I, like most humans on earth, am a former teenager. I spent nearly all of my teenage years id'ing as a woman, so I lived the teenage girl experience. There were the obsessions, the relationship drama, the exposure to feminism, the fangirling -- all normal, teenage stuff.
But being a teenage girl wasn't easy. There's this huge problem in popular culture where we get upset every time teenage girls like something. As in, I actually heard someone say they didn't like Hamiltonbecause they felt the teenage girls had ruined it.
Every time teenage girls start to like something, it becomes a joke. I remember being teased for loving and fangirling over "Doctor Who" in high school, but when guys my age liked it, nothing ever happened. It was another part of them, nothing to be ashamed of. As a teenager I often felt that I had to conceal my interests and excitements, because I was repeatedly told that I needed to be quiet, or that no one actually cared. These interests were a part of me, and being told that they didn't matter made me feel like I didn't matter.
And then there's the stuff I was told to buy. You have to comply with the latest fashion trends. You have to buy clothes you can't afford, things you don't want because the lack of fitting in is so incredibly alienating. The standards of beauty I was supposed to follow didn't fit with me; I wasn't thin enough. Then there are the girls who aren't white enough, or woman enough, or even straight enough. How do we as a culture make them feel?
Obsessing over things, putting ourselves into frivolous things, it's a distraction. Life isn't easy for the teenage girl. I was told by school, parents and the church that sex was between a man and a woman and only for marriage, and yet the guys I knew at the time were pressured constantly to prove their manhood by having sex with as many girls as possible. But, if a girl did have sex, she was degraded and called a slut.
We, as a culture, need to ease off on teenage girls. It seems wrong to me that we have a common phrase like "boys will be boys," to write off inappropriate behavior when we punish teenage girls for doing something as human as having an interest.
And that's where this problem relates to teenage boys. I once read something that, paraphrased, said the following: "Maybe it isn't that girls mature faster than boys, but that we tolerate boy's immaturity years after we tolerate girl's immaturity."
Seeing what teenage boy culture did to my teenage boyfriends was horrible. Friends I held close got serious anxiety that they were still virgins. Others felt like they needed to have sex with as many women as possible because if they didn't they weren't a man. Others still felt they had to degrade women in order to fit in.
And others forgot the meaning of the word, "No."
The toxic masculinity that we value in teenage boy culture is just another part of rape culture. Robbing teenage girls of their ability to freely and openly like something also has to do with this. It turns girls into beings with no ability to like anything and therefore entirely indifferent to anything, and convinces boys that they are entitled to a girl for ridiculous reasons. One of those is that, after being told that she can't like anything, she can't have an opinion worth listening to.
We have to ease off on teenage girls. They've been through enough. But teenage boys? Get at 'em.
