The

DIARY

of

A Next-Gen It-Girl

Essays, notes, and Journals by Crosby Jassem

My Name is Crosby Lake Jassem and I am eighteen years old from Manhattan, New York and for my Senior Project I made a zine titled The Diary of A Next-Gen It-Girl. It includes essays, journals, cultural criticisms, and photos.

I knew since last year, when we visited senior project night, that I wanted to make a book of essays, but I didn’t know exactly how that would manifest. My first thought was to make a substack. After reading a few substacks I quickly realized that substack as a vehicle for publishing writing is really serious and has mansplainer vibes and my writing was too carefree and fun for substack.

I then decided that a digital zine would be the perfect way to present my work. Zine making is like a sacred art form for teenagers who have a lot to say and don’t know how to say it, and the medium makes it really easy for the author’s character to shine through. It’s like a diary or a scrapbook. I made my zine on Canva, and it was really fun!

During the six week project everyday I would either go to the public library or a cafe and I would get a large coffee and I would sit down and write. I wrote a lot about pop culture, movies and tv shows that I’ve watched and things that I’ve read. I wrote about what It’s like to be a girl growing up in the 21st century on the brink of the information age. I was inspired by Christy Wampole’s op-ed The Essayification of Everything.

There is a lot of writing that ended up on the cutting room floor and a lot of things that aren’t getting published, however I am still proud of what I have. I feel like throughout this project I really learned how to write truthfully and develop a personal writing and creative style which I hope to develop even more throughout my life. This is just the beginning.

Excerpts from essays I never wrote pt 1.

Teenage girls' trauma visualized and dramaticized through the male gaze only puts more pressure on us to be perfect. I remember when I was fifteen at the height of my depression I had an obsession with being a "pretty girl who cries". I would repost memes on my spam instagram account about being pretty while sitting in my room crying listening to radiohead and phoebe bridgers. I had a fantasy in my head about a boy falling in love with me because I was just a beautifully traumatized girl who couldn't stop crying while smoking simultaneously. I leaned into this trope in a ridiculous way, and it became really fucking unhealthy. I started to view myself through the male gaze. Even when I was sitting alone in my room with bags and dried up tears under my eyes, I imagined what the boy I liked at the time would think if he saw me like this.

What I’ve Been Listening To...

What is wrong with teenage girls?????

Why are teenage girls acting so grown up all of the sudden? Why does growing up feel like a race? And why is doing drugs and having mental illness and semi-consensual relationships with older men suddenly cool and trendy? Why do I want to do it? And why do I feel like I should?

I tend to turn to pop culture, specifically television for answers, and what I found was a little bit upsetting. It is Grown adults who are making dark, gritty, and risque TV shows about high school aged girls and over dramatizing their lives for the viewers entertainment all the while marketing their shows as “realistic”. This creates damaging and unachievable standards for the girls watching these shows, and truly ruins our perception of ourselves.

For example, when I was in middle school, my friends and I were all huge fans of the show Pretty Little Liars, about a group of four high school girls; Aria, Spencer, Emily, and Hanna dealing with the stalker “A” and trying to solve the mystery of their missing friend Alison.

The show is a perfect time capsule of the mid 2010’s, meaning they all served chunky belt and knee high boot, and it is a show that would absolutely NEVER be greenlit today. Basically every single girl in that show had a full blown “relationship” with a guy who was nearly a decade older than them, the worst case being Aria, who was on and off dating her high school English teacher for the entirety of the show, and they literally end up getting married in the finale. But anyways, when I was twelve and watching this show I was a huge Ezria (the internet ship name for Aria and Ezra) shipper and I remember being royally pissed off when Aria’s parents did not approve of her dating her English teacher. The fact is, I was way too young to understand how fucked up this was, and rewatching the show now I see how disgustingly manipulative all of Ezra’s behavior was. First of all, when they met he knew she was a student; he thought she was in college but when he found out she was in high school and literally his student it didn’t stop him from dating her.

He constantly blamed her for the relationship, saying things like; he couldn’t help but be in love with her and he couldn’t physically stop himself from being with her. Even when Ezra got punched in the face by Aria’s brother and her parents forbid them from seeing each other, he still went to be with her when she asked, picking her up and kissing her in the pouring rain.

