Corey Maison is happy now, but fifth grade was a nightmare for her. When she was younger, Corey was bullied by her classmates to the point where one even told her that if she killed herself, no one would care. At 14, though, Corey found happiness and new friends all because her family and her new school accept her as a transgender girl. View Iframe URL. Corey shows in her video that she never fit in with her peers when she was younger. She was shunned by girls and teased by boys, and even laughed at by adults later on.

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Three teenage girls — Cher, Tai, and Dionne — posing together for a photo and smiling. There is a marked difference between how teen movies portray teenage girls and how adult movies view them. These are teenage girls who have storylines instead of spaghetti straps and barely-there skirts. The transition from child to adult in men is almost always treated with reverence in the media. Even outside of more serious lexis, films like American Pie hold their female characters to a lower regard than the men — their comedic value is often underestimated or left for a sequel, if the original male version is popular. See: Neighbo rs and the follow up, Neighbors 2 , for example. But we feel it most keenly aged fourteen, being told our taste in music is bad, our want for attention is embarrassing, and our taste in clothes is either too adult or too childlike. Of course, there is much more to unpack in regards to how the media represents various marginalized groups. For example, in its representation of teenage girls, the mainstream media most often represents only thin, white, middle-class, able-bodied, straight, cisgender teenage girls. In films like these, this want is seen as a kind of sexual power that girls on the very verge of becoming legally sexually viable hold.
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Let me tell you an everyday story about one of the many things that can happen when girls are taught to hate themselves. When I was 13, a man took me up to his apartment while his wife was out, gave me Pernod to drink and tried to manipulate me into giving him physical affection. I worked for this man in the shop he ran below the apartment, and I had agreed to go upstairs with him after weeks of what can only have been careful grooming on his part, following a sustained effort on my part to achieve what I thought was the ideal body size.
I knew back then that this made me attractive, and being attractive to grown men made me feel good. I was more preoccupied with what I saw: worldliness, sophistication, a gateway to adulthood. None of these interactions became physical, which, looking back, was probably because I liked the idea rather than the reality. Other girls I knew went considerably further. I was I look at my daughter now and I know what lies ahead.