I knew the whole oldest daughter syndrome thing had gone way too far when someone I know started trying to diagnose my daughter with it. She’s two and doesn’t even have any siblings yet.
I read too many newsletters to remember who wrote what, but someone was calling herself the eldest daughter, even though she had an older brother... because she was the first girl child. Like, that's not what 'eldest daughter' means. You weren't parentified, which is a real thing, and much of what I take eldest daughter discourse to be about: putting yourself aside for other family members, either because you were told to, or because you felt it was the right thing to do.
I'm an eldest daughter who was a rule follower and studied hard and tried to always to do the right thing. I may have regrets/a teeny bit of anger over various childhood issues, but I'm an adult and know that I wasn't truly harmed. I wasn't forced to care for my younger brother, and any high standards I felt I needed to hit were mostly self imposed and because it didn't occur to me to be otherwise.
Taylor Swift has a younger brother, but since she has been a professional musician/singer/celebrity since she was a young teen, I'm not sure how she is an eldest daughter as we define it. Rule follower and hard worker, sure. But parentified? They moved states to give her a career, uprooting her brother from his own life. If anything, it's Taylor's brother who probably has the more interesting story to tell.
I do buy that (especially in larger families) the male children, even if older in principle, can be a bit flaky on all the organising-mom's-birthday-present and more major forms of admin that emerge as the parents get older. If the women are Taylor Swift fan age or even Taylor Swift age they probably haven't yet hit this anyway though?
This is just "emotional labour" discourse for families instead of marriages anyway.
It is emotional labor! There is a large discourse about 'parentified' children, especially in large families or certain cultures. The eldest daughter is sometimes responsible for helping get her siblings dressed and ready for school, or take care of them after school, for example. I think that's a lot of eldest daughter discourse, along with getting good grades and deferring to others wishes. So yes, helping with aging parents can be an eldest daughter thing, but there are often years of backstory before that.
I have to say, in my experience, the eldest boy is really relied on by mom in a different way. My grandmother asked my dad, her eldest out of 5, for money to give her own mom instead of her husband. I've seen that kind of behavior a lot. My dad also helped take care of his much younger siblings.
And on some level, with 3 kids, I sometimes do it, too - my oldest is an 8 year old boy and he'll sometimes help his little brother make breakfast or get dressed. He also will physically stop his younger siblings from running out towards a parking lot after activities and I appreciate it - he knows that's dangerous and stops them. I've told him when my husband was away that I really needed him to behave and listen because it was just me and he stepped up.
So let's not forget that an eldest boy can be held to a higher standard, too.
Nah, my grandfather was just sick of helping her mom, I think, and my grandmother didn't work independently after having kids. My great grandmother had previously lived with the family, and it ended after she wrongfully accused my aunt of stealing her teeth. Sometimes people just have compassion fatigue, so my grandmother went to my dad after getting told no by my grandfather.
I had a grandparent on both sides who had a parent who was always asking for money. It's a common issue and source of conflict in marriages.
To be fair to Taylor, much of her work is probably not directly autobiographical/confessional unless she says so. She has plenty of songs expressing vulnerabilities that make little to no sense given her life. And this particular song's relationship to the "eldest daughter syndrome" people talk about is loose at best anyway.
I think a lot of fans of artists (and writers and musicians and creators in general) tend to assume everything is either autobiographical, or something they would do if they got the chance. So everything gets picked apart for “is this what Taylor Swift really went through/thinks” when it might just be telling a good story.
I think the opposite, lol. I think it was Folklore specifically where Taylor was given credit for writing from other people's perspectives, like in the song 'Betty'. I don't remember reading much about that beforehand. Obviously not every song she writes is about her, but I do think most of her songs about relationships are parts of her life.
There was a song she had on an early album from the perspective of her elderly neighbours as a young couple, and another one from the perspective of Robert F Kennedy Sr and his wife when they first met, so it's definitely something that goes back further to some extent. Even ones written more first person are presumably heavily embellished too though, or are basically just a made up story from some kernel of a real thing.
I guess what I'm referring to are relationship songs in particular. Most people assume that, and Taylor has fed that thinking (remember when she used to capitalize letters in the lyrics so they would spell out clues about who the song was about?).
