Sad Girls Panel Discussion

Key words: Sad girl, archetype, Tumblr, mental health, cyber feminism, internet culture, memes, hysteria, lobotomies, stigma, gender norms, aesthetics, tropes, therapy, displacement, feminism, expression, girl rotting, humour, performativity, delegitimisation, vulnerability, Lana Del Rey, public platform, voice, expression, art, poetry, web-weaving, romanticisation, sexualization, historical, stigma, fetishisation, Britney Spears, celebrity, rage, horror, melodrama, pain, emotional communication, race, POC, privilege, health, chronic illness, identity, social media, therapy, therapeutic, competitive, community, support, emotional clarity, narratives.

IG: Hi guys, I’m Isabella Greenwood, welcome and thank you all for coming to our panel discussion on sad girls. We have some sad girls here, and we're really excited to talk about this topic. This talk is in conjunction with Henrietta Scrine's curated show at Shipton, Soft Edge of the Blade, that you guys see around you. The show was inspired by 2010 tumbler girly aesthetics and this talk begins one of many panel discussions that Shipton will host alongside their exhibitions. I'm going to be curating an exhibition here with Thomus in December so that's something fun to look forward to. This is a really important topic, and we've got some great panelists here. We have some really amazing writers and journalists that have written on things from cyber feminism to girlhood as a trend. We also have Aimee here, who is a therapist, and can offer insight from a psychological perspective. I think the sad girl aesthetic has become an archetype in and of itself, largely categorised by girls in white linen dresses and dripping candles and dates and figs and Sylvia Plath—potentially lambs as well. Maybe churches, possibly graveyards; lots of tears…girl rotting. And it is funny, for sure, but it's also quite serious, and perhaps indicative of our relationship with mental health and female mental health at large. I think internet culture is interesting because although memes can be really funny, they also offer insight into what's happening within our society in the present moment, our relationship with ourselves and with topics like mental health, specifically in women. And this is obviously not a new topic. There's a really difficult history when it comes to women's mental health, from the really interesting history of lobotomies or witch trials. Mental health has always been something that's really, you know, stigmatised women or women assigned bodies, and it's been potentially something that's quite dangerous for women to talk about—it’s something that can be weaponised against them and put down to them being hysterical; the word hysteria actually comes from the Greek word, utero. And so for centuries, words like ‘hysteria’ have been commonly associated to women, reducing the impact of women's mental health at large. And so, we're here to unpack the sad girl archetype and aesthetic as both a product and a side effect of internet culture, and the way that these types of archetypes and tropes are perpetuated through things like memes in the public discourse and debate whether that's helpful to destigmatise things like mental health, or whether it perpetuates tropes that are quite difficult to unpick, and whether it potentially can delegitimise or sexualise women’s mental health, which are so prevalent now. One in five women who have access to diagnosis are diagnosed with some kind of mental health disorder; so it's a real issue that we wish to unpack within this panel. I'm going to let everyone briefly introduce themselves, and then we'll launch right into a question. There’ll be an opportunity at the end for some Q&A and then we'll also have some really wonderful poets read a few sad girl poems. If you guys want to briefly introduce yourselves, and we'll jump right in.

SN: Hi everybody. My name is Sihaam Naik. I am with Polyesterzine, and I write a lot about culture, displacement, cyber-feminism, feminism, and I'm so happy to be here with the Sad Girl Avengers.

OA: Hello. I am Olivia Allen, and I kind of write for whoever. I don't really set out to always write about sad girl things, but it seems to kind of keep coming back to that somehow. I think it was too much time spent on Tumblr as a teenager, but I write across art, culture, fashion. The big three.

AF: Hi, I'm Aimee Francois. I'm a practicing artist and an art psychotherapist, and I specialise in forensic adult mental health, working with both men and women. I also do work with children as well and families, but my big passion is working with with women in the criminal justice system and the mental health sector. I’m really passionate just generally about working with women, both clinically and creatively, so both as a therapist and as an artist. I'm really delighted to have been invited here today. 

AQ: Hey everyone. I'm Alex Quicho. I'm also a lightheaded girl, so if I need to run outside it's because I'm about to faint. I'm a theorist and lecturer at Central Saint Martin's and London College of Fashion. Last year, I wrote a semi viral essay called ‘Everyone is Girl Online’, which became a like canonical article of girl theory. So I guess that's why I'm here on this panel. But I don't often write about girl stuff. I also write about things like violence and gore and war and the Third World and extraction, but maybe we can fold that all in. 

IG: Thank you, and maybe we should just jump right in with what does being a sad girl online mean to you all.

AQ: I think sad girl online is definitely an archetype. I think it goes hand in hand with the advent of the internet as an expressive space. I often think about how positivity is the default setting of capital and the default affect of how we have to operate in the world as healthy people. The sad girl is a kind of healthy channeling of things that are outside of that space. The Internet has often been a place where people squirrel away and hide those feelings or express them anonymously through pseudonyms or aliases, kind of faceless e-girl vibes before the term e-girl was even coined. So, I do think that internet culture wouldn't exist without the sad girl and so much of contemporary pop culture now is shaped by the legacy of the sad girl online as a very like private and expressive and integral underbelly or shadow or Lilith for our ultra-productive, performative, smooth, shiny, capitalist girl selves. So I think the two are very inextricable from each other.

OA: I think it's a performative thing. I think however sad you are as a teenager, a lot of the aesthetic commodifying of the sad girl comes from being in these online communities. You probably don't wake up and think, I'm gonna wear a white, floaty dress. It's because you watched The Virgin Suicides. But speaking from my own experience as a teenager, I enjoyed that you could turn something that’s quite mundane and, essentially, depressing into something aesthetic; into this kind of character and then, I think that leads into other archetypes like manic women on the internet and stuff like that. But, yeah, I think it's something to perform. I don't think it's something that you're born with.

SN: I feel like traditionally, women were supposed to be primary caregivers, like mothers supposed to be very demure, dare I say. But I feel like just by existing and being sad, it's sort of political and it's regressive, and it shows that we can be whoever we want to be, and I think that's beautiful. And I feel like the internet helps with that, because we've got two ideas, right? We have 1950s trad-wife, and then we have liberated girl-boss. And I feel like the internet helps to bridge the divide. The sad girl couldn't exist without the Internet showing us that it's okay to be a little bit like Effy Stonem.

IG: You guys have all spoken on the performativity of the sad girl archetype. Do you think that that sense of performance delegitimises it, or do you think that it creates it as something more powerful within the internet psyche?

OA: I don't think it delegitimises it. I think it just makes it into something all encompassing. I don't think it's as black and white as all these girls are really sad and they all dress the same kind of thing. It's being part of this community, even though it's probably really toxic and unhealthy…I think teenagers gravitate towards that…I’m speaking about teenagers, but I mean sad girls in general. I don't think it delegitimise it. Everyone is performing to an extent. When you get dressed in the morning, you're thinking, how do I want people to perceive me? Nobody is exempt from this, I think the sad girl aesthetic is just more obvious. And I think that's what people don't like about it sometimes.

