “Pretty When You Cry,” she makes the statement that
popular music (she particularly references Katy Perry’s hit song ROAR), feels
“like it was drawn up from focus groups and genetically engineered in a
laboratory for the sole purpose of EMPOWERING [LISTENERS].”
Whereas in
Lana Del Rey’s music, the appeal for women comes from the simple fact that the
songs do such a good job at encapsulating the futile nature in which society
tells girls to pursue equality, to fight for equal footing in a system that was
custom-made to oppress them. For young women, Lana’s music almost feels like
saying “screw you” to all of the teachers and parents that have preached
perseverance as a cure-all to the subjugation that all women face at some point
in their lives.
Lana Del
Rey’s music is, ultimately, one of the defining factors of the Internet Sad
Girl Era. Looking at the Sad Girl as a generally one-dimensional figment
produced by western societal norms, it is pretty clear that Lana Del Rey’s
music matches perfectly with the essence of the Sad Girl, who lives to be sad.
Still, it would be inaccurate to say that Lana Del Rey’s music is responsible
for building up the modern Sad Girl persona; it is more truthful to make the
statement that her work perfectly sums up the Sad White Woman doctrine: to be
young and beautiful and abused or to sooner die.
Exhibit B:
The Sad Girl on the Internet
Black and
white photos of roses, tears, and cigarettes hanging from red, full chapped
lips. Rosy cheeks and puffy eyes next to images of batteries at 1%. “S(he)
be(lie)ve(d).” “He kissed the scars on her skin / He made her whole again.”
Crying selfie. Crybaby by Melanie Martinez. Effy and Cassie from Skins. A
crying white girl after crying white girl. The Internet Sad Girl Aesthetic.
For those
with unrestricted access to the internet in the early 2010s, the Internet Sad
Girl manifested most potently on Tumblr, Twitter, and the beginnings of
Instagram in the form of blogs and pages dedicated to perpetuating the culture.
While some
pages proved to be empowering and provided a space for people, particularly
teenage girls, to vent and share their feelings to a void of strangers, the
Internet Sad Girl also established a dangerous criterion for those struggling
with mental illness to share tips on harmful activities such as self-harm or
even suicide.
While sites
like Tumblr have now established guidelines and preventive measures to keep
their spaces safe and clean, in the early days there was little to no regulation
on what a user could post.
For
example, the now-deleted account “Depressions and Disorders” was a page run by
a teenage girl (who has since made anonymous comments about running her site in
an interview with Buzzfeed) which consisted of posts about self-harm habits and
tips, planned suicide attempts, eating disorders, and anonymous confessions
submitted by the account’s followers. Although the account owner often
suggested therapy to her followers, she also included posts that were in
support of self-harming techniques (sometimes including photos) and tips on
hiding mental illness and self-harm evidence from parents and therapists.
Thousands
upon thousands of tweets flooded feeds, talking about how difficult it was to
be a teenage girl, which did nothing but enforce the narrative that women are
inherently sad, inherently tortured, and inherently upset about not being
beautiful. Perhaps it is simply that the Internet amplified the pre-possessed
insecurities of teenage girls and young women, or perhaps Lana Del Rey’s music
released some chemical through headphones into the brains of impressionable
young women. Whatever the case, the Internet Sad Girl is someone who yearns for
a relationship, for a man, who cannot keep her mental state intact or be strong
in life. She is treated horribly by men yet wants them all the same, waits
eagerly for him to text her back, and enforces heteronormativity.
While this
is likely not the intention at the forefront of any self-proclaimed Sad Girl’s
mind, the movement reeks of the patriarchy and the ever-present male gaze. As
the Sad Girl is presented online, she lives to pour all of her essences into a
male counterpart, for someone big and strong to sweep her off her feet and
solve all her problems because she can not do it herself. It enforces the idea
that women are at their very best when they are sad, young, and helpless.
