'I'm Not Like Other Girls' in Young Adult books

hello everyone my name is leonie welcome to another video today we're gonna have a little discussion video about the not like other girls phenomenon and how it appears in young adult books specifically so many of you know that i really love young adult books especially when i was younger when i was a teenager i would devour them like they really made me fall in love with reading but also around that time like you know the early 2010s when why it kind of came up there was also a general trend among a lot of girls especially girls on the internet to see themselves as not like other girls i'm different i'm not like the other girly girls and i was definitely one of those people unfortunately especially on the internet there were many many little pictures and comics and memes about this phenomenon with very clear indicator that other girls were bad and if you were not like other girls that was good you know other girls wear makeup but i read books this very popular picture which was basically just if you read books then you will also start wearing different clothes and you become a brunette and at the beginning of the 21st century around this time young adult books also became super popular with books like twilight looking for alaska and hunger games and these books mostly reigned in a young teenage girl audience so given that many of these young girls thought that they were not like other girls of course that's going to be seen reflected in the main characters of these young adult books who usually also really fit the not like other girls trope and lately a lot of girls have been looking back on that time on the whole not like other girls phenomenon and talking about how maybe that wasn't really that good there are many many videos on the internet about not like other girls phenomenon but today i just wanted to add to that by specifically looking at young adult books and why i think that the not like other girls trope is very specifically appearing in young adult books and what it tells us about why the trope was so popular i have theories i'm editing and i just want to clarify that i'm specifically talking about early why a book so the ones that were popular around the 2010s because that's when they're not like other girls trope meme thing was also popular i relate so much to this main character she's not like other girls she doesn't like fashion or boys she'd rather be at home than be at a party so me i can't wait to finish the story that will eventually end in her becoming beautiful and getting with the guy [Music] wait and let's first start with a short explanation of the not like other girls trope just to make sure we're all on the same page there are other videos on the internet that dive way deeper into this but i just want to make sure you know we all know what we're talking about and what better way to talk about a phenomenon on the internet than with memes from the times why can't you be normal why can you be interesting other girls fake boobs orange makeup facebook skinny trashy me real boobs white natural tumblr just right nerdy and this is from a blog with the caption when a writer sets their heroine up as a really strong female character by denigrating other often more traditionally feminine female characters so what is the other girl that we are seeing in all these comics first of all she's usually more traditionally feminine and white and second of all she likes makeup boys boy bands fashion and by extension she is seen as trashy shallow generally just not good the general gist of these kind of comics is that femininity is not valued but of course the question is why why do girls feel the need to call themselves not like other girls i think the answer is twofold the first one is the one that's mostly talked about and that is of course internalized misogyny if you grow up in a world where femininity is often vilified and associated with bad personality traits then you're gonna want to distance yourself from that and say that you're definitely not like that at all and if you're already kind of an outcast person then it's even easier to put more distance between yourself and the popular girls but what i also think plays a role is that it's kind of like a very mini baby version of rebellion where girls just kind of start distancing themselves from what is expected of them as girls i can give you an example of when i was like 13 years old i really didn't like makeup and fashion which i know look at me now but one of the reasons that i didn't like those things is definitely because of just internalized misogyny you know i thought it was shallow and stupid but also because i felt like it was kind of forced onto me like i felt like because i was a girl i kind of had to be into makeup and i had to be into fashion but i just wasn't and it made me very annoyed that i felt like it was kind of forced upon me so i think there's definitely a lot of frustrations with these n logs which is just shorthand for not like other girls because you can look at all these other girls that are really putting effort into their makeup and their fashion and it can make you think should i be doing that like should i also be doing these things if i want to be more popular maybe i don't even want that and as a teenager you're not or at least i wasn't aware of like societal standards so you just angle your frustration at the girls who do the thing again if you want to go into this a little bit more deeply i will link in the description some videos on the topic but now let's look at how we see this in y.a books so a very common talking point of these not like other girls girls was they were different because they liked reading and books that were very popular with this audience were young adult books so the question is how do we see the not like other girls trope reflected in young adult books in the early 2010s spoiler alert it's a lot let's just give a little history lesson of the year genre and how it evolved to me this whole thing with the not like other girls all started with paranormal romance it was the time of twilight and every single twilight copy