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I found this article equal parts baffling, super important and way too intense. It took me three tries to make it to the end, and I can’t get past the fact that they used the death of a young woman as the declencheur for this conversation.
I also wonder how distorted my own visions of these topics are since I’ve only been using Tumblr since the age of 22. Not to mention how sick I am of people lauding/touting Molly Soda as representative of this so-called “Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic.” “Tumblr-famous tEEN GuRL?” She’s 23. Bitch was on livejournal just like the rest of us, never used Tumblr as a diary or a tumblelog in the traditional sense, but as a hyper-parodic art school experiment exploring notions of girlhood. The more people talk about her, the more people talk about her and convince themselves she is some sort of elected representative of every teen girl on tumblr ever? When in fact, she’s mostly mocking it? Snore.
Also, very curious about the absolute absence of discussions around race in this piece… the central figure is Asian, but that is not addressed at all. This is compounded by the fact that all of the images and examples used are very much centered around whiteness and white privilege. There have been countless important discussions challenging the way white young women in these online spaces react in knee-jerk ways to being challenged to at least address these questions. Not to mention, more importantly, how many POC resist those dominant scripts by creating and sharing their own images, giving voice to “girls like them” in a way that hadn’t been nearly as accessible/widespread a few short years ago.
I’ve got lots of feelings, most of them not good. Like, knot in the pit of my stomach not good.