AQ: I guess on the point of performativity, this is something I theorise a lot, because I think that this accusation of performance is used to delegitimise girls in general, and it actually is a power, right? I think that the ability to perform and see emotion as something as material as any other creative material, like concrete or jelly, to think of your feelings with the same rigour that you might apply to any other part of your life, and to look at them from every angle and consider how you might represent them, that's an important part of being alive. And I think often we feel a lot of shame about these performative aspects, because we think it's false. But I think so much of being alive requires that kind of falseness as a protective measure. It's like an armour that many people put on. And the sad girl thing, I think disconcerts a lot of people in the world because it has a kind of tinge of authenticity or vulnerability, and that makes people feel like, duped or like they're being faked out on something they're like, how can you be sad and acting sad or like, is that sadness even real? Our girl, Lana Del Rey, was always accused of that. And I just think that it's really interesting that this accusation of fakeness is often used to put the knife into many people's personae, when actually that fakeness is a requirement for all of us to exist, and isn't necessarily a negative. I think the sad girl really demonstrates that to us.

AF: I guess coming from someone that didn't grow up with social media until I'd reached adulthood, give away my age, I guess for me and as well, coming from from an artist point of view, we can look at social media and the media as an extension of our creativity and our need to use the arts to express ourselves and find a voice on a public platform. Before social media and the internet, we could make art, we could write poetry, and those, for a very long time were some of the few ways that women could express themselves and so I guess I see social media as an extension of that tool to be creative and express. And I think, like you say, the kind of negativity that that gets, that it often invites, is something that women particularly had to endure throughout history when wanting to express themselves, having a voice, you know, dare we? Dare we speak about our own thoughts and feelings and have that platform? So I think some of that fits into something that has been prevalent in our society for centuries as well. 

SN: I feel like the act of creating is so beautiful. Do you guys know what ‘web-weaving’ is by any chance? In case you don't, it's basically on Instagram or TikTok or even Twitter, I guess, people sort of splice poetry, images and music all set to the sound of Lana Del Rey or Mitski. And I think it's so reminiscent of when I first started writing, or the feeling I had when I discovered that voice inside me—-it was because of the internet and because women were authentically having their Sylvia Plath moment on my timeline. And I was like, I must participate the women are calling.

IG: I think it’s also interesting to think about, I suppose, on the one hand, the performativity of the sad girl aesthetic or archetype, can—as you've all mentioned—be something that's quite empowering and a creative outlet. But I wonder your thoughts on, perhaps, the over identification with it. And I think right now, we definitely live in an age of overly diagnosing both ourselves and other people, which can be helpful and empowering, especially as you know, not everyone has access to mental health services, and so in some instances, the culture of self diagnosing can be quite empowering. But on the other hand, over identification with things like overly using words—like mania or I'm having a flashback or you know, I'm so depressed—can potentially trivialise real mental health issues or even people being like, I'm so OCD, I'm so clean right now; it can really detract from the struggle of people with mental health issues when they are, one, trivialised, and two, when people over identify with a diagnosis, and how that can really impact the way that they might see themselves and interact with the world, and perhaps even be used as an excuse to have less responsibility over their actions. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that, especially you, Aimee, because you have a psychotherapeutic background.

AF: Is that my cue? I think you raise a really good point. I think, like with anything, where there's good to come out of something there is always harm as well. I think we are in an age where mental health is so much more widely spoken about, and we're much more open about our mental health. And I think that's a really fantastic thing. But yes, we can over diagnosed as well. And I think it's a bit of a spectrum, and it can be a bit of a slippery slope. And also mental health is very individual. So, you know, there are some people who just having a diagnosis is really, really helpful. It's really empowering. It enables them to have an identity, to help them better understand themselves and get the right support, for others that might be too big a burden to bear. It might not be something they associate with or want to be associated with, and there's still a lot of stigma around mental health. So I think, like with anything it's about having a balance. It’s being well informed and well educated and really understanding what mental illness is. And again, it is a huge spectrum, and everyone's experience of mental health, not just mental illnesses, is unique. So, you know, I think the more information we do have, whilst that is powerful, can also be damaging. The average person on the street is self diagnosing, diagnosing their friends, diagnosing their family. You know, everyone's got a problem now, but I think the positive thing is that we are talking about it so much more, and it is out there, and people are much more confident and comfortable in asking questions and seeking support. And I think that can only be a really, really good thing. But like with anything there's, there's two sides of the coin.

OA: I read something recently. I was going to pretend it was from an article, but it was a tweet. There's something about how everyone wears  their algorithms now, like, you can tell what people are being fed like through the algorithms…what you wear, what you listen to. It becomes people's identity in a very obvious way and I think you can tell when you see someone on the street who's listening to a lot of Lana. But I also think that kind of, really dreamy, hazy aesthetic kind of thing is very different to being, like, actually clinically depressed. And I think—unless you're a fourteen year old who hasn't been out in the world—you probably do recognise that. People kind of identify with this aesthetic, especially online, because it's so prevalent, but it's kind of different to the reality of it. I mean, you're talking about the girl rot thing and how you have to be ‘hot’ to be able to get away with it. And I think there is a lot of that, even if it is people talking about mental health or talking about how sad they are, it's still this poetic, beautiful, Sylvia Plath-esque thing. It's not, like, you haven't left your house in four days and can't have a shower or whatever and so while I think it is kind of a conversation about mental health, I think it's also quite separate and maybe a naive look at mental health…if that doesn't sound too savage.

IG: Do you think that people with real mental health issues might seek for help online by posting very sad girl things in a sort of tongue in cheek, aesthetic way, but they might really be seeking real help. And is it difficult to differentiate between that and people that are just being silly on the internet?

OA: Yeah, I think that's definitely an issue. I think if you post something slightly unhinged on the internet, people sometimes read it as a cry for help and it's not it's just being fun on the internet kind of thing. I agree with the framing of your question. I think some people need to take things they see on the internet with a pinch of salt. Like, just because someone is posting a lot, it doesn't mean that they’re spiralling.

IG: Preach.

SN: I feel like Gen Z has a special brand; a mix of irony and sincerity. So it's really difficult to find a blur between the two. So when memes happen, it's really hard for corporations to advertise to us, because we see through it right away, and we're like, well, brat summer's over. Thanks, Duolingo owl. So I feel like…yeah, definitely that.

IG: I also wanted to talk about the sexualization of women with mental health. And this is something that's, especially clear and in male directed films like the classic Queen's Gambit, where she's having a mental breakdown, but she looks incredible. She’s wearing a slip dress. She's smoking a cigarette. Her hair is perfectly blow dried, and it almost became like a viral meme, because women were like, Is this really how men think that we suffer? Do we not have real, you know, problems? If we're having a breakdown, we don't look this good. But yeah, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that. 

