The captivating usage of underage femininity in the interest of corporate financial gain is not new, in fact, it feels standard and expected. What does feel new is the surge of teenagers born in this millennium, who choose to act and look much older than they are for Internet fame. Girls are photoshopping themselves to have curves that haven’t grown yet, wear more mature clothes, and pose provocatively for the world. This phenomenon of teens presenting themselves to look older than teens ten years ago has gained enough attention to have generated its own popular meme. Two girls are compared with the caption “14-year-olds now vs 14-year-old me”. Every comment section of such a meme will have a majority of people shaming the girls for over-sexualising themselves before they can even fully understand what it means. The “14-year-old me” will be praised for adhering to an unwritten law of looking the way a teen is supposed to, whereas the “14-year-olds now” are slandered and slut-shamed. It isn’t that they don’t want to look their age, the problem is, there no longer is a look for that age group like there was in the past. 

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The ambiguous appeal of brands, like Fashion Nova, geared towards teenage girls is that these companies are investing in the next generation of consumers. They are not concerned with championing asexuality in developing teens as seen in the memes. Unisex clothing is a popular euphemism for curbing these adult stereotypes, but this non-gendered approach does not sell makeup, launch titan social media accounts or appeal to the spirit of youth. Brands would far rather hook future, long-term customers than allow time for young people to make up their own minds.  

“Where are their parents?” One might ask, but pinning the fault for the over-sexualisation of teenagers onto the parents or even the children themselves won’t help anyone because it isn’t a matter of individuals, it’s a system. A system built to glorify celebrity teens, It girls, and as a convenient byproduct it benefits a vast amount of companies and organisations. Advertisements of the fashion and beauty industries play a role, the pornography industry with its most popular category “teens” plays a role, school dress codes only focused on monitoring female students play a role, and unconvicted sexual predators of high status play a role in not only normalising the objectification and sexualisation of young women and teenagers, but in the creation of a system where girls grow up thinking of their own bodies as sexual before they think of them as biological. These girls are raised in a world where the most influential teenage apparel brands of the last decade have all gone bankrupt, and instead of continuing to wear children’s clothes they move onto adult clothing. They grow up in a world where porn has become an available and accessible extension of sex ed. A world where they can aspire to be an international model at 15, just like their beloved Lily Rose Depp. These girls enter a society that still focuses on women’s looks before their skills, and teaches the value of men’s approval before self-worth. 

Every generation looks at the next one nostalgically and has a need to feel superior. Whether it’s grandmas ridiculing millennials’ inability to live without the internet, or their grandmas ridiculing the silent generation’s inability to live without electricity. Society has a way of moving and developing much faster than it appears and suddenly people feel disconnected, not up to date. To understand the behaviour of the next generations, we have to remember to include factors beyond the individual and realise how deep capitalism has trickled into the infrastructure of our society and soaked the essence of goals, conformities and interpersonal relationships. After all the new generations can’t be held accountable for being who they are and doing what they do, when everything they exemplify is a reflection of the world society has created for them.