The third and final season of Euphoria concluded this past Sunday on HBO. It’s Tuesday afternoon, and it’s still the talk of the town on my social media feeds.

Rue Bennett died of a drug overdose in the final episode. And I wish I could have seen what my own face looked like when I realized the episode still had an hour left remaining.

I didn’t even want to finish that shit.

I skipped through Ali’s speech about fentanyl addiction. Listened to Maude Apatow and Sydney Sweeney deliver the flattest sisterly exchange I have ever heard in my entire life. There’s absolutely zero love between the two.

Ali storms into the Silver Slipper and kills Alamo Brown. Bishop betrays Alamo. Ali ends up in the place Rue truly wanted to be.

It was bittersweet.

Everyone found some semblance of peace.

Except for Rue.

And I know there are people who find peace in death. She isn’t hurting anymore.

But I call bullshit.

From television to film, the female main character will spend her entire life suffering at the hands of others. The only way she’s “set free?”

Death.

And that’s a tragedy.

Rue dying is a realistic possibility for many addicts. But I think it’s really unfortunate that she spends the entirety of Season 3 sober just to die on Ali’s couch.

Her death catapults others toward finding peace.

Ali forgives himself for not being able to save his sponsees by avenging her.

The strangest thing about Rue’s death isn’t that she dies. Addicts die every day.

It’s that nobody seems to care.

A body removed from the story so everyone else can move on.

No funeral. No mention of her mother or Gia.

Her friends act like she didn’t exist.

Lexi and Cassie have a conversation that feels like it’s being spoken in a different language. Lexi expresses guilt about her final conversation with Rue, and Cassie sounds like she’s miles away in an entirely different reality.

If I got addicted to a substance, betrayed my entire family, and dabbled in illegal activity just to wind up six feet under, my family would still bury me at the end of it.

In media, it always seems to be one or the other for women. The only accurate story we tell is that even in death, women are in service to others.

Women die to catapult someone else’s story forward.

And I think that’s why this idea terrifies me so much.

I’ve spent my entire life questioning whether I was real. Wondering if there was a reason for me being here or if I was simply unfortunate luck for my parents. If I had a purpose. If I even mattered.

And maybe that’s why we spend our entire lives trying to leave a drag path behind us.

Evidence we were here.

Because if we can prove we existed, then maybe it wasn’t all pointless.

Rue never got that opportunity. Neither did Eleven from Stranger Things.

How heartbreaking it must be to spend your entire life ashamed of yourself and believing you’re unworthy of basic health, only to never experience any relief.

To sacrifice your life to push the narrative forward and have that sacrifice barely acknowledged.

You’re free from the pain when you’re dead, sure.

But Rue died hoping for forgiveness and begging to be saved.

That’s a tragedy.

Ask anyone and they will tell you that Ariana Fountain loves a good horror movie.

And that I do, my friend. That I do.

But holy fuck, modern horror is getting boring.

On first watch, Backrooms was…not good. If you’re a fanboy, I’m sorry. Narratively, the story is flat. It runs out of steam about an hour in and spends the second and third act running in circles.

Backrooms seems determined to explain everything and nothing at the same time.

Clark is an abusive husband, a failing furniture store owner, an alcoholic, and a general sad sack. He refuses to take responsibility for his life or his behavior. Many such cases.

The climax boils down to a confrontation between Clark and Mary in which we learn that the Backrooms create copies of people, Clark has been eating said copies, and his employee’s head is sitting in a freezer for reasons the movie never seems particularly interested in exploring.

Mary essentially gives Clark permission to continue being miserable. He embraces it. Then he dies almost immediately at the hands of the monster lurking the halls.

A chase scene follows. Mary escapes. She’s captured by Async. Mark Duplass is completely wasted. A copy of Mary now exists in the Backrooms.

The extended cut includes lengthy scenes about childhood trauma that make the film feel like an entirely different movie. Part of me wonders if somebody looked at this creepy science-fiction horror film and thought:

“No. The audience absolutely needs this to be a character study.”

Because buried somewhere inside Backrooms is a much more interesting movie.

A televangelist in the 1990s struggles to untangle the web of her life and find some semblance of happiness. She stumbles into a maze-like structure and is forced to confront the one thing she’s spent her entire life running from.

And that, my friends, is a movie.

Some could argue that the entire point of the Backrooms is that you’re not supposed to understand it. Fair enough. But confusion and mystery are not the same thing.

The film is largely carried by Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor. By the time the credits rolled, I found myself with so many questions that I wasn’t even sure which ones I wanted answered.

Maybe that’s why the movie frustrated me.

Not because it was mysterious.

Because it wasn’t.

It felt trapped between two ideas. It wanted to be a creepy science-fiction horror film and a meditation on trauma at the same time. Instead of committing to either, it spends most of its runtime awkwardly bouncing between the two.

Which brings me to Obsession.

One of the most fascinating parts of horror fandom is watching people argue about what a movie is “really” about. The prevailing theory online seems to be that Nicky represents women with Borderline Personality Disorder. Which is certainly a take.

Despite the movie quite clearly being about a man who strips the autonomy from his female best friend and attempts to turn her into a character in his own fantasy. When she refuses to play along, he becomes resentful.

Bear comes dangerously close to cheating on Nicky because he’s bored. Exhausted. The asshole can’t even commit to suicide so Nicky can be free.

Yet somehow people still manage to walk away blaming her.

I find that fascinating.

More and more, I notice women looking for ways to blame themselves even in their media consumption. I’m genuinely not sure how an adult watches Obsession and concludes that the woman is the problem.

But that’s the difference between a two-and-a-half-star movie and a four-and-a-half-star movie.

Obsession knows exactly what it’s trying to say.

Backrooms doesn’t.

And that’s my issue with modern horror.

Not every horror movie needs to be a thesis statement.

It feels like every monster now represents grief, addiction, depression, motherhood, loneliness, self-destruction, or the entire human condition.

Get Out was revolutionary.

The movies that followed were insightful.

Now the well is starting to run dry.

Ironically, I ran into this exact problem while writing my own screenplay.

For the last six months, I’ve been working on a slasher called Halloweekend. At some point I found myself asking the same question every horror filmmaker seems obsessed with:

“What is this really about?”

Not the plot.

The meaning.

My first draft was basically a Netflix miniseries. Too many characters. Too many moving parts. Too many explanations.

I spent months trying to make everything connect.

I had the ending. I had the beginning. The middle was a mess.

By draft 10, I realized I was asking the wrong question. I wasn’t writing a term paper. I was writing a horror movie.

The horror films I love aren’t the ones desperately trying to prove how smart they are. They’re the ones that understand fear.

The original Backrooms image became an internet phenomenon because nobody understood it. The yellow walls. The fluorescent lights. The endless maze.

The possibility that something was waiting around the corner.

The moment you explain the monster, you begin to shrink it.

Sometimes a killer is just a killer.

Sometimes a monster is just a monster.

And sometimes a movie should just be a movie.

If I wanted to watch the equivalent of a ten-page paper, I’d just go on YouTube and watch a 20-something explain something to me in a 2 hour video essay.

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I never thought I would see the day where the OnlyFans market would be oversaturated. It used to be risqué to show your body online. Now I just roll my eyes and keep scrolling.

Yes, another photo or video of someone masturbating or showing dick and balls on my timeline for no apparent reason. I don’t dabble in the sex economy, but Elon Musk’s Twitter algorithm seems to think I do.

And it’s not just oversaturation — it’s normalization.

i. the porn star as persona

Once upon a time, porn used to be a role.

You clocked in, had sex on camera for money, and then clocked out. Maybe you were good enough to win an award or ten. You had a stage name, the wider industry, and a separation of space between yourself and the consumer.

In fact, I had to do some light research to even write this essay. I’m not talking about the Mia Khalifas and Sasha Greys of the internet age — beautiful women with “stained” brands. The internet regularly reminds Mia Khalifa that they think she’s a slut. But even then, there was still a distinction. She was known for something she did, not something she was expected to be at all times.

In the 70s, 80s, and even early 90s, the emphasis was on performance, not identity. There are dozens of porn stars from the Golden Age who are either dead or successfully made a career pivot. They still work in adult entertainment in some capacity, became authors, or quietly disappeared from the public.

An example of this would be former adult film actress Stacy Valentine. According to Wikipedia, she was a hit in the 90s for about five years and retired quietly. She used the onset of her fame to escape her creepy husband. As I was reading, I still couldn’t help but wonder what the hell happened to all of these women. Stacy Valentine is pretty much absent from the internet. There’s no Instagram, TikTok, or even Facebook attached to her name. There is a lonely LinkedIn profile — for the past 20 years, she’s been the West Coast Creative Director for Penthouse.

There is a sort of half-interview from 2000 that I found. The interviewer more or less provides his personal opinion of Stacy rather than an actual interview. The ending is supposed to be hard-hitting, and it is, but from a man it feels less like cultural commentary and more like misogyny.

Where do we go from here?

Porn used to be story-driven productions that eventually ended in sex. They were even played in theaters. To me, it seems like it used to be a classy party.

Now, porn is everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

The goal is no longer to create something — it’s to produce as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Cut the costs, cut the production, go bigger and get better. Faster production means quicker money.

Therein lies the problem.

ii. the collapse into identity

Instagram has always been a way to promote your image. It’s essentially a shopping app with a social media function.

Twitter seems to be where the real money is, though. Every comment section is contaminated with porn bots. I’m not sure if these are real people that get paid, AI, or what. You can search “cupcakes” on Twitter and the first video will be someone shoving a cupcake up their ass.

That’s the point. Sexual content is no longer contained. It doesn’t live in its own category anymore. It bleeds into everything else.

Once that boundary disappears, so does the distinction between performance and identity. The porn star used to have a role. The influencer just has a feed. What used to be labor is now presented as personality.