AF: I think if we look at most films that represent women who have mental ill health and become unhinged. I think probably 99% of them are over sexualised. I mean, you've mentioned Queen's Gambit, but you've got: Girl Interrupted, Carrie, Black Swan. The list goes on, and especially when you compare that to the male counterparts in film, you know, sort of the the medically insane men in films are often portrayed as geniuses or comedic heroes: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Beautiful Mind. And even with the more horror films like Psycho, you know, men being quite dangerous, aggressive and powerful, whereas with women there is still a fetishisation when it comes to mental health. And that’s prevalent throughout history. Go back to Ancient Egypt, you mentioned earlier around hysteria and coming from the word utero. The Ancient Egyptians believed that female depression and anxiety was directly linked with the fact that the uterus would unhook itself and move around the body, and that sort of carried through into the Ancient Greeks. Plato believed that the womb would wander. And I think they used aromatherapy to try and treat it interestingly. But it sort of carried through and until we came to the term hysteria. I think it was Hippocrates who coined the term ‘hysteria’. And again, directly linking women's mental health with their reproductive and sexual organs. And I think the cure that they came up with initially was that, well, women needed to have more sex, and the best way to do that was to marry them off and get them into marriage, make sure they were having lots of sex and lots of babies all the time. The uterus would stay in place, and you know, women would be happy. But then that later changed. And they felt, no, no, no. Actually, women don't need lots of sex. They need to have no sex at all. So the treatment for hysteria, mental health and depression was to sort of maintain virginity the rest of their lives, and they'd be okay. And then we move into the Victorian era and orgasms, which you'd think would be a nice, you know, orgasm is usually a good end to any story. But in the in the Victorian era that's how they treated hysteria. Women, you know, were far too ill-equipped to do that themselves, apparently. So, male physicians would stimulate the pelvic floor muscles in order to give women an orgasm, in order to treat hysteria and depression. Where I'm going with this is that everything to do with women's mental health throughout history for thousands of years, has come down control around their sexuality, and then we move on from the Victorian era, and it's still the case. We see that through society, through social media, through the way that women are portrayed when deemed to be mentally unwell. Even now, even though mental health stigma has reduced, we've got a lot more awareness about women's bodies, how and where mental health diagnosis comes from. But yet, still, there is a need to control, sexualise and fetishise sometimes.

IG: I was actually having this conversation with someone the other day about how the most that they've ever been hit on is when they’ve been severely mentally unwell, and it's always older men. There really is this deep fetishisation of the unwell women, potentially because there's more control surrounding themselves and their bodies from someone else, obviously. And I think even the concept of the classic, like Leonardo DiCaprio not dating anyone over 25 and that coinciding with the development of the prefrontal cortex and women having, you know, a more stable sense of self, is also really interesting, because there's such a fetishisation of young women and women generally that are perhaps, less mentally stable, or have less of a sense of self or identity or belief system and how this is something that is ultimately exploited and heavily sexualised. 

OA: Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think my experience of the sad girl Tumblr aesthetic…I remember it being quite sexless. It was kind of virginal, innocent. It was a lot to do with, being thin, having a childlike body, all of that kind of deeply traumatic stuff. But I also think that does feed into what you're saying, because it's being infantilised, being able to be told what to do by someone else. But in my experience, I don't associate it with sexualization and that kind of coquette thing. I think it's more like you are trying to be a child, and then, you know, people take advantage of you when you're in that state, but it was less of a performative naivety, maybe less of the Lolita type thing.

AQ: I love all the pop culture and historical references that have come up—as someone who just had a mental breakdown in a slip dress. But the talk of the history of sex, and repression and the science of female hysteria made me think of the quintessential cyber feminist book, Zeros and Ones by Sadie Plant, which is also a biography of Ada Lovelace, who essentially invented AI and so much that is threaded through there is her amazing sad girl vibes. Also, there are diary entries in there where she is convinced of her own genius, but she's also fleeing from people observing and undercutting her all the time. And there's just amazing material in this book that is just a history of computers, basically, but also computers used to be called women—and I say women loosely, like you don't have to be biologically female, and that's a big part of cyber feminism as well—and vice versa. But even the experience of a kind of torture and alienation and turning away from the world and turning inwards towards something else that will help you program and understand your feelings. That is also woven into how the Internet was invented, which is kind of amazing. So the internet is a hysterical place, and all the uteruses are roaming around it without bodies.

SN: When we're talking about cinema, I thought it was really interesting to bring up the Ali McGraw Disease. Does anyone know that? I feel like I'm just fact spitting I'm sorry, but it was coined by Roger Ebert to talk about Ali McGraw, who was an actress. She starred in this film called Love Story, and basically she has this terminal illness, but throughout the film, she just gets more youthful, more radiant, more beautiful, blush cheek. It's amazing. And he basically coined this film term to mean: someone who is incredibly ill just becomes incredibly beautiful throughout the film, until their death, which I think is just the idea of the sad girl. Like, I'm sallow, I'm a Victorian doll like Timothy Chalamet, but I have so much youth, and that's just not the case, like when we rot in bed. My hair is matted, there's DC’s everywhere, and it's a mess. And that's the reality of sad girl femininity. 

IG: Yeah, I think the way that being a sad girl is so romanticised and has all these memes affiliated with it, with the long dresses and the figs and the candle light and the Sylvia Plath book collection is just like, very indicative of how we view sadness and mental health issues within the context of women. Ultimately, it's an opportunity to either fetishise women or have more power or control over them, or it's a way to sort of dismiss the deeper implications of mental health issues. I also wanted to speak on the historical demise of some of the ‘2000 celebrities’ that obviously had mental health breakdowns, and the way that that was kind of recorded in the classics like Hello! Magazine and things like that, but obviously Amanda Bynes and Britney Spears and, you know, the continual decline of poor Britney, who posts perpetual, really long captions with lots of emojis, to the point that people have actually questioned whether she's being held hostage. But the truth is that she's probably being held hostage by her own mind, because, you know, free Britney, like she's actually freed, and she's still posting all these posts and just perpetually spinning in her living room with those crazy dance moves and lots of intense, erratic eye contact. It's kind of like the spinning ballerina in the jewellery box. It's kind of the Britney Spears effect. And the way that these women that have had real mental health crises and breakdowns were targeted by mainstream media in the early 2000s and how that almost made them stuck in that era. And I just…the image of Britney constantly spinning and dancing in her room on her Instagram reels kind of encapsulates that for me, and I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

AQ: I didn't have anything useful to add. I just think that Britney's sending us a secret message.

IG: So true.

AQ: Okay. This is maybe a tangent, but I think that there is something really interesting about the bedroom as a place. It's the setting for, I think, the girl figure in general, but especially for the sad girl, because of the romanticisation of convalescing, crying selfies, the stage set, the candle light…I think there's something really interesting as well that …I’m really not a big fan of being like since social media, this thing has changed forever…But I do think that the bedroom as a public space is something very specific to our era, which is quite amazing and terrifying in that the bedroom becomes a kind of stage set for how emotion is portrayed. And like I said earlier, I don't think it's necessarily negative that it could be staged, or that someone could be thinking of an audience, because I think also so much of being alive through the ages…a friend of mine does a lot of academic research into the experience of female saints, for example, and that was the sense that someone was constantly watching and observing your actions, and you wanted to kind of please them and ecstatically connect with them. And she talks about that as an analog for the digital experience, a kind of ecstatic connection to some kind of force beyond you, but you're still in this total monastic privacy of your own space. And I think that's quite beautiful and scary, and I think that's what Britney is definitely accessing. There's something kind of ecstatic about this, whirling and spinning and blinking and writing, which is all like stylistically, really similar to medieval saints.

IG: I love that connection.

AQ: She’s channeling the divine.

IG: Tea.

SN: I feel like we had Britney and Amanda, but like, right now as we speak, we're having the whole Chappell Roan thing. And basically it's sort of a cautionary tale, because something very similar happened to Christina Grimmie, where she was like mauled by her stalker at twenty two and something very similar is happening with Chappell Roan right now, where we're seeing it as it's happening, someone trying to set boundaries—and it's interesting to note why we're so obsessed with celebrity and the pop star and the girl pop star, and is she getting womaned? We don't know, more later.