that came after that we have a main character who is an outcast she's different she's kind of nerdy but she falls in love with like a mysterious brooding boy who is definitely a vampire or a werewolf maybe a zombie probably something sexier than that and she's also an outcast she's clumsy she's just a little a little quirky but despite her being a little bit different than her feminine friends her life still revolves around this one dude and her whole story is still like completely revolving around the romance which is something that end logs definitely don't like so personally i think the real shift to like the not like other girl main characters came after this because what you need to know about the y genre is that there was kind of like a shift in demand people started criticizing all these paranormal romance books where the main characters were just damsels in distresses all the time that in combination with more action-focused stories like dystopians and urban fantasies people wanted more strong female characters let's talk about strong female character for a second so this started out a super valid criticism of stories why is stories with main characters that were complete damsels and distresses with no agency that only cared about boys so it's great to want stories that are different than that the problem is that in these new main characters their strength was often defined by their lack of femininity and anything else that was feminine any other girl that would really care about boys would be at risk of being called a damsel in distress character and not good and all these new strong female characters were the exact same like they were all snarky good fighters and emotionally unavailable hmm how am i gonna write a strong female character should i write a well-developed character with layers and depths no i'm gonna give her traditionally masculine traits that's a strong female character right and by giving our main characters more traditionally masculine traits she stood in even more contrast with her usually more feminine rival counterpart so here's kind of how i would summarize like the two main archetype of female characters that you see in these ya books first you have the main character she is plain normal unpopular and devoid of any feminine traits both physically and mentally like she doesn't like shopping or makeup but she also usually has a very boyish body type and is very flat chested and then often but not always there is a female girly counterpart her rival that is way more girly way more into fashion tall pretty hourglass figure gets a lot of attention from boys and is usually a lot more sexual examples of this are alina and zoya in the grisha trilogy clarion isabel in the mortal instruments mare and evangeline in red queen jude and nycacia in the cruel prince trilogy and also i would say katniss even though she doesn't have a specific female rival counterpart i do think she's not like other girls because she's very just like not feminine and she also says the following other girls are age i've heard them talk about boys or other girls or clothes i aren't gossipy and clothes bore me to tears there i have it so although i do think that some of these characters are well written or even um developed to be kind of growing out of these stereotypes um and a lot of these also don't actively denounce femininity it does say something that like there's this specific brand of non-feminine strong female main character that you see in all of the popular ya books at the time and since most readers read like all of these popular books i do think that definitely sends a message to the reader so what are the implications of this if you want to be a strong female character which there was a really big need for then you can't really have any traditionally feminine traits which of course implicitly suggests that if you are feminine or more traditionally feminine then you can't be a strong or intelligent character or at least definitely not the hero of the story but of course although the main character's life doesn't revolve around the love interest anymore there's definitely still a lot of focus on beauty in these ya books and there will always be a love interest and the main character will always end up getting a boyfriend so now that we've looked at some examples i think the big question that we all have is why if there was such a big need for more strong female characters because we didn't like these girls whose life you know only revolved around boys and i wanted something more feminist then why didn't every book just get rid of always needing to have a love interest or all this focus on beauty all the time why did it just end up in hating on girls and most of like pretty much all of these books were written by women so we also can't say that this is just men writing their manic pixie dream girl ideas onto for teenage girls these are written by women so these are women talking about their experience and usually because why a in that time especially was more kind of like wishful thinking self in search for the reader these are just women writing kind of their own fantasies so why why is the not like other girls tropes so appealing in a fictional setting to answer that question i think we need to look at kind of what it's like being a teenager a girl teenager what kind of the female experience is as a teenager think about what's not like other girls say when they're talking about other girls oh they're so vain they're so shallow they only care about makeup and looks they only care about getting attention from guys and oh i'm just kind of naming everything that women are expected and encouraged to do guys we live in a society we do though we live in a society where if you do what is expected of you as a woman you will be shunned for doing exactly that and i think a lot of teenage girls for the first time start experiencing this femininity contradiction i'll just call it the femininity contradiction from now on i'm sure there's like a more academic term for this i don't know but basically femininity is inferior but also expected of you if you want to be happy little side note when