I'm the eldest girl within a large extended family, and feel like I was held to stricter standards and criticism by my family at large, but also just think it's because I had my more conservative grandma for longer (which I appreciate), and secondly, my aunts and uncles just hadn't had kids, especially daughters, at my age yet. It's normal for people to be overly idealistic about how they'd raise kids prior to having them. All that to say, I'm not really negatively affected by all that.
I have two daughters, who are three and a half years apart, and the older one has always taken a lot of responsibility for the younger one. My husband and I were afraid that a couple decades from now, she’d feel like we “made her be responsible” or “parentified” her, so we kept telling her she didn’t have to do so much for her sister. Then finally she yelled at us, “I LIKE packing her lunch! I LIKE cooking dinner for her! Stop telling me I don’t have to!”
💯 - you're not leaving her to watch a kid all day. Kids LIKE responsibility. We have PTO meetings with "childcare" where older kids, 6th graders, watch elementary aged kids. They want to do it and get gift cards!
I think there can be some reality to the eldest daughter thing - my little brother was non-verbal autistic, my mom worked nights and my dad wasn’t allowed in the country, so I was indeed parentified in terms of making sure my brother was clean and fed up until my early teens - but I just wish there was less of an *identity* sewn up in it. For millennials these subtle dynamics were more salient literally thirty years ago! Get over it! Why the internet fixation on wounds in the remote past? Especially ones that aren’t even abuse, they’re just like, my parents were a little unfair to me and lax with my sibling(s).
I also had to take care of an autistic brother to cover for my mom. And essentially had to stand in for absentee dad throughout my childhood/teens. It was bad times all around.
A. We have a ton of gooner games and not much evidence that they outsell other games. There’s a gooner game called NIKKE which releases regular content and does pretty well. But I imagine it’s dwarfed by other forever games like Fortnite or Stardew Valley, which are pretty tame.
B. I don’t think anyone actually believes this anyway. Social media is primordial ooze for memes. Successful ones flourish and others die. “Yassify a game woman to make her ‘better’” is a successful meme. People addicted to notifications and red badges will mindlessly help it propagate.
Yeah they know how to take gooner money it's just not by wasting time with stuff like atmosphere. You make cellphone gambling games with premises like 'what if WW2 warships but hot anime girls' or 'what if guns but hot anime girls '
The hilarious part is… I think the dudes playing “Anime Babe WWII”, are perfectly satisfied with that. They’re not looking to pollute the prestige Sony game with it.
Likewise, I’m more than happy to play Super Mario, and I don’t want to infect gooner mobile games with my chaste or family friendly preferences.
Video games are making everyone happy right now. Everyone except for people who make a hobby out of being unhappy online.
It seems like there is some vocal minority who want the huge production values of prestige games combined with the sexiness of gooner games. For such people, it seems reasonable to direct them to mods. If you want to play the latest Final Fantasy or Resident Evil, but with all the female characters in the buff, it takes like 5 minutes to install a mod for that.
Yeah, we live in an absolute cornucopia of choice in our entertainment options and it feels like no one seems to appreciate that. You can absolutely mod resident evil 4 remake to have your player sprite be naked ada wong but i guess that's a lot of work for somebody who seems to get more entertainment out of complaining on the internet than playing video games.
I don't really get this long rubbing "gamer" meme or taking some game that is generally a highly successful AAA release and doing an edit of a still from the game to give a female character Instagram face and a massive pair of honkers with copious cleavage and then being like "this is what it should be" or "this would have sold so much more".
Aside from being cringe-inducingly juvenile and obviously not something that would make the game better or more commercially successful, I just don't get why these people want video games to all also be softcore porn. We have regular porn you can watch, and these days can even get porn versions of any game character you like.
We also just don't see this in any other medium. I never see gooner movie fans who insist that Everything Everywhere All at Once would be improved by having all the female characters replaced by pornstars in skimpy bikinis, and that the absence of this can only be explained by the authority of the woke mob.
I am the older sister of one brother. At the risk of sounding like one of those old folks who had to walk to school uphill through the snow five miles both ways, let me share how the eldest-daughter thing went down in my family when my brother and I were in high school:
1. I had to come straight home from school and do chores like cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the whole house. My brother had chores in theory, but he never did them because, in his words, “they can’t make me.” And he was right—my parents never did anything about it.