OA: I think it's interesting the difference between the manic Britney having a breakdown on Instagram stories, to the quiet…I’m thinking of the Olsens going to rehab, and looking very chic and bundled up, but then coming out quietly. And I was listening to a podcast, and they were doing like a blind item about how no one realises that the Olsens were feeding…unintentional word choice, but into the pro-Anna Tumblr communities. And were really active on that, but were really behind the scenes, quiet about it. And I think there's a difference between this kind of sad girl who might be posting online or whatever, but isn't out in public making a spectacle of herself. And I think that's why people find Britney so entertaining, because she's, you know, doing these insane videos and whatever. And it's not the kind of Yellow Wallpaper in the attic, waiting for time to pass. It's really a cry for help that you can't really avoid. And I think people turn that into something humorous because they're more uncomfortable with it. I think if it's the kind of convalescing woman who’s posting Sylvia Plath, or screenshots, or whatever, people are more into that, because you can kind of switch it off and just like, dip in. 

IG: Yes, I think that you both raised a good point about how we really kind of put celebrities on this crazy pedestal and sort of expect them to almost be robotic and have no emotions. And so when celebrities, in the example that you gave, and with Chappell Roan, that she had, almost like, asked for space and boundaries, and it was received with such backlash, it's because we almost assume that celebrities don't have their own emotions, and we idolise which is why, as you mentioned, Britney received such backlash. Even when she did things like shave her head, she was immediately villainised when really she was going through something potentially quite human, just having a really intense mental breakdown. And I think that it is maybe good the way that some celebrities have started to kind of humanise the experience. I mean, I saw a video even today of Winona Ryder, the paparazzi were kind of bullying her to take her sunglasses off. And then Jenna was like, No, you don't have to do what they say. This new generation of celebrity has a greater sense of boundaries, and, you know, being quite present with their emotions, in a way that older celebrities, or celebrities of the 2000s didn't really have so much like they were really, they were really, performing and doing what they were told. In some ways, we’re seeing the more human side of celebrities now, especially with the whole trend of celebrity documentaries and you know, even the Taylor Swift one, we're like, oh my god, she's a real human and the same with like, Selena Gomez, like, oh my goodness, she also suffers from like, real issues. And I think that it's obviously an obvious point, but I think it's quite important as a society for us to see that sometimes celebrities are also sad girls, and that's okay. 

AO: I think the sad girl archetype though is quite anonymous. I mean, it's a kind of a Lana type aesthetic, but that's also quite a generic, girl next door, you know, she's got long hair, she's skinny, she's white, she's all of these things but it's not tied to a certain idea. Even with Lana, it's the identity of her music and the aesthetic of that. It's not, you know, Lizzie Grant. And I think that's why Britney will never be a sad girl, because she’s too much of a person in her own right. And I think a lot of the kind of tumblrified sad girl aesthetic did come from it being these black and white photos that could have been taken by anyone. This could be anyone's room, anyone with long hair. And I think people want from celebrities the kind of public breakdown. I don't think anyone wants celebrities to kind of go off for a year and, like, get better or whatever. When that happens, people turn against them, and they're like, they think they're better than their status or whatever.

IG: So, the celebrity can't be a sad girl.

OA: I don't think so. I think they can be deeply unhinged. There’s always something kind of funny about it, even Britney, like bashing in the car window or whatever. People love the theatricality of it, and the sad girl is not that entertaining to watch unfold, because it's just, oh, you know, another day of you lying in bed eating a pomegranate or something. There's no kind of peaks and troughs. And I think people need that from public figures. 

IG: And I suppose also the sad girl has to be something that is somewhat accessible to lots of people, which obviously the celebrity isn't, but maybe that's the issue too: us not really considering the possibility for celebrities to have real breakdowns and real mental health issues, and when they do it is something that's gets so much media coverage and shock and even a deep sense of shame as well.

AF: I think it's because we often dehumanise and objectify celebrities. They're out there ready for us to project anything we want to put onto them, whether that's make us feel better or sometimes, obviously, they make us feel worse. They make us compare our lives. So I think that's why, maybe perhaps they don't feel like they’re genuine, sad girls, because they're not. I think sometimes we can separate them from real people and keep them there so that we can…

AQ: I had a question for the culture. I’m curious as to whether everyone thinks that sad girl is separate from melodrama, because Lana Del Rey obviously wants to be Latina. And as someone from the Latina veld, I'm like, yeah, this is part of our culture, like, single tear rolling down your face, black eyeliner, the ocean tosses in the distance, and it's like shadowy palm trees at low exposure. And I think that's a big part of Lana's persona. But that is also  melodramatic, that is a theatrical, cinematic crying with high grain. And I think that has its place alongside of the internet, private-feeling, shit-posting sad girl also, and these are all related. You guys have probably read this book, Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai. In our culture, we have this sense of big feelings, so things like a cinematic sadness or melancholy, things like the sublime, the romantic, things that literature and art, have addressed. But then what do we do with these little feelings that are less attractive to fixing in art, but are maybe attractive to make a tweet about, or like a MacBook Photo Booth photo about and like that doesn't make them less important. They still make up our existence, and I think it's wonderful that the sad girl has created room for expressing that. But I guess my question mark is, like, is that something that's only accessible to civilians? Is that something that we do want to see from our like melodramatic or romantic cultural figures? Is there something that is opposed in them, or are they all kind of wrapped up in each other? I don't know. I guess I was curious about that because I was just thinking of those wheels that people come up with to think about emotions, where sadness is cut up into like sixteen little things, and it like describes all the other words that are inside sadness. And then I was like, I never knew, but yeah. So I don't know what you guys think about that.

SN: I feel like sadness, but particularly the sickness that we talked about, the very thin, very sallow. I feel like it is a privilege to be sick or to be a sad girl as well. I feel like all's well and good until you can't make it to your shift because you're sick. Working class people cannot afford to be sick. But also, like women of colour, where do they fit into this? Because I know, like the Indian and also the African community, there isn't a focus on sickness or thinness. In fact, it's actually a privilege and also like a standard to be healthy. The foods reflect that, the communities reflect that, the culture reflects that. And I feel like it's interesting also to think about how we're sitting in a vacuum talking about sort of the westernisation of it on the internet, obviously, but sickness beyond this would be like a completely different quotient, I think. 

AQ: Sorry, that just sparked a thought. If you've read Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory, it's amazing for that. I think they've written it and rewritten it several times. So it was written in the height of sad girl era. So like 2015 and it's been revised over and over again. There’s a 2013 edition and a covid edition and all this stuff that kind of addresses sickness and health and aestheticisation of it, like access to sickness, and how you show up for community or withdraw from it all through a body that is like not functioning as it should. And I think there is also that is a big thread in, like, the melancholy around being alive. But I just thought that that piece is really incredible for it, because it's also always being rewritten, like a body is always changing, but it also makes room for the small feelings attached to feeling melancholy or being like, I'm not allowed to feel this way, or I don't have a framework to actually enter into enjoying my sadness, because it's not part of the world that I grew up in, for example. I guess that is a reference for thinking more broadly about the sad girl. So yeah, thanks for sparking that thought. 

IG: I think you also raise a really important point about how the sad girl archetype is often, you know, a white girl, and the like kind of aesthetic of porcelain skin and the white dresses. There's a real kind of overarching sense of purity, and how that in itself, is  deeply problematic. And I think also the idea that it takes great privilege to be sad, to be able to afford to rot in your bed, that's not something that’s accessible for everyone, and so in some ways this archetype can perpetuate some really difficult and troubling stereotypes and completely avoid, you know, concepts of privilege, which are deeply embedded within the sad girl archetype. I'd be curious as well, if anyone has further thoughts on that.