Take Instagram — there’s the IG Baddie, and then there’s the woman who is more explicitly selling access to her body. But visually, the difference between the two is getting harder to locate. They use the same poses, the same lighting, the same language of desirability. One is called branding. The other is called sex work. Sometimes the only real difference is whether a paywall is involved.

There are plenty of women online whose feeds function as a kind of public advertisement — not always explicitly, but obviously enough. Music, modeling, reality television, influencing, and paid sexual access no longer feel like separate categories. They collapse into one another.

The performance is still there. It just no longer calls itself one. The market is built around male desire — constant, immediate, and frictionless. Almost zero input but maximum output. This trend extends beyond the digital and into everyday life. How much labor can be extracted from a woman with minimal effort?

iii. porn as lifestyle

We see it in the bodies of the women that spent thousands of dollars on themselves.

BBLs, filler, breast implants, liposuction. Nipping and tucking every detail into precision. It’s almost a caricature of what is feminine. And it dominates online spaces.

The women of Zeus Network’s Baddies franchise. Joseline Hernandez. Nicki Minaj. Kylie Jenner. Kim Kardashian. Blac Chyna. On and on and on.

Instagram culture sells the dream that porn used to. If you promote this brand, they’ll give you the clothes for free. If you go to this basketball game, you can sit courtside. If you get on this yacht, you’ll be famous. If you just have sex on camera this one time, we’ll give you $10k and you can finally run away from your abusive home.

We are so consumed by sex as a culture. It’s not a coincidence that red-pill content has become extremely popular over the last ten years. It’s also not hard to understand why Gen Z doesn’t want sexual content in their entertainment. We already see it doing something mundane like scrolling Instagram or Twitter. Occasionally on TikTok, you’ll scroll past a livestream of someone having sex. It’s so abundant that it feels practically automated.

iv. the end

Porn used to be a thing you consumed in private. Magazines. VHS tapes. It was “hard” to get and exciting when you could. The internet age made it constantly accessible all the time. And I think it’s hindered us as a society.

Sex used to be something you had to go out and seek. You had to learn how to function socially and talk to people like they were human. Sex is no longer “special” and I’m not sure it ever really has been. Sex is constant. Sex appeal. Sex acts. Followers. Money. Branding.

And for all of our supposed liberation, sex is still not neutral. Under patriarchy, it still operates unevenly. It still asks more of some people than others. That is part of why Gen Z’s avoidance makes perfect sense to me. If sex continues to function as labor — social, emotional, physical, aesthetic — then opting out stops looking like repression and starts looking like self-protection.

This is why women report bitterness about dating and why men complain of loneliness. Men get power. Women get stuck with the labor. The system isn’t producing connection — it’s producing imbalance. There’s those of us who are fucked and those who do the fucking.

And my point in all of this — and every single one of my essays — is wondering where this leaves women. I wonder where this leaves me.

If porn and sex become automated — shaped by the structure of patriarchy — how does this affect women?

Are we constantly expected to “put out” in this system? Are we expected to participate in our own objectification?

How do I approach intimacy?

Is the constant access to sexual content — and the “better,” or “other” woman — why I avoid it?

I don’t think I have an answer yet.

Butt stuff is for boys. But I digress.

The discourse has been hilarious, but also weirdly enlightening about the current state of feminism. Man, oh man, I think women are fucked.

I am always surprised by how many women still resist the idea that patriarchy oppresses all women. Because if patriarchy is real, then it doesn’t politely excuse individual men from participating in it. That is how the system works.

What really sent people into hysterics, though, was the implication that their sex lives might be shaped by it too. Emphasis on might, because obviously there are some freak hoes out there who genuinely enjoy butt sex.

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The issue isn’t really selling your body for money, taking it up the ass, or getting ejaculated on. It’s the refusal to acknowledge that these acts benefit men.

Because they do.

Within patriarchy, within power structures, within everything we claim to believe about how the world works, men benefit from women performing sexuality in ways that center them. That doesn’t suddenly stop being true because you personally enjoy it.

And you can like what you like. No one is breaking into your bedroom to stop you. Radical feminists are not hiding in your closet, waiting to confiscate your sex life.

They’re asking you a question.

Why do you like it?

And more importantly, would you like it the same way if you had never been taught to?

Which, apparently, is a radical and offensive question. Misogynistic, even. Somehow.

I thought it was just a question.

Ideologies force people to reckon with who they are. I can understand why so many women reject radical feminism: the scope of it. Many people can’t tolerate the implication that they may not be fully autonomous.

Think of it this way.

If your desire is shaped by external forces, then your identity is unstable.

If your identity is unstable, then the idea of choice becomes complicated.

If choice is complicated, then empowerment becomes complicated too.

And if you are a woman living under patriarchy, the implications of that can be soul-shattering. In a system as existentially crushing as this one, it inevitably raises the question of whether true freedom is even possible.

I think this is part of what explains choice feminism and its meteoric rise. If you choose to be degraded and disrespected, then at least it feels self-authored. And if it feels self-authored, it no longer feels like submission to power, but empowerment.

Where does this actually leave women?

Women are told that we’re free.

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. And yet, women are still told that we can choose. More than that, we’re told that we already have.

OnlyFans models are en vogue. Sugar daddies, findom, and 304Tok have all gone mainstream. On the other end, Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith have become popular “traditional wife” influencers. Women on both ends of the spectrum are loudly, publicly proclaiming their choices.

So when women hop into my comment sections and loudly proclaim their choice to be a wife and mother, I politely make it clear that I don’t really care.

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Choice feminism is a big ol’ nothing burger. You can’t “choose” to do what is already expected of you.

Men expect that you marry them and have their children. They expect that you come home, clean their house, have sex with them, and be agreeable.

And I know this to be true because women get online every single day and let us into the reality of married life.

I have yet to see a woman on TikTok who actually seems happy as a wife.

And we can agree that these structures exist. There’s tangible proof.

You can acknowledge things like the second shift—women clock out of work and then clock back into motherhood. That’s widely accepted.

So why were women dying on the hill of anal?

You can agree that patriarchy shapes labor, family structures, and expectations. But the idea that it might shape desire? Suddenly that’s absurd?

I can’t buy into that.

Women are asked to experience being adaptable, flexible, and moldable as empowerment.

The real issue isn’t whether patriarchy influences desire. It’s what it means if it does.

If patriarchy touches everything, then how does the individual woman decide where the conditioning stops? Can you even make that distinction?

The question even sends me into a spiral as I type this. This is why I’m so put off by dating. Everyone thinks I hate men or I’m anti-love, which isn’t true. I’m anti-patriarchy. Maybe that’s anti-men by design.

The truth is, I don’t know if I can love a man without wondering if he benefits more from the arrangement than I do.

By the standards of the system, he benefits from my emotional and physical labor. I’m his best friend, confidante, maid, nurse, nanny, cook, and sex puppet. That sounds really fucking exhausting. And women agree to do these things because at least they’re guaranteed a ring, or even the occasional I love you.

I don’t see that as a fair exchange. I’m not sure I ever will.

Radical feminism feels extreme because it refuses the comfort of choice feminism. It calls into question what’s sacred—love, romance, sex. In this system, those are the only things that are supposed to belong to women. And when we’re too busy dabbling in those things and arguing with each other, we run out of time to restructure society in a way that actually benefits us. In turn, this benefits men.

I understand why people reject the question. Because to take it seriously, even for a moment, is to risk realizing that the most intimate parts of your life might not be entirely your own.

And I’m not even saying they aren’t.

I’m just saying people refuse to find out.

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I should start a new series called “look at our women dawg we’re never making it out the patriarchy.”

In this series, I’ll give my opinion on random Internet topics involving women, because why not.

This week, it’s about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, an American love story, and why the women of the Internet seem to hate it so much.

For the past month, women on TikTok and Twitter have been moaning and groaning about the influx of 20-somethings dressing like Carolyn Bessette. It’s your basic minimalist style from the 1990s — think Dakota Johnson or Zoë Kravitz today.

It’s a quick and easy style to mimic: a white tee, blue jeans that hang just right, and a simple gold chain. Or no jewelry at all, because that was the CBK way.

And to be clear — this style isn’t new. The Internet is acting like it appeared last week. I’ve had it pinned on my Pinterest boards for years.

So why is this suddenly such an issue for the women of the Internet?

Honestly — who cares?

Oh no. A million women want to have a uniform. The horror.

The real issue is this: we’re living in the golden age of “I’m not like other girls.”

You think by standing with the men and pointing and laughing at women, you’ve somehow transcended womanhood. Your interests are so niche, so refined, so intellectual that it disgusts you to see such basic bitches parading around the Internet.

I’ve seen dozens of videos of women telling the CBK look-alikes to “get a hobby” or “make some friends.” Your issue isn’t with women. It’s with the companies that are successfully marketing viral products to us all. Everything becomes a must-have item for the next It Girl, I’ll agree. But it’s not the fault of a bunch of 24-year-old influencers in New York City.

It’s Rhode, Fenty, Hollister, Victoria’s Secret, Madewell, Abercrombie, and now even Walmart’s fault. It’s the marketing department’s fault. It’s TikTok and the algorithm’s fault. It’s trendy to assimilate.

But here’s the thing with fashion.

Dressing well is a hobby.

Fashion has always been a shared language among women. Trends move through friend groups, magazines, Pinterest dashboards, and now TikTok feeds. Women copy each other constantly — and that’s not a failure of individuality. That’s literally how culture works.

The real irony is that the women complaining about “everyone dressing the same” are also dressed the same. They just picked a different uniform.

Because whether you’re wearing the Carolyn Bessette uniform, the thrift-store-maximalist uniform, or the “I’m cooler than this trend” uniform — you’re still participating in the same system.

I hope one day women collectively surpass this inner need to constantly view each other as competition. No one cares if you wear 100% cotton or only dress like Carrie Bradshaw. You’re still being a bitch. The system maintains itself because women actively participate in it. We choose to drag each other online because, oh god, the men are watching!