2. I was not allowed to go to parties where there was any alcohol. My brother got brought home by the cops for underage drinking on more than one occasion, without being punished.
3. I had a curfew that was tightly scheduled by my dad to minimize any opportunity for hanky-panky. My dad would find out what time the movie my date and I were seeing ended and estimate the time it would take to drive me home afterwards, and that would be my curfew. And I definitely was not allowed to have a boy in my room, even if it was a friend and we were working on a school project. My brother brought his girlfriends home and took them to the guest bedroom in the basement with no supervision or protest from my parents.
4. I was required to go to church every Sunday morning and most Wednesday evenings. My brother quit going to church at some point and our parents never made him go back.
I’m not actually as resentful as I sound. My brother and I had a terrific relationship as kids and still do. But eldest daughter syndrome is totally a real thing, and just because some women gripe about it to an irritating extent online doesn’t change that.
Do you think the “eldest” matters as much there as the “daughter”? If your sibling was a sister, do you think she’d have had similar rules?
One thing I definitely saw in some families is that there would be a “prodigy” and a “screw up” and the former would always be held to a higher standard. Often the prodigy was an older sibling but not always. And the screw up was often a middle child but sometimes the baby.
I’m an older brother and feel like I was held to a higher standard, but a lot of it was self inflicted. My younger sister was more of a boundary pusher.
Oh, these are two really interesting points! I totally agree that in the past (and maybe still) parents were much stricter with daughters than with sons.
You may also be right that families’ energy and hopes tend to coalesce around “the prodigy”—or the kid who seems to be the highest achieving. And then the strict discipline is to keep the high-achiever on the straight and narrow.
The irony is that in our family, I was a super high-achiever in school but have been a SAHM and housewife for 25 years. And my brother, who was a middling student in high school and college, is far and away the most successful person I know.
I grew up with younger sisters and they weren't held to the standards I was. Parents were much more confident of how things would pan out by the time the next sibling reached teenage.
Daughter aspect is a big part, but the elder part is very significant as well.
To steelman the gooning gamer guys (an unsympathetic group of dudes to be sure), their complaint is less about mere access to giant anime boobs (which as it’s been pointed out you can get an unlimited supply of for free) and more about who’s sexuality gets validated by nerd culture at large, which is by in large pretty progressive and is maybe over correcting a little after decades of being a straight boys club.
These guys probably spent their formative years seeing articles in Kotaku about how seeing Laura Crofts boobs gave a generation of women an eating disorder- the implication being that if you are a straight man your sexuality hurts women even when you personally haven’t left your basement and are too scared of girls to talk to them. Meanwhile your sisters in nerd culture can read about some lady getting railed by a griffin while on a public bus and the responses by the cultural validators are between neutral and “you go girl!” It’s easy to see why someone might resent the double standard and be nostalgic for an imagined past where you could slobber over Chun-Li in peace.
Now, obviously mature adults understand the history and larger cultural context that sort of justifies this double standard (if you said to these guys “you can look at smut on the subway but have a much bigger chance of being sexually assaulted” none of these guys would take that deal) but those things are kind of hard to understand if you’re a thirteen year old boy. And the way you feel at thirteen stays with you.
I don't get why people are so surprised that Steve Jobs's daughter is good looking. Laurene Powell Jobs is still good looking and Steve Jobs was good looking when he was young. There's a reason he was played by Ashton Kutcher.
Also, since her dad was Steve Jobs, she's mega rich. Not that that makes her genetically good looking, but she has no trouble affording things like great stylists, fashionable clothes, hair dressers, personal trainers, cosmetic surgeries etc. if she wants to.
1. Those picture of England in Autumn are a lie. Mostly it’s hanging around a pedestrian precinct with a Boots, a Morrisons, and a Weatherspoons while the rain half pisses on you. Not a full piss, mind, nothing so committed, a half piss.
2. The expression on dog woman’s face: “I wanted none of this. This is so wrong.”
I’m an eldest son with three younger brothers. A lot of those descriptions sound pretty accurate, but tbh, I think it just makes me significantly more competent (my brothers don’t know how to clean ANYTHING)
A lot of the discourse online seems bad at differentiating between 1) specific ways sexism manifests for elder daughters, especially for conservative cultures and 2) the fact that the oldest child usually has some expectation of competence.
I'm so tired of the only Woman Personality Traits that pick up any discourse steam being those about all the ways in which we’re neurotic because of immutable and mundane facts
as the youngest daughter, i'm going to start 'youngest daughter syndrome' and it's just when no one in your family treats you like an adult even when you're in your thirties with a degree, a spouse and a mortgage
(i absolutely love and get along with my older siblings, but my sister did try to stop me from touching a hot stove when i was, like, 24 lmao)
Hahaha, yes, I'm literally almost forty with a spouse, two kids, a house, and a professional job, and have been living fully independently since 18. My mom still checks in on my packing when I'm going to visit her.
Being an eldest daughter like the meme says isn’t necessarily an ethnic/racial thing - it is being a bit parentified, held to a higher standard of perfectionism by parents, sometimes even parenting the adults and either fulfilling it like Taylor has or ricocheting all the way to the other end and becoming too wild to be tamed. I hope it ends with the millennials. It shouldn’t happen among the younger set who have had more permissive parenting standards afaik. Wouldn’t wish this fate on anyone. Though I’m glad it didn’t end in the meme dumpster so someone in 2300 AD can listen to the song and remember us fallen soldiers 🥲
I knew the whole oldest daughter syndrome thing had gone way too far when someone I know started trying to diagnose my daughter with it. She’s two and doesn’t even have any siblings yet.
Congratulations. I suppose.
I read too many newsletters to remember who wrote what, but someone was calling herself the eldest daughter, even though she had an older brother... because she was the first girl child. Like, that's not what 'eldest daughter' means. You weren't parentified, which is a real thing, and much of what I take eldest daughter discourse to be about: putting yourself aside for other family members, either because you were told to, or because you felt it was the right thing to do.
I'm an eldest daughter who was a rule follower and studied hard and tried to always to do the right thing. I may have regrets/a teeny bit of anger over various childhood issues, but I'm an adult and know that I wasn't truly harmed. I wasn't forced to care for my younger brother, and any high standards I felt I needed to hit were mostly self imposed and because it didn't occur to me to be otherwise.
Taylor Swift has a younger brother, but since she has been a professional musician/singer/celebrity since she was a young teen, I'm not sure how she is an eldest daughter as we define it. Rule follower and hard worker, sure. But parentified? They moved states to give her a career, uprooting her brother from his own life. If anything, it's Taylor's brother who probably has the more interesting story to tell.
I do buy that (especially in larger families) the male children, even if older in principle, can be a bit flaky on all the organising-mom's-birthday-present and more major forms of admin that emerge as the parents get older. If the women are Taylor Swift fan age or even Taylor Swift age they probably haven't yet hit this anyway though?
This is just "emotional labour" discourse for families instead of marriages anyway.
It is emotional labor! There is a large discourse about 'parentified' children, especially in large families or certain cultures. The eldest daughter is sometimes responsible for helping get her siblings dressed and ready for school, or take care of them after school, for example. I think that's a lot of eldest daughter discourse, along with getting good grades and deferring to others wishes. So yes, helping with aging parents can be an eldest daughter thing, but there are often years of backstory before that.
I have to say, in my experience, the eldest boy is really relied on by mom in a different way. My grandmother asked my dad, her eldest out of 5, for money to give her own mom instead of her husband. I've seen that kind of behavior a lot. My dad also helped take care of his much younger siblings.
And on some level, with 3 kids, I sometimes do it, too - my oldest is an 8 year old boy and he'll sometimes help his little brother make breakfast or get dressed. He also will physically stop his younger siblings from running out towards a parking lot after activities and I appreciate it - he knows that's dangerous and stops them. I've told him when my husband was away that I really needed him to behave and listen because it was just me and he stepped up.
So let's not forget that an eldest boy can be held to a higher standard, too.
Your grandmother looked at her son as a provider vs her husband... that's a lot to unpack, imo.
