The combined influence of the reckoning with race and gender in the 2010s and the force teen girls hold on social media has left them in a position of what appears, at first glance, to be an unusual sort of strength. Lately, pop culture has stopped meeting the obsessions of teen girls with a reflexive sneer and has started instead to treat them as tastemakers. They’re ridiculed so often that we have an endless stream of trendy new words to describe teenage girls whose tastes we find cringeworthy: basic, VSCO girls, cheugy. They are the base of an entire media economy of TikTok stars and influencers, and people tell them that the things they care about are fundamentally meaningless and do not matter, even as those teen girls make millions of dollars.Ĭonsistently, teenage girls drive popular culture forward and then get mocked for their troubles. They can, if they are Billie Eilish, dispense with the norms of pop music and then make Grammy history.
They can end the 15-year dominance of the skinny jean with a single mocking TikTok and drive Kylie Jenner’s lip kits to sell out within minutes of their release. They’re language disruptors, doing everything from ditching doth and maketh to inaugurating the modern use of the word like and speech patterns like uptalk and vocal fry, and they’re called airheads incapable of speaking properly. Teen girls helped popularize novels in the 18th century, and we called them hysterical, until novels became a respectable subject for dinner party conversation. To be a teenage girl is to simultaneously be pop culture’s ultimate punching bag, cash cow, and gatekeeper.īefore Beatlemania was Sinatrauma, which described the hordes of screaming teen girls who worshipped Ol’ Blue Eyes. The Beatles went on to become one of the most influential rock bands in history, and the girls who loved them first were treated as the punchline of a tired joke. Adults called those Beatlemaniac teen girls oversexed and hysterical - until, eventually, they saw the perfection, too.
“Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures,” wrote Paul Johnson in an infamous New Statesman article in 1963. Teen girls were the ones who loved the Beatles first, when the rest of the world didn’t get it. They screamed and wept and pulled at their hair and fainted, because the band was perfect, the most perfect thing they’d ever seen, and they were overcome by the perfection. Teenage girls looked at that pack of floppy-haired Brits crooning in perfect harmony about hand-holding and holding on tight, and they thought, yes.
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