We were all so young when we watched this, and we saw absolutely nothing wrong with it. And the fact is that life imitates art. If we see predators like Ezra Fitz on our screen, it makes predators in real life think that their behavior is okay, and that they can get away with this scot-free. When sexualizing girls and inappropriate relationships are so normalized in television, it makes them all the more acceptable in real life.

Now the current teen show taking the world by storm is 2019’s Euphoria, created by HBO’s resident creep Sam Levinsion. Euphoria revolves around a group of teenagers who live in a suburban town in California,

and it follows them as they navigate their ever so dramatic relationships and lives. There is Rue, the narrator and drug addict played by Zendaya (who won two emmys for her portrayal of this character), Jules, who is the transgender bisexual love interest for Rue and played by actress and model Hunter Schafer. There’s Barbie Ferrera’s Kat, a plus-sized girl who becomes a camgirl dominatrix as a way to embrace her body and sexuality(?) and then gets written out of the show in season two because the actress complained about her character being offensively written. There is Nate Jacobs, a scary white man character who abuses his girlfriends and is also maybe gay? Maddy is Nate's girlfriend who is a bitch to people who don’t know her but is actually a really good friend and unfortunately a victim to the sassy Latina trope. Then there's BB who vapes a lot and Rue’s younger sister Gia who cries a lot. And then there is Cassie, who is beautiful, blonde, has big boobs and also, cries a lot.

Cassie is a character that I related to a lot, especially during the first season. I was fourteen (which is way too young to be watching this, by the way) and I had just broken up with my first boyfriend, and was reeling from the fact that all the boys in my eighth grade class would talk about me and my body behind my back, and also to my face, which I learned from one of my two male friends at the time, who I’m also sure was one of the main perpetrators.

Cassie had a very similar problem to me, as in the pilot episode you see a bunch of boys passing around photos of her nudes and talking about how they wished they could fuck her. While it wasn’t the exact same case for me, it was validating to know that other girls, even if they were fictional, went through the same thing. However as I got older I realized this representation was lacking in some ways. We never actually got to hear Cassie’s side of the story.

Cassie’s whole thing is that she doesn't know her self worth and lets the men in her life define her. It’s a really compelling and relatable story, but it was handled in the absolute worst way possible. The thing is, she is too beautiful and too perfect, and when her mental state was declining, we didn't see that happen with her physical state too. Euphoria as a show relies a lot on visual storytelling, and we as the watcher cannot grasp that Cassie is losing her mind in her relationship with Nate if she looks so pretty the whole time. We know the show has no problem with making characters look "ugly" when they are in a bad mental state. Throughout the entire second season you can literally smell Rue through the screen, and this really should have been the case with Cassie. We desereved scenes between her and her mother and sister, where she got to actually explain the way she felt about Nate and the other men in her life, and her mother and sister actually listened instead of making fun of her. Cassie deserved a special episode like Rue and Jules had where she spoke to a therapist and we got to hear her side of the story.

Unfortunately however, Cassie's characterization fell short, and Levinson pushed her feelings and any possible humanization of the character aside in exchange for drama and fan service. The older and more cynical I get, the more I truly believe that Cassie’s character is just a fetishization of female trauma and not really meant to validate girls with similar experiences.

So yea, the way teenagers are portrayed on TV is gross, fetishy, and absolutely ruins our perceptions of ourselves. There are ways to do it right, like the 2000’s sleeper hit Higher Ground, about a group of teens at wilderness therapy discovering healthy relationships and found family for the first time, and shows marketed towards a younger audience like the Disney Plus show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. The Netflix show Sex Education is also a great example, as it shows a realistically cringy and messy example of teenage identity and sexuality. Seeing these examples of teenagers who have absolutley no idea what the fuck they are doing is actually really healthy, and we need to see more of that.

Hopefully when my peers and I become big time TV executives, writers, and directors this narrative will switch, but in the meantime…focus on yourself? I don’t know. Thanks! Bye.

My favorite albums:

THIS IS...ICONA POP by Icona Pop

2013

Vibes are: The Bling Ring, Pitch Perfect, Driving in LA in a convertible with the roof down at sunset smoking a cigarette

Perfect Picture by Hannah Diamond

2023

Vibes are: I AM THE NEXT-GEN IT-GIRL, Pink glitter pen , Wistful, Hopeful

CRASH by Charli XCX

2022

Vibes are: Queening Out, Modern pop bible, Why am I the only one at this party who is dancing and having fun?