Nah, my grandfather was just sick of helping her mom, I think, and my grandmother didn't work independently after having kids. My great grandmother had previously lived with the family, and it ended after she wrongfully accused my aunt of stealing her teeth. Sometimes people just have compassion fatigue, so my grandmother went to my dad after getting told no by my grandfather.
I had a grandparent on both sides who had a parent who was always asking for money. It's a common issue and source of conflict in marriages.
STEALING TEETH! There's a first time for everything! ;)
To be fair to Taylor, much of her work is probably not directly autobiographical/confessional unless she says so. She has plenty of songs expressing vulnerabilities that make little to no sense given her life. And this particular song's relationship to the "eldest daughter syndrome" people talk about is loose at best anyway.
I wonder about that as people do tend to think everything she writes is about herself. Clearly some is but all?
I think a lot of fans of artists (and writers and musicians and creators in general) tend to assume everything is either autobiographical, or something they would do if they got the chance. So everything gets picked apart for “is this what Taylor Swift really went through/thinks” when it might just be telling a good story.
I think the opposite, lol. I think it was Folklore specifically where Taylor was given credit for writing from other people's perspectives, like in the song 'Betty'. I don't remember reading much about that beforehand. Obviously not every song she writes is about her, but I do think most of her songs about relationships are parts of her life.
There was a song she had on an early album from the perspective of her elderly neighbours as a young couple, and another one from the perspective of Robert F Kennedy Sr and his wife when they first met, so it's definitely something that goes back further to some extent. Even ones written more first person are presumably heavily embellished too though, or are basically just a made up story from some kernel of a real thing.
I guess what I'm referring to are relationship songs in particular. Most people assume that, and Taylor has fed that thinking (remember when she used to capitalize letters in the lyrics so they would spell out clues about who the song was about?).
I'm the eldest girl within a large extended family, and feel like I was held to stricter standards and criticism by my family at large, but also just think it's because I had my more conservative grandma for longer (which I appreciate), and secondly, my aunts and uncles just hadn't had kids, especially daughters, at my age yet. It's normal for people to be overly idealistic about how they'd raise kids prior to having them. All that to say, I'm not really negatively affected by all that.
Also, parents tend to stress out more about their firstborn and so there’s more pressure placed on them than later siblings.
The eldest daughter thing seems to be an extension of people who make their whole personality their generation or their Meyer-Briggs results.
I have two daughters, who are three and a half years apart, and the older one has always taken a lot of responsibility for the younger one. My husband and I were afraid that a couple decades from now, she’d feel like we “made her be responsible” or “parentified” her, so we kept telling her she didn’t have to do so much for her sister. Then finally she yelled at us, “I LIKE packing her lunch! I LIKE cooking dinner for her! Stop telling me I don’t have to!”
💯 - you're not leaving her to watch a kid all day. Kids LIKE responsibility. We have PTO meetings with "childcare" where older kids, 6th graders, watch elementary aged kids. They want to do it and get gift cards!
Yep, and as the younger brother has gotten older, sometimes I make him make his bigger sister dinner
I think there can be some reality to the eldest daughter thing - my little brother was non-verbal autistic, my mom worked nights and my dad wasn’t allowed in the country, so I was indeed parentified in terms of making sure my brother was clean and fed up until my early teens - but I just wish there was less of an *identity* sewn up in it. For millennials these subtle dynamics were more salient literally thirty years ago! Get over it! Why the internet fixation on wounds in the remote past? Especially ones that aren’t even abuse, they’re just like, my parents were a little unfair to me and lax with my sibling(s).
I also had to take care of an autistic brother to cover for my mom. And essentially had to stand in for absentee dad throughout my childhood/teens. It was bad times all around.
The video games thing is so dumb because
A. We have a ton of gooner games and not much evidence that they outsell other games. There’s a gooner game called NIKKE which releases regular content and does pretty well. But I imagine it’s dwarfed by other forever games like Fortnite or Stardew Valley, which are pretty tame.
B. I don’t think anyone actually believes this anyway. Social media is primordial ooze for memes. Successful ones flourish and others die. “Yassify a game woman to make her ‘better’” is a successful meme. People addicted to notifications and red badges will mindlessly help it propagate.
