I am sick of magazines telling me what to do. Close, but that’s not it. I am sick of reading articles that tell me the right way to apply lip liner. No, I don’t know what that is. I am sick of being told that I’m a girl. Yeah. That. I identify as female. But if one more magazine or commercial tells me that I’m a girl or a woman I will express my anger in traditionally and socially constructed masculine ways.
This is because I hate what the media thinks girls and women are. I do not like their definition. I would like to see their sources. Research. I want to see evidence of research. I want to see the case studies that told them women have thigh gaps and smooth hair and long eyelashes and if they don’t the human race will not happen anymore because hello men are only human all they want is perfection or they can’t reproduce– just read Cosmo.
A college-aged female fed up with the media’s depictions of women. Look, I know this isn’t groundbreaking stuff. Ha, if I had a nickel, ammi right? We all just can’t stop talking about it! Your boyfriend must be so annoyed by all your talk about social constructs and the injustice of Photoshop. Your poor boyfriend. The things he puts up with, haha, what a keeper.
I will throw your boyfriend off of a cliff.
I don’t want to stop talking about how terrible the media is to girls. And if everyone wants to stop hearing about it and we comply, we’ll just have a bigger problem. And I’ll die early from a stress and anger induced heart attack by the time I’m 25.
We didn’t come out of the womb wanting perfectly shaped eyebrows and with a strong natural inclination to save up money for a tummy tuck. Our whole girlhood was full of outside sources telling us that we love pink and we will soon care about the presentation of our armpits. There are girls all over the world right now trying to figure out how to straighten their hair because apparently their natural hair isn’t okay anymore. (“What’s mascara? Where does it go? Near my EYES??”) ALSO did you know that 53% of thirteen-year-old girls are unhappy with their bodies*? 53%. If women weren’t so bad at math because of biology I would understand how terrible that is!
So yeah. I’m still annoyed. I’m still angry. I’m still going to talk about this. And you can tell your boyfriend that if he rolls his eyes one more time that I have at least five different cliff locations from which he can choose to be flung off. I’m not a monster.
I’m tired of being a girl. I’m tired of being a woman. I’m growing increasingly more annoyed by those articles circulating in our nebulous world that try so hard to decipher “What Women Really Want.” Dude, I don’t know. I want a Reese’s cup right now. In an hour maybe I’ll want a beer. Tomorrow I might want to fly to California and become a lumberjack or whatever it is they do in California. I’m a person. Just because I have long hair that I like to braid sometimes doesn’t mean you need an article telling you what I mean when I say “Want to go to Starbucks?”
So yeah, I’m taking a break from identifying as a girl. I’m an actor and I’m a student and I’m a daughter and I’m a friend. And occasionally I’m still an Ashlee Simpson circa 2004 fan.
*This statistics is taken from the documentary Miss Representation, available on instant watch Netflix. Everyone should watch it. I’ll know if you don’t.