CIDEE DESPI
Cidee is many things at once — a development sector professional, law student, and a writer, mainly, but also an enjoyer of many hobbies. She is everywhere on social media as @cideeeee. She lives with two cats.
What does the rise of girlhood mean? I understand girlhood to mean that, as adults now, we have come to realize the complexities of what we have gone through as girls; it’s become popular because we’re all trying to make sense of it now.
The whole “rise of the girl” has two sides. It’s super cool that we’re embracing it. But (with trends like) “I’m just a girl, I can’t do math” or the stay-at-home girlfriend, minsan nagme-merge ‘yung love natin for girlhood and ‘yung essentialist and antiquated ideas about the role of women in society. It’s very insidious, the way it creeps up on us.
What do you think of the conversations women have been having about the commodification of girlhood?
It’s not new to be told as a woman na, to be socially accepted, you need to look a certain way so you need to buy this and that.
What’s alarming now is intensity of it, and trends associated with being a girl move very quickly. There are many attempts to flatten out the multitudes of being a woman by making sure that whenever personas (we aspire to) are readily available for consumption. “You want to be a Clean Girl? You need to own this” — to us it’s nothing serious; I’m just buying Dior lip oil. But (when we subscribe to the idea that) we can be a certain kind of girl by buying something, parang bumibili lang tayo ng personality off the rack. May flattening out of being a woman, when we’re so much more complex than that.
Can we ever unlink girlhood from consumption?
My challenge for myself these days is to make sure my life is generative. The lives of a lot of young girls are not as generative anymore because they live on the internet —aside from being constrained at home because of the pandemic, there’s not much life outside the home and work or school.
We aspire first for an aesthetic before we learn about ourselves. There’s no work that we put in to understand what we like. Even just listening to music these days, algorithms give you something you probably like already. There was a sense of discovery before — there’s not a lot of that right now, just consumption. The alternative is to go offline a little bit, engage outside the internet.