Yeah they know how to take gooner money it's just not by wasting time with stuff like atmosphere. You make cellphone gambling games with premises like 'what if WW2 warships but hot anime girls' or 'what if guns but hot anime girls '
The hilarious part is… I think the dudes playing “Anime Babe WWII”, are perfectly satisfied with that. They’re not looking to pollute the prestige Sony game with it.
Likewise, I’m more than happy to play Super Mario, and I don’t want to infect gooner mobile games with my chaste or family friendly preferences.
Video games are making everyone happy right now. Everyone except for people who make a hobby out of being unhappy online.
It seems like there is some vocal minority who want the huge production values of prestige games combined with the sexiness of gooner games. For such people, it seems reasonable to direct them to mods. If you want to play the latest Final Fantasy or Resident Evil, but with all the female characters in the buff, it takes like 5 minutes to install a mod for that.
Yeah, we live in an absolute cornucopia of choice in our entertainment options and it feels like no one seems to appreciate that. You can absolutely mod resident evil 4 remake to have your player sprite be naked ada wong but i guess that's a lot of work for somebody who seems to get more entertainment out of complaining on the internet than playing video games.
I don't really get this long rubbing "gamer" meme or taking some game that is generally a highly successful AAA release and doing an edit of a still from the game to give a female character Instagram face and a massive pair of honkers with copious cleavage and then being like "this is what it should be" or "this would have sold so much more".
Aside from being cringe-inducingly juvenile and obviously not something that would make the game better or more commercially successful, I just don't get why these people want video games to all also be softcore porn. We have regular porn you can watch, and these days can even get porn versions of any game character you like.
We also just don't see this in any other medium. I never see gooner movie fans who insist that Everything Everywhere All at Once would be improved by having all the female characters replaced by pornstars in skimpy bikinis, and that the absence of this can only be explained by the authority of the woke mob.
I am the older sister of one brother. At the risk of sounding like one of those old folks who had to walk to school uphill through the snow five miles both ways, let me share how the eldest-daughter thing went down in my family when my brother and I were in high school:
1. I had to come straight home from school and do chores like cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the whole house. My brother had chores in theory, but he never did them because, in his words, “they can’t make me.” And he was right—my parents never did anything about it.
2. I was not allowed to go to parties where there was any alcohol. My brother got brought home by the cops for underage drinking on more than one occasion, without being punished.
3. I had a curfew that was tightly scheduled by my dad to minimize any opportunity for hanky-panky. My dad would find out what time the movie my date and I were seeing ended and estimate the time it would take to drive me home afterwards, and that would be my curfew. And I definitely was not allowed to have a boy in my room, even if it was a friend and we were working on a school project. My brother brought his girlfriends home and took them to the guest bedroom in the basement with no supervision or protest from my parents.
4. I was required to go to church every Sunday morning and most Wednesday evenings. My brother quit going to church at some point and our parents never made him go back.
I’m not actually as resentful as I sound. My brother and I had a terrific relationship as kids and still do. But eldest daughter syndrome is totally a real thing, and just because some women gripe about it to an irritating extent online doesn’t change that.
Do you think the “eldest” matters as much there as the “daughter”? If your sibling was a sister, do you think she’d have had similar rules?
One thing I definitely saw in some families is that there would be a “prodigy” and a “screw up” and the former would always be held to a higher standard. Often the prodigy was an older sibling but not always. And the screw up was often a middle child but sometimes the baby.
I’m an older brother and feel like I was held to a higher standard, but a lot of it was self inflicted. My younger sister was more of a boundary pusher.
Oh, these are two really interesting points! I totally agree that in the past (and maybe still) parents were much stricter with daughters than with sons.
You may also be right that families’ energy and hopes tend to coalesce around “the prodigy”—or the kid who seems to be the highest achieving. And then the strict discipline is to keep the high-achiever on the straight and narrow.
The irony is that in our family, I was a super high-achiever in school but have been a SAHM and housewife for 25 years. And my brother, who was a middling student in high school and college, is far and away the most successful person I know.
I grew up with younger sisters and they weren't held to the standards I was. Parents were much more confident of how things would pan out by the time the next sibling reached teenage.