i'm talking about like femininity i'm talking about like what is seen in society nowadays is traditionally feminine you know like wearing pink being shallow being really into beauty but it's important for us to understand that this is of course a very straight white centered idea like for example all girls do is care about boys is very heteronormative and that's not even to speak about the relationship that trans girls have to their own femininity also what has been perceived as the pinnacle of femininity has always been the white woman whereas historically black women were usually not even seen as real women in western countries so it's important to understand that when we're talking about femininity in the context of being not like other girls that experience is of course very different for different women so back to the femininity contradiction you know femininity is inferior but also kind of expected of you i think a lot of teenage girls start noticing that for the first time like when you become a teenager example number one is that boys kind of start making fun of girls for wearing makeup that it's like fake and unnatural but at the same time you will be just surrounded by advertisement all the time telling you to wear makeup so you can feel more beautiful also teenage girls are often kind of like stereotyped as being shallow and ditzy and just generally having undesirable traits and but you yourself maybe consider yourself not shallow at all and maybe kind of smart but you also notice that you are kind of the outcast type whereas the girls that act more ditzy and shallow tend to become popular so what's going on with that so teenage girls kind of start to realize that femininity is seen as a bad thing but by rejecting femininity they will also never achieve the power and popularity that these other girls have like either you just are a very girly girl and will probably be made fun of and really killed for being so girly but you know you'll probably maybe get more attention and be more popular or you reject the femininity and can feel cool about that but you'll probably get less attention from guys and maybe you'll feel more insecure about the way you look etc it's just you can't really win or at least not in real life you can't in the world of fiction everything is possible enter the y a book you can have yourself insert main character that can hate on other girls for being girly and pretty while at the same time achieving exactly what society still tells you you should want to achieve you know beauty and being the special chosen one and getting a boyfriend what a great message to send to teenage girls so i've identified three ways in which you can see this happening in ya books so let's dive into them the first one is the rival mean girl like i said before usually there's kind of like a girl mean girl character that we're supposed to hate that's like the nemesis of the main character but i feel like this other girl is not just a representation of stupid girly things she's also a representation of all the standards that the main character can't meet and we see this in the fact that you know the girly girl mean girl is not just a character we're supposed to hate she's like actively a rival to the main character like usually they're both rivaling over the same love interest for example and to me that does show an awareness that although we hate everything the mean girl stands for we are aware that everything she has is kind of desired by society and probably the love interest might like that and therefore she poses a threat to the main character so it's not just hating on girly things there's also the awareness that maybe if we were like her our life would be easier so when the outcasted main character looks at the other girl she stands face to face with everything that she might want to have like beauty and fashion and attention from guys but she also stands face to face with all the things she might not want to do in order to get there like wear makeup or play dumb or wear clothes that you might not be comfortable wearing the second thing is male approval i remember from my teenage time that kind of the amount of like attention or approval you got from guys like romantically was like pretty like synonymous to how good you felt about yourself and if no one was like romantically interested in you that just kind of made you feel like you were just a piece of trash gonna be alone forever you know a lot of the self-worth of teenage girls is in whether boys like them or not and i will say that i do think that maybe this is not just a girl thing like i think this is just a general teenager experience that a lot of your self-worth just comes from whether someone of the gender you're attracted to is also attracted to you but i do know that for example sapphic girls experience and that the attention that they get from men is just valued way more than the attention that they get from women and we also see that if men seek out a lot of attention from girls that are seen as cool but if girls seek out a lot of attention from guys they are seen as because you know women are encouraged to have attention from men but if you actively pursue that then that is it is a bad thing you may think how how do we see this in young adult books i thought we decided that um we didn't like main characters who wanted attention from guys that is correct so we just got a bunch of main characters who really weren't interested in guys who would not respond to any advances of any dudes i feel like this is also where a lot of like hate to love came up the hl love romance throw where the main character would like just not be interested and just not like you know she was not interested in boys or romance but of course eventually she would get the guy like there would even be love triangles so she says she doesn't need a man to make her happy she doesn't want a boyfriend but she does end up getting one and i think this sends like a really weird message to the reader it's like you're telling someone that's like smoking is bad you should never smoke also by the way here's a cigarette because i know you like it i recently