Savage by aespa

2021

Vibes are: Young adult sci-fi/fanstasy where teenagers overthrow the corrupt government, mini skirts, get me get me now get me get me now dudududu

Melodrama by Lorde

2017

Vibes are: Situationship, Girl who is going to be okay, cast party, should have won album of the year

Excerpts from an essays I never wrote Pt 2.

In the context of me reading about the history of femcel (female invoulintary celbicate) culture

• So real femcelism or original femcelism is really "i'm not like other girls" tumblr posts of like a hot girl with big boobs being hot and the caption is like "other girls" and then it is an ugly girl with leg hair and the caption is like "me: a potato" and stuff like that. Learning that the origins of femcelism aren't like "yass girlboss kill your husband slay" and are more rooted in misogyny and kind of bringing down girls who are traditionally feminine makes me sad. It seems like the og femcels only believed that women would embrace femininity and be pretty for male validation, which totally isn't true.
• “but the original femcels were much more fixated on themselves and their appearance, and were even critical of self-love movements. One moderator wrote on the r/Vindicta thread in 2021: “Reminder to femcels, people who LIE to you and tell you that ‘you look fine the way you are’ are NOT on your side. They BENEFIT from you remaining ugly and not fixing your looks because it makes them more attractive relative to you.”
• this just sounds like extreme insecurity. Like how when girls are going through puberty they will purposefully make ugly faces in photos to avoid seeing what they actually look like. I'd like to say that the femcels are just gay, and want to date the pretty girls but that is probably not the case. There is something so interesting in seeing beauty in other women as evil and sinister though. It's almost dystopian. It's interesting that the femcels think that pretty women are out to get them. It's probably all rooted in internalized misogyny.

One Day, I am going to write a movie about a girl group that gets exploited so bad that they vrigin suicides and I will win an oscar.

I’ve Done It. I’ve Finally Watched The Idol.

HBO’s The Idol created by Sam Levinson and Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd) would have to be one of, if not the most disappointing and disgusting TV show we have gotten in the past decade. The show, which was originally being directed by Amy Seimetz, was supposed to be a courageous (and feminist) satire about pop stardom, with the titular Idol Jocelyn (played by Lily Rose Depp) described to be a commentary on child stars turned adult pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, and Selena Gomez. The cast was star studded, and all of Stan Twitter's favorites were signed to the project. It had Lily Rose Depp, Troye Sivan, Rachel Sennot, BLACKPINK’s Jennie Kim and of course, The Weeknd. The people were seated, to say the least. That was until the infamous Rolling Stone article dropped that referred to the show as “torture porn” and revealed Tesafye’s hostile takeover of the show because he believed that “the show was heading in too much in a female perspective” (Rolling Stone). Amy Seimetz dropped out when the show was 80% done, and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson took over as showrunner. Levinson ``weakened the shows over arching message by dialing up the disturbing sexual content and nudity.” It “went from satire to the thing it was satirizing” (Rolling Stone).

Now I didn’t watch the show when it first came out because I thought it looked stupid, offensive, and like a huge waste of time, but I’ve always had things to say about it, and have been dying to give my two cents. So unfortunately, I had to sit myself down and force myself to watch The Idol.

And boy, was it hard to watch. I decided to take notes as I watched it, and some of the standouts are “This writing is so fucking STUPID”, “Why are her nipples so erect. They look fake.”, “You can tell that the writers have never known a woman in any capacity other than sexual before.”, “The Weeknd’s character is so fucking gross. I would say he’s serving acting, but I fear he’s just like that”, and “YES JENNIE SLAYY!”

The people from Rolling Stone that referred to it as torture porn were absolutely right. The show reads like bad fanfiction that a horny fourteen year old boy wrote on reddit. It’s so gross I can’t even describe it. Also as the self proclaimed head of her fanclub, I believe that Rachel Sennot was miscast as Leia, and I think someone like Maude Apatow or even Ayo Edibri could have played the role better. Rachel is too sharp and smug to play a meek character like Leia. I also kind of feel bad for her because you can tell she thought she was getting her big prestige television break, but that is going off topic.

There was one (1) singular well written part in the first episode which was a conversation between Leia and Jocelyn. You see a bit of humanity in Jocelyn for the first (and last) time as she talks about how scared and self conscious she is about her work. “People are waiting for me to fail. I don’t want to prove them right. I don't want to make a fool of myself.” This is a really deep moment and Lily Rose Depp acts it beautifully. However it is ruined thirty seconds later when Leia brings up Tedros, asks Joceyln what she sees in him, saying that she thinks he is “so rape-y” to which Jocelyn responds that she “kind of likes that about him.”