Of course,
the Internet Sad Girl only caters to the SadWhite Girl. The sadness and
struggles of women of color or the sadness of the impoverished were and still
are virtually ignored on social media. To truly be sad on the Internet and be a
part of the Internet Sad Girl trope requires a sadness rooted in white
privilege. In other words, sadness about not adhering to Western beauty
standards, or experiencing discrimination and marginalization in one’s
day-to-day life, or not being able to afford healthcare are not facets of the
Internet Sad Girl’s woes.
Of course,
the Internet Sad Girl is not all-consuming. In the last five or so years,
social media has been used as a powerful tool for change. As feminism evolves,
people are made aware of the dire situations that concern the world such as
COVID-19, the climate crisis, or movements like Stop Asian Hate. Thus, there is
a greater sense of intersectionality within who is included in modern feminism.
In 2020
alone, many feminists, primarily white women, were made aware of the injustices
that marginalized groups face in the United States alone, particularly within
the Black Lives Matter (BLM), which was sensationalized in the media and
online. It became trendy to be an activist and to speak out against injustice,
while it became stale and tasteless to be ignorant and self-absorbed. More and
more women have been realizing that what you look like and how men perceive you
are nothing in the face of terrors like racism, the prison-industrial complex,
and the impacts of historical imperialism.
“Maybe we
have realized that although not being texted back is irritating, it’s pretty
small scale in the face of all the awful things we see every day in the news,” says
the Establishment article “The Internet Sad Girl Is Over — And That’s A Good
Thing.” “Maybe it just fell out of fashion, as internet trends always do. Or
maybe it’s the fact that we have become not just depressed at what is
happening, but furious too, and we are no longer content to be regarded as
passive.”
Exhibit C:
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Other Figures
During my
journey into the depths of the Sad Girl’s corner of the Internet, I found
myself among a cacophony of Sad Girl tropes. The Sad White Woman is an entity
that goes by many names and faces, some heavily discussed for their prevalence
in media and film, and others that have taken shape by the heavy discussion on
social media platforms such as Tik Tok.
Of course,
there is the giant of the Sad Girl Industry known as the “manic pixie dream
girl.” The manic pixie dream girl, or, as I like to call her, the
I’m-not-like-other-girls-girl, exists solely to complement the white, “nice
guy,” male protagonist. On the surface, she seems to be independent, cool, and
fiercely idealistic, and “quirky.” Bonus points if she has colorful hair and
skateboards/rollerblades as a primary form of transportation. Think Ramona
Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, or Clementine Kruczynski from Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Ultimately,
the archetype may give the impression of a conventional feminist, someone
boyish and who opposes traditional feminine things such as makeup or dresses,
but in reality puts down other women in the process of appealing to the male
protagonist; furthermore she rarely passes the Bechdel Test.
Under the
“I’m-not-like-other-girls” umbrella, we may encounter the following variations
of the Sad Girl in media and online: The Sexy Tragic Muse, The Cool Girl, the
Pick Me, and the Broken Bird.
The Sexy
Tragic Muse, outlined in more detail in an article by Hannah Brooks Olson
titled “I Don’t Want To Be The ‘Troubled Girl’ Anymore,” is an evolution from
the previously established starving artist character. After observing examples
in television and film (Vanessa from Gossip Girl; Mimi from Rent), in
retrospect, the Sexy Tragic Muse tends to be a rather stagnant character, but
almost always can be seen backing the male protagonist (who is usually an
artist himself). She is only capable of pain, both physical and emotional, and
adoration for the male lead. Beyond that, however, the Sexy Tragic Muse is a
shell of a person.
One of the
more important details that distinguish her from other tropes is that the Sexy
Tragic Muse does not exist in real life. She is a symptom of poor and
overly-formulaic writing and is inorganic.
Next, we
arrive on the Broken Bird. Like the Sexy Tragic Muse, she is mostly only seen
in bad writing and rarely glimpsed in real life; she is not a real, multi-dimensional
person. Even so, she is a harmful trope within media because she feeds into the
Manic Pixie Dream Girl umbrella (which, as we have previously established,
encompasses harmful female stereotypes that, at their cores, are perpetrators
of the patriarchy).
