One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

The four essays collected in Part 2 further Kennedy’s explorations of how coming of age as a millennial complicated her experience of Self-Discovery and Personal Growth in the Modern World. Kennedy employs her iconic comedic style throughout these essays in order to appeal to an array of readers and to humanize her complex examinations of contemporary media, culture, and technology.

In each essay, Kennedy hinges her arguments and explorations on specific cultural trends, personal experiences, or pop culture references. These tangible points of reference ground her philosophical discussions in tactile or relatable ephemera from the millennial era. In “Popular-Girl Handwriting,” for example, Kennedy uses her adolescent obsession with gel pens and bubble letters to consider her ongoing desperation to be seen, liked, understood, and accepted by her peers. This essay also relies upon allusions to familiar brand names including Abercrombie & Fitch, Lacoste, and Ralph Lauren, which Kennedy uses as defining socioeconomic markers of the era. These allusions are similarly meant to resonate with Kennedy’s millennial audience. In “Are We Going Out? Or Out-Out?,” Kennedy furthers her discussion about popularity, acceptance, and self-identification within the context of college and Greek life. Allusions to “Facebook albums of party girls,” “games of F the Dealer and Kings, [and] Never Had I Ever,” and “pervasive diet culture” provide further real-life context and backgrounding for the essay’s broader social commentaries (160, 163, 172). In “Serotonin, Plain and Tall,” Kennedy tackles sensitive mental health topics by referencing the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting and her own journey towards and through therapy and diagnosis. Finally, in “Kate Expectations,” Kennedy uses cultural references like NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys, MTV, The Holiday, and Love Actually as organic entry points to her discussion on sex, love, romance, and marriage. These cultural allusions authenticate Kennedy’s love for and knowledge of pop culture, while fortifying her overarching social commentaries and claims.

Kennedy adopts a feminist lens throughout her discussions of popularity, body image, friendship and bonding, and sex and dating. As a cisgender woman, Kennedy holds that her point of view is not all-encompassing. However, she does choose a particular stance in order to analyze the ways in which early aughts cultural trends particularly harmed young girls’ senses of self and abilities to claim autonomy over their bodies and futures, speaking to the theme The Influence of Media and Culture on Women’s Identities. In “Popular-Girl Handwriting,” for example, Kennedy argues that being popular was often represented in the media as “cruelty for sport and psychological warfare,” both of which were seen as “core to the female condition” (121). Kennedy cites examples of these representations and parodied traits in popular movies and shows of the time including Mean Girls, Hey Arnold!, The Princess Diaries, Holiday in the Sun, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, among others (121). She goes on to argue that such pop representations of popularity taught girls that to be accepted they had to not only look a certain way, but they had to act in a certain way, which was usually unkind, lacking in empathy, and harmful to others. Kennedy is therefore arguing in the name of upholding other women, rather than tearing them down for one’s own personal gain or status.

She assumes the same stance in her subsequent essays. In “Are We Going Out? Or Out-Out?,” for example, Kennedy holds that organizations like Greek life “only prioritized women whose experiences were nearly identical to [her own]” (171). Furthermore, such organizations taught young women that to be accepted and loved, they had to smile bigger, look tanner, and act more content (171). Such codes of conduct, Kennedy avers, only fed into dangerous stereotypes about women and girls and motivated women to hurt themselves by eating less, exercising more, manipulating their bodies, and ostracizing girls who did not exactly resemble them. She further underscores these claims in the section’s latter two essays. “Serotonin, Plain and Tall” and “Kate Expectations” argue that mainstream cultural trends throughout the aughts limited women’s futures, dismissed their mental health, and simultaneously taught them that they were fragile, broken, and in need of saving. Kennedy therefore illustrates her own personal growth by assuming the feminist stance that she was taught to scorn and fear when she was growing up. She is therefore claiming her own anger with patriarchal structures, owning her own misinformed beliefs and biases, and speaking out against reinforcing these trends in contemporary society.