…And just like that, any good character development we might have gotten out of Jocelyn is immediately thrown out the window with lines that characterize her as nothing more than a sex doll. Tedros comes over to her house after this, and they work on her song and then he literally assaults her. I’m not kidding. He asks if she trusts him, she shakes her head no, and then he proceeds to kiss her and choke her by tying her robe around her face and then cutting a hole where her mouth is so she can breathe. The writers do not even try to hide that they find non-consensual sex attractive. It’s right in your face, and It’s really, really, uncomfortable to watch.

And if you thought it couldn’t get worse, the show is also anti-semetic right in your face. They do not try to hide it, and it is supposed to be a joke that you as the watcher are in on. The Jewish characters in the show, Nikki Katz and Andrew Finklestein (played by Jane Adams and Andrew Roth) are Jocelyn’s evil money hungry managers who couldn’t give less of a shit about her well-being and are evil just for the sake of being evil. Now I have no problem with evil managers as a trope, and I actually enjoy it, and think that it can be done really well, but there was absolutely no reason for the evil managers in this show to be so outwardly Jewish. Their names are Nikki Katz and Andrew Finklestein for christ’s sake. Nikki Katz and Andrew Finklestein are respectively two of the most Jewish sounding names I have ever heard in my life, and the way the characters act and speak is so Jewish too. You can tell that it was the director's intention to make them as Jewish as possible because they were higher-ups in the entertainment industry. It is again, really disappointing, frustrating, and uncomfortable to watch.

But enough complaining about how bad this show was, let’s instead talk about what I could have done to fix it. If I could scrap the entire project and make something new, this would be it. Welcome to The Idol: Crosby’s Version.

• It centers around a four member girl group and they are gearing up for a new comeback that is dark, sexy, and like nothing they’ve ever done before (a la STELLAR’s Marionette or Jocelyn’s World Class Sinner (I’m just a freak) from The Idol).
  
• There is lots of emotional abuse from the manager and the manager/the music industry in general is the villain of the story.
  
• The girls will all pull a Virgin Suicides (kill themselves) the big plot twist/reveal at the end.
• I want it to be thematically and aesthetically similar to Blackswan and White: Melody of Death but a psychological thriller.
• I want a popstar to do the soundtrack and write/produce songs for the fictional girl group. Some who I think would be fitting are Icona Pop and Charli XCX

• I want Petra Collins involved somehow
  
• I want Sofia Coppola involved somehow
  
• I want members from NewJeans, Stellar, Girls Generation, Fifth Harmony, TWICE, and other girl groups who have experienced similar things to this fictional girl group to be involved in the production process somehow. I want it to be a respectful and realistic adaptation of their experiences.
  
• As for the girl group members, I kind of want a mix of actresses who can sing and dance and members of active girl groups to play them. People that come to mind are NewJeans’ Danielle, VCHA’s Camilla, Rachel Zeiger, Oliva Rodrigo, NiziU’s Nina, and Sofia Wylie.
• I want a scene where the girls go online and read all of the disgusting heinous things that gross people write about them online and the girls cry and throw up because of it.
• I want a Uniqlo in Challengers type of sponsorship from Fanci Club, nodress, or Sultry Virgin.
• I want it to be set in 2013 because I need all the original music to give 2013 vibes.
• I want one of the girls to have been a child actress and have a crazy stage mon

Also, there is a reason that I want it to be a girl group and not a singular popstar other than that I just listen to a lot of girl groups. I think it would be interesting to explore tension and co-dependency between the group members. Like the girls almost have a trauma bond but it’s slowly chipping away. We can explore favoritism from their management and jealousy between the members.

We will also be able to see the different girls’ reactions and feelings about having a new dark and sexy concept. One of the biggest problems with The Idol for me was that it raised but never answered the question: does she like being slutty, or does she feel like she has to be because objectification is all that she's ever known? I believe that we can answer this question, and all the other unanswered questions that The Idol raised in multiple different ways with the different girl group members.

That's all I have for now, but you should know that when I get a lot of money one day I will make The Idol: Crosby’s Version a reality and I will win an oscar.