When I was a child, there was no room for vapid interest. Especially not as a little girl. As I sit down to write this piece, I am faced with a reluctant and regretful sort of sadness. I am a 24-year-old woman who completely understands why my father had the opinions he did as I was growing up, but the reality is I have completely stopped myself from indulging in certain elements and aspects of pop culture due to being told only a certain type of woman enjoys reality TV, romance books, and trashy girlish movies. I was told people pursuing the arts are bound for homelessness and are elitist but ultimately useless to society. I was told only a certain type of music is worth any weight. I was told the boy bands I liked were only for childish little girls.
I was told only a certain type of woman is good. And I so badly wanted to be good. And so, I built this character. I was one of the boys. I was good at taking misogynistic jokes, because feminists were annoying and didn’t make good women. I was good at pretending I did not care about how I looked, because that was materialistic and unbecoming of intelligent and intellectual women. I was good at judging other women for what they liked, because I was a good woman who did not care for anything other than male-centered media since that was real art.
I became very good at hating myself and blaming other women for my suffering. Slowly, I decided that I didn’t like being left out. That I did want to gossip with my friends about Big Brother and Survivor. Maybe I didn’t actually like Family Guy and thought the way everyone treated Meg made me incredibly uncomfortable.
In secret, I began watching reality TV. And I actually really, really enjoyed it. But simmering right underneath that enjoyment, was a foreboding sense of wrongness. I should not be doing this. Women who engage with this content are stupid. Women who like these things are not intelligent. Women who watch these shows are flat and uncultured.
And so, I stopped. I couldn’t do it. I felt like I’d done something genuinely heretic. I wanted to be liked so badly by men that these internalized opinions of women I’d grown up around left me completely unable to find enjoyment in entertainment I liked. This continued on for a long while, and the feeling of guilt and embarrassment never seemed to subside. I was ashamed of myself for being a bad woman. You would’ve honestly thought I killed someone and buried their body in my backyard for the amount of shame and anxiety I felt around being the perfect woman.
When I started my first year of university, I had a massive breakdown over only getting into Art History, because I was told my entire life that if I did choose to study in that field, I was worthless and was bound for a lifetime of failure.
Before I switched my major to Communications and Cultural studies, I studied all sorts of art and artifacts from all over the world. I was introduced to so many artists outside the canon that changed my perspective on life and art. I was surrounded by passionate sculptors, artists, photographers, painters, and historians seeking knowledge because they loved their field. I worked hard and learned that I love to write academically.
I became someone who I began to like.
After another year in university, studying communications, my wealth of knowledge and academic interest only grew. I started reading non-fiction on my own time, just because I wanted to. Hell, I even picked up a literary fiction book because I thought I may enjoy it; this only
snowballed. I found Booktok and started reading romance because I thought it may be fun, and it changed my perspective on love, friendships, and reading as entertainment. I started focusing on women and gender studies because I excelled in it academically and loved researching and writing about it.
And then one day, I decided I wanted to watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills based on a recommendation from one of my best friends. I signed up for Netflix, got my popcorn ready, and settled into my couch and watched the first episode.
Then, I watched another.
By the third, I began to cry.
Still, as I sit here, I have this overwhelming urge to scrap this and not admit that I watched it and enjoyed it. I want to implore you to believe I am an educated woman with many intellectual interests. I want to convince you that I am better than this.
Yet, as I cried and cried and allowed myself to feel these emotions at full force, the dam could not be plugged back up. To realize being a woman is to be beautiful, complex, and layered and not something to be policed and dictated by men is a true gift. Maybe it was just my frontal lobe developing, but who knows. But ever since that day, I have begun to let myself understand this shame for what it was: the wrongness of living as a woman with internalized misogyny.
That moment of glimpsing behind the curtain of curated mancentered womanhood, without the needling opinions of men, was so freeing that it terrified me. I realized that these thoughts were never born of my own voice, and that alone fundamentally changed the way I viewed myself and other women. Letting those barriers down and allowing myself to feel in community with the women around me was perhaps one of the most fulfilling things I’d ever done in my life.
If you see yourself in me, I need you to know that it’s okay to be a horrible, stupid, vapid, ignorant, and uncultured woman. Because no one says things about what women love other than men who hate them.
