The Commodification of Girls

it isn't new but its bite is far worse

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In the wake of her flower offerings to the king, the queen, and her brother, Ophelia’s final words before she drowns herself offstage are, “God buy you.” In Elizabethan times, this translated to “God be with you.” 

But I’m hung up on “buy” spelled as it is. Especially given that her father, Polonius’s favorite metaphors are often financial transactions: “Tender yourself more dearly [or] you’ll tender me a fool,” he warns Ophelia in Act 1. Ever ominous in his diagnosis of her life and relationship, he calls her boyfriend, Hamlet’s entreatments and vows “brokers”, tells her she needs to set a “higher rate”. But then she is used as chum bait, sent back again and again into her romantic wreckage. Because of course the young woman serves as a fruitful asset for his relationship with the king, a commodity: her personhood, steak at the market. 

I’m reminded of the commodification of girls today—in social media especially: The It Girl becomes Polonius, influencer extraordinaire, always needing to be at the inside of everything, destined to be stabbed behind the arras for her duplicity at pretending to be one thing—cool and effortless—but not so cool that she can keep herself from selling her cool and taking on promotions as all good influencers do.

And then, the wreckage in her wake: the girls who desire so feverishly to be that: the impossible thing that’s been commodified— with the right shoes, the right bags, the right brows, the right skin. Fantasy as reality.

I describe coming home from a bad day at school in 1995. I slam my bedroom door, pop in a Fiona Apple cd, write vigorously in my journal about Matt Howell. My students counter with stories of crying in their bedrooms, their own private chapels, too, but also wondering if the emotion merits filming. What would I look like crying? Is it like the photo dump Bella Hadid made last week? Are my tears nearly so pretty? 

It’s true, we’ve long considered ourselves in reflective surfaces to distorted effect. In his seminal Ways of Seeing, written in 1972 about women in art, John Berger wrote, “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.”

We (and I change pronouns here to include my Gen X sisters and Boomers) halve ourselves; there's a part of us feeling our feelings and a part of us watching our feelings appear to others. Dividing our sight, flattening ourselves, over and over again, as Ophelia has been reduced here, to expressing the inexpressible through a bouquet of weeds.

Social media, of course, has put this practice on steroids and the statistics on teen depression and social anxiety bear this out. (The mirror is a lot more savvy and a lot more sinister than it was in Snow White’s day.)

Now so many young women I work with feel they’re living a simulacrum of a self: planning how they’ll film both their college acceptance and rejection reactions for TikTok, wondering behind closed doors if they were to film their emotions what it might look like to others. “Ugly, real reels just make the line between projection and reality hazier for us,” one of my students expressed. Everyone understands the carefully curated, chrome-filtered bikini shot is a fabrication. But the real dumps are a much more insidious lie. One of my other students described seeing her peers’ profile pictures as they’re walking towards her in the hallway: the real them is secondary to her perception of their virtual selves. It’s all kinds of mixed up.

Elite kids in Brooklyn called it quits and opted for Luddite flip phones, but not all kids have the willpower, the privilege, the courage, or the means to do this. And for many students who feel different from those in their actual life, social media has been essential to feeling less alone. But I can share how much students love the option to be in a space or partake in an experience without social-media access. School trips without phones go something like this: anxiety about missing something, followed by relief about not having to be reminded what they’re missing, followed by anxiety about not being in touch with anyone other than who is presently with them, followed by appreciation of what and who is immediately around them. 

When they walk in the classroom, my students put their phones in a shoe hanger on the inside of a cupboard door where we don’t see them or hear them for our 75 minutes together. I celebrate when a student forgets to grab their phone at the end of class. And, as the year goes on, more students do forget. It’s usually only five minutes before they return, but that’s five minutes of conversation with a teacher or friend, five minutes of thinking about the reading for next class, or five minutes jostling through a crowded hallway. And five minutes of not worrying about likes.

The trick of it is, of course, enough time off that experiences can be had without considering the aesthetic of those experiences, without considering how to manufacture that moment into a highlight reel.

While cautioning his daughter not to act or appear the whore, Polonius famously advises his son “to thine own self be true”. O, should all of this allowance of self be Ophelia’s, too.