I can’t have Tom, Dick, or Harry thinking I’m a stupid bitch ruining the environment because my plain white T-shirt or tulle skirt is made from plastics!

While women participate in this online warfare, they’re simultaneously taking to the streets to cheer on JFK Jr. look-alike competitions. Why? I don’t know. I guess it’s only sweet and cute when men do it. There are women in comment sections actively praising men for their newfound sense of style. The men aren’t basic, corny, or lacking an individualized sense of self. They’re unique!

I’m also so curious about this phenomenon. Women can criticize and bully each other, but you can’t acknowledge it. Because women are perpetual victims with no agency. Or whatever.

Then women can poke, prod, and coddle men like they’re toddlers. And then when I bring up that some women are just obsessed with men and the male form, I’m the asshole.

Sigh. We’re never escaping the patriarchy.

And that’s really what this entire discourse is about.

Not Carolyn Bessette. Not white T-shirts. Not whether a pair of Levi’s makes you a basic bitch.

It’s about the strange cultural ritual where women perform individuality by humiliating other women. Every trend cycle now comes with a secondary trend: the women loudly announcing that they’re above the trend.

But the truth is much less glamorous.

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy wasn’t a style icon because she was “unique.” She was a style icon because she understood something most people don’t: clothes become powerful when they’re simple enough for other people to copy.

That’s literally how fashion works.

One woman wears a white tee and jeans.

Then ten women do.

Then a million women do.

And suddenly the Internet decides it’s a moral failing.

My point, if it wasn’t already obvious, is that women constantly view each other as competition. As a result, we criticize and bully each other. Meanwhile, heterosexual women love men so much that they praise the exact behavior they ridicule other women for.

And then we wonder why men don’t take us seriously.

It’s because we don’t even take each other seriously.

Timothée Chalamet’s rise to fame over the last decade has been interesting, to say the least. I generally enjoy his performances. Dune: Part Two is one of my favorite films of 2024. I think it’s a career highlight for Chalamet, but unfortunately, that’s not saying much.

We can sit and argue whether or not he’s a good actor — in my opinion, he’s just okay — but that would be a waste of time. His offscreen persona is much more fun to dissect than his onscreen performance.

He doesn’t dominate tabloids because of his acting, but because of his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner. Oh, and his “desperation” to win an Oscar. I admire the level of honesty. I think it’s okay to be passionate about your craft, but there’s a certain arrogance. Especially if it is, quite certainly, not your time yet.

Ask anyone — or just Club Chalamet — and this is Kylie’s fault. Unfortunately, I think critics are onto something. But not quite for the reason everyone seems to think.

It’s because of cultural appropriation.

The KarJenner clan has spent the last fifteen or so years borrowing from black culture and building an empire off of it. Has this possibly redefined beauty standards and/or black womanhood? Probably.

Has it affected how Kylie Jenner is perceived by the public? Almost certainly.

“What does this have to do with Timothée Chalamet?”

Well, nothing. But it has everything to do with Kylie Jenner.

How we view the Kardashians as a culture is tied to how we view Black women and/or vice versa.

I’ll admit that when I first heard they were dating — it gave me pause. What was an androgynous, pretty-boy intellectual doing with a Kardashian?

“She’s not smart enough for him! She’s not his true type! What do they even talk about? She doesn’t know movies! That crowd doesn’t take her seriously!”

- Randoms on Twitter, probably

The bob-and-a-tote-bag crowd has been driven insane by this sudden revelation. Maybe Kylie Jenner is just hot and Timothée Chalamet isn’t as deep as you thought. Just because he kissed a boy on camera, it doesn’t mean he’s this free-thinking progressive. He’s no James Spader!

I think there’s a subtle racial undercurrent. The character assassination of Kylie Jenner has been relatively harmless, and it’s harmless because she’s white. Imagine the harassment if Kylie were actually Black.

We’ve seen how this goes. Think Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. FKA Twigs and Robert Pattinson.

And to be clear—I’m not saying any of these traits make someone Black. They don’t. That’s exactly the point.

I think it would be naive to deny that you probably unconsciously categorized her as such in your mind. I know I probably did. And maybe that’s by design.

It’s similar to when a designer brand becomes associated with Black consumers—Gucci, Louis Vuitton—and critics suddenly question whether it’s “losing its value.

As a result, there’s been some image and brand reshaping within the last few years. Gone are the days of long-haired, wind-swept intellectual Timothée. Say hello to #Wiggathe.

The marketing for his last two movies was humorous. Who doesn’t love some “white boy hanging out with Black people” social media marketing? He was hanging out with Druski, after all! Ha ha!

The Complete Unknown and Marty Supreme are two movies that have nothing to do with Black people. In fact, one is about Bob Dylan and the other about ping-pong. So why the sudden shift? Why not the Cannes Film Festival and Venice photocalls? Why not the suave, fashion-led, indie-darling looks?

Because Kylie Jenner doesn’t align with the concept of the indie darling. She doesn’t fit the indie-darling fantasy—not because of identity, but because of the aesthetics she embodies.

It’s also why part of me can’t stand it. It doesn’t read as genuine. It reads as damage control. It’s “I want to keep my career, my female audience that made me famous and also my girlfriend.” And I think that’s fine. He shouldn’t be penalized in the eyes of the public for loving a bad bitch.

But stop trying to sell your audience bullshit. Timothée Chalamet was not always “down.” He was a corny white kid that got his start by kissing Armie Hammer in a movie. Shoutout Guadagnino. He can evolve, but should that evolution come at the hands of your girlfriend? Your girlfriend that’s simultaneously adjusting her image to fit yours, nonetheless?

To close out Black History Month, maybe this essay is just about cultural appropriation and its evolution. Timothée Chalamet is still corny. Kylie Jenner is still a white woman. And the #wigga act is annoying. If the Recording Academy just now gave Beyoncé AOTY, you might lose that Oscar, Timothée. And the way your girlfriend is perceived might be part of the problem.

The backlash isn’t about Kylie Jenner. It’s about how we still rank women in proximity to prestige. And until that changes, no amount of marketing rebrand is going to save anyone’s Oscar campaign.

Try again next year!

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It was a joke about the dozens of women in the comments performing verbal gymnastics to justify the fact that they got married young — as if anyone personally cares what Nicole from Utah is doing at 22.

What surprised me wasn’t the disagreement. It was the ferocity.

Dozens of women, teeth bared, ready to call me everything but my name — over a man. Over their marriage. As if I had attended the wedding. As if I knew them. As if I cared.

I did not realize implying that marriage is not a personality trait would be taken as a personal attack.

Instead of defending myself to teenagers on the internet, I’ll offer some big-sister advice. It won’t be gentle. It might be rude. But it’s honest.

Some women should be wives and mothers. Truly. Cook the dinners. Make the beds. Chase the kids. Do it at 18, 20, or 22 — I genuinely do not give a shit.

Get married. Go in the house. Live your life.

But the second you log onto the internet and start foaming at the mouth because other women chose differently, you’ve already told on yourself.

Don’t hate-share. Don’t send it to the “mommies!! <3” group chat with a prayer emoji and a passive-aggressive sigh. Don’t convince yourself that curiosity is bitterness or that independence is a threat.

Accept your choice as a choice — not a crown.

Because the moment you need strangers to validate it, you’ve admitted it wasn’t enough on its own.

I am exhausted by the internet’s fake “sisterhood of the traveling pants” bullshit. Women are not especially kind to one another. We are competitive, defensive, and deeply unserious about our own insecurity — especially when we feel locked into a life we can’t revise.

Any time someone so much as raises an eyebrow at your decisions, suddenly they’re “single and bitter.”

Who said I was single?

And what exactly am I bitter about?

If your life is so fulfilling, why does a stranger’s throwaway comment unsettle you this much?

Getting married at 22 doesn’t make you superior. It doesn’t make you wiser. It doesn’t make you evolved.

It makes you married.

And if that sentence alone makes you angry, maybe I’m not the problem.

I try not to sound like a misogynist. Or an ice-cold judgmental bitch. I’m not above criticism — trust me, I have my own issues. I avoid conflict. I’m lazy about dating. My self-esteem is a work in progress. I am not a finished product pretending to lecture the masses.

What I do dislike — strongly — are women who pedestalize their roles as wives and mothers and then use them as moral leverage over other women.

Do you know what I actually see when I look at these women?

I don’t see women I envy. I see women who traded curiosity for certainty too early. Women whose friendships quietly evaporated. Whose ambitions got folded into “someday.” Women who haven’t been asked what they want in so long that the question itself feels insulting.

I see lives that shrink instead of expand.

And yes — that terrifies them.

When your entire identity is “someone’s wife” or “someone’s mom,” every other woman becomes a threat. Of course you assume everyone wants what you have. Of course you interpret difference as judgment. An understimulated mind will invent competition just to feel alive.

I’m not saying love is stupid. I’m not saying partnership is pointless.

I’m daring the modern woman to interrogate her relationship with herself.

Because it can’t always be about Todd.

Who the fuck is Todd?

Who are you?

What do you like when no one is watching? What do you want that isn’t socially approved? What brings you joy? What scares you? What did you give up without realizing it?

Women are socialized to stop being curious about their interior lives the moment they are chosen. And that is devastating.

I don’t care that much about teenagers being mad that I said marrying your boyfriend young is boring.

I care that women would rather dismiss uncomfortable ideas than sit with the possibility that they built their entire identity around a role instead of a self.

Women don’t fail because they choose marriage or motherhood.

We fail when we confuse a role with a personality — and then attack anyone who reminds us there could have been more.

Gone are the days when making a fuck ton of money was the goal for women. I grew up wanting to be a journalist or a lawyer in New York City. I figured I would live in Tribeca and be decked out in designer. Very CBK, if you will.

I remember when it was all about being “fabulous,” and it was chic that you couldn’t keep a man. Now teenagers are hootin and hollerin about getting married young. Good lord, conservatism is back, y’all.

