The Miseducation of Teenage Girls- and how we should start giving them credit for their cultural impact
By Rhiju Chakraborty (they/them)
It's been a century since the term "teenager" was coined and shaped into a narrative for public discourse. The "teenager" is known for their rebellious nature, and a desperate desire to break free from societal trappings, but the teenage girl is a much more recent phenomenon that's been culturally associated with negative imagery, such as childishness, naivety, and foolishness.
Teenage girls have been behind the meteoric rise of every one of your and your parents' favorite bands, such as the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Queen. A surprising statement, as teenage girls are known for their music being considered basic by the general public. But it's this music, deemed basic, that generations later become pillars of music.
Teenage girls were the ones who flocked in masses inside tiny record stores to sell-out copies of Abbey Road. Before the Beatles, they popularized Frank Sinatra. Before the Blue Eyes singer, they made Elvis Presley a legend, championing the songwriter and helping cultivate the image of the artist we know today.
The story is an old one, but one that's worth telling anyway. The story of how we as a society use teenage girls as a punching bag to project all of our deepest insecurities onto, while every industry imaginable on this planet, from beauty-care to music, uses them as their meal ticket. They have for generations been shaping our culture, but once they grow up and fade into seniority, and society starts to appreciate what they popularized in the first place, their role in pioneering the art, that we now consider a "classic", is suddenly forgotten altogether.
They're the tired punchline of every imaginable insult. Their taste in everything, from fashion to politics, is one that's made fun of relentlessly. They're the exact opposite of refined taste, yet we so easily forget who brought the taste into fashion before it was refined. They have the collective power to bring a cultural icon out of obscurity. Corporate marketers recognize them for their monetary value and empower them to pump out financial benefits, yet we as a society somehow hate them for getting so much attention and being mainstream.
We love to hate on them because we know life as we know it couldn't exist without them. We see their influence even in our modern vernacular. They helped us move on from Shakespearean words such as maketh, thy, and doth, and transition into a way of speaking that's more familiar to us today. Literature as we know it, wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for teenage girls. It was stories from literary masterminds such as Jane Austen, and the Brontë sisters, who penned novels such as Wuthering Heights, Pride & Prejudice, and Jane Eyre, and who were championed by their young female fanbase, who helped them evolve the concept of novel writing from something that was sneered at, to something that’s become a respectable way to think critically about the world around us.
Teenage girls have for centuries been able to put a finger on shifting waves and capture the zeitgeist of whatever period of history they're in. Very facets of the economy have been curated to profit off of their incredible monetary and socio-political capital. They have been the ones behind pop-cultural movements, such as the #freebritney movement (a movement whose figurehead was also the victim of the societal shaming of teenage girls).
Imagery of throngs of screaming girls at a concert for a boy-band is immediately evoked when teenage girls are mentioned in a conversation. But what if instead of reducing them to an image that denies them of their political, and cultural capital, we actually start to give them credit for the way they've shaped our culture? Because then maybe, just maybe, we can as a society, move past this mindset of having a superiority complex and recognize that we need them more than they need us.
