so many grown men are confused and threatened by teenage girls whose fame has nothing to do with their appearance and everything to do with their intelligence, as this means they can't be dismissively reduced to the former or reassuringly infantalised into lacking the latter
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it's a strikingly parallel form of rage to the anger these same men often direct at older women, where "older" is code for "not physically attractive to me" - career female politicians who've never pandered to the male gaze, either.
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the catch 22 these men prefer is simple: an attractive woman who speaks out can be ignored because she's pretty and just wants attention (and what would she know about non-beauty matters, anyway?), but an ugly woman who speaks can be ignored because lack of beauty = lack of value
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this logic, however, is the quiet part they don't like to say out loud, and so becomes all the more audible when teenage girls - a demographic overwhelmingly sexualised in culture and media - are given a platform that has nothing to do with their looks.
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they can't falsely claim, as they do with "older" or "ugly" women, that their dismissal of their words is based on other things they've done in their career, or their histories, or their past political bedfellows, because none of that applies to girls still in their teens
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they can't claim that they're doing it for the 'gram, or for social media kudos, or to bolster their profile in their other careers, as though any of this would inherently invalidate their arguments if they were. they're just speaking for themselves and their beliefs. that's it.
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and if you have to take ONE teenage girl seriously for making well-founded, passionate arguments that are inconvenient to your personal conception of the world, then you might have to listen to OTHERS, too - and that way lies madness! better to froth in impotent rage instead.
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ultimately what these dudes who are angry at outspoken teenage girls are saying is, "IF SHE'S NOT FOR ME, THEN WHAT IS SHE FOR??" and really that tells you everything you need to know about the intersection of misogyny and politics
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End of conversation
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