I never thought I’d see the day where Taylor Momsen* was discussed and critiqued as a feminist icon, but here you have it. This Lindsey Horvath person is horrified; Taylor Momsen is not “her kind of feminist.” To be fair, I suppose she’s not mine either, not least because a fifteen-year-old shouldn’t have to be anyone’s anything, it seems to me. It’s hard enough work being yourself at that age, even if you are a young, blonde, pretty starlet.
I guess every woman has served her time on the Girl Power squad, at least anyone who came of age since the 1950s, anyway, because every era’s been selling us someone to be who isn’t ourselves. It’s a pretty easy pitch, after all – you can keep repeating the old “I love myself” mantra while you’re simultaneously dreaming of being someone, anyone else.
Cher, Madonna, Britney, Lindsay, as well as all their ancestors and descendants, exist in this strange space of being chosen as paradigmatic women by other actual women who know full well that all this paradigmatic womanhood stuff is pure, unadulterated bullshit. It’s impossible to live up to.
Every once in awhile I go somewhere to something to talk to the cool feminist women I meet on the internet, and often (apologies for the self-serving anecdote) I’ll meet someone who really likes my… well, I hesitate to call it writing. Blogging and commenting, let’s say. And I always get a (sometimes small, sometimes large) doubletake when I explain who I write as on the internet, because it entails a certain image that I guess I do not fit well in real life.
Obviously I am no Taylor Momsen. (For that, Ceiling Cat, a thousand thank yous.) But so often expectations seem to get the better of our idols, and I feel like all the buildup, all the demand for perfect clairvoyance and hindsight from young women who are just starting to come into themselves (and older ones who are realizing that the promise of wisdom held out by age might have been a ruse) is exhausting the life out of us. All this wanting to live your desires (as if you knew what they were), to do the right thing at the right time with the right people (as if they just walked up to you and introduced themselves) – it takes more energy than I feel like I’ve got.
* If you do not recognize this name don’t worry; this is just one of the stars of “Gossip Girl,” a show with which the New York media is utterly obsessed.
That is a very weird article. Before I read it I presumed that Taylor Momsen had given one of those very common to young starlets ‘I think i’m a feminist because I empower myself through wearing very little’ interviews. But she er hasn’t. So I found the article rather unpleasant in the way it picked a 15 year old girl apart (as you rightly point out a 15 year old doesn’t have to be anything).
Do I think that Momsen appears to be sacrificing her teenage years for some wierd sort of iconography of fucked up girlhood, possibly but I still don’t see how that equates with one’s view of feminism or why it justifies calling out a 15 year old in a column. Help me out here someone.
Wait, where did Ms. Momsen (or anyone other than the author of that piece) declare herself a feminist of any sort?
OH RIGHT SHE DIDN’T.
I may not “get” her adolescent Courtney Love redux performance, but it seems to me that what Momsen is doing, as best she can, is figuring out how to be a young woman in this fucked-up culture, with its fucked-up messages about sexuality, vulnerability, toughness, and success.
You’re right, emilyanne. Horvath said “empowered” and “feminism,” Momsen didn’t. Horvath says she is “uninterested in chastising [Momsen] for behavior manufactured by a patriarchal culture,” but I’m not sure I buy it, given the focus on the lingerie and the fact that she singled out a teenager to write her article about in the first place.
I can’t say I’m very interested in oh-gosh-i’m-growing-so-old articles in general, but this particular attempt to deal with turning-twenty-seven, which actually is not all that old, is using not teenagers in general but one specific teenager the author doesn’t even know as the example of how distant she feels from people younger than herself. If she’s so concerned about a dearth of good role models, she ought to continue to be one herself. Her article indicates that she works with teenagers in the Young Feminist Club. She doesn’t say anything about what those young women think about Momsen as an empowerfulled role model, which says clearly to me that this isn’t about feminism, it’s about Horvath growing older. If it were about young feminists, she’d have let them speak a little more. As is, the only place the Young Feminist Club fits into her article is to show how very sad and far away the troubles of teenagers make Horvath feel.
So, we pick certain women (or girls) to hold up and fetishize. We dream of looking like them, living like them, being them. We think we are not good enough, less than worthy unless we mold ourselves in their images. We beat our heads against a wall trying, even though deep down we know it’s an impossible undertaking. Sadly, most (all?) of the women and girls being held up also find it impossible to live up to the ideal we have imagined them into. They may end up feeling not good enough, less than worthy if they fail to be what we think they are. So they end up beating their heads against a wall trying to actually be the embodiment of the perfection we impress upon them. In the end, we fail, they fail and fall from grace, and everyone stews in a giant pot of unrealistic expectations and dissatisfaction. Why do we do this?
kithkin, exactly. Personally I felt more alienated from the author of the piece with her odd angst about turning 27 then from Ms Momsen herself who is simply experimenting as teenagers do albeit on a larger scale and with the downside of minor celebrity. When I finished reading it all I wanted to do was ask Horvath to grow up and get over herself, which was undoubtedly an unfair response given the fact that she obviously does do some interesting work with the Young Feminists Club, but which frankly was about what this somewhat bitter and unpleasant piece deserved.
Totally. I feel a little bit uncomfortably when I see her looking like Courteney Love, but as someone said:
“(…) it seems to me that what Momsen is doing, as best she can, is figuring out how to be a young woman in this fucked-up culture, with its fucked-up messages about sexuality, vulnerability, toughness, and success.”