Daughter aspect is a big part, but the elder part is very significant as well.
“Parents were much more confident of how things would pan out by the time the next sibling reached teenage.”
That’s a significant part of this I think. Firstborns are more intensively parented, for better and worse.
It's not just intensity. The parents are much more anxious and idealistic.
If I had a second, I'd parent it just as intensely. But I'd be much less worried and possibly cry a lot less in its presence.
To steelman the gooning gamer guys (an unsympathetic group of dudes to be sure), their complaint is less about mere access to giant anime boobs (which as it’s been pointed out you can get an unlimited supply of for free) and more about who’s sexuality gets validated by nerd culture at large, which is by in large pretty progressive and is maybe over correcting a little after decades of being a straight boys club.
These guys probably spent their formative years seeing articles in Kotaku about how seeing Laura Crofts boobs gave a generation of women an eating disorder- the implication being that if you are a straight man your sexuality hurts women even when you personally haven’t left your basement and are too scared of girls to talk to them. Meanwhile your sisters in nerd culture can read about some lady getting railed by a griffin while on a public bus and the responses by the cultural validators are between neutral and “you go girl!” It’s easy to see why someone might resent the double standard and be nostalgic for an imagined past where you could slobber over Chun-Li in peace.
Now, obviously mature adults understand the history and larger cultural context that sort of justifies this double standard (if you said to these guys “you can look at smut on the subway but have a much bigger chance of being sexually assaulted” none of these guys would take that deal) but those things are kind of hard to understand if you’re a thirteen year old boy. And the way you feel at thirteen stays with you.
The internet has a habit of making us 13 years old at heart.
I don't get why people are so surprised that Steve Jobs's daughter is good looking. Laurene Powell Jobs is still good looking and Steve Jobs was good looking when he was young. There's a reason he was played by Ashton Kutcher.
Also, since her dad was Steve Jobs, she's mega rich. Not that that makes her genetically good looking, but she has no trouble affording things like great stylists, fashionable clothes, hair dressers, personal trainers, cosmetic surgeries etc. if she wants to.
Yeah, she probably has a makeup artist to her makeup for at least some of her selfies. Which is fine.
1. Those picture of England in Autumn are a lie. Mostly it’s hanging around a pedestrian precinct with a Boots, a Morrisons, and a Weatherspoons while the rain half pisses on you. Not a full piss, mind, nothing so committed, a half piss.
2. The expression on dog woman’s face: “I wanted none of this. This is so wrong.”
I’m an eldest son with three younger brothers. A lot of those descriptions sound pretty accurate, but tbh, I think it just makes me significantly more competent (my brothers don’t know how to clean ANYTHING)
A lot of the discourse online seems bad at differentiating between 1) specific ways sexism manifests for elder daughters, especially for conservative cultures and 2) the fact that the oldest child usually has some expectation of competence.
If you are the older of two, you are the elder daughter.
If you are the oldest of three or more, you are the eldest daughter.
Quite simple, really. I still remember which schoolteacher taught me this at the age of approximately 11.
I'm so tired of the only Woman Personality Traits that pick up any discourse steam being those about all the ways in which we’re neurotic because of immutable and mundane facts
as the youngest daughter, i'm going to start 'youngest daughter syndrome' and it's just when no one in your family treats you like an adult even when you're in your thirties with a degree, a spouse and a mortgage
(i absolutely love and get along with my older siblings, but my sister did try to stop me from touching a hot stove when i was, like, 24 lmao)
Hahaha, yes, I'm literally almost forty with a spouse, two kids, a house, and a professional job, and have been living fully independently since 18. My mom still checks in on my packing when I'm going to visit her.
Being an eldest daughter like the meme says isn’t necessarily an ethnic/racial thing - it is being a bit parentified, held to a higher standard of perfectionism by parents, sometimes even parenting the adults and either fulfilling it like Taylor has or ricocheting all the way to the other end and becoming too wild to be tamed. I hope it ends with the millennials. It shouldn’t happen among the younger set who have had more permissive parenting standards afaik. Wouldn’t wish this fate on anyone. Though I’m glad it didn’t end in the meme dumpster so someone in 2300 AD can listen to the song and remember us fallen soldiers 🥲