eldest daughters, thought daughters, gay sons and crunchy moms
no, those aren't the lyrics to the 'fairly odd parents' theme song
Angels! Hi! I have missed you SO much (despite meeting a lot of you on our NZ tour where each city had a book signing line of about 2 hours 🥺)
First I’m going to say the biggest thank you in the world for making ‘Make It Make Sense’ an instant bestseller, and now I am going to shut up about it while we get back to our regular programming (which I know you’ve been missing.)
It’s so nice to be home and in your inbox, god I’ve missed you.
Oh, PS, I’m on my internet culture bullshit today, enjoy xxx
☆⋆｡𖦹°‧★ ON THE WEB ☆⋆｡𖦹°‧★
My algorithms won’t stop feeding me highly specific ‘family role’ content, so I wanted to write about it:
First we have the eldest daughter
Ok so I thought this was just a meme I was seeing about how the eldest daughter is always the problem solver, takes on a lot of the family’s problems as her own, and has a lot of pressure on her, like all the time.
Turns out with a quick google, ‘Eldest Daughter Syndrome’ is an actual thing:
And I hate to say it, but based on the ‘signs’ I’m seeing listed, I fear I may have it:
Having a strong sense of responsibility
Feeling a need for control
Carrying the heavy weight of parents’ expectations
Struggling with same-age relationships
Feeling resentment towards family (parents or siblings)
Always putting others before themselves
People pleasing behaviors
My gut instinct is to say that we don’t need a syndrome for everything, while empathising with eldest daughters around the world. Sorry!
Then we have the ‘crunchy moms’
Apparently these are the opposite of ‘silky moms’ and somewhere on the spectrum of ‘granola moms’ (literally someone just kill me at this point.) Crunchymoms.com describes a crunchy mom as:
“A “crunchy mom” is a woman on a quest for more information. A mom who is environmentally, health, and socially conscious. She cares enough about her family to question the status quo. She recognizes that there are a variety of approaches to individual problems and refuses to be locked into a single perspective. She seeks to learn more about why things happen and tries to discover the root cause of the problems she observes.”
A ‘crunchy mom’ is kinda giving ‘trad wife’ (ugh) and just like ‘trad wifes’ there’s a bit of a darker underbelly to being ‘crunchy.’ It’s ‘natural living content’ but honestly, the shit I’ve been served looks like it’s mostly asking women to ‘question the status quo’ and encourage them to go back to their ‘subservient’ place in society. Huge eek. Here’s one interesting take on the ‘crunchy mom’ to alt right pipeline. Something to think about.
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And we can’t forget the ‘thought daughter’
And now for the term that the girlies seem to love to refer to themselves as: the ‘thought daughter.’ The thought daughter is “a woman or girl who overthinks everything’ but it’s actually funny when you learn where it came from - it’s a response to the ‘thot daughter or gay son?’ meme, where women have decided that instead of being a thot daughter (a term that means ‘hoe’ but like, in jest), they’d rather be a ‘thought daughter.
If you want a better definition (and an incredible essay on this) let me recommend ‘oh so you're a thought daughter now? should i call joan didion?’ by
.‘ In it, Sarah defines a ‘thought daughter as:“… often highly intelligent, sensitive, feminine but just to an extent, relates to media like the Virgin Suicides, a Lana Del Rey listener, and a sentimental, nostalgic girl. She’s nonchalant, your everyday girl, just constantly plagued by thoughts and very intuitive and smart. I see music, book, and movie recommendations “for the thought daughter,” fashion advice to dress like a thought daughter (what does this even mean), and I wonder if I’m crazy. Suddenly, reading Joan Didion or Albert Camus means you must be a thought daughter, you have to spend time wallowing in your room, writing in your journal as performance art as if someone will read it someday. Joan Didion would hate this, she would be laughing her way to a new essay, some harsh critique of imitation and the lack of identity.”
If you’ve stuck with me this far, well done, and if your brain is melted, that’s okay too.
☆⋆｡𖦹°‧★AND IN ACTUAL NEWS ☆⋆｡𖦹°‧★
Sri Lanka has sworn in a new ‘left leaning’ president
Sri Lanka's new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has taken his oath of office, promising to "rewrite history" for a country that is recovering from its worst economic crisis.
Trump says he won’t run for president again in 2028 if he loses in November
A girl can dream.
At least four people have been killed and 18 injured in a mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama
King of YouTube faces allegations of creating a toxic environment on reality show set.
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I’m a thought eldest daughter 🥹
thank you so much for the mention <3 the thought daughter is everywhere!