In My Room
Dear Reader,
I’ve been spending a lot of time in my room. And I’ve been thinking about how I spend a lot of time in my room. And I’ve been thinking about my childhood bedrooms. My college dorm. My first apartment. All these spaces I’ve inhabited that reflected back to me who I was.
I’m not sure if I just thought this or actually said it, but once as a child my mom was disciplining me for something and sent me to my room. That was the go-to form of discipline. Honestly, I think it was the only one that my parents deployed. I’ll boast that my brother and I were good kids, you can ask my parents yourself if you disagree. Anyway - I was sent to my room, and I thought (or said) “Well good because I like to be in my room anyway!” Which was true. I thought I was pulling one over on them by enjoying the punishment, though now I realize that my room was, and continues to be, the place where I can recenter myself and calm down, relax, whatever. Thus achieving exactly what my parents wanted: a calmer child.
Through that door I’d enter my little world. Read my books. Listen to my CDs. I remember playing at being in my 20s and imagining that this room wasn't just a bedroom but actually my studio apartment. I was a young woman living in the big city with Molly, my beloved doll, at my side.
On Reflections
A Love Letter to the Childhood Bedroom
I am 26. I sit in my room and tinker with things. I read the spines of my books, separating them into mental categories: read, need to read, intimidated to read. I look through my records. I read the lyrics on the inside of the vinyl covers. I remember the ones I bought and where. I remember which I stole from my mom. I remember the ones from my brother. I spread out on my rug. 2015 Geneva Goodwill, mom and I got it for $13 for my freshman year dorm. I rip apart magazines and paste the images haphazardly into my journal. I sit in bed watching The Sopranos on my laptop while crocheting.
I am 9. My pink walls plastered with the faces of Disney stars from the latest J14. I sit in my room and tinker with things. I sit in front of my blue boom box from grandma. I read the lyrics to “Oops!.. I Did It Again” while I listen to it play. I look at my white bookshelf covered in stickers and read the spines of all my books. Some my mom and I would read together when I was younger: The Velveteen Rabbit, Where the Wild Things Are, and Corduroy. Below my reading level now but I still love to look through them. I go to The Blue Room (the guest room that doubles as my play room) and grab my dolls. I sit in bed under my pink canopy and watch a movie on the family portable DVD player.
I’ve always loved my room. For a quiet, creative girl it's always been an oasis. A place where my creativity can safely thrive. I look at all my things, all carefully picked out or gifted. All mine. All of me. I see my friends who made the art on my walls. I see the cherished, generous gifts from my grandparents. I see the memories the objects hold from all the different rooms in all the different cities they have followed me to.
A Girl’s Fight for Inclusion
Research on the working/middle class girls’ quest into subculture
There is a game women have found that men love to play. The “name 3”. Women will be sporting their team's logo, their favorite band’s merch, etc, and men will take this as a challenge. “I see you’re wearing a Led Zeppelin shirt. Did you just get that at Urban Outfitters? Do you even listen to them? Can you name their lead singer? Can you name three songs? … Okay, “Stairway to Heaven” doesn’t count, name a different one.”
People often dress to express what they like, which subcultures they identify with. Men often act as the gatekeepers, letting each other in - but asking women to prove themselves worthy of entry.
Thus a young girl's ties to subculture may only exist within the walls of her room. No one to turn her away. No one to quiz her. She can be all the different things she wants to be.
When subculture was studied back in the 1950s, researchers found that “the financial dependency of a working class woman on her husband mean(t) that a good reputation mattered (above) everything else” (McRobbie & Garber). Men were allowed more risks in their youth due to their financial freedom. Whereas women had more pressure to maintain a positive reputation, thus limiting their outward participation in social and political movements.
This, along with the social responsibility for women to make a nice home, lead to a rise in leisure activities geared toward women that take place in the home.
“It is suggested that girls’ culture of the time operated within the vicinity of the home, or the friends' home. There was room for a great deal of the new teenage consumer culture within the confines of the girls bedroom. Teenage girls did participate in the new public sphere afforded by the growth of leisure industries, but they could also consume at home, upstairs in their bedrooms” (McRobbie & Garber).
“Bedroom culture” was officially born. Coined by sociologist Angela McRobbie, “bedroom culture” was borne out of her research that found that girls were more likely to stay inside for fear of being rejected from other social circles or due to threats of dangers. There was a freedom in privacy that allowed girls to be messy, silly, and all around honest without having to deal with social fall out. Again, with a girl's financial future being tied to her future husband, there was immense pressure to publicly present as a suitable bride. Deviance from the norm could lead to very real hardship.
As we move out of the 50s and 60s, and into the current day, we do see this less and less. Women are no longer dependent on men for their financial security - and yet researchers still see that “there is a gap with feminine participation in youth subcultures … (and especially a) struggle for space and recognition in a predominantly male cultural movement” (Weller). Researcher Wivian Weller explored this concept by studying women’s participation in the hip-hop movement in Brazil. In his research, he found that girls are forced to either accept or reject their own femininity. That by rejecting it - they are accepted by the boys, the majority group member, but then disliked by the other girls. Or they can align with the girls, but this permanently puts them on the outskirts of the movement. Either way they lose in the end by rejecting themselves or their community. But linking up with the boys, Weller found, was only a short lived victory. One of his subjects who was apart of a girl group who rejected femininity shared that “now that I've grown a bit older, that I've grown prettier, that I've become more feminine and that my body has taken a pretty shape, so to speak,.. they,... just overnight they change into somebody else, react totally different and that can spoil lots of things, a friendship that's the way it is, it's something you just can't change.” (Weller). They were only safe within the group until the boys saw them as women, as an object of sexual desire. Then the jig was up, they were outed once again.
Angela McRobbie & Jenny Garber found a similar effect in their work too. That a girl's ticket into a male dominated subculture “with the possible exception of sexual deviance, … seemed to depend entirely on whose girlfriend she was” (McRobbie & Garber). In that way, never a truly accepted member of a culture - but a pretty object to have in the room. Privy to the party so long as they look nice … and are open to “hooking up” with someone there.
So what’s a girl to do? Well … stay in her room. As consumer goods started to focus on young girls' bedroom culture, there began a rise in what is referred to as “teenybopper” culture. Also based around the bedroom, this subculture focuses on the obsession young girls form toward tween pop stars and actors. Justin Bieber, One Direction, Zac Efron. Pick your poison. If you were a young girl, or have ever known one, you know what this looks like. Magazine cut outs tapped to the wall, participation in internet fandom, collecting merch, and so on. This subculture is saturated with young women, and we don't see similar participation with young men. Why is that? There are a few theories as to why, these are the two I connected with most:
“Young pre-teen girls have access to less freedom than their brothers. Because they are deemed to be more at risk on the streets from attack, assault, or even abduction, parents tend to be more protective of their daughters…teenybopper takes these restrictions into account” (McRobbie & Garber)
“Membership carries relatively few personal risks. For girls of this age, real boys remain a threatening and unknown quantity. Sexual experience is something most girls of all social classes want to hold off for some time in the future. They know, however, that going out with boys invariably carries the possibility of being expected to kiss or “pet”. The fantasy boys of pop make no such demands. They “love” their fans without asking anything in return.” (McRobbie & Garber)
Ultimately, researchers see “bedroom culture”, or “teenybopper” or whatever you want to call it, as a young girl's subconscious way of buying time. Of showing resistance to being prematurely sexualized. Puberty is on the horizon, fast approaching. Their male counterparts are already starting to explore sex and often girls feel the unspoken pressure to perform. These schoolgirl fantasies of interactions with far off celebrities allow girls to imagine flirting playing out in a way that is always safe because it exists in the confines of their imagination and only shared with their fellow girls. In this way, they keep each other safe.
Works Cited:
“Girls and Subculture” by Angela McRobbie & Jenny Garber
https://pages.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readings/CSReadings/McRobbie-n-Garber_Girls_and_Subcultures.pdf
“The feminine presence in youth subcultures: the art of becoming visible” by Wivian Weller
http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-026X2006000100003