Does a Stunted Adolescence Breed Earnestness?
We have so much to learn from the art of being cute.
It has been a landmark year for teenage 20-year-olds. Between the barrage of Taylor’s versions dredging up our shared experiences of youth, the Barbie movie recontextualizing our childhood toys, and the constant regurgitation of nostalgic IP, it is safe to say many of us are reliving our childhoods.
I think that is why many are retreating to their childhoods so intensely. Perhaps it is the abundant availability of our childhood media thanks to streamers, or the pop-psychology popularization of healing our inner-child, but there is a tangible sense that everyone is revisiting softness and juvenescence. Maybe cynicism no longer serves in a world that is experiencing global boiling. What place does hardness have in a culture that is already so isolating and adversarial? There is something to be said for taking a moment of respite from all this and seeking simple creature comforts. Especially for those of us who historically have been gatekept from enjoying these support systems. It shouldn’t be seen as a weakness to let one’s guard down for a moment, to accept the occasional hug from the familiar and the sororal.
Is it any wonder then, that after the past few years, many of us are finding solace in retreating into those childhoods in addition to committing ourselves to a cause that I refer to as: self-cutification. This is a softening process by which one can model their own life after the cute and quaint stylings of their favorite Sylvanian Family. This is Lisa Frank stickers in our journals, Sandy Liang collabs with Baggu, the Snoopy image of the day, and a display shelf of Sonny Angel dolls.
The very understandable urge to Bella Sara our lives, by which I mean: to find whimsy and beauty in the day-to-day, comes after a long period predominated by irony poisoning and the patent refusal to enjoy things coded as cute or effete. However, the pendulum is starting to swing the other way, big emotion is coming back en vogue. Gone are the days of machismo quip-comedy, of “well that was awkward.” Instead, cuteness reigns supreme. As more and more of my peers drink this Flavor Aid from their commemorative Muppets glassware, I find that earnestness, in loving the things you enjoy, separate from what is conventional, is coming back into style. Trend alert! Sincerity!
Particularly, I am finding a certain sense of liberation from my own journey of self-cutification. Being cutie-pie-pilled, as it were, has brought with it a certain childhood healing and gentle parenting that I am finding incredibly cathartic and necessary. This started, the way all good therapeutic practices do, with my rewatch of 2004’s A Cinderella Story starring our baby-voiced low-rise denim icon Hilary Duff. I remember, upon release, feeling locked out of this film, not being able to express my joy and wonderment each time its commercial would play on my comically deep bubble TV. I was a little boy, and little boys should not be enamored with the inherent drama of Duff walking down a grand staircase in a white wedding dress, masquerade mask, and shellacked yellow hair in tight doll curls. This was culture for girls, which came with it an air of disdain and belittlement. It could never be seen as high-art or deserving of value. Yet all along I longed to be a part of it, if only it were allowed.
So much of the media from my youth was coded in this way. There was always an understanding of frivolity. Twilight was for pathetic stay-at-homers and Hot Topic girls, Hannah Montana was for screaming mindless preteens, and Gilmore Girls was for the hyper-femme and neurotic. Variety managed to get in a double dog whistle with their review at the time saying, “it’s still a chick show, but at least ‘Gilmore Girls’ could attract women well past the N' Sync phase.” It goes without saying that media for boys did (and does) not receive this kind of social ire or moralizing. At the time there was certainly no handwringing over the music of Maroon 5 or Drake & Josh. This specific gendered critique is not unique to the 00s, but it was certainly felt. It is telling then, that “boy media” of this time has not endured or had the same celebrated cultural renaissance that has been enjoyed by Miley Cyrus or the animated Barbie movies.
There was always something lacking in boy media, something hollow in its presentation—and for me at least, that was its refusal to embrace emotionality. Toxic masculinity warning in 3-2-1: This is because of toxic masculinity.
This oppressive force vilified (and vilifies) softness, thus making it inaccessible for boys, while ridiculing the girls who connected so readily and understandably. But the old-guard gatekeepers are largely obsolete, and the media, art, and culture they sandbagged are now more directly available. We are now our own arbiters and are choosing to return to these concepts we could not enjoy the first go-around.
