TW for mentions of harmful topics such as sexual assault, grooming, exploitation of minors, childhood trauma, and references to bodily harm.
“how fantasy becomes a gateway for normalization” is the core idea I want to push here, and I want the work to sit inside that discomfort. I used inspiration from the video essay “The Grooming of Girlhood” by final girl digital (highly recommend this channel) to frame this piece as a representation of the dehumanization and grooming of young girls. It reflects how girls are often reduced to surface-level traits like hair, clothes, nails as if that is the entirety of what we are allowed to be (intentionally of course). In the system, identity becomes something performed for consumption, "femininity" often curated for onlookers rather than to be a comfort and attainable concept for the women and girls who live within it. The coins in the piece represent that transaction: hair for coins, teeth for dollars, innocence for attention. How many times were you offered money for your body? Attention for your "purity"? It’s the idea that girls are taught subtly, but constantly to trade pieces of themselves for validation, especially through the internet and the systems built and reinforced by older, wealthier men (sugar babies, only fans, sex trafficking) It is mass conditioning disguised as fantasy. There is also a deliberate tension between aesthetic fantasy and something much darker underneath it. The dark stamp of the tooth is the only thing that breaks through that illusion. It’s jarring on purpose. A lost tooth is painful, bloody, unforgettable it’s not just an object, it’s an event your body remembers. That becomes a metaphor for the loss of innocence, including sexual violence and other irreversible moments that mark a person forever, even if they are later framed as something that “heals” or “grows back.” The childish writing (even misspelled) “I believe in the tooth fairy” is intentional too. It shows how early this conditioning begins. Even in something as innocent as fantasy and storytelling, there is already a structure that teaches girls to accept sacrifice, to normalize loss, to turn harm into something magical or cute. That’s the trap: it starts as fantasy, but slowly becomes the language we use to understand reality, until we stop questioning it at all. Why is this? That is what want this piece to make you ask. How far does the conditioning go? Is this really what makes us girls?
I hope this makes sense and I also hope it sparks discussion, I made this for a school project and I wanted to talk about something important to me and everything going on in the world right now. I wanna know what everyone else thinks too. Okie byeeee