Audience: So when you speak about Britney Spears, I feel like I've got quite a close proximity in my family life to mental illness. And I think, as you said, there's a privilege with being able to identify yourself and express it, you're almost like an aesthetic, because people who are in that mentally ill place it's not within their realm of thinking to be online or to be thinking about curating an online persona. I just think the hierarchy of mental illness is such that you can be mentally ill but only in a way that we understand.

IG: No, thank you so much. That's a really good point. And I think that’s one of our overarching questions, really, is the sad girl aesthetic, ultimately, delegitimising the real struggles of mental health and kind of coquetifying them with a cute little ribbon on, like, you know, a medication bottle. We've all seen that meme, and is it, essentially saying that mental health in women is something that's cute and aesthetic and something to aspire to. And then obviously there's the potential for it to sort of destigmatise it and make it seem less scary, or, you know, make light of something that's so difficult. And I think a lot of people do sometimes joke about their mental illness; it’s a way for them to kind of accept it in some way. I'm sure, Aimee, you've got experience with clients’ self depreciating jokes when they're talking about their mental health issues. And I think it's such a slippery line, because you raise a really good point, we're at a real risk of turning mental health into something that's ultimately an aesthetic and something that's sweet and cutesy and has its own kind of visual language, which is obviously, deeply problematic.

AF: Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up. When I was invited to come here today, I was actually thinking about what would the women that I work with in a secure, inpatient setting have to say about sad girls, and what would their viewpoints be, and what would their experiences be? And I think it’s not decided. I don't think either end of the spectrum, whether we're looking at sad girl or the really acute states of mental health, you know, they're both relevant and they're both important. But I think it's really interesting when I think about the difference between sad girl culture and the women that I work with, and what their experiences are, and what they would have to contribute and think about, you know, it's far from glamorous. It's far from beautiful. It's a really dark place to be, and the women are really, really suffering. But interestingly, even in the setting that I work in, which is full of some of the most unwell and some of the most dangerous women in the country…when our ward was recently redecorated, I thought, Oh, thank God they're going to get rid of the ghastly pink walls, you know, because all of the other wards across the hospital—that are all male wards—are white or yellow or blue, muted colours. While the female ward, we only have one female ward out of twelve, it was this horrible pink colour until they redecorated it. The women got to choose the colours of their rooms, the colour of the wards. And I thought, great, we're going to see a bit of individuality. It's going to mix it up. But they all went for pink, lots of different shades of pink to be fair, and I thought that that was really interesting; in thinking about this idea of prettifying and the pink ribbon on the bottle. But actually there is this kind of need, I think, for the women in those situations sometimes to bring a bit of femininity into it. I work as an art therapist, and even the artwork with women is very, very different to the artwork produced by the men that I work with. So, I don't know quite where I was going with this, but I guess I wanted to highlight, what you were saying, that there is this very serious, very devastating side to mental health that no one would want to see on the internet, no one would want to look at, or engage with, but within that there is still some humour, there is still some humanity, there is still some need to feel beautiful and to still have meaning and to still be relevant and to still be able to engage.

IG: Thank you, and it'll be interesting as well to hear you speak more on like aesthetics and female mental health, as you work as an art therapist. So the way that, aesthetics and art, and potentially things that could be like more beautiful and more expressive and more creative can kind of transpose harder emotions.

AF: In terms of the artwork that gets made. It’s hard not to over generalise because I guess everyone is unique and there isn’t one size fits all, in terms of all women engage in art making and therapy in this way, and all men doing the other but maybe for this point, it might be helpful to look at the extremes. I think there certainly is a difference. And I think for both for men and women that I work with, aesthetics is important. Although they're both using artwork in therapy to express themselves and to communicate things that may be unable to be verbalised or said. There usually is still that need to make something feel beautiful, or for it to be important and valued and seen as something worthwhile, when everything else that they're doing or feeling feels like utter shit. It's like, well, if I can make something that is good then I must have some goodness in me, and I must have something of value in me. I would say aesthetics are important on both sides. I think the women do generally make things that are prettier. There is a lot more colour, there is a kind of floral aesthetic even though I try, desperately sometimes to pull them away from it, there is a natural pull sometimes to some of these things. And I don't know whether that is coming from them themselves, or whether, again, it's this built in societal default setting. This is what I should be doing—because that obviously comes in therapy as well, trying to beat the therapist, you know, I'll do what they're expecting me to do. This will make me look normal. This will make me look healthy and well. And with the men, more typically, you might see very different themes. I would say that men write more. In my experience, there's a lot more written words in the artwork, again, wanting to sort of display their skill set, sometimes in different ways, but more sort of storytelling, typically, maybe much more graphic, violent imagery as well. But again, I'm talking about extremes. It's fluid. It pops up in both. But yeah, there are differences, for sure, and I think it's really tricky, because art therapy is very complex and very broad, and there are lots of ways that people engage in it. There are, in a very generalised way, some obvious differences, but they do cross over as well.

IG: It's interesting, you were saying that women will almost perform femininity in their art rather than through authentic expression, although maybe that might be their authentic expression in instances. There is this notion of performing femininity in conjunction with sadness.

AF: Definitely. I think sometimes when artworks been made that is not aesthetically pleasing or not aesthetically beautiful there can be a bit of a shock and it can be a bit of a…is that what is going on inside of me? So I've had women try and make beautiful images that have gone wrong. I mean there's no wrong art making in my mind, but for them, it’s gone wrong. It's got messy. It’s like mixing colours together, and it all goes brown. It can be devastating to be faced with that in therapy. I’m trying to make something beautiful, but it's just coming out like shit. And that can often be a mirror of how they're feeling inside. But what they really want to portray is, everything's okay, everything's good. I'm doing well, but it's all just coming out bad. And I think that can be really distressing for the women that I work with, especially more than the men. So I think that's where some of the need to make something beautiful or feminine comes from. It's almost trying to project, this is how I want to be feeling. This how I should be feeling. This is how I should portray myself. I should be feminine, and I should be this, but actually where I really want to get to is, you know, where all the anger and the sadness and all the shit is—that’s where the good stuff is.

IG: Yeah, which is often not aesthetic and covered in pink ribbons and Sylvia Plath.

AF: Absolutely, and I think it's really difficult for people to move away from that. As an artist, I know it's really hard. I want to make artwork that means something. Means something to me. I want it to still look good but actually, sometimes the things that mean the most don't always look the prettiest.

AQ: As you were saying that I got this montage in my head of like how in Cinema, the difficulty of that is always expressed in a shot from behind the female protagonist, and she's looking in the mirror and she's smearing her makeup around. And it's exactly that. This expression of the failure of wanting to make something beautiful but you can't because you're going through something. I feel like it is this mini trope in cinema and is quite a powerful thing for us culturally to contend with. Aimee’s comment also made me think of the poet Anne Boyer. She wrote this amazing book called The Undying, which is about illness and pain. There's a couple of amazing lines in there that were about how often when we talk about pain in pop culture or amongst ourselves, we think of pain as this like incommunicable thing, or it's this thing that breaks us, and it breaks language. It breaks form. And she makes this argument that pain is like the ultimate communication. It transcends species. The clarity of pain is so extreme that it's actually our other modes of communicating that don't quite capture the excessiveness of it. And I think that's really a big dimension of what we talk about when we talk about aestheticising pain. In a lot of my work, I write about how do we aestheticise violence? How do we express pain? I think that it's so interesting to look at it in these settings where, clearly the pain is the clearest message but it's the translation and interpretation of it where that ambiguity starts to flood in—where people start to feel alienated all over again until they can access it again. I find that quite curious about sad girl culture in general, because I feel like all of these ways that we try to communicate what we're feeling surround this clarity of message, which is fascinating.

