As an emerging woman writer and visual artist, I recently found some obstacles along the way of my artistic path, both in the personal and professional field. I started questioning the cultural differences between boys and girls in the field of arts. As a matter of fact, I like to write about romance. However, I always find myself narrating what I am not—sometimes too resigned from reality—believing that’s the only way to attract a larger audience. So I thought: Should I think like a boy to succeed artistically?

Girls have been raised with the idea that love and sensitivity were our best capabilities. Of course, this is just a common idea depicted by popular culture to allow us to insert ourselves professionally without walking in men’s steps. The truth is that females lived in a world undeniably shaped by men. Since our childhood, we’ve been lulled with the idea that being heartbroken, cheated on, or bored are the only ways to survive relationships. This social illusion often operates through popular media such as books, films, and music. These, often interpreted and written by men, portray women through heterosexual fantasies.

Madame Bovary, the famous novel written by Flaubert, portrayed an unhappy and lonely woman facing the realities of deluded love and ambitions. This sad destiny was written with such realism, although fictional.

On the screen side, Rom-coms (even if I am very fond of those movies) are, for the most part, written by men for women, often portraying the female character as a delicate and humble person confronted with a secure, wealthy man. I am not writing a general confession but just an opinion based on cultural facts.

Woody Allen’s films, as good as they can be, follow the path of patriarchy, always picturing romance for women but narrated by a man. Within that conception lies a misinterpretation of feelings and situations where, once again, the male character is in the leading position—having mistresses, dating teenagers, telling his wife he’s going to come back, and so on.

Through TV, what comes to my mind directly when speaking of girlhood is Sex and the City. Yet it is still written and directed by a man. Even if women’s sexuality was perceived as a breath of fresh air in the industry at that time, looking back on that TV show twenty years later made me realize that it came with a misleading and primitive perception of what women are aiming for in terms of sex and career.

This reflection is also true in the music field. Hip-hop and urban music in general are often hurtful toward women in their lyrics, whereas the industry is run by men. For instance, we could give the following lyrics: « I just put your bitch on another bitch and hit ’em both » or « She gon’ eat the coochie like she cake — all we do is fuck, we don’t go on dates. » These beautifully well-written lines from Ye came to me as an example when I was looking for a striking one. I went on Kanye West’s music profile, played a random song from one of his last albums, and picked up those lyrics—that is to say.

It is through meaningful examples that I want to raise the question of girls’ representation in pop culture and how this affects our way of evolving in creative fields, supported by my personal experiences.

As a writer engaged in intimacy and culture, I’d like, through this article, to ask girls their feelings toward the representation of women in cultural artifacts.