On Girls and Goths in the Early Aughts

I think horror was always a part of my identity, lurking somewhere deep in my bones, long before I realized it.

All things being relative, coming of age during the early aughts as a girl was no picnic. (I’ve written and talked about this before.) It’s only relatively recently that we’ve begun, as a society, to reckon with the unique brand of blatant misogyny that was imposed upon women, especially celebrities, during the first decade of the new millennium. Characterized by Perