The Kids Are Watching
As a younger millennial, my youth was situated somewhere between the debut of Bratz dolls and the first airing of the Carl’s Jr. Kate Upton commercial (we all know which one I’m talking about). Sometime within these glory days of blatant sexualization, I sat on the floor of my bedroom, dressing my dolls in miniskirts and tube tops, Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time” playing on MTV in the background, and my first major life goal was born: to become hot. During this time of ignorant bliss, I didn’t realize how gross, and otherwise problematic, it was for a 7-year-old to aspire to hotness above all else, nor how gross it was to film, produce, and release a music video centered around the “sexy schoolgirl” trope.
The nightmarish state of affairs surrounding the beauty standards women and girls are—and have been—subjected to is unfortunately nothing new, and while the pressures to be “pretty” or “beautiful” lay the foundation of our modern, image-obsessed culture, for anyone paying attention (as I was), “sexy” holds more capital. In a society which values capital above all else, becoming hot felt like a very important, maybe even the most important, goal to achieve.
While I was certainly told the right things by my parents and teachers about how essential it is to be kind, to be smart, to be strong, what I was shown, via a barrage of hypersexualized images, advertisements, movie tropes, etc., contradicted these sentiments. And as the abounding visuals of the “sex sells” marketing strategy proliferated from television to desktop to the palm of my hand, it didn’t take long for my impressionable young self to receive the message loud and clear: the most impressive and influential quality a woman can have is sex appeal.
Before I could graduate to being hot, I first had to learn how to be pretty, a process which was undoubtedly aided by the consumption, both conscious and subliminal, of the media of my youth and reinforced by the scrutiny of my peers. During the liminal stages of the image-driven media we know today, there wasn’t much concern, or any concern at all, with what society’s unhealthy fixation on outer beauty, particularly that of women, was communicating to younger generations, nor how it might affect the ways in which we interacted with each other. In the pursuit of monetary gain, my youth was hijacked by the echoes of a vain culture reverberating through the school hallways.
I was in third grade the first time I was teased for not shaving my legs. If my memory serves me, the specific line of advice I was given was that I ought to “go back to the zoo.” I knew that grown women were expected to amend their body hair to that of a sphynx cat, but I hadn’t anticipated being confronted with this standard so early on. I suppose I have my Italian ancestors to thank for gifting me leg hair long and dark enough to be seen across a classroom.
In an attempt to appease the bullies, I did something I would later recognize as nearly every woman’s catch-22. Armed with a rusty razor I found in a dark corner of the cupboard beneath my mom’s sink and literally just water (ouch), I gave in to the pressure, unintentionally reinforcing a standard that had initially brought me distress. As a result, I was then teased for having done so.
This pattern continued throughout my primary and secondary school experiences. I was criticized for my pale complexion, then taunted for showing up to class with a nearly-third-degree sunburn. I felt pressured to wear makeup, then was deemed as “trying too hard” when I did (to be fair, sparkly blue eyeshadow in the sixth grade was maybe a bit much). As if the journey through childhood and adolescence isn’t perplexing enough by nature, girls like me were witnessing firsthand the unveiling of the labyrinthine, vapid system that lay ahead, riddled with mixed messages, in which the best thing we could be is beautiful, and the worst thing we could do is care too much about how we look. This confounded my journey toward hotness, as I was beginning to realize that simply achieving my goal wouldn’t be enough, that I would have to curate my good looks, all the while feigning disinterest in them.
Perhaps the most apropos illustration of this paradox in the media of my youth is the “ugly-pretty girl” movies, the formula for which was straightforward and unchanging. A girl, who already meets society’s standards of beauty but (this is important) doesn’t know it, is “transformed” into a better (prettier) version of herself by simply taking off her glasses and putting on some mascara. At which point, she is rewarded with (the guy, the job, the respect she already deserved but never had) not only because she is pretty, but specifically because she is the type of pretty girl, or woman, who doesn’t care too much about her appearance.
Truthfully, I loved watching Mia Thermopolis blossom from a dorky highschooler into a poised princess with straightened hair in The Princess Diaries (2001) as a young girl, but in hindsight I realized that plucking your eyebrows shouldn’t be paramount to fulfilling your life’s ambitions. Other ugly-pretty girl movies, like She’s All That (1999) and Never Been Kissed (1999) featured protagonists who were largely unhappy prior to their makeovers. If we’re being generous, the message here is that in order to feel your best, you have to look your best. While there may be some truth to this, the movie-makeovers of my generation weren’t geared toward self-care and individual expression. Rather, they all centered around a single trope, in which a thin, usually white girl or young woman conforms to the predetermined beauty standards indicative of her time, and feels better for having done so. This dilutes the concept of looking your best with the reality that your best may still not be good enough in a society with such narrow, ubiquitous standards of beauty.