(The concept of Charli XCX’s Everything is Romantic playing in the trailer of a “Wuthering Heights” adaptation. )

This movie is a snooze. Like, aggressively boring.

I’m not even going to get into the novel because honestly, who cares. I’ve never actually read it. I’m judging what’s on screen. And what’s on screen is two people who’ve known each other their entire lives (and let’s be real, the half-sibling vibes are doing some heavy lifting) waiting until adulthood to suddenly start fucking like rabbits.

Why?

We’re told it’s class. Heathcliff is poor. Okay. But nobody said they had to get married. And that excuse immediately falls apart when the maid marries well and disappears halfway through the movie.

Nelly exists only to be mean and block communication. She burns letters, talks shit, keeps them apart — but why does Heathcliff just… accept this? He had no issue sleeping with Cathy while her husband was literally in the next room. But now suddenly he respects boundaries?

Also. Five miles. In England. On horseback. Is that not, like, an afternoon?

Isabella’s character is another mess. And that accent? Some weird “chav check” English thing that was so distracting I stopped paying attention. As an American, I don’t know regional accents — but I do know when something feels weirdly modern. It felt very 2026.

Margot Robbie is beautiful. She is also way too old to be playing Cathy. I’m sorry. Watching crow’s feet talk about souls and soulmates completely took me out. If Cathy reads as young on the page, then this performance just makes her seem immature and kind of silly.

They also have zero sexual chemistry. Honestly, zero chemistry at all. This is what I think Gen Z actually means when they complain about sexual content in media — not because it’s awkward or taboo, but because it sucks. Where is the eroticism? Instead, I spent two hours and sixteen minutes watching Jacob Elordi stick his fingers in Margot Robbie’s mouth with zero emotional payoff. Oh — and they don’t even take their clothes off. BOOOOOOOOO.

I’m also really tired of the industry force-feeding me “leading men” who can’t act. There is no Denzel or DiCaprio for Gen Z. You cannot convince me that Jacob Elordi or Timothée Chalamet fit that bill. Maybe that’s a longer essay about celebrity and constant accessibility — but still.

And yes, I hated Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. I find Emerald Fennell’s writing limited and oddly juvenile for an adult woman. Her understanding of interpersonal relationships feels shallow and lame.

This was “Wuthering Heights” the way it would be if you skimmed a SparkNotes summary.

(Also, I don’t know if they were doing BDSM in the 1800s…?)

2/5.

The 2 is for cinematography and costuming.

What a fucking snooze.

It took me six hours of starting and stopping this movie to finally finish it. I shoveled twice, washed my hair, made dinner and still had thirty agonizing minutes left to get through.

After the Hunt cannot seem to decide on its point. It refuses to make a decision about how it feels about the sexual assault. It attempts to criticize gender politics with many odd comments from supposed intellectuals.

All on the cushy, very-liberal campus of Yale University.

That’s why I find the plot confusion to be so odd. It feels as though the answer to the question is obvious and writer Nora Garrett has no interest in answering it.

The highlights of the film are the dedicated performances from Garfield and Roberts. Unfortunately, Ayo Edebiri is entirely too wooden to be taken seriously as a drama actor.

Her line delivery always annoys me — she delivers like she can’t still believe that she was somehow allowed on a film set. And neither can I.

I’m finishing this essay weeks later and I can’t tell you what the point of the movie was. I will say that Luca Guadagnino is reaching his limit, I fear.

Perhaps, it’s time for a break. Challengers was fine. I went into it expecting full-blown sexiness and got PG-13. I cut off Bones and All when she bit that poor girl’s finger off.

The last few movies of his were essentially two hour long Loewe advertisements. Roberts, Edebiri, and Garfield looked amazing. Hair included.

I find this to be the issue with a lot of films this past year — they want to say something, but fall short. Why? Is it a culture thing? Women’s rights? The “woke mob?”

Why are we so afraid of saying, “Rape is bad, and those Gen Z kids are annoying but also right?”

After the Hunt left a very sour taste in my mouth. I was bored, unconvinced, and unmoved. That’s the review.

I. Opening

Fame is built on desire.

The desire to be seen, to be chosen, to be forgiven when the culture inevitably turns. Most pop stars spend their entire careers either chasing that desire or bracing for its expiration date.

Beyoncé does neither.

She does not ask for relevance, nor does she fear irrelevance. Her work arrives complete—unbothered by reaction, immune to backlash. She exists in what I can only describe as the afterlife of fame: a space beyond audience approval, where success is no longer fragile and attention is no longer currency.

Pop superstardom requires accessibility.

In the early 2000s, that access was mediated—tabloid covers at the Walmart checkout lane, a carefully managed TRL appearance. Today, access is constant. With the click of an app, you can track your favorite celebrities in real time. Their thoughts, homes, relationships, and insecurities are all available. They are no longer aspirational. They are, in many ways, normal.

Famous women are expected to want the audience.

They thank us. They reassure us. “I wouldn’t be here without my fans.”

Famous women are expected to need forgiveness.

They apologize preemptively. They self-flagellate. I understand I’m a role model.

Famous women are expected to perform relatability—inviting fans into their homes, planting Easter eggs in their work, writing songs about high school heartbreak well into their mid-thirties, clinging to youth because the industry has taught them that relevance has an expiration date.

You are either young and on the cusp, or aging and expendable.

In an industry as cutthroat as entertainment, women are told they expire at thirty.

Beyoncé is the anomaly.

Not because she is more famous—but because we do not really know her. And that is not an accident. It is the design.

II. From Woman to Institution

After the release of BEYONCÉ in 2013, she largely ceased participating in the traditional celebrity economy. No confessional interviews. No explanatory press tours. No attempts to narrate her own image in real time.

In the age of Substack posts and TikTok captions, we are reminded daily how easily words are misinterpreted. You can say you like pancakes and someone will ask why you think people who enjoy waffles deserve to die.

Now imagine that impulse—misreading, projecting, demanding clarification—at a global scale.

How do you remain true to yourself in an industry built on misunderstanding?

You limit access.

In another reality, her career might have ended quietly after 4. After I Am… Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé was exhausted. She fired her father as her manager and retreated in search of creative clarity. The result was 4—a soul-driven return to classic R&B that many critics dismissed as underwhelming.

In 2011, the consensus was lukewarm. 4 was good, but not groundbreaking. Beyoncé sounded incredible—because of course she did—but the music felt out of step with its moment. The pop landscape was dominated by EDM maximalism: Avicii, Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia. The culture was partying. Club music ruled. Beyoncé’s restraint read as absence.

By 2011, Beyoncé the celebrity was beginning to fade.

By 2014, she would no longer be one.

When you occupy that level of cultural altitude, people begin waiting for you to fall.

Around Beyoncé, rumor doesn’t circulate—it metastasizes. Conspiracies fill the vacuum where access should be. She is accused of worshipping Satan. Of being part of the Illuminati. Of faking her first pregnancy. Of moving through the same shadowy social circles as disgraced men. The theories are often absurd, sometimes grotesque, and always revealing.

What matters is not that these rumors exist—but that she never corrects them.

She does not sit down for a clarifying interview. She does not rehabilitate her image in real time. She does not explain herself to Diane Sawyer or Dateline, the way Britney was once made to. She does not offer a carefully managed apology tour, the way Rihanna was forced to after 2009.

Instead, she withholds.

When Beyoncé finally offers access, it arrives years later, transmuted into art. You learn about her miscarriages long after the grief has been metabolized. You learn about the fractures in her marriage only after they’ve been reframed as myth, confession, and survival. Her interiority is never raw—it is processed, curated, and intentional.

Many artists today prefer you to suffer alongside them in real time.

Beyoncé insists on privacy until pain can be shaped into meaning.

That delay is not coldness.

It is authorship.

III. Scale, Distance, and the Evidence of Containment

Meanwhile, compare her to the pop stars of today. We live in an attention economy. I could open Instagram and scroll through dozens of photos of Dua Lipa on vacation. Sabrina Carpenter and her friends in Paris or spilling out of some NYC nightclub. Artists in their bedrooms, half-asleep, mid-workout, offering intimacy as proof of authenticity.

Accessibility has replaced mystique. Overexposure is framed as honesty.

By contrast, Beyoncé’s Instagram is curated and edited. You don’t catch her living her life in real time. When a photo surfaces of her on vacation, it doesn’t feel exciting—it feels like a violation. Even the phrase “Beyoncé in the wild” carries an instinctive sense of disrespect, as if the public has crossed a boundary it knows exists.

That boundary is not symbolic. It is logistical.

Beyoncé has spoken about arriving at events in disguises. There are documented moments of award shows pausing as lines form simply to meet her. She cannot attend public events without separation, security choreography, and containment—not as spectacle, but as necessity.

I could dedicate paragraphs to her cultural impact—how she reshaped album releases, redefined modern performance, and altered the visual language of pop. But that scale is precisely why comparisons become unavoidable.

This is why arguments erupt when she is placed alongside Taylor Swift. Why people reach for Michael Jackson when trying to contextualize her. Not because the careers are identical—but because the distance is.

Fame at that altitude stops functioning like celebrity and starts functioning like containment.

We don’t know Beyoncé because access to her has been structurally eliminated. Her life is sealed so her work can endure. In a culture that demands constant explanation, her refusal to explain herself has become the point.

She didn’t disappear.

She transcended the need to be known.

Introduction

It’s been a few weeks and I feel as though I can finally confess.

I really did not care for the Stranger Things ending.

Ten years of build-up for a forty-five minute epilogue that read like a first draft. And I saw it in theaters. If I had watched it at home, I would have turned it off.

The writing is one thing. The choice they make for Eleven is the bigger problem.

Female martyrdom is when a story treats a woman’s body as the receipt for everyone else’s closure. Her pain becomes a public resource. Her death becomes social repair.

And it ties into my previous essay, Sex, Survival and the Death of the Final Girl. The Final Girl is a myth now.

Eleven sacrifices herself with the lazy excuse that “it won’t end if I’m still alive,” which—due to the Duffer Brothers’ writing—may or may not even be true. But that’s almost beside the point. The point is that the story can’t imagine her living. It can only imagine her useful.

There are arguments against reading it this way—it’s not their moral responsibility, it’s fiction, people need to “grow up”—but I disagree.

The media we consume shapes how we understand the world. So why do so many stories keep reinforcing the same idea: that women don’t get bodily autonomy, they get narrative utility? That the first “choice” a powerful girl makes for herself is to end her life for the benefit of everyone else?

That’s not a twist. That’s a tragedy.

Eleven and Elphaba spend their narrative arcs being manipulated, lied to, and tortured by the people around them. And when they’re finally granted a sliver of autonomy, they use it to disappear.

Both endings are technically ambiguous, but the messaging is clear. You do not exist to be happy. You exist to teach everyone else resilience. You exist to make other people better. And then you vanish—quietly, conveniently—before anyone has to do the hard work of accountability.

As a girl, imagine how that lands in your chest. You spend two hours or ten years watching, hoping, cheering for this underdog—this girl who is bullied, misunderstood, treated like a monster—and you identify with her struggle, even if you don’t want to admit it.

And then she “chooses” death.

Everyone smiles, grateful they got to know you, grateful your suffering made them softer, wiser, redeemed. While you’re just gone. And no one has to apologize for not being a better friend. No one has to show up for you. Hell, we don’t even see anyone publicly mourn you.

That’s the function of female martyrdom: it lets the community feel cleansed without anyone changing.

Are women born wicked?

Neither Elphaba nor Eleven gets a normal childhood.

Elphaba is tormented for the color of her skin. She’s ostracized, and the onset of her powers doesn’t improve her life—it makes her easier to fear. She’s publicly humiliated by Glinda and her followers, who successfully turn the rest of the student body against her.

Her relief from misery is temporary. A few months after she finally makes friends, she fulfills her one true wish: she meets the Wizard. And the moment she refuses to sacrifice her autonomy—refuses to become a tool—she is immediately rebranded. Not complicated. Not human. Wicked.

She spends the remaining years of her life hiding and on the run. She never gives up her fight for Animal rights. And when the Wizard finally falls, Elphaba still cannot safely remain in Oz. The citizens still believe she’s a criminal—and despite Glinda offering to tell Oz the truth, Elphaba declines.

Glinda enjoys the glory of saving Oz, while Fiyero and Elphaba disappear together forever. Glinda is the only one who knows—and the only one who is devastated by it.

Stranger things have happened

Eleven spends her entire life being experimented on and manipulated. She experiences moments of joy with her friends, with Hopper—what it means to be truly a part of something good.

The choice to end her life didn’t belong to Eleven. She decides the horror won’t stop if she remains alive, and maybe that’s true. Maybe the military would have hunted her down, or the Upside Down would have made some dramatic reappearance—but how depressing is that as a moral?

The girl spends her life tormented and all she gets in the end is death. Not even a funeral. Hardly a thank you.

Meanwhile, Max—who was in a coma for two years—gets to graduate and walk again. Will and Dustin go off to college. Mike tells the story and becomes a writer.

Sure, Eleven’s death benefits the “greater good.” But she was still a person. She had an interior world. She had wants and dreams. And it all gets reduced to a conclusion that feels less like catharsis and more like convenience.

If you’re a survivor or a victim of bullying—don’t look to media to comfort you. Your favorite show might still insist your suffering only ends once you’re gone.

The third act problem

We see this standard in other films too: Promising Young Woman, Don’t Worry Darling.

There’s no longer an acceptable cultural ideal of a woman surviving—of a woman fighting for her right to her own life and actually getting to keep it. Triumph becomes an afterthought, or it’s withheld entirely.

Promising Young Woman lands on a sexually violent final act that ends with the lead character’s death. Her murderer is also the man who raped her best friend. Neither woman lives to see justice prevail. I remember finishing the movie and being left with a sour taste in my mouth—not because it was bleak, but because it felt like the story needed a dead woman to make the point stick.

Don’t Worry Darling spends its runtime following Alice as she tries to uncover the mystery behind the Victory Project. The movie ends ambiguously—the audience doesn’t get to see if she escapes the simulation or is simply recaptured. A woman has her autonomy stripped from her by her man-baby husband, and we don’t even get the dignity of watching her survive.

I believe media reflects our cultural ideals. We’re in politically trying times. Women’s rights are being stripped away as I type this. ICE is separating families and murdering civilians.

To watch our media lean so heavily into themes of death and lack of bodily autonomy is scary. It feels final. It feels reinforcing. It feels like some weird form of propaganda: make the masses comfortable with conformity and they will eventually comply.

Incels. Podcast culture. Neonazism. Fascism. We’re spinning around and around in a circle.

The rebellion of the nasty woman!

But on the flip side, there’s a rebellion occurring among women. We’re actively rejecting the ideal that keeps getting forced down our throats.

“Nasty, nasty bad pop girls” like Addison Rae and Charli XCX embracing vulnerability and the complexity of being a woman—not a girl, but a woman.

“Messy woman” literature—Ottessa Moshfegh, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy, My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin—books that are curious about the female experience. It’s not perfect and that’s the point.

We have books and films about motherhood and postpartum psychosis, such as Die, My Love and Nightbitch. Women are waking up and saying—wait, I can want more? More life, more love, more sex, more silence? I’m not just a functioning vessel for everyone else to use for their own gain? And as a woman myself, I think that’s pretty fucking cool.

Hell hath no fury, as they say. The feminists of the 1970s had the Final Girl. Debate about how “feminist” the trope is is more than fair. But it was kick-ass for the sole survivor to be a female. Everyone else got sliced and diced, but the “weaker sex” lived on to tell the tale.

I think our radical, messy woman will do the same. I think women will do what we always do: we’ll grieve for each other, fight for each other, and make sure our ideas live on.

Introduction

The Final Girl was a staple character trope in the slasher genre. She survived despite the odds being stacked against her and successfully evaded her captor or outright killed him. As the slasher genre dies, so does the Final Girl. Where does that leave women in horror? It leaves women in an awkward in-between space of political correctness and poor storytelling.

The Final Girl survives, but not triumphantly.

Promising Young Woman, Don’t Worry Darling and Blink Twice will be used as examples of “new age” horror films or “social thrillers,” that feature final girls who do survive the omnipresent final boss (a misogyny/sexist/racist monster,) but at the cost of their sanity. These films highlight cultural fears of denial of bodily autonomy, which has been a consistent presence since the 2016 Presidential election and the eventual overturn of Roe v. Wade.

The Final Girl survived a period of cultural fears surrounding teen promiscuity and corruption of the youth from the 1970s into the late 2000s. Many argue that she does not have a place in feminism. Still, I say that the Final Girl and her status can be used to identify where America has landed culturally on feminist topics. Horror films of the 2020s have landed here -- women must accept that they live in a patriarchal society and if they refuse, violence will be the outcome.

The media that misses the point

Promising Young Woman, a social thriller released in 2020 was the feature directorial debut of Emerald Fennell. It starred Carey Mulligan as Cassandra, a woman who lost her best friend, Nina, to suicide after she was raped in college. Cassandra works in a coffee shop and spends her nights pretending to be publicly intoxicated and threatening anyone who attempts to take advantage of her sexually.

The film was marketed as a “revenge” film, where it was implied that Cassandra was murdering the men she was taking home. In the trailer, she even keeps a tally in a journal of her encounters. By the end of the movie, Cassandra discovers that Nina’s rapist is having his bachelor party at a remote cabin in the woods. She poses as a stripper, drugs the other men attending, and manages to tie up the rapist. The audience gets a monologue about rape culture and sexual assault, which amounts to nothing because Nina’s rapist breaks free and murders Cassandra.

As we near the end of the film with no conflict resolution, it’s revealed at the wedding reception (as police come to arrest everyone involved in Cassandra’s murder) that Cassandra notified people of her whereabouts and what likely happened to her. Nina’s story starts where it began, and Cassandra loses her life as a result with no justice for either party.

Don’t Worry Darling, a social thriller released in 2022, was the “sophomore slump” of Olivia Wilde’s directing career. It starred Florence Pugh and Harry Styles as a happily married couple living in a 1950s-Palm Springs-esque community where Pugh’s character realizes something is not quite “right.”

Our female lead discovers a world-shattering secret; her husband has placed her into a simulated 1950s reality. In the real world, she’s a doctor which keeps her from taking care of her husband and the home. In the spec script, she almost breaks free from the simulated reality. She kills her husband in the simulation and the real world but passes out and wakes up again in the simulation strapped to a hospital bed. It’s 1954, so she’s promptly locked away in a psych ward until an old friend visits her and points her toward a way out.  The motivations of the characters are fleshed out and less sympathetic; you actively hate the husbands from the very beginning. Her escape is also much more daring and violent; she sodomizes her husband to give herself enough time to reach the exit. The final film ending is much more ambiguous. She still murders her husband and is chased to the exit, but the screen cuts to black before confirming her escape.

Blink Twice, another social thriller released this past August marked Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut. It’s a film about a woman named Frida and her best friend, Jess who are both invited to travel to the island of tech-billionaire Slater King. The “twist” is revealed in the second act; the women on the island are being systematically drugged and raped every night. A second twist is revealed, Frida had already been to the island once before. Chaos ensues and people die, except the main perpetrator, Slater King is allowed to walk away with his life. Frida drugs King marries him and takes over his company in the name of “revenge,” but the viewer doesn’t get to see what happens beyond that.

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The cultural death of the Final Girl

A common thread throughout all three of these films is that the Final Girl doesn’t survive her ordeal triumphantly. She doesn’t sprint toward the last few minutes narrowly escaping, rather she’s knocked out cold and dragged back inside the haunted house.

