#esteemers

i think at this rate, we all know i met daria in highschool in that ridiculous self-esteem class.

What’s something you care desperately about?

well she’s not a thing but i desperately care about my puppy rosie, she is literally my child like the other week i facetimed her drunk just to make sure she was alright bc apparently she was missing me x

In Twenge’s article, An Army of One: Me, she mentions this episode of Daria from MTV.  Daria is a prime example of a young girl on the fringe of what our society has become according to Twenge’s article.  Daria doesn’t fit into the mold her family and her school is attempting to shape her into, and she defies the expectations while openly mocking nearly everyone around her that goes with this cookie-cutter flow.

Between this episode and Twenge’s article, I find one aspect particularly interesting: women seem to be the focus of this self-esteem issue.  Granted, there are a few boys in the self-esteem class in the episode, but little attention is paid to them at all and the girls are kept front and center.  

This would seem to parallel the study from the early 90s mentioned by Twenge which states that girls “lose their self esteem on the way to adolescence” (768).  However, subsequent studies showed that girls do not lose their self-esteem at all.  Instead, their self esteem merely does not rise as quickly as boys’ self esteem during adolescence.  Not only does that sound more realistic, but also more logical.  This is not a coincidence.

Twenge also mentions Gloria Steinem, a feminist whom spent the 70s and 80s fighting for women’s rights, and her book Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.  This was obviously an effort by Steinem to reach out to girls and other women to show them that they are worthy in a society that has done little but suppress them over the course of its existence.  How can we possibly expect the females growing up in our society to have self-esteem burst at any age when we are constantly pressuring them to fit into our expected molds? 

Dress this way! Wear your hair this way! Lose weight! Do what we say!

In Daria, many of the boys aren’t even chastised for anything they do, if they’re paid attention to at all. Furthermore, the parents and the teachers are so preoccupied with themselves, how they’re feeling, and how well they are doing what they are doing that they completely fail to see things for what they actually are.  Even Daria’s mother ended up being focused solely on herself after she decided to take Daria out to something that Daria wanted to do.