The Broken
Bird suffers from an emotionless existence, devoid of any meaningful emotional
development. She is usually viewed as beautiful, cool, and unattainable by the
main male protagonist. Bonus points if she is an aloof older sister, the sole
female lead in an action film, or the snarky young girl. She is defined by a
past trauma, which is the only discernible element of character depth she
possesses. Her sole purpose in writing is to check the inclusivity box. How can
a film or story be sexist when it includes a super badass chick?
The Cool Girl (sometimes called “Bruh Girl”) is unique in that we can observe her in our everyday lives. She describes herself as the following: the Cool Girl is friends with boys and not girls. She dislikes makeup and wearing dresses, and girly television shows or magazines. She likes hanging out with The Guys because she cannot stand the drama that comes with having female friends. She is into non-girly things like beer, football, video games, and meat. She is adamantly anti-feminist.
She
flourishes when she puts other women down. While she might seem tough, she
ultimately adheres to the male gaze. The Cool Girl is a woman who is pitted
against other women for the benefit of the patriarchy to enforce the subversion
of women in society. When interacting with a Cool Girl, it is important to
remember that she is a product of a patriarchal society, and while those who
consider themselves to be feminists likely find the Cool Girl infuriating, it
must be recognized that her attitude is to no fault of her own.
Finally, we
move to the Pick Me girl. In many ways, the Pick Me is similar to the Cool Girl
in that she is fueled by internalized misogyny and that she chronically puts
down other women. However, she differs in that she can (though not always) be
feminine, boy-crazy, and obnoxiously flirtatious. Pick Mes push away other
women in the hopes that it makes them more attractive to the male gaze.
For a time,
Pick Me Girls were trending on TikTok — or rather, making fun of Pick Me Girls
was trending on TikTok. The trend involves young women, particularly teenage
girls, imitating Pick Mes, usually pulling from real-life experiences in high
school or college. While the intended tone of the videos usually is satirical
or ironic, the videos are received mostly as a form of comedy, via the comments
sections.
For the
most part, the primary objective of this trend seemed to not necessarily have
been to put down Pick Me Girls but to raise awareness against the harmful
attitudes of internalized misogyny within women. The main creators of content
calling out Pick Mes have been other women, demonstrating that many females are
aware of the issue and are aware that the goal of feminism is inclusion, not
polarization of other women, even if they have internalized misogyny. While
this is important discourse to have, the fact that social media has made the
Pick Me trope well known has led to a trend in Pick Me girls making fun of Pick
Me Girls (in true Pick-Me fashion), which only continues to serve the purpose
of criticizing women rather than to address actual issues with that mindset.
Even further, this has resulted in men taking the Pick-Me-on-Pick-Me criticism as
an invitation to make fun of the trope, which thus reinforces the patriarchy.
Pick Mes
are not as common in writing, however, they are probably the most common trope
found in real life. They are one of the more tangible and therefore more the
harmful cliche of the four sub-genres. While all tropes discussed here are all
conforming to the male gaze, the Pick Me is the most relevant to the 21st
century and society as we know it.
Exhibit D:
The Sad Girl Theory
Finally, we
reach the more optimistic side of the Internet Sad Girl: Sad Girl Theory.
Originally a term coined in 2015 by artist and activist Audrey Wollen, Sad Girl
Theory offers a new perspective on the sad female, arguing that feminine
sadness can be utilized for empowerment and self-fulfillment. Essentially, it
states as follows: women being sad on the internet can be taken as a form of
activism and protest. Women and girls can share their sorrows and struggles
online to destigmatize female sadness, to provide transparency to womanly
struggles for body autonomy, and to change the narrative that “female sadness
is weakness” to “female sadness is strength.”
This theory
has been embraced by so-called “selfie-feminists.” Artists at the forefront,
such as Zofia Krawiec and Wollen herself, have posted pictures encapsulating
their sadness — images of them crying, feeling empty, and discomfort in being
sexualized. All have acted to expose female sadness, regardless of race, with
the intention of empowerment and the normalization of feminine sorrow. While
the primary medium for selfie-feminism has been Instagram, sites like Twitter
or Youtube have seen similar content (see: artist Molly Soda crying on camera,
posted in 2012 on Youtube).
