Olivia Rodrigo lifts her voice into a breathy sarcasm to end her song "all-american b*tch" off the recently released album GUTS. I’m grateful all the time, I’m sexy and I’m kind, she sings, I’m pretty when I cry, I’m grateful all the time, all the f*cking time. Those lyrics — and the near-universal moments of girlhood they reflect — have taken over TikTok, with users flocking to the sound to share the experiences they’ve had of smiling prettily while they’re threatened or demeaned, of hearing the refrain “not all men," of being hit on by older men as a teenager. The videos show a carousel of different circumstances and points-of-view, with one thread running through them all: the difficulties of being a girl in a world that both looks down on girlhood and demands femininity.
“The way you can literally feel all the feminine rage infused into this,” wrote Sarah Lockwood, 26, over a video of herself smiling into the camera with her hands clasped behind her back. When she first heard Rodrigo’s song, Lockwood was reminded of America Ferrera’s monologue in Barbie about how hard it is to be a woman. “It’s this constant balancing act,” she says. “And if you fall off the balance beam or even wobble a little bit, you’re called ungrateful, you’re told you’re complaining, or that you’re a b*tch. We’re constantly walking on eggshells.” The difference between rage and feminine rage is that feminine rage must hide itself behind a perfectly polished and polite veneer. Don’t show that you’re upset, or they’ll call you sensitive. Don’t react, or you’ll be considered dramatic. Don’t show that it’s all getting to you. Swallow the rage and most importantly, smile. Be grateful. All the time.
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Lockwood’s own feminine rage feels like “almost something ancient. The minute I start not being taken seriously because I show even an ounce of emotion, that is when the feminine rage starts to come out. But it can’t even fully come out because then I won’t be taken seriously.” In Rodrigo’s gritted-teeth ending to the song, Lockwood hears an echo of her own rage. Maybe if more people understand, she thinks, something can change. She knows music has that power.
When Emily Simmons, 23, saw the trend, one image from her childhood rose above the rest. “This song is how I felt as a 15 year old when an elder at my church thanked me for dressing modestly compared to other girls there because his mind had a tendency to wander,” she wrote in her video. Growing up in what they call a “fairly high-demand religion,” Simmons says there was a premium placed on purity and modesty. Outfits were filtered through the lens of reactions they could potentially provoke from men. Simmons was approached in her youth by men in the church who would either commend or condemn her outfits.
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“There’s that experience of girlhood and just being expected to be quiet and demure and take whatever people say as a compliment, even when it’s not,” Simmons tells Teen Vogue. “I really love the sarcastic tone of the affirmations. It’s like, these are affirmations about what we’re expected to be versus what we actually are.” The change in tone of the song – from Rodrigo channeling her inner pop-punk princess while screaming that she knows her age and will act like it, to the breathy, eerie calm of the affirmations – speaks to what it’s like to force yourself into having what is seen as the “appropriate” reaction, even in the fact of inappropriate behavior.
Grace Ogden couldn’t choose only one thing that Rodrigo’s lyrics brought to mind. Instead, she listed 19 examples, including “dress coding for literal minors,” “not all men,” “females,” and “well what was she doing out so late?” When Ogden, 21, listens to the song, she hears her own thoughts. “It’s like the inner dialogue of a woman… going home and being completely exhausted and filled with rage that you have to put on some show [not only] to take care of yourself and keep yourself safe, but also please those around you,” she says. (When she says this, I think of walking home recently and being catcalled. For a moment, I let the mask of femininity slip and I screamed back and then I worried if showing my rage was going to cost me my safety.)
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Ogden has been in martial arts training since she was a child and despite her advanced knowledge, she still considers her best defense to be acting nice and polite, no matter what is thrown at her. Every time she goes out, she says, she calls her brother, who reminds her to be safe and watch out for her friends. “It isn’t all men, but it’s all women. Having to think about how to navigate a situation with the safest outcome every time you’re interacting is just exhausting.”
That’s what Olivia Rodrigo’s song seems to be saying: that she gets it and she’s exhausted too.
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