In the 1970s with the burgeoning sexual revolution, the horror genre was used as a tool to remind women of the punishment that came with being a sexual being. In “Men, Women and Chainsaws” by Carol J. Clover, the Final Girl is described as, “the Girl Scout, the bookworm, the mechanic, and unlike her girlfriends, she is not sexually active.” The Final Girl doesn’t necessarily need to be a virginal damsel, but she does reject male attention in any form.

She is intelligent, resourceful, and even paranoid; she notices the things her friends seem to miss (pg. 39). In the 1970s when women were finally allowed the right to access safe and legal abortion, our media condemned the idea of the “morally loose” woman.

The audience quickly comes to understand that femininity ensures exploitation; masculinity ensures a fighting chance at survival.

In 2024, in an allegedly progressive, sexually-free cultural landscape that claims to admonish sexual predation, there has been a consistent theme in the media we consume. In the 2020s, the slasher genre has become irrelevant, and the social thriller has taken its place. Cassandra, Alice, and Frida are three beautiful women who have their sexuality displayed wantonly on screen. Cassandra uses her body and beauty to trick men into taking her home; Alice and Jack spend much of the film having non-penetrative sex in various parts of their simulated reality; and Frida desperately wants the power she assumes will come from having a relationship with Slater King. Sex is the central theme in each of these films as they highlight the power imbalances between the characters.

If Promising Young Woman had been released in the 1970s, it would have been the box office flop, I Spit on Your Grave. Promising Young Woman was intended to highlight the subtle evilness of your average drunk man in a bar.

I Spit on Your Grave violently positions the brutal rape front and center in the film. The audience understands that this is a woman that has been attacked and humiliated and she’s rising from the dead for revenge.

Promising Young Woman doesn’t explicitly say the word rape or even show the violence on screen, but once Cassandra discovers her best friend’s attack was recorded, you finally come to understand what happened as the viewer.

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In Don’t Worry Darling, Alice’s entire existence in the simulated reality denies her autonomy over her life. Alice and Jack don’t have penetrative sex in the film to reinforce the idea that the “power” belongs to Alice. An argument can be made that all the sex in the film is essentially rape; Alice never consented to be in that world to begin with.

In Blink Twice, Frida craves power and obsesses over her proximity to it. Within the first few minutes of the film, she conveniently winds up in the orbit of tech-billionaire Slater King.

They share laughs, they drink, and Frida is quickly invited to a getaway on his remote island. In a not-so-shocking twist, it is revealed that Slater King and the other men on the island have been drugging and raping the women every single night that they’ve been there.

Zoe Kravitz does an excellent job at creating a level of claustrophobic terror; Frida realizes something is amiss but isn’t quite sure what and ignores it. She even goes as far as to show the violence on screen, and it is a very anxiety-inducing few seconds. Women are running away and screaming in terror but are quickly caught and dragged back.

The women finally wake up from the drug-induced haze they’ve been under, and violence erupts. Everyone dies, but Frida goes out of her way to preserve Slater’s life. The film ends in a very confusing tone, Frida has been drugging Slater, marries him, and runs his company.

All three female leads present as the archetypal Final Girl. Cassandra and Frida are both cunning, cruel women and the real version of Alice is a strong career woman.

While the Final Girl isn’t designed to be a sexual being it can be argued it is because of the time the trope debuted in. The idea of the virginal Final Girl does not hold up because America is much less conservative than it was in the 1970s and even early 2000s. The consistent ambiguity in these films leaves the audience confused about its themes, thus continuing to perpetuate rape culture.

In Promising Young Woman, the audience is told that survivors of sexual assault can only receive justice in death. The filmmakers of Don’t Worry Darling seemingly struggled to find an appropriate way to conclude the story. Rather than highlight the fear of being denied bodily autonomy, Wilde’s directing preferred to highlight the open display of female pleasure. Blink Twice is another example of a film struggling to find a way to appropriately conclude its story. The audience is told that survivors will be unaffected by their trauma if they receive a big payday in return, which was a common argument made during the height of #MeToo.

Additionally, Blink Twice was originally titled Pussy Island, which tested poorly but would have been more fitting given the plot of the film. The consensus was that the word was too inappropriate and reduced women to only their bodies (which is almost the entire point.)

Culturally, horror films have always reflected what we were most afraid of. In a Vox article from 2016, the home invasion was a consistent theme in horror. That year was a presidential election year that highlighted the fears of many white Americans and claims spouted by the Republican party; nameless, faceless people of color invading their spaces. It is an easy metaphor for the fear of foreigners.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Since then, we have gotten horror movies, such as Blink Twice, Immaculate, The Omen and so on that exemplify this cultural fear of unwanted pregnancy and motherhood.

Where are you going, where have you been?

It will be argued that the films mentioned above are a byproduct of a post-#MeToo world and rape culture. We claim to admonish sexual predation and believe survivors, but the ending of these films suggests otherwise culturally. Promising Young Woman only seeks justice for its survivors in death. Don’t Worry Darling does not allow the audience to see justice for the sole survivor at all. We’re not even told what happens to the other women still trapped. Blink Twice walks a thin line between empowerment and subjugation.

  Perhaps, there is no place for a Final Girl in our current political climate. There is no space where a woman can successfully overcome the killer in a social thriller because the killer is still at large and a being she cannot actively see. Rather, we do not allow her to harm the ones that work on behalf of the “killer,” but destroy her instead if she dares to survive.

I’m rewatching Sex and the City (as one does) and I’m finally realizing how much these women kind of suck.

I know Carrie writes a sex column and her relationships are her thing, but damn, does this bitch have a hobby that’s not Mr. Big or smoking? Like does she do Pilates? Does she read a book? Does she have a plant? A cause? Anything? The second time she breaks up with Big after he leaves for Paris, she spends weeks shit-talking him to her friends until they finally tell her to shut the hell up. Carrie thinks he’s so boring and so old and he has to be himself and she gets to be her and blah, blah, blah. The conversation was very reminiscent of a conversation I would have now with my friends at 23.

The most embarrassing scene in the second season is the finale when she catches Big after his engagement party and asks, “Why wasn’t it me?” THEN, she says, “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell,” and when Big responds with obvious confusion (as a man does) she responds, “You never did understand.”

Mind you, Carrie is in her early-30s. These are thoughts grown women should keep amongst their friends or in their heads, not say out loud like you’re auditioning for the role of Most Tortured Person Alive at a stranger’s engagement party.

And don’t get me wrong—this rewatch isn’t making me Team Big. If anything, it’s making me realize Big is exactly what men have always been: a guy who likes having a pretty, wild, funny woman around as long as he gets to feel smarter than her.

Even so, I don’t fully buy into the idea that Mr. Big never loved Carrie. He obviously cares for her and enjoys her company. However, there are subtle instances that make it clear he doesn’t really know her. In Season 2, Big buys Carrie that god-awful sparkly bird purse and claims, “It reminded me of you.” Like… okay. First of all, that purse should be tried at The Hague. Second of all, “it reminded me of you” is what men say when they don’t know anything about you besides “tiny” and “chaotic.”

During their arguments you can honestly tell he thinks she’s quite dumb or flat out naive. He talks down to her constantly and always dismisses her feelings. He tells her “you don’t understand” or “you don’t know what you’re talking about” and Carrie’s inner monologue is actually agreeing with him, which is insane. That dynamic is not sexy. It’s emotional hospice care.

Emotionally unavailable men breadcrumb you to death until you finally say I’m sick of this, and then they magically become the most present, devoted man on Earth the second you move on. When Big saw that Carrie moved on he immediately did what he could to ruin it.

He acted like his hands were tied when he decided to marry Natasha and all but shrugged his shoulders when Carrie found out. He knew Carrie wouldn’t be able to resist because maybe he would actually change this time for her. Maybe this time she’ll be worthy enough for him to establish their relationship.

Meanwhile he dismisses her feelings constantly—when she wants to meet his mother, when she says “I love you” and he doesn’t say it back, when she’s tired of him looking at other women. Big never did anything to reassure Carrie that he actually wanted to be with her.

But here’s the part that makes this show sting when you rewatch it with a frontal lobe: Carrie clearly had insecurities and inadequacies that surpassed anything Big was capable of fixing. Carrie very much needed therapy, but even ruins that in Season 2 by sleeping with an alcoholic she met in the office. Carrie is the type to go to therapy and treat it like a creative writing workshop.

There are so many instances where these women could have actually been happy. Carrie could have been very happy with Aidan, but she ruined it by cheating with Mr. Big—because Carrie herself is not emotionally available. From one avoidant to another, I recognize the signs.

Yes, Carrie is vocal about her feelings with Big, but she plays emotional mind games first. It’s a vulnerability fake-out. You share select things to ease that sense of detachment and loneliness, to feel as though you’re trying to connect, but you still get to stay emotionally safe. It’s minimizing risk and maintaining control. Miranda and Samantha do this too. In fact, Charlotte is the only character that ends up truly happy because she goes all in. She’s annoying sometimes, but she’s the only one who doesn’t treat intimacy like a hostage negotiation.

When Carrie has the opportunity to even be remotely happy she sabotages it because she feels emotionally unsafe. She knows what to expect with Mr. Big and deep down she knew he wouldn’t show up at the altar to marry her. She knew he wouldn’t want to move in with her. She chooses these things because I can guarantee it would hurt her a lot more if Aidan decided he suddenly didn’t want her, so she decides for him first. It’s “I can’t get left if I leave first” with a designer shoe budget.

As I rewatch shows I really had no business watching at 15, I realize how much these women actually suck. Miranda is a miserable, angry person, Carrie and Samantha are both insecure, male-identified women and Charlotte is the only one I actually like. Don’t even get me started on the women of Girls. They are such awful people and even shittier friends. Hannah Horvath is the entire reason I took a step back and finally realized my self-loathing comes across as narcissism. Self-obsession is only cool in your 20s and starts to get tacky in your 30s. Carrie Bradshaw the millennial, hipster nerd generation would have loved your newsletter.

