When unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot by white police officer Darren Wilson this past August, Americans of all colors raised their voices in sorrow and outrage.
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.
You are a brand. The sun-drenched, chrome-filtered frames of your Instagram feed; the captioned albums on your Facebook profile. Your six-word Twitter bio, clever without pretension.
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.
“Always be happy, never be content.” Etched in pavement just a few steps from my dorm, the inscription never fails to draw my attention. I’ve always read it as a testament to Princeton’s hard-driving academic ethos: a reminder to students to always keep striving, never to cease pushing themselves to achieve.
“What is that thing?” I watched in confusion as Anna exhaled a thin stream of what looked like smoke into the cramped air of her bedroom. With only a few weeks left in our senior year, we had spent the afternoon trading high school reflections and speculating about the mysteries of college, now only months away. Real schoolwork and the anxieties of the application process now behind us, these last months of spring had begun to feel like a sort of limbo, a time of licensed aimlessness before the fall brought new routines.
And as the yelling continued, it became clear to me that we had done nothing — nothing, that is, except for being female and alone on a Saturday night.
“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.”
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.