Audience: I was just thinking, you guys were talk about films a lot and it made me think about the Good For Her cinematic universe and films like Pearl or Us or Gone Girl. Do you guys think there's a link between the same audience of young women who likes those kind of movies and who might indulge in sad girl aesthetics.

AQ: I don't know if I have an answer, but it does make me really curious because I do think that like…I’m not a professional but I do go to therapy and the thing that my therapist is always say is that grief and rage are connected because I'm always like, I'm so sad, I'm so angry. And I think that in terms of pop culture, these things are really connected. I think some of the hallmark films that appeal to the female gaze in a particular way outside of a male framework of desiring and objectifying. Again, I'm very like, not a gender binary person but for the sake of simplicity, let's talk about it this way. I think that there's something really interesting in the flip between sadness, melancholy, languishing, surrendering, and the absolutely white hot, I'm in control, I'm evil, I'm doing what I want element and they're sort of connected. There's this like, I've endured so much helplessness, I've surrendered so much, I've laid myself out, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Now it's my turn, which is amazing, and I feel like Black Swan is probably the archetypal version of that, and also how American Psycho could not have been written by a straight man.

OA: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think when the sad girls have had enough, they become the hysterical, Amy Dunn, Gone Girl type woman. I was meant to write a piece about this years ago and it was about how you're told you’re hysterical, and you're being mental or whatever, so you just become that, and you embrace it instead of rejecting it, and kind of retreating and being like, Oh, I’m so sad. I'm so depressed, whatever. You're like, Yeah, fuck it. I am insane. I'm gonna do something crazy. I think a lot of those films and characters are an exploration of that. I don't wanna say it’s empowering, because that gives the wrong message but I think there's something quite entertaining about being like, Yeah, I'm done with my rotting, enough posting crying selfies, like, I'm gonna go and ruin this person's life. Maybe that's my own neuroses that I should deal with. But yeah, I think it's great. I'm like, Pro.

SN: I feel like it's also interesting considering that they say that women are born with grief inside them—like your mothers for example—and it's so inbuilt, you never really escape it. And I'm really interested in film, when it comes to horror movies, because I feel like they have the most accurate portrayal of female rage, women grief. It's like you've been wronged, you're dead, and you're back for revenge, like this, this stuff exceeds our planetary expectations. Like I'm back. I linger, I persist, I will be evil, and actually it's supernatural, so you cannot kill me. And I just love that. I feel like, if you want to see true ‘Good for Her’. It's very much in the horror films. And I love that, huge fan.

IG: Thank you for your question, by the way.

Audience: Hi. Thanks for a really interesting and very wide ranging talk. I wanted to ask something that triggered in my head when Alex was talking about our girl, Lana, wanting to be Latina, and also your point about acceptability, about the racialised aspect of the sad girl aesthetic. Because I never really thought about it. But when I run through the feed, the tumbler feed in my head, as we were talking, there is like an acceptability around the aesthetic of the sad girl and this white, frail, melancholic…and then it became somewhat aspirational to this kind of generation of girls who live on the internet and the impact of that on the sense of self to a lot of us who grew up in that era. If you could speak a little bit more about it…

SN: Thank you. I have to be so real with y'all. I did not engage with the sad girl on Tumblr. I could not relate to her. I didn't look like her. Didn't want to look like her. And I just feel like when you think about the sad girl, you think very thin, very frail, very white, coquette. I was more like, I was a hipster at twelve. I was all about that mustache. Didn't even need the tattoo, you guys, love being Indian. So for me, I just couldn't relate to that. I couldn't see myself in that. But there's a little bit of strength in that, where you find your own place on the internet, and then you come out, and you just have an amalgamation of everything you've learned, and you take the best out of everything. So I feel like I'm glad I didn't go through that. But guess what? Bipolar Princess right here, it did not escape me by osmosis. I am still here but I feel like there is a lot to say about how we are in that vacuum. That complete bubble of just seeing white women. POC female rage is like, can you maybe not? Can you chill actually? This isn't very beautiful. So I feel like embracing my rage has come from journaling and writing and speaking to other people who look just like me, and that's why I think the sad girl community is all about the community and who's around it if that makes sense. 

AQ: Yeah, I'm also a bipolar princess, and I was very much a sad girl on Tumblr. There is something interesting about it. I don't want to get too vulnerable with the race stuff but I do think there's something really interesting in that there are these screens that happen. So I think regardless of where you're at if you're not conforming to what a predominant aesthetic is, you will have almost like these iridescent screens between you and it. And sometimes you'll forget that you're not that thing. And then you'll, like, look at yourself crying in the mirror and be like, wait, that's wrong. It looks wrong. You take a photo of your like wilted roses, and for some reason in your like, shitty little house, you're like, wait, that looks wrong, too. Anyway, I think everyone really villainises the curated aesthetic because it separates so it unsticks from reality at a certain point, and then we accept. It because we're like, this is just a form of artwork that is created vernacularly. But then I think there is something that still mutates and like cooks within us when we're absorbing and seeing ourselves in a certain stream of culture that is really predicated on how emotions are represented, and then you're like, Am I allowed to have these emotions if I don't look like how those emotions are online? And that can be sadness or rage or whatever, and it can be film, or it can be the internet, or it can be Mike Kelly artworks, or it can be, I don't know, the back page of a magazine, like there's so many ways that people choose to identify with things and find models of themselves in things, but those models don't always match up. It's like different cookie cutter shapes or something and I think where those things cut off parts of you are important to notice. But I think it's also good for everyone to practice being aware of when that happens as opposed to being like, all of this is bad, or all of this is good, or all of this is a cope, or all of this is healthy for me, which I do think that we're encouraged to do online, right? Like self care is good. Let me buy whatever I want. This Amazon package will solve my trauma. So, yeah, I've always just been curious about that. I don't really have an answer answer but I do think that a lot of people probably have that experience of being like, Am I allowed to be a yearner if I don't look like a yearner? Am I allowed to be rageful if I don't look like someone who's pretty when they're axing their enemy. I think that is a part of being a gender that is used to being observed and constructing your image through other people's perception of you. I think that's always going to be a part of yourself, but also how you perceive whether your emotions are authentic enough or not. I hope that made sense. 

Audience: There’s so much that has resonated with me in this. I listen to a podcast called ‘Back from the Borderline’ that talks a lot about this kind of stuff. I guess, you were talking about the sad girl community, and a lot of stuff that was coming up for me was like the kind of girls girl thing of it being for that. I feel like there's aspects where sad girl culture is competitive in nature. I think a lot of that comes from girls who have found this community of those unable to fit in. And I think a lot of us are neurodivergent or struggling with mental health problems and then we come into this group where we feel like we're accepted, and we gravitate towards it, because we've all come from areas where we don't fit in. I guess I wanted to ask, what are your thoughts on how the girls girl archetype fits in with sad girl culture? 