If you know me personally, you know I’m a certified man-hater (you can trademark that). I even wrote an entire Substack post about it—but here’s the truth: I don’t actually hate men. I love the seemingly perfect ones that grace my screen and say the right things to win over the stubborn female lead. What can I say? I’m a hopeless romantic with a violent allergy to real-life dating.

As a little girl, you grow up believing Mr. Right will eventually come find you, sweep you off your feet, and take you far, far away from your boring life. Your life doesn’t really start until you meet him—and in the meantime, you just kind of wander around bumping into things.

Mr. Right is funny, smart, gainfully employed, takes you out on actual dates, and calls when he says he’s going to. He’s not cheating, not emotionally unavailable, and he’s weirdly obsessed with you—to the point of it being semi-annoying. As I get older, I realize either being stubborn isn’t “sexy” like it is in the movies, or Mr. Right is a myth. Considering I’m a woman and therefore always right, I’m going with the latter.

Oh dearly beloved, sweet Aidan Shaw. Carrie didn’t deserve you. Who wouldn’t want a 6’5” handsome man with an actual adult job who builds furniture and loves you? Carrie looked at a man who can sand wood and communicate and said, “No, actually, I’d prefer a guy who treats me like an optional subscription.”

Haters will say Edward Cullen is abusive, and maybe they have a point, but I disagree. You’re just not evolved like me, sorry. Who wouldn’t want pure love and devotion and a dramatic suicide attempt because he thought you died? (Kidding. Mostly.)

When I was fifteen, I watched Girls on HBO for the first time and thought it changed my life. Adam and Hannah seemed perfect for each other. He was attentive—most of the time—funny, and attractive in a strange, wounded-dog sort of way. But rewatching it now? He didn’t have a full-time job, pushed her boundaries constantly, and was flat-out selfish. Lena Dunham might be one of the most annoying white women on the planet, but she can write the hell out of a show. That one scene where Hannah says she’s tired of being self-aware and wants to be happy? Still hits.

As I rewatch shows like this, I can’t help but think about my own life and how much growing I still have left to do. Why do I find the always-angry, emotionally stunted men attractive? And what does it say about me?

I’ve never known love to be easy. I’ve never seen anyone close to me experience a relationship that didn’t come with cheating, lying, abuse, or just… silence. Eventually, the woman caves—not out of love, but out of fear of being alone. And the compromise always falls on her. It’s her career. Her time. Her money.

Love just always seemed like a punishment for women. So I never thought it was worth the effort.

I also just haven’t met anyone worth trying for. I don’t have the emotional capacity required for dating. I don’t think most men are that funny or that interesting. And I have no interest in sifting through garbage just to find a diamond.

As little girls, we’re told “wait for your knight in shining armor—he’ll come for you!” But what if he doesn’t? Or what if he does, and he’s just an asshole? Why should I wait for someone to save me from my allegedly boring, unfulfilled life?

I think the most important work any woman can do in her life is redirect her energy positively—so she can pick the Aidan Shaws and Seth Cohens of the world. You deserve someone who is sure about you the first time your eyes meet—not someone who just settles because they can’t seem to get rid of you.

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“Oh, I feel JUST like Carrie on Substack.”

Carrie Bradshaw at least had the nerve to be a terrible human being, which actually made her an interesting writer. She was a horrible friend and girlfriend — hence the column! It was from lived experience people!

Lately it seems that anyone with an iPhone and a stable Wi-Fi connection deems themselves the voice of Generation Z.

Substack seems to be a pseudo-intellectual dumping ground for clickbait essays on some 22-year-old’s opinion on life and love.

Which is fine — yet, a lot of these essays are written with the obvious intention of keeping the reader at arm’s length.

Okay, your boyfriend dumped you. Well, what did you learn? Did you weep? Did you not eat? Do you regret it? Do you feel silly? Do you not care?

What makes your experience so unique that you must use 800 words on it?

To be a writer, one must have lived experience worth sharing. One must be vulnerable. You cannot tell me about how love has failed you and not tell me how it made you feel. If it made you feel small and humiliated. Or larger than life itself.

In your 20s, the only experience you have is your vulnerability. What wisdom or authority do you have to pass down to someone your age or younger? You’re 23. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would I trust the judgement of a person that hasn’t learned the skill of vulnerability? Self-compassion? Your words are just noise. Noise that just floats into oblivion with everyone else’s noise.

The most human and mature thing an adult does — that makes them an authority on life — is accept that they are not the smartest person in the room. There’s always someone that has more knowledge. You can always be taught the same lesson by life over and over again.

I know I have.

I don’t write because I have answers. I write because I’m willing to admit I don’t.

I pray that twenty-something women spend time thinking about what they truly desire. Not performing their interests for a fake audience. Every thing that makes someone slightly interesting gets ran into the ground by individuals attempting to perform coolness rather than just embodying it.

Tik Tok after Tik Tok of young girls preaching how to maximize their lives. Listening to podcasts, reading Substack essays, collecting “physical media”. Just one more thing to add to the rotation. Every post is a curated information dump.

You aren’t good enough. Do these hobbies you have no interest in to prove that you are.

I’m not a human being. I’m a product. Purchase me for the low, low price of my identity and try me out.

There’s a 30 day return policy.

i. introduction

Truthfully, I was more of a Disney Channel girl than a Nickelodeon girl.

This was likely because my mother never wanted to pay Comcast extra so I could actually watch Nickelodeon — but that’s okay, I’ve gotten over it.

Drake Bell was my first crush. Beck from Victorious was my second (Avan Jogia, if you ever read this, I love you — tell Halsey I said hello). Naturally, I stopped watching Nickelodeon when Victorious was canceled, because I refused to watch The Thundermans.

The fascinating thing about being a child star is that not everyone survives the process. You are either mediocre — good enough and promptly forgotten — or excellent and punished for it through prolonged public humiliation.

Disney was simply better at the machine of child stardom. Record deals through their own label. Branded merchandise with your face in every mall in America. Television crossovers, DCOM cameos, morning show appearances. They did not play games with their talent.

If you wanted to be famous, you were going to work.

Disney Channel made stars. Nickelodeon did not. Trust me — they tried.

Miranda Cosgrove.
Jeanette McCurdy.
Victoria Justice.
Jamie Lynn Spears.

No one was rushing out to buy their latest record.

Nickelodeon, by contrast, was messier. Louder. Less polished. Its stars weren’t trained to scale — they were exaggerated, caricatured, and discarded once the joke wore thin. Which is why Ariana Grande never looked like a survivor of that system.

She looked like an accident.

Which is what made her so efficient.

ii. cat valentine and the safety of infantilization

Much of my writing is framed through the lens of a child who lived through these moments. To me, Ariana Grande was Cat Valentine — and for years, I didn’t understand why people cared so much about Cat from Victorious at all.

Even now, in her early thirties, Grande has never fully shaken the ditzy redhead image Nickelodeon stamped onto her. Her early brand existed as a kind of kaleidoscope: baby-faced ingénue, cartoonish femininity, and a Mariah Carey–esque voice that felt almost incongruent with her presentation.

The high ponytail. Puffy skirts. Crop tops and tights. She stood with one foot still wedged firmly in the Nickelodeon door and the other hovering just shy of legitimate pop stardom.

Her sexual appeal wasn’t threatening — because, in a sense, it didn’t really exist yet. There was no urgent need for handlers to panic over a chaotic Britney Spears– or Rihanna-level implosion. The public didn’t perceive her as volatile, dangerous, or even particularly adult.

She wasn’t a scandal waiting to happen. She was safe.

Her appeal, at the time, was closer to Christina Aguilera in theory — vocal talent first — but without the aggression, hunger, or visible rebellion. Grande’s image didn’t ask to be taken seriously.

To this day, the most persistent criticisms surrounding Grande are almost entirely about her body. In her early twenties, she was “too small,” “too thin,” “too childlike.”

As body image conversations shift toward neutrality and acceptance, Grande’s body continues to surface in online forums, dissected with an almost clinical familiarity. Rather than entertaining the possibility of chronic illness, stress, or lifelong struggle, the discourse defaults to blame. Control must be intentional. Discipline must be rewarded or punished.

What’s striking is not that her body remains a topic of conversation, but that the conversation never evolves. There is no scandal attached to it. Her body is not a site of rebellion or refusal — it is proof of maintenance.

And this is where the machine becomes visible.

Grande’s image is curated so meticulously that even transgression feels inert. Her romantic scandals register as background noise. There is no fall from grace because there is no grace to fall from — only consistency.

This is the paradox of Ariana Grande: her image management is so effective that it renders her almost boring and nonthreatening. Beyond her undeniable vocal talent, there is very little left to interrogate — because every potential point of intrigue has already been neutralized.

iii. the body as proof of discipline

The structure of any body-based mental illness — and any body-based performance — hinges on the idea of discipline. Maintenance requires consistency. Visibility requires control. To successfully sustain a body under constant public scrutiny is to signal obedience to routine, restraint, and labor.

A pop star is nothing if not disciplined. Rehearsals. Appearances. Paparazzi shots. Photoshoots. Meet-and-greets. Brand deals. Acting pursuits. Every output is another moving part in the machine of legibility. To show up repeatedly, polished and precise, is a form of work not everyone survives. Many break under it. Others disappear.

In 2013, Ariana Grande was labeled “too thin” — not because of widespread concern for her health, but because men no longer found her body desirable.

Strike one in the pop star playbook. If men don’t want you, you can’t sell fantasy to that market.

In 2025, she is thinner still, and the tone has shifted to outrage. Not care, exactly — but condemnation. Having an eating disorder is no longer culturally transgressive or romanticized the way it once was. Now, thinness reads as irresponsibility. The pop star turned actress becomes a threat to public health rather than an object of desire.