How can we
connect these ideologies to modern-day feminism? In interviews, Audrey Wollen
has reiterated her theory over and over. She argues that Sad Girl Theory
destigmatizes female sadness, bringing awareness and a sense of strength to
feminine struggles. It serves as a sort of new-wave feminist concept easily
disseminated by the emergence of the Internet and social media.
Additionally,
she argues that while the idea to teach girls to live as optimistic,
self-loving, “girls-can-do-anything-that-boys-can-do” thinkers is rooted in the
right place, it is cruel to raise girls to shirk their feelings of angst,
sadness, and frustration at the inequalities they have to face. Moreover,
feminism itself is something Wollen believes should encompass the
acknowledgment that being a girl can be difficult and painful.
Ultimately,
the goal of feminism is to be inclusive to all women, something that the
community has struggled with since the movement’s conception. While progress
has been made since the early 2010s when the toxic ramifications of the
Internet Sad Girl Aesthetic were at an all-time high, the harmful tropes that
we see in media because of that standard are still very much present, and they
affect real girls and women. The Sad Girl is more than poor writing; it is a
direct reflection of our culture. It is because the Sad Girl exists that we
need feminism more than ever.
Society’s
Obsession with the “Sad White Girl” By Sarah Hart. Slick Magazine, October 15,
2021
If you
could pick a moment when the sad girl tweeted and streamed and sighed her way
into the mainstream, you’d probably place the year as 2011.
That
summer, Lana Del Rey emerged, fully formed, onto the internet in a whirl of
beauty and tears and cigarette smoke. With her pleading looks and plaintive
glances, Del Rey was a Valley of the Dolls-era Sharon Tate for the 21st
century, a Bardot beauty fallen on hard times, a good girl gone despondent. The
image she cultivated was one of hard, masculine men and the women who yearned
for them, who grieved for them — “it’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you,
everything I do” — who were nothing without them. Above all, she was
capital-“S” Sad. She was something tragic, something doomed.
“Vamp of
constant sorrow,” Rolling Stone proclaimed, over an image of her wearing furs
and smoking sadly (of course). It’s an image that Del Rey would shrewdly
utilize in the years following — whether in song names (“Summertime Sadness,”
the unsubtle “Sad Girl”) or public image (flower crowns, sepia filters, a
fixation with suicide and death). Something about this overt yet glamourous
sadness, this image of mascara smudged perfectly by tears, of a cigarette in a
holder held by a delicate yet trembling hand, stuck in the cultural consciousness
of the decade. And thus the Internet Sad Girl was born.
2011 was
also the year when Instagram began to take hold, and YouTube continued to
cement its place in media. With new technology came the opportunity to share
your most intimate moments in a way that wasn’t possible before — the ability
to be truly steam-of-consciousness in your discussions of your feelings, your
secrets, your particular problems at that point in time. It’s easy to see why
this way of baring all was particularly appealing to young women, who were used
to being silenced when they tried to talk of their sadness and depression, who
had it ingrained within them that they should aspire to be cool, calm, fine
with everything that happened to them.
Young women
in this new era were also the victims of wage stagnation and an escalating
housing crisis, poor access to mental-health services, increasingly limited
access to reproductive rights; in other words, they had many reasons to be
miserable, depressed, and cynical, and suddenly there was a platform on which
to voice these concerns. A platform where people listened, or at least related.
Every retweet, every like, every “same,” serves as an affirmation that your
feelings are valid, that you are not alone in your struggle.
“the
sadness of girls should be recognised as an act of resistance. [A] limited
spectrum of activism excludes a whole history of girls who have used their
sorrow and their self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination. Girls’
sadness […] is a way of reclaiming agency over our bodies, identities, and
lives.”
Viewed
through this lens, the Sad Girl is inherently radical — it is an expression of
personhood, of the difficulty inherent in being a girl. The selfie taken while
crying in a bathroom, the tweet about missing your ex — these are the methods
of girls resisting what is expected of them.