read an article by asia monet where she also talked about this so i'm just gonna share some quotes from that article because i think i cannot say it better than she did i will also link it below femininity is the mark of vanity of popular mean girls it rebukes readers for the very thing it serves them stories where girls are whisked away to marry princes and become princesses and our gifted powers beyond their imagination only happen to the girls who do not want it if you want it which obviously you do because you spend the money on the book to read it you're not like her she doesn't want a boyfriend she just gets one wanting boyfriends is side character material so yet again we see a contradiction here you know wanting a boyfriend is definitely a bad thing but also we're gonna give it to you because we know that's what you want and you should want that and the third thing is beauty so beauty standards affect everyone but especially women are told that their value comes from how aesthetically pleasing they are i think you can especially see this in the difference between teen boy romance movies and teen girl romance movies like if you have a movie with kind of like a nerdy main character who is a boy and who falls in love with like this beautiful girl eventually she'll end up kind of like liking him anyway without him having to change everything whereas in a lot of girl movies you'll see this like nerdy main character who falls in love with like this super hot dude somewhere towards the end she will get a makeover where she will suddenly become gorgeous and that's the moment that the love interest suddenly sees how beautiful she was all along and that actually has been in love with her all this time it's very clear that these girls are taught that their value lies in their beauty and if someone's not paying attention to them instead of accepting them for who they are they should become beautiful and that's when people will accept you for who you are but of course if a woman actually actively tries to be more beautiful by wearing makeup for example or doing things with fashion that is scene is shallow because you're expected to be beautiful just naturally you're not allowed to try i also just realized it's always other characters doing this to the main character the main character never initiates this or asks for this because of course asking for something like that would make you shallow of course we also see this in y.a books the main character is usually not into fashion not into makeup but there's always like very specific the bath scene where the main character like gets to the castle or the palace or whatever and they have this luxurious bath where they get scrubbed clean or like there's like a team of servants or people at the capitol that like make them pretty and like shave them and like scrub them clean and usually they will also be given some makeup get a little bit of a makeover get a beautiful dress to wear and the main character is almost always like hating on it and talking about how she doesn't care about this and that she never cared about these things and that it's just stupid and shallow but it's clearly presented as a scene to be enjoyed by the reader so again there's this like weird contradicting message so in conclusion i think that is why the not like other girls phenomenon is so popular among teen girls it basically serves girls something that they can never achieve in real life and that is both hating on femininity you know giving into your internalized misogyny but also still achieving the things that you usually will only achieve if you give in to your femininity which of course is not a good thing because it only perpetuates these ideas further and we may wonder how is this now like has this changed i still don't really know a lot of very popular why a books but the main character it just is girly like it's not never really goes that far but the not like other girls vibe is definitely going away and i feel like especially if you read why a books that have lgbt main characters or main characters of color they don't really play into these stereotypes as much so i'll put on the screen some recommendations i'm also not trying to say that it's like bad to enjoy any of these or any of the books that i mentioned because i enjoyed them a lot and i'm gonna say like a lot of them i still enjoy and like makeover scenes in books really are my guilty pleasure like i love them every time i'm just making this video because i think it's interesting to just kind of reflect on where that comes from and what it means and now what did we learn from this because i find it fun to look for some kind of message and everything i think what we can learn from this is that if we don't watch out genuine like critique of anti-feminist behavior can very easily just turn into straight up misogyny like what started out as a really good genuine critique of all these main characters whose lives only revolved around boys just quickly turned into a distancing from anything that is feminine and calling any girl or a main character who was interested in boys just shallow and stupid okay and that is everything that i had to say on the non-like other girls trope in young adult books let me know what you thought i'm really wondering if you guys like videos like this i don't usually do these kind of long form discussion videos but i have a lot of fun so if you have like more ideas or topics that you would like me to cover or just if you would like me to make more of these kind of videos let me know down below and give it a like if you liked it again check out all the links that i've put in the description of all the things that i mentioned throughout this video i really hope you enjoyed this video and i will see you soon in another one goodbye there's an ambulance wait for the ambulance revolves around it's snowing this is very distracting why is it snowing it's april okay

Channel: The Book Leo

Views: 669,106

Keywords: book, books, booktube, reading, booktuber, commentary, discussion video, discussion, video essay, feminism

Id: 4nFblYw--PI

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021