Ever since the giddy, popcorn and T. Swift-fueled “Truth” games of seventh grade slumber parties, those two words have become a default response to countless puzzled male faces. From Sex and the City to Gossip Girl, generations of chick flicks and girl-power soap operas reinforce the idea that no crush, no kiss, and no hook up, no matter how “casual” or “on the D-L,” is to be withheld from a girl’s close circle.
A teenage girl is found dead in her bedroom. The culprit? Emo, a death-obsessed youth subculture. But while some teens claim emo romanticizes mental illness, others call it therapy.
When I walked into the women’s locker room at Dillon gym earlier this week, I noticed a poster that made me bite my lip. Tacked up between weekly fitness schedules, the sign grabbed my attention with the headline: “The weight is over.” The line, I thought, could have been pulled from a diet product ad—Sensa, maybe, or Alli. It was the sort of cheesy slogan you see on caffeine-and-diuretic “supplements” at CVS.
I fell in love with Lana Del Rey a week after I got my driver’s license. Sixteen and in the deeper throes of teenage angst, I’d taken to calling the suburban split-level I’d grown up in “my parents’ house” and spending as much time as possible out with my steady, if less than stable, high school boyfriend.
“If corporate feminism is the end of feminism, then it is the end of a movement that has been ending for generations—and continues to thrive, most indebted to its harshest critics.”
I joined LinkedIn the summer before sophomore year. I had just started my first “real” internship, a public relations gig at a radio station in Boston, and felt remarkably grown-up sitting in a cubicle in black pumps and a pencil skirt.