But this
new-era manifestation of the personal as political is undone by the very
platforms it thrives on. Across Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter, we saw artists
like Molly Soda, who showcased works which consisted of her crying on webcam,
and Arvida Byström and Amber Navarro, whose exhibition of digital and Instagram
art was titled QWERTY, Flirty and Crying. Another flag-bearer for the movement
was Sad Girls Guide, which in a memorable piece for The Toast, intoned that
“sad girls aren’t the girls you see walking around with the teary-eyed gaze of
someone who looks like they could break down at any instant if nudged the wrong
way.” Hugely popular Tumblr users such as Plastic Pony and online zines like Sad
Girl Magazine contributed to the sense that this was a major internet movement,
rather than just the preserve of artists.
Adding to
this, and one of the most high-profile examples of the Sad Girl phenomenon, is
“So Sad Today,” Melissa Broder’s hugely popular Twitter account. Dedicated
solely to publishing tweets about, simply, being sad, Broder’s account is so
popular that it spawned its own book. Sample tweets include:
“i don’t
like you, respect you, enjoy your company or find you cute but i still need you
to like me”
“i miss
ex-boyfriends who were never my boyfriend”
“determined
to not get my life together”
At the time
of writing, the account had 506,000 followers. There are normally four or five
tweets posted a day, most of them with thousands of retweets, a constantly
updated stream of wry, knowing despair. Laid out like this, an infinite scroll
into the depths of sadness, stripped of complexity and context, the idea that
the online Sad Girl is an act of rebellion seems hollow. Repeated over and over
again, it becomes empty, no longer an outlet but a parody of sincere emotion, a
stereotype and fetishization of female sadness. If the Sad Girl is desirable,
funny, sexy, then surely to make serious and concerted attempts to alleviate
mental illness or depression is the opposite of those things. When there’s an
onus on performative, calculated vulnerability, there’s no reward for
sincerity.
Attempts to
feel better rarely translate well into 140 characters. Rather than immediately
shareable or aesthetically beguiling, narratives of recovery are difficult and
complex and ugly. Women trying to help themselves are ugly, as is any effort
shown by a woman. To care, to want, regardless of optics or popularity, is
something women are constantly denigrated for.
This is
particularly worrying in the way the movement fetishizes bad relationships, in
there being something glamorous or romantic about being treated shittily by
men, and to keep wanting them all the same. Of course, this is reality: People
can and will lust after those who have treated them badly. There is a certain
luxury in longing for something you cannot fully have. But it’s that this,
again, is championed as something that is a core tenet of being a girl, that
womanhood is defined by sitting and waiting and yearning. That this is normally
expressed as waiting for guys to text you back, or give you the time of day at
all, not only seems to reinforce sexist ways of thinking about how men and
women should communicate, but also emphasizes the heteronormativity behind the
movement. Just as Lana Del Rey’s songs and videos pine over daddy figures and
emotionally-unavailable bad-boys, the Sad Girl movement seems to define the
female experience as something that hinges on male interaction, a subtle exclusion
of girls who don’t date men.
It’s no
surprise that the rise of the Internet Sad Girl directly coincides with the
ascendance of social media platforms that not only place a direct emphasis on
sharing personal, private details, but also trade in an aesthetic currency.
Look sad, but do it in a way that makes you look hot. Depression and sadness
become something that is only valid if you can look good doing it, if you can
post a selfie on Instagram with your mascara smudged. As the Sad Girls Club
article on The Toast notes in a painfully irony-free description of their muse:
“she listens to better music than you and might spend her alone time watching
French films from the ’60s or angsty TV shows from the ‘90s.” The Sad Girl is
more than just a woman who’s sad: she’s always cool, always better than you.
The Manic-Pixie-Dream-Sad-Girl.