Is this regression inherently positive? And is referring to this as a regression in and of itself patronizing? I am well aware that these gendered ideas have existed for generations and therefore can come with a feeling of co-opting or taking up too much space, especially when men come to appreciate predominately female media. The male Redditors who stomped through the My Little Pony fandom come to mind. They celebrated this show ironically, creating a Brony culture so all-consuming that it effectively pushed out the young girls and women for whom this media was intended. Is there an ethical way for a man to adopt cutie-pie culture without paternalizing the space or claiming complete and utter dominion?
I ask this question tenuously, as it is oft used as a support for terf ideology or harmful gender absolutism. I am well aware that the logical extreme of this argument could be taken to a place that I simply do not endorse. By asking how can men partake in culture created for women, I ask more as a plea that they stop ridiculing so-called “girly things” and those who venerate them, and instead, merely allow some of their lessons to be received. There is so much to be learned from girls’ slumber party culture, of friendship bracelets, of shared hair elastics, in empathy, community, and tenderness, that I hope men can come to observe without also claiming ownership over these practices and lessons.
With the release of Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album Guts, a specific sect of Twitter-gay is once again fusing their identity with the songs and projected character of a 20-year-old girl. Nearly every post is a screenshot of her lyrics or an ape on her coming-of-age sleepover cinema aesthetic. As a popular artist, her team likely encourages this widespread adoption of her image and ethos, though it may be isolating for her core demographic to witness.
The entire concept of a 20 year-old-teenager, which I opened this essay with, may be appropriative of the experiences of actual teenagers. There are times, and this is challenging to say, that the world does not need to revolve around adults. Centering one’s own experience over that of the young people who can relate most of all can be insidious. I can’t endorse all the ways in which adults have commandeered children’s media, often sexualizing or warping it to fit an adult sensibility (I’m specifically looking at Rule 34 as well as the Girlbossification of Disney’s recent live-action ventures.) Though, I would push back on this sentiment as well, isn’t this simply the same discourse many of us experienced when we were younger for embracing the unabashedly emotional? Both can be true, older people can gain something out of media aimed for the youth without displacing them from this culture itself. The gays on Twitter can appreciate Rodrigo and so can the teenagers, it is actually legal now.
Not everyone is accepting of this shift with open arms. There are landslides of critiques lobbed at Rodrigo herself from millennials who decry her as the end of true pop-punk music. They call her a derivative of Avril Lavigne and Paramore, and mock her overly emotional songs and melodramatic sentimentality. All the while they forget the very ways in which cultural critics looked down on the women of their youth, including Hayley Williams and Lavigne. They neglect to remember the forty-year-old men who looked on judgementally at Britney Spears’ concerts incapable of comprehending the hype, and how, at the time, that made them feel so Missundaztood.
The mockery they withstood at the hands of uncles, teachers, and boys in their school is replicated without regard or concern for harm. It is dispiriting to see the same hardened tentacles of the patriarchy, the ones that created these structures in the first place, once again belittle and devalue art created for and by women. Only now it too is perpetuated by its own victims.
Perhaps we are all doomed to this fate. The 20-year cycle not only brings back the culture of our past to be recontextualized for today’s audiences, but it also brings with it the same nasty impulse to look down on the things coded as feminine. This generational abuse is itself a cycle, and one that by breaking, at least personally, has brought feelings of validation, relief, and joy.
Being emphatic, being uncompromising & unafraid, and loving the things I want to love brings me more joy than anything the patriarchy has purported to create for me in mind. If that is the takeaway from revisiting my own childhood, then how could that ever be considered infantilizing? How could something be called a retreat or regression if it is what brings about so much growth? If you need me I’ll be cute-maxing with a strawberry pastry and my favorite Hilary Duff film.
It’s too challenging to consolidate my thoughts into a coherent comment so I’ll just say that this essay really made me think about the difference between enjoying/seeing parts of yourself in a piece of art vs. that piece of art being about you or made with you (plural you) in mind.