Do you have a stand-out childhood story that is indicative of not only what you were like as a tot, but of how you are today, too? I do.* When I was 4, I had a phase where I only ate bread, and only wore pink. I had a pink velvet dress that I wore to death, ate bread like a duck in a Catholic church pond, and could not be swayed from that path. I hadn’t chosen the lifestyle: the lifestyle had chosen me.
*(Actually, I have a couple — and as it was my younger sister’s birthday yesterday, here’s another one I’ll share, to humble myself for her. I didn’t look at my sister — didn’t cast my eyes to her general direction — until she was 11 weeks old, because I had just seen Lady and the Tramp, and Lady ignores the new baby who she’s really jealous of. There is 4 and a half years between my sister and I: there was no excuse for this behaviour. You can read last year’s newsletter, also inspired by my sister’s joy at the little things in life, here. Happy birthday Squeals! Have the gift of my attention.)
This phase — and Mom, this time it really was just a phase — stuck for a couple of weeks, until I moved on. (This, we must remember, was a one hundredth of my entire life: so I think I did pretty well on the ol’ willpower front.) I didn’t move onto something with similar single-mindedness; I think it was just whatever patterns Boden’s pedal pushers came in. While I didn’t stay away from pink completely, I kept it at arm’s length, preferring the pale blue of my favourite Tarzan pyjamas on my actual arms and legs and torso.
I don’t think it was intentional, but I do think it was a subconscious way of distancing myself from being a ‘girly girl’, with its associations of frivolity and frippery and whatever else it carries as patriarchal baggage. That sounded like a lot of stress and expectation, and I didn’t want that. (Fun fact, which I’m sure you know already: in Roman times, pink was considered the ‘boys colour’. Almost like……….they’re made up!) I wasn’t a Tomboy, either, with whatever baggage that carried; I just wanted to play Wii Games and watch Lizzie McGuire in peace.
Fast forward to the mid 2010s, and we meet again with millennial pink. This time, though, instead of being over it, I’m all over it. I had bubblegum pink hair. I lapped up the Baker-Miller pink staircase at Frank’s like everyone else who lived in London in 2016 did. A couple of years later, I set up a business with pinky branding; a year or so after that, I launched a pink-on-pink t-shirt, which has since become my bestseller.
The reason this is at the forefront of my mind is because I’m currently finishing my MA dissertation, which is about how the British media treat female fans of music (what we might today call a ‘fangirl’). What I’m seeing again and again, amongst other things, is an infantilisation of the fans (there’s no shared etymology between those two words: I’ve checked. “Infant” comes from in (not; the opposite of) + fans (speak; being able to speak).)
We denounce SO much because it’s most often enjoyed by girls/young women/anyone who is coded as feminine (and, of course, for those who are Black or POC, there’s additional facets.) From fashion to pop music, it’s deemed to be without merit. How can it be something good, if it’s something that girls like? The idea is almost laughable.
(In my research, something I’m also seeing a lot of is the suggestion that these fans don’t even have an artistic or aesthetic assessment of the music in question: they’re just running around with love heart eyes and drool coming out of their mouths. Did I fancy every single member of One Direction at the time? Yes. Do I also listen to their albums in the present day, because I still think they’re bops? Yes!)
At best, when you liked something GIRLY, it was something cheesy, something you admitted to self-deprecatingly as a ‘guilty pleasure’. At worst, it was embarrassing, a mortifying acknowledgment that you knew might stop people from taking you seriously in other, totally unrelated, areas of life too.
But, as ever — Harry Styles gets it. In a much-adored Rolling Stone interview from 2019, he said this about his female fans:
“They’re the most honest — especially if you’re talking about teenage girls, but older as well. They have that bullshit detector. You want honest people as your audience. We’re so past that dumb outdated narrative of ‘Oh, these people are girls, so they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ They’re the ones who know what they’re talking about. They’re the people who listen obsessively. They fucking own this shit. They’re running it.”
And he’s right. We ARE so past that dumb, outdated narrative of “these people are girls, so they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Long live, instead, the days of “Oh, these people are girls, so let’s pay close attention to what they like; because they’re the present and the future.”
Here’s a little window into what I’m enthusiastic about at the mo…
01 lusting after
some knitwear from GMMRS. This was one of those rare instances when the instagram algorithm really worked, and it was so spot-on that I nearly forgave it all of its previous misdemeanours (nearly.)
02 currently reading
This lovely interview with Monica McLaughlin, from On Substack. I’ve been subscribed to Dearest for a while now, and her genuine interest for the topic shines in every email she sends; it was lovely to read more about how her enthusiasm drives her.
03 wishing I wrote
MORE WORDS ON MY DISSERTATION HAHAHAHA SEND HELP X
04 whipping up
I’m gonna be honest with you: I was seeing family this weekend, so I’ve done a whole lot of not very much cooking (but a lot of eating). For breakfast today I had a white Magnum, and I highly recommend it to start the day right.
05 listening to
Amy Gledhill on the Off Menu podcast. Amy’s a comic from Hull, and it was so nice to hear them talk about places that I actually knew of.
That’s all for now! Thanks so much for being here; I really appreciate it.