Wrapped up
on this is still another form of exclusion. Search for the term on Tumblr,
perhaps the site that most fetishizes the idea, and you’ll see image after
image of, specifically, thin white girls holding cigarettes, their tights
slightly ripped (presumably this is an indicator of despair, rather than them
having caught them on the edge of a chair). These images also betray the highly
middle-class origins of the movement. It’s telling that the Sad Girl as a term
was coined by an artist, that it is prevalent among those with social and
cultural capital. The tears of black women, of poor women, are constantly
ignored in society — you can’t use performative sadness for your gain when you
are disenfranchised and your sorrow ignored. As always, it’s only those who are
privileged in society who can capitalize off it. Nobody wants to like your
crying selfie if it’s about how you literally can’t afford to buy food, or if
you don’t fit the mold of Western beauty standards. Then you’re just a woman,
crying. You’re not part of a movement.
Similarly,
actual mental-health problems, outside of references to various medications or
therapists, aren’t part of the Sad Girl aesthetic. It’s not hot to be cowering
on the floor because you can’t cope with your anxiety anymore. It isn’t sexy to
lie in bed for four days straight and only eat beans on toast because it’s all
the effort you can manage. When women’s real depression and real upset is taken
and scrubbed clean and sanitized so that it becomes an aesthetically pleasing
image, or a witty 140 characters, it is a negation of our complex and
challenging lives.
With the
ascension of Trump, the more ferocious and important battle for women’s rights,
and continuing cuts to support services, you might expect the Sad Girl movement
to be stronger than ever, for women to have retreated into an aestheticized
version of disillusionment. But the opposite seems to have happened: The Sad
Girl movement seems to be on the decline.
The patron
saint of sad girls, Lana Del Rey, has even named her next album Lust for Life.
While the @sosadtoday account is still updated, Melissa Broder now functions as
an agony aunt in Vice, perhaps preferring the security of paid, traditional
media outlets. The artists who used to be the forefront of the movement, such
as Plastic Pony, have removed their Tumblrs from the internet, and Molly Soda’s
artwork has turned away from videos of her crying. Web searches for So Sad
Today peaked in early 2016, and have been generally declining throughout 2017.
Maybe we
have realized that although not being texted back is irritating, it’s pretty
small scale in the face of all the awful things we see every day in the news.
Maybe it just fell out of fashion, as internet trends always do. Or maybe it’s
the fact that we have become not just depressed at what is happening, but furious
too, and we are no longer content to be regarded as passive.
The
Internet Sad Girl is dead. Now let’s get angry.
The Reign
Of The Internet Sad Girl Is Over— And That’s A Good Thing. By Hannah Williams.
Medium, August 24, 2017.
L.A.-based
artist Audrey Wollen made a digital splash last year with her Sad Girl Theory,
the idea she proliferated across social media and in interviews that female
sadness and self-loathing is not a singular experience to be ashamed of, but
actually a form of empowerment that can ultimately unite women. Using Instagram
as her primary platform, the ethereal, red-haired beauty transformed her feed
into her very own art gallery, where she is the main attraction. Its
provocative and enthralling mix of self-portrait selfies, where Wollen often
objectifies her own body, inserts herself into famous paintings, and makes
statements about her very particular worldview. We caught up with the fiercly
intelligent and highly articulate CalArts student to find out more about Sad
Girl Theory, her nuanced relationship with the Internet, and how she plans on
spending the rest of the summer.
How would
you describe your artistic aesthetic?
I don’t
know if my aesthetic is particular to my artistic practice or just a general
methodology for existing or surviving—a way of thinking about “looking” that
helps me continue this wavering project of “being”—but my summer aesthetic is
currently in transition from “school girl Anime princess in Manchester, UK,
1988” to “18th-Century prostitute discovers Bjork CD on syphilis deathbed.”
What are
you currently working on?
I’m writing
a book. At least, I’m saying I’m writing a book to justify how much time I’m
spending alone in my room freaking out about words. If you’re freaking out
about words, say you’re writing a book. If you’re freaking out about colors
existing, say you’re making abstract paintings, you know? I count freaking out
as a kind of work, so right now, I’m freaking out about girls, our histories
and our futures, words, and how they change what girls are, our histories and
our futures, bodies, and how they change words, and how they change what girls
are, etc, etc.
How would
you describe Sad Girl Theory?