Women on the internet have spent the last several years dissecting Grande’s appearance with a fixation that feels less like concern and more like surveillance. The tone resembles that moment in a zombie movie when someone in the group has been bitten — and everyone knows it — but no one says anything outright. Instead, they watch and wait for proof.

The body becomes evidence. A future collapse is imagined, rehearsed, and almost desired. Not because the audience wants harm, but because pop culture is conditioned to expect consequence. A visible breaking point would confirm that the machine has limits.

iv. dangerous woman as a reframe

When Dangerous Woman was released in 2016, many critics noted its lack of cohesion. Caitlin White, writing for BKMAG, observed that it was “rather ironic” the lead single was titled Focus, because that’s exactly what the record lacked. The critique wasn’t about Grande’s ability — her voice was, as always, unimpeachable — but about credibility.

Quinn Moreland’s Pitchfork review pushed this idea further. Grande was praised for her technical skill but faulted for emotional distance. She remained guarded, withholding, difficult to access. What was meant to be a sexual pivot felt strangely safe — not because of prudishness, but because nothing about the album threatened her existing image.

This was not a rebellion. It was a resize.

The latex bunny ears, the monochrome visuals, the sultry production — all of it signaled adulthood without risk. Sexuality was introduced as aesthetic, not behavior. There was no public unraveling, no tabloid spiral, no visible loss of control to accompany the shift. Desire was presented carefully, as something to be looked at rather than lived through.

Critics struggled to believe the persona because belief requires exposure. Dangerous Woman asks the listener to accept intimacy without ever offering vulnerability. The album flirts with R&B — a genre that depends on emotional proximity — yet Grande keeps herself at a deliberate remove. The songs are technically excellent, often thrilling in isolation, but resistant to confession.

At the time of Dangerous Woman, Grande was still in transition: no longer Cat Valentine, not yet a figure capable of rupture. The album does not mark a break in her career, but a test of its elasticity. How much adulthood could be layered onto her image without destabilizing it?

The answer, it turns out, was quite a lot — as long as nothing actually changed.

Ariana was often viewed as a kind of Barbie doll — talented and pretty enough, styled in girlish outfits, but curiously hollow beneath the surface. She sings about sex with a sense of remove, marked by a limitation of lived experience rather than transgression.

Her albums are tonally fractured — oscillating between innocence and sensuality — yet consistently yield excellent singles. Grande is a master of surface-level precision, even when the interior world remains carefully sealed off.

Her voice performs exceptionally well under R&B instruction — Sweetener received an 8 from Pitchfork, after all — but R&B as a genre demands a certain intimacy, a willingness to be emotionally legible. The result is music that is technically impressive, often beautiful, but deliberately withholding.

v. desire without scandal

This is likely why her image registers as boring.

Even as fans spend years piecing together her relationship timelines and labeling her a homewrecker, no one ever really cares. It mostly lives online as a running joke. People would rather circle the conversation back to her body, or to the fact that they think Ethan Slater is ugly.

The narrative never sticks.

In an era of Notes app apologies, Ariana simply never acknowledges it. She and Ethan are rarely photographed together. She’s never publicly discussed him in any way that reads as romantic or intimate.

She doesn’t perform shame. She doesn’t engage in public self-flagellation. And without those things, the punishment never arrives.

Instead, she increases her output.

The brand of Ariana Grande is never interrupted. The machine keeps chugging along. If she existed fifteen years earlier, her face would have been plastered across every OK! magazine in the checkout aisle. She would have sat for a Good Morning America interview. There would have been a Diane Sawyer special.

Now, output rinses tabloid fodder out of the news cycle.

Singer transitions into beloved, Oscar-nominated actress.

R.E.M. Beauty.
Wicked.
Eternal Sunshine.
A world tour.

Two things she once swore she had no plans to do anytime soon. She made it clear — this tour is a last hurrah for what we understand to be the Ariana Grande brand.

In 2024, she appeared on The Zack Sang Show and said she had no intention of releasing an album during Wicked. She claimed the 2023 Writers’ Strike simply left her with extra time, and she “decided” to record new music.

Coincidentally, that was also the year news of her relationship with a married Ethan Slater broke.

Was her album Eternal Sunshine image control? What is there to criticize if Grande consistently and successfully proves her cultural value?

vi. outro

Ariana Grande didn’t escape the system that consumes women in pop culture. She learned how to survive it by never giving it what it wants most.

Sexuality, for women, only matters when it devastates you. Desire is only legible when it collapses your interior world. Tragedy only registers when it derails the machine entirely. Grande never lets it get that far.

Her body is maintained, not sacrificed. Her relationships are absorbed, not punished. Her sexuality is staged rather than lived through in public. Every potential rupture is redirected into output, and the machine keeps moving quietly and efficiently.

Ariana Grande remains intact because she never allows herself to become narratively interesting in the way pop culture demands of women. She has been able to do what Taylor Swift cannot. She has ruled her career with an iron fist that has transitioned her from good girl into an adult woman. She’ll get that Oscar one day and she’ll have rightfully earned it.

The pop machine didn’t break her.

It made her sustainable.

For a really long time, I always kind of nodded my head and filed my parents’ advice into the “I’ll cross that bridge when I get there” box. Most of it is reassurance—reminders to move at my own pace. What’s meant for me will find me. Vienna waits for you. Oh, mirror in the sky—what is love?

My parents are secretly very big softies, true to their Sagittarius natures. If you’ve been a reader of mine for the last six months, I’m sure it’s finally clicked into place.

A Gemini sun, Sagittarius moon, and Aquarius rising with two Sagittarius parents?!
I know. It explains the dazzling wit.

Anyway, these big softies have laid down some powerful knowledge over the years that finally started making sense in my brain this year. No more claiming “I’m just a girl.”
Nah. I’m a woman.

“Not everyone can come with you, not even me.”

I learned this lesson in the second half of this year. I don’t give up easily. I’ve always considered myself a bit of a clinger. Conversations could always be had. Things could always possibly improve.

But sometimes we just have to accept that we aren’t compatible with everyone.

Some people really are in your life for a season. And most things do happen for a reason. Not to be cryptic, but it’s fascinating how you blink and people can just be gone. My parents have had to remind me that my path is different—that I’m growing and changing. I’m not meant to live a small life. And in the pursuit of that life, sometimes people have to be left behind. Not out of malice, but out of necessity.

When you try to drag the perpetually unwilling along your journey, they become extra weight. You have to exert twice the effort—once to pull them forward, and once to make sure you don’t trip and fall trying to carry you both.

In my desire to grow, I have a habit of sharing my knowledge with others. It came as a shock to me when I was harshly shown that not everyone carries the same attitudes that I do. Not everyone was raised the same way. I’m not saying these are necessarily bad things—variety is the spice of life. I suppose cruelty will always shock me, though.

Our comfort zones are dangerous.

My comfort zone kept me around people who had no business having access to me. And not to be all “rah rah, I have opps” about my life, but I don’t think the people we keep closest even realize the power of their tongue.

I’ve spent decades surrounded by women who mirrored my earliest core wound—because it was familiar. Comfortable. It felt normal to be around women who secretly disliked me without even realizing it—women who questioned my character and eroded my self-esteem.

My ambition, my desire for self-improvement, and the assumption that I deserve to be happy trigger something in the insecure. It was genuinely shocking to me to discover that people are, in fact, jealous of me.

To escape this, I had to make the radical decision to choose myself—and to be “alone.” Not keeping friends around just to say I had them. As a result, I feel like I’ve been floating. I surprisingly care a lot less than I thought I would.

It’s disarming, but it’s also exciting. I’ve grown so much over the last five years—even this year alone. I’ve traveled across the world, lived away from my family, walked a red carpet, and saw Jennifer Lawrence in the flesh. I felt the chill of a Utah winter and genuinely thought I might lose my toes. I’ve had conversations with baristas, men on sidewalks, and the owners of production companies.

I took up my writing at a time when I felt my absolute lowest. Most importantly, I didn’t let negativity make me bitter. I used solitude as a period of reflection and self-knowledge. I’m so far out of my comfort zone that I don’t even know what it looks like anymore.

Harsh, but true: loser women do exist, and they walk among us.

Loser women aren’t insecure women. They aren’t women who are struggling or figuring themselves out. They’re women who refuse to build a self and instead try to live inside someone else.

There are women on this earth who would skin me alive and wear my flesh if they could. I have watched women quite literally steal my hobbies, dating preferences, lingo, personal style, hair color—anything—because they have no sense of self.

And instead of dealing with that, they take their anger out on me—because they could never be the original. Just a copy.

And you may ask: how do you know this for a fact?

Because.

I know me when I see me.

And I’m using a lot of word salad to skip over the point — if you have an inkling that your best friend is competing with you, don’t wait to cut them off like I did.

Trust. Self-trust. Compassion. Vulnerability.

I’m not ashamed. No one can make me feel shame. I’m a human being with wants and desires just like everyone else—and I’ve spent a very long time trying to accept that.

What I will not do anymore is apologize for existing. You will just have to be inconvenienced by my presence. You will hear me. You will see me. You may find me ugly, fat, annoying, or stupid—and I will not care.

I’ve finally realized that I have spent my life surrounded by unmotivated women that admire and resent me because they know they could never be me. As a result, they did their absolute best to make me as small as possible so they would look big in comparison.

These women will spend their entire lives seething at the thought that I never needed them, but chose them to be in my life. And for people who operate under a scarcity mindset? That’s terrifying.

I will trust myself to choose me. I will trust myself to extend compassion and grace toward myself, because I deserve it. I encourage you all to do the same.

Like Beyoncé said: “Goodbye to what has been.”

Goodbye, fair-weather friends.
Goodbye, self-doubt.
Goodbye, fear.
Goodbye, low self-esteem.

I would say it has been a pleasure to know you, but that would be a lie.

It’s been a long year. A beautiful, long year. I’m so grateful. I would never trade my life for anyone else’s.

Cheers to a new year. I’m not slowing down.

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