Fortunately for me, or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), I fit in with these overly-specific standards just enough to feel justified in my pursuit of them. I started to learn how to toe the line between maintaining my appearance and seeming like I cared too much about it, and, whether I realized it or not, I was becoming increasingly concerned with cultivating my good looks and less so with that of nearly any other aspect of my being. In her TED Talk, self-esteem advocate Meaghan Ramsey says, “In an image-obsessed culture, we’re training our kids to spend more time and mental effort on their appearance at the expense of all other aspects of their identities.” This is exactly what was happening to me, and when I finally became old enough, or rather “developed” enough, to try my hand at being hot, this imbalance of character only got worse.
As if perpetually striving for beauty isn’t taxing enough, society was communicating to me that pretty is good, but sexy is better. I remember dancing along to The Pussycat Dolls’ music video for “Buttons” with my friends as young as 11-years-old (if you’ve seen the video, you understand why that’s concerning). Despite the pretense that perhaps the group’s music and performances simply weren’t made for kids, I recall sitting in my living room, watching The Pussycat Dolls perform live at the 2005 Teen Choice Awards, transfixed by the power of their sex appeal to command an audience. They later performed at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards in 2009.
This conception in which I was conflating power and strength with sexuality was reinforced across pop culture, from superheroine movies, like Catwoman (2004) and Elektra (2005), to reality TV, like Keeping Up With the Kardashians (2007), to basically every film released between 2000-2010 starring Megan Fox, all of which placed greater value on sexy aesthetics than anything else. In pursuit of the esteem we believed would result from achieving this coveted hotness, my friends and I headed to the mall to buy our first pushup bras. As we waited for our budding breasts to grow, something else was growing between us: a fierce competitiveness, not regarding who was best at soccer, who had the highest grades, or who could play the violin, but rather whose waist was the smallest and whose cleavage the deepest.
Our society’s penchant for commodifying sexuality was seeding my most foundational relationships with resentment and back-handed compliments, something I wouldn’t recognize as anything other than “normal” for years. Around this same time, the blatant objectification I had witnessed in the pop culture of my youth started happening to me firsthand. Having been spoon-fed all of the wrong ambitions since I was old enough to play with dolls, I took this as a sign that I was finally coming into my own. Like all of the worst drugs, the high I got from garnering the affections of my male counterparts, from “outshining” my female peers, was exhilarating at first and fleeting soon after. And when this attention on behalf of my long sought-after hotness advanced beyond the boys at school to grown men out in public, the effects diminished to expected at best and scary at worst. As I inched closer to the arduous journey of young adulthood, the final moments of my teenage years were accompanied by a sense of dissatisfaction, a trait I thought I possessed by nature, not by choice.
It wasn’t until I went away to college, when my first “serious” boyfriend cheated on me with my conventionally-less-attractive best friend, that I was forced to confront the disproportionate amount of value I had placed on outward appearance since childhood. Away from home and lacking in any real hobbies or passions, I fell into the first of a series of identity crises in which I realized that I had little to no idea who I was outside of the “attractiveness” that had been bestowed upon me by people who were just as misled as I was. Even still, it would take years of misdirections, bad decisions, self-loathing, and eventually soul searching before I became acquainted with who I really am. Through a painstaking process of uncovering my more profound and hard-fought qualities, I’ve realized I am so much more than “hot.” I am driven, passionate, artistic, intelligent and, slowly but surely, I’m learning what true confidence in yourself feels like.
I often wish I could step backwards in time to tell my gangly, young self that she’s already something much better than the curated depictions of female sexuality that she aspired to; she’s a real person (though I doubt she’d listen). It has taken years for the cascade of implications surrounding growing up in an image-obsessed culture to reveal themselves to me, and despite having uncovered many deeper shades of myself since, I still find the internalized concern with my appearance difficult to fully shake. Now that my generation has aged beyond existing as the target audience for pop culture, I wonder, what is our media communicating now?
Madalyn Carter is an artist and writer from Southern California. She recently graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Rhetoric and Composition, and she feels strongly about utilizing her skills and capabilities to help shape a more ethical and compassionate world. Madalyn believes that our ability as a species to create, express ourselves and share knowledge is exceptional, and that because we can, we ought to.