OA: I don't have much of a point on this, but I think it's definitely very competitive, especially in terms of Tumblr, it was very much like, Who can be the saddest? Who can be the thinnest? All of this kind of stuff. I think, maybe ten years later, or whatever, and we were holding hands and listening to Lana Del Re, it’s okay, but I think back in the day, there was nothing supportive about it. I think it's kind of an interesting point when we talk about you know, we're de-stigmatising mental health and it's great people can talk about it or whatever, but I don't think it is particularly helpful if we're all just saying we're depressed and then in a competition between, like, who can be the most depressed? Like, it's not a positive community in that sense. I think that's why, if you're actually, genuinely depressed, you probably shouldn't be engaging with this kind of community. I think it's all fun and games when it's just what you want to post on Tumblr or whatever but I think the competitive side of it is really damaging. And I see this a bit now on Instagram. A lot of meme accounts. I can't think what they're called but that have this kind of aesthetic. A lot of it is bordering on this, you know, I'm the most waif, I'm the most depressed. I'm the most beautiful sad girl kind of thing. And I don't think any part of that community is supportive. And I also, I think in terms of the Lana Del Rey thing, nothing in her music is about being with your girlies, or whatever. It's all talking about men who fucked you over, and how you’re, like, the hottest girl ever. It's not let's help each other. I think there is something inherently narcissistic about it and by commodifying your sadness, you're saying…and I think people don't like to admit this but part of it is saying I'm special and I'm different, but everyone's saying that. So, I think it gets to a point where you have to realise you're probably not…in a nice way. I think the kind of underside of it is deeply competitive and traumatising.

IG: I think that's a really good point. There's definitely the aspect of being a sad girl, or sad girl culture, where it is hyper individualistic and kind of all about the self. I mean, all these meme accounts really feed into this idea of curating yourself, and kind of disregards larger groups and community. Though, on the other hand, it can also be quite exclusive. We spoke earlier about race, and even class and how they come into the sad girl culture or necessitate the sad girl. I think that's a really good point and something to consider, and speaks on the dangers of aestheticising mental health, really, because on the one hand, it can be like, hyper, insular and individualistic, and then on the other, it can also become this sort of, like, Mean Girls thing, and any kind of internet archetype is kind of a trend in and of itself, and trends can be quite exclusive and, you know, exclude certain groups of people, especially minorities. And so that's something to definitely consider. Thank you so much for asking that.

Audience: Thank you guys. It's been such an interesting dialogue. I do have a few questions, the first being, I think, a big motto of the disabled community in general is ‘Nothing About Us Without Us.’ So my curiosity is around the birth of the sad girl, who began this and was it actually birthed by people that were sad or mentally, or physically ill, or was it actually brought on by someone that wasn't a part of the community and then re-established by them? And then I feel like also, if we could take sadness away from sickness for people that are chronically ill or in a permanent state of discomfort, I wonder what their perspective is on this, or if either of you have worked with people with chronic illness, and what their kind of approach to this aesthetic is. And then I think finally, like, I grew up as a very sick child so when you're when you grow up in that state, and you enter adulthood, you want to really reclaim and repossess or own your body in a way, prove your functionality and prove your you're now able. You're now not dependent or a burden on your family or those around you. So I wonder how this is also maybe frustrating or upsetting for individuals trying to prove their durability because they grew up in an ill state. So, there are three key questions there. First is the origins of this aesthetic. Second is differentiating sad from sick for those that are chronically ill. And then the third is about those that had a congenital illness and now feel in their adulthood that they have to prove their functionality? 

IG: Thank you. Not to be cliché but in terms of the origin of the sad girl archetype and aesthetic, it is a product of the patriarchy because it's born of this idea of women being fragile and associating women's mental health to hysteria or mania and then aestheticising or sexualising it. So I'd say its origins are from patriarchal norms and our culture at large. It's reinforced by things like internet and meme culture but, ultimately, it’s something that's existed for thousands of years. Maybe the original sad girl would have been institutionalised against her will and lobotomised. So, I think that it has deep origins, and things like meme culture have given it a contemporary twist.

AF: Yeah, I think that's a really great question, a really good point to make. It is important to differentiate. We often think that these more, what we would call negative emotions and feelings like sadness and anger are bad things, and we've all got to be positive and happy all the time. That's what being healthy is, that we're happy all the time. And that is just absolutely not the case. It's really important to be sad sometimes. It's really important to be angry sometimes. It's important to differentiate between what it's like to experience sadness. Sometimes, really deep sadness is really appropriate and is really normal and is really healthy, even if that sadness may last a bit longer than we'd like. There’s lots of reasons why we may feel sad, but the difference between sadness and depression or a real kind of deep psychiatric disorder and sickness is huge. It's important that those things are separated. And it's not to say that one is less or more important than the other, because they're both important. As I said, to be sad is part of survival. It's part of how we relate and grow in the world, but to be truly sick, to be truly unwell to the point where you are not in touch with reality, to the point where you are harming yourself or harming others, is a very, very different place than the sort of sad girl archetype, but also just sort of being perpetually sad. So, I think it is really important to differentiate between those two things. And sometimes, people swing. It can be a bit of a pendulum as well. It's not to say that people can be sick and always be sick and stay there and can never get to the other side. We can oscillate between the two as well.

IG: What was your last question?

Audience: It’s more on physical illness rather than mental. What you spoke to there was sadness and sickness in chronic states. But, I think when you're born with a disability or a difference, and you feel as though you grew up being a burden to those around you, we're talking about privilege there, right? The privilege of actually taking a sick day. When you grow up consistently sick being around those people that you love dearly, to somewhat leaning on that, if you're disabled, you're not considered to be a full body or a full form. So, when you finally do enter adulthood, you are in the state of wanting to prove yourself, and so often you don't actually allow yourself the privilege of slipping, which is healthy. But I wonder how these women lean on the priveldge of aesthetic sickness

IG: Or even the way that aestheticising sad girl culture does really detract from people that are either like, really mentally ill or really physically ill, and how it's not something that someone can just put on a silk gown and take hot selfies on their satin pillowcase, and that it's actually a real, difficult disorder and something to live with, and that is really the issue with aestheticising these types of things. It can detract from the severity and the importance. As some of the panelists have mentioned, it takes immense privilege to be able to feed into aesthetics and trends like the sad girl aesthetic. Not everyone's allowed to be a sad girl.

AQ: I'm going to port in a framework from my friend Maya's theory on gender synthesis. I think it could be appreciated in this context too, because Maya talks about the difference between gender dysphoria and euphoria, and how these things are very integral to the whole process of something that the majority of people won't experience, but it's how you negotiate it yourself. And it also makes me think of the work of Lauren Newton, who is someone who has had a long term chronic illness and has dealt with it in many ways, a lot through theorising it, but also through appreciating and applying both BDSM and coquette aesthetics to how she expresses her relationship, not just to her body, but to the existence of illness in her life—like illness is a companion. And again, this like, communicability of pain and how we actually connect with people about it, to kind of, go beyond…if the pain is clear to us, how do we make it clear to others? How do we understand ourselves and how do we understand the people around us? Obviously, over aestheticizing anything, it can get lost in the mush, especially on social media. But I think for a lot of people, there's this reparative relationship to it too; where Maya talks about the euphoric element that flips away from the dysphoria. I think for people living with something long term that you're kind of building or thinking about, or living with or considering as a part of you, or it's not part of you, or it is, or it's something that you want to own, or it's something that you want to show an ability around, or you want to project a certain identity around it in the world…I think having room for all these different styles of expression are really important and quite beautiful in that sense. But I do agree, like obviously, social media can diminish it, though I do find it really nice that there are people in the world making quite important things about how you actually have the discomfort and sadness and depression and the euphoria and the ability and the learning to live with something and the accepting of something all wrapped up in the same styles of expression, I think is quite expansive.

