THE SHADE OF TOXIC FEMININITY

Hearing about the “toxic femininity’’ what thoughts come across your mind. I asked some of my friends and they told me “OH,you are writing about femi-Nazi?”or it is about Puseo- feminist

That one breed who hates men constantly for no reason (“but i can tell you many reasons'') and its wild to see people have such a mindset toward the word “feminist”. FEMINIST & FEMININITY IS TWO DIFFERENT

WORD. To those people who don’t know FEMINIST stand for a person who supports feminism; FEMININITY stands for qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of women. There are so many traditional gender stereotypes for all genders.we can talk about those stereotypes all day long but it will not be enough.to be more specific we have some shade of toxic femininity.

I was surfing through the internet, found an article written by the ROISIN LANIGAIN and it was like this “Hey, do you like listening to Lana Del Rey? What about Fiona Apple? Mitski, Hole, Melanie Martinez, MARINA? Can you recite the ‘cool girl’ speech from Gone Girl verbatim? Do you love that one Jacques-Louis David piece (''Portrait of a Woman in White”) not because you care about art, but because you like the broken female protagonists of Otessa Moshfegh’s literature? Do you have a favorite Lisbon sister (and is it Lux)? Are you still mourning the loss of Tumblr? Do you like to read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita? Do you enjoy Catholic iconography? Pressed to describe yourself, or to have others describe you, would you be comfortable with adjectives like “toxic” or “manipulative”? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, then congratulations — you might be a femcel.”.So the word femcel in short for female involuntary celibate, which means that women who cannot get laid not by choice. And I was like ugh it is necessary to categorize women just because of the taste of music and books she read, and the lifestyle she romanticizes. I was kinda offended by it but Hey! It's the internet we are talking about the Internet aesthetic trends or she calls it toxic femininity. and I noticed that a friend of my sister was always spamming her instagram stories with sad aesth lana del rey inspo quote of being sad and cool with it and so much of self hate & being overlooked by men and she is just 19 or something.

Someone who constantly surfs the internet, like me, can understand where Lanigan is catching on; there are people on the internet who create some of the saddest playlists you've ever heard, or the girl on Tik Tok Fyp may be the self-described "saddest person in the world."Fleabag girl or podcast girl, green juice, claw clip, or Emma Chamberlain— these women are obsessed with categorizing themselves and using Femcel as this aesthetic designator. According to Rayne FisherQuann, it's common for women to share their identities' thoughts as an artfully curated list that they consume or aspire to consume, and young women are guided by it's neurores to define their entire identity, and this is often implicated as the looking glass for public to one's mental illness like depression, eating disorder, and different eating disorders.

Lanigan describes this niche interest in aesthetics as Femcel-Core. I might find myself enlisted in those categories, which is ironic and funny at the same time.

But the question is what leads women to deprive themselves of their own identity and adapt to the femcel tendency: is it the societal structure where they can’t come out of the box, or are they the victims of misogynistic thought? In any case, the girl who lives in the shadow of toxic femininity does not fall into any of the normal categories.

And there's always a new culture and ideology of beauty and fashion impacting femininity.

- Samikshya Shrestha LACM