consuming the girl

Online culture encourages young people to turn themselves into a product at an age when they’re only starting to discover who they are.   When an audience becomes emotionally invested in a version of you that you outgrow, keeping the product you’ve made aligned with yourself becomes an impossible   dilemma.

I was entering adulthood and trying to live my childhood dream, but now, to be “authentic,” I had to be the product I had long been posting online, as opposed to the person I was growing up to be.

She looks like an Instagram—which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal.

Consumer culture has always been intimately involved with the disciplining of women’s bodies—whether fashion or advertising or magazines exhorting women to shape up, work out, and do better in everything from appearance to parenting to sexual techniques.

The term “girl” came into popular usage in England in the 1880s to describe working-class unmarried women who occupied an emerging social space between childhood and adulthood. Not quite a child, she was childlike in that she had yet to become a wife or mother, the type of modern urbanite who engaged in “frivolous” pursuits like consumption, leisur

I think there’s a safety in girlhood, in the mistakes and the naïveté, the youth and maybe even the beauty, which is all pushed by the media we consume,” Ms. Reese said. “Womanhood, meanwhile, is seeped with this lack of playfulness, seriousness, aging — the horror, right?”