IG: Thank you. Does anyone else want to add to that?

SN: I am really interested in cyber feminism, which I know you are as well. And a huge part of cyber feminism is rejecting the concept of the binary and understanding that femaleness looks different in everybody. I think you'd like Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto—it talks about the future of female or feminism, and a lot of it says that the future would be completely different, would be much more inclusive and I feel like a lot of the sad girl aesthetic that existed on Tumblr was very racist, also transphobic, very ableist. I think it's interesting, if you want to look into cyber feminism, there's a lot of great stuff in there as well.

IG: Thank you so much, and thank you to all of our panelists. This concludes our discussion. We now have three amazing poets that are gonna share some sad girl poetry with us, and then that concludes our evening. We'll play some sad girl songs and do as you will, go be sad if you wish. Okay, so I'm gonna hand the mic over to Isabella Rosary.

IR: Hi, I try to be traditional and write out my poems in a notebook, but I did it on the bus because I was running late, so I guess good luck to me. Yeah, my name is Isabella. I am an official sad girl, I guess—Honorary NHS, decade-long therapy badge wearer. Thank you for such a beautiful panel. It was amazing. I had a lot of thoughts, which is rare. A lot of new thoughts were happening, so that was cool…I have two untitled poems, because I'm not good at finishing things:
 
‘Untitled #1’, Isabella Rosary
I sit here empty and talentless.
My rotting is not even some kind of beautiful protest,
It's just visitation rights for my own personal purgatory, which mainly involves doom scrolling and cyber detecting;
Putting together cryptic clues from the digital realm,
Filling in the blanks, terribly,
To give the void some reasonable satiation as to why I should continue to fester in the limitless gulf that is: the internet.

IR: That’s number one and then this is a more recent one.

‘Untitled #2’, Isabella Rosary
Wellbutrin summer,
The heated blanket,
Comfort into disturbance,
A familiar trajectory.
I've become my only informant,
And hand sanitiser is essential.
Please don't touch me.
So, do you enjoy working here? 
I'm not so sure.
Sunrise Uber,
Visceral to my circular past,
But I'm sobered this time.
Clinical hedonism, of which I am now observer.
A second puberty,
And I'm asking for mercy this time.

IG: Thank you so much, Isabella, that was beautiful and sad, and now we have Aro Ha. If you would like to join us and feel free to intro yourself.

AH: Hi! Thank you so much for this evening. I've had so many thoughts too. I think I ultimately keep coming back to Alex's first point about the default expression of capital being happiness, and how anything that is seen to sort of divulge from that, like, if you want to ever explore or express the strangeness of being alive, a rational response to injustice—or just the grotesque aspects of being alive—Anything that doesn't fit under this sort of umbrella is seen as non-commercial and therefore misunderstood, so I do really reject the whole sad girl thing. I think it's really limiting, and I find it again, also very frustrating, and I couldn't engage with it growing up. I actually listened to Ultraviolence for the first time last year…it was good, sure. I just rejected all of that so much. I think the privilege of it kind of stank. Something essentially crazy happened when I was turned to my family and I think I saw it as a healthy way of engaging with feelings. The full complexity of human emotion is not afforded to everyone. Maybe we just need more ways to accept the full spectrum of the beautiful human existence. Poetry helps me do that. This first one is called:

‘I Am Not A Girl I Am a Pocket Turned Inside Out’, Aro Ha
There are days you want to feel the charms pulling at your earlobes,
Skirts around your ankles, hair sweeping across your shoulder blades,
Tote bag full of trinkets.
Then there are days for unzipping the girlish membrane,
Wearing your organs on the outside.
Smile unstitched,
Eyebrows unthreaded,
Hips unburdened. 
On these days, nobody asks you to carry their things.

AH: So, this next poem. When I sent it to you, that was the first time I'd shown it to anyone, so thank you. It doesn't really have a name, yet.

Untitled #1, Aro Ha
The surrender comes before the centring,
Ever walked into a Boots and suddenly wanted to cry?
In between the hushed aisles for lips, tummy, teeth.
The witch hazel and wood toothbrush with white bristles.
Organic cotton pads, 
You steal them back after that first family holiday where you wore your purple dress and got catcalled for the first time,
Obviously not ever,
But, you saw your body for the first time and knew you were a cut of meat bleeding, decided you must yield to something.
You think of the men who raised you whenever you squat in the forest to pee,
Taught you how to build a home with twigs and moss around a tree. 
And you will learn to move on, like how you learned to leave those men, quick. 
Matter of fact.
Wipe your fanny with a dock leaf. 
They raised you like the kid you were,
Lathered your hair with a gentle shampoo, 
Saying you’re like a weird little elf girl, but you'll never spoil a thing.
You think of gender like a decoration—
Until you're stripped of it by somebody else.
But, you will learn to care for this slimy, plying body, somehow.
Think of gender as a cost of sliving. 
Now, you're living by a sweet canal,
It's a special site of scientific interest for indigenous species of Damselfly, now.
When you were at school, girls came here to get flashed,
Or surrender themselves some other way,
Probing at the tree sap in the bark.

IG: Thank you so much that was beautiful.

ADW: Hi, I'm Anna de Waal. Thank you so much for a wonderful panel. Again, you're all gorgeous and so interesting. So, these two poems I wrote when I was sixteen and posted on my Tumblr. I was a true Tumblr sad girl. I had about twenty thousand followers, and I pretended that I was much older than I was. Both poems are untitled.

Untitled #1, Anna de Waal
I knew a girl made of mist once,
On the first day of school, she held my hand and I gave her my favourite velvet ribbon. 
We lay on the fields and I looked at the clouds and she started to cry, 
Almost howled softly, if one can, howl softly.
She left me, my girl.
She said she was going home.
I see her in my dreams, sometimes.
She doesn't turn when I wake.
My cheeks are damp with dew.

ADW: And this is the second.

Untitled #2, Anna de Waal
There's a doll in my bed,
Ghost, pale skin, dusty hair, wide glass eyes.
She's wearing my night dress.
Its thin whiteness makes her look sad and small,
Little Snow White imposter in her little open coffin.
I love my doll. I dress her up, kiss her hair, tell her to play nicely.
Keep quiet. Don't cry, you’ll spoil your silk.
When the porcelain splinters,
I mend her with cobweb lace and wood sap glue.

IG: Thank you, Anna. Thank you everyone so much for coming. It's been so nice to have you all here. And as I said, this is the beginning of many panels we’ll have at Shipton. There’ll be more weird and niche topics to speak on. It’d be nice to see you all there. As I mentioned, I'll be curating a show here in December, so we'll do a fun little panel for that too. Thank you so much!

Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/panel-discussion-the-sad-girl-archetype-in-the-internet-age-hosted-by-isabella-greenwood-tickets-1001309552827?aff=erellivmlt