on teenage girls + why they're not that bad

let me be frank: i'm sick and tired of old white dudes who make fun of teenage girls. whether it's mimicking of the way that we speak- "like, omg, that's literally the best thing ever" - to calling us vain and self-absorbed, middle-aged men on the internet love to pick at the things that we like and do and say. the number of times a tweet mocking selfies and starbucks and the use of instagram to garner attention has appeared on my timeline is sad and disgusting and makes me pissed.

teenage girls are people, too- important people. young women are the leading linguistic innovators in the world- the speech patterns you make fun usually turn into common vocal inflections half a decade after we start using them. the use of "uptalk" (ending every sentence in a question? which is usually attributed to teenage girls?) is now found in dads ordering food, communicating with people, as a way to make them seem less intimidating. and it's not seen as stupid as they do it, because a) they're men, and b) they're not fresh-faced + youthful.

i think that this is the thing that really pisses me off. teenage girls are not stupid. teenage girls have never been stupid. the things that adolescent women write, draw, paint- create- are self-aware, interesting, wonderful. check out tumblr if you want to see: it's these teenage girls that are taking current events and mashing them up with tv shows and jokes and pictures to ground them in our reality. it's not us grappling with an inability to understand world affairs- we're internalizing them and making them part of us, part of our aesthetic, part of our interests.

and goddamnit, if you shame teenage girls for doing that, you're probably not a person i want to be friends with.