Sad Girl
Theory is the proposal that the sadness of girls should be witnessed and
re-historicized as an act of resistance, of political protest. Basically, girls
being sad has been categorized as this act of passivity, and therefore,
discounted from the history of activism. I’m trying to open up the idea that
protest doesn’t have to be external to the body; it doesn’t have to be a huge
march in the streets, noise, violence, or rupture. There’s a long history of
girls who have used their own anguish, their own suffering, as tools for
resistance and political agency. Girls’ sadness isn’t quiet, weak, shameful, or
dumb: It is active, autonomous, and articulate. It’s a way of fighting back.
Who are
your favorite "sad girls?"
Every day,
I find new ones or reconsider old icons. I have my familiar classics: Judy
Garland, Sylvia Plath, Ana Mendieta, Lana Del Rey. And my new obsessions—right
now, I’m really into Little Edie from Grey Gardens, Edie Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, and Eve herself, as in, Adam and.
What is the
importance of sad girls and what is the importance of acknowledging sad girls?
I think
it’s important to look very hard at anything that mass culture wants to stay
invisible. Sad girls have been kept invisible for literally thousands of years.
The number-one cause of death globally for girls between 15 to 19 is suicide,
and yet, we still tell every girl that her sadness is individual, her own
failure, her own symptom, and to keep quiet about it. Suffer alone. It’s often
dismissed as teenage angst, or some narcissistic panic. Instead of trying to
paint a gloss of positivity over girlhood, instead of forcing optimism and
self-love down our throats, sticking a Band-Aid on this gaping wound, I think
feminism should acknowledge that being a girl in this world is really hard, one
of the hardest things there is, and that our sadness is actually a very
appropriate and informed reaction.
How has
Instagram worked for you as a platform? What do you like about it?
I started
putting my work on Instagram at first simply because it was available. It’s a
free and easy way to show people images that you have made. But I very quickly
realized that Instagram gave a lot of young girls a way to control how they
represented themselves, to play with their own performance, to construct an
identity, alternate identities, and then tear down everything they had just
built with a click. I like the little territories of female image-making that
popped up: Sometimes they honestly feel like actual neighborhoods or camp
grounds, a corner of digital space that girls managed to claim as their own.
Plus, I kinda like that Instagram has boundaries that we can push up against.
It’s not a utopia—it has obvious censorship problems, it has corporate bias, it
profits off of people’s personal work and information. We can critique those
issues from within the medium itself, and that’s exciting for me.
Do you ever
worry about oversharing on social media?
Yes, of
course, I worry. I literally worry about everything that I do, though.
Honestly, I’m actually weirdly strict about what makes it onto the Internet.
There are huge parts of my life that I don’t like sharing: I don’t like the
social hierarchies that can develop, so I try not to post anything that shows
off who I hang out with or who I saw at a party or whatever. I don’t post about
the specifics of who I’m in love with. But I do talk about a lot of things that
we are told should be kept “private” or “personal”: Nakedness, bodies, trauma,
alienation, intimacy—you know, girly stuff. One of the most important mottoes
feminism has given us is “The personal is political.” Usually, if a part of my
life is considered “too personal” to share, I try to think about why that
specific part has to be kept secret and who that secrecy is protecting.
Who are your largest inspirations?
I rely on a
whole family of queens, past, present, and future, to keep me going. These
range from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Grace Jones to my friend and teacher
Maggie Nelson.
Who are
your favorite artists?
Deee-Lite,
Joan Didion, and Edgar Degas.
Who is your
favorite new artist?
I love the
girl noise duo odwalla88!
If you
could have anyone as a roommate, living or deceased, who would it be?
Vivienne
Westwood, easy. But Vivienne now, Vivienne at 74 years old.
What's on
your summer playlist?
Kylie
Minogue’s album Fever (2001) is the best summer music of all time.
What are
you looking forward to this summer?
Summer is
actually my least favorite part of the year, because I’m always sweaty and
sunburnt and sad, but I think this summer might be okay. I’m going to lie on
the floor in front of the fan, and as long as I don’t move at all for three
months, it will be okay.
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