There’s a scene in Pixar’s Turning Red that made me want to dive straight through the carpet into the afterlife. The main character, 13-year-old girl of Chinese-Canadian origin Mei, began to draw fantastic images of her beloved, 17-year-old clerk Daisy Mart Devon. Her mother finds this fan art and goes to scold Devon for corrupting Mei. Mae’s mother has no idea that all those scribbles were a figment of imagination, not reality – love running through the pages of a notebook.
Since the advent of television and film, the media have dictated the terms under which they were considered attractive, and most screen media in particular have failed to accommodate a wider and more erratic range of desires. This is true of on-screen girls and women who, for decades, have mostly conformed to an established image—white, thin, and burly—and have been attracted to boys and men who fit a similar set of norms. But this homogeneous notion of attractiveness did not take into account how one-sided, truly fictional, and often quite strange, the longing for adolescence, when loves are just born, is. It’s only in the past few years that girly lust has made its way onto the screen, complicating the media landscape with wild, imaginative and often nasty scenes that make the story much more human.
Image: Disney
Puberty is when many of us first begin to think about what it means to be attracted to other people. First-time excitement is confusing and overwhelming, while Turning Red’s frankness and exaggerated lust capture this moment of life with hilarious finesse. When Mei Li draws a cute boy who works at a corner store, she starts with pretty standard ideas: his muscular arms, his attractive panama hat. But the scribbles intensify. And soon she paints it with water, in which fantasy and reality merge together. This desire to keep drawing comes unbidden. Her self-reproach for her fantasies only makes her draw even more insistently. The existence of the mermaid is neatly intertwined with other doodles, such as her and Devon embracing.
At the age of 13, she already feels that such hobbies are inappropriate for her – either because of the reaction of her parents, or because of social norms for how she should behave, or because of how overwhelming these emotions are. She also hides her interest in boy band 4*Town from her parents by claiming that one of her friends is a real fan, which is an absolute lie. Scene from the movie friends absolutely roar because of the concert 4 * Town — and the discovery of the school bully, who Tyler is also a fan of, is the incredible culmination of this dirty fangerling. Turning Red never makes fun of these moments and doesn’t make cheap jokes at the expense of the girls. Instead, he invites viewers to empathize — and perhaps remember their ardent teenage obsessions.
Image: Disney
This is not far from how teenagers and teenage girls in other recent media portray and validate their own unusual desires. There’s Pen15’s Maya, whose “porn” stash includes a snap of her lover as well as a photo of smooth sand dunes. Obviously, this cache remains hidden from prying eyes. And no list of horny teen girls would be complete without Tina Belcher of Bob’s Burgers, who writes erotic fanfiction based on fantasy series as well as erotic fantasy about her passions, most of which involve a lot of guys’ butts. (As well as zombies.) They all remain in diary collections, though her family is aware of her writing as well as her love for Boyz 4 Now, a fictional boy group in which her younger sister Louise pretends to be uninterested.
All of this is a great reminder that many of us went through a phase of deep stiffness that included a lot of references and a lot of imagination. My first hobbies were fictional characters, teen celebrities and of course some of my classmates. I spent a lot of time thinking about Edward or Jacob from Twilight, the lust titans of two thousand girls. This internal debate wasn’t so much about whether Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner were hot—although Lautner’s numerous shirtless appearances contributed to that—but about who I would really rather date a vampire or a werewolf. I was thinking about cold and immortality against the warm-blooded community. The fact that they were both dangerous was strongly in favor in the column. I soon wondered if my math partner in 6th grade was more of a vampire or a werewolf, and did that affect my love for them?
On the other hand, I didn’t like Edward or Jacob as much as I fantasized about Danny Fenton from Danny Ghost or villains like Shego Kim A+. I spent a lot of time imagining how cold (and hot) I would be if I was greeted by a celebrity (specifically, any of the members of Paramore). I also remember the Cosmopolitan double-page spread featuring curved bananas – you can imagine what the story was about. My version of Maya’s Pen15 porn stash (if I wasn’t afraid to have it) would probably have included a color printout of a banana.
I’m ecstatic that such wild girlish horn expressions are finally making their way into our media. I cringed excitedly at May’s merman fantasies and her weeping—with heavy snot—over every member of 4*Town (but especially over Robert). We were all little freaks at that age. And we were all so different—Mae’s fantasies are pretty buttoned up, even though her mom reacts so aggressively to them. Maya spends most of 7th grade hoping someone will kiss her and overcoming her inner shame about masturbating. Tina’s fantasies are outlandish and completely unrelated to how her lover Jimmy Jr. actually feels about her.
We have finally entered the age of the media, where girls’ awkward early desires become less of a laughing stock and more of a source of comedy thanks to the embarrassed solidarity many of us feel when we look back at that time. Strange infatuation is a rite of passage. What we did then was objectively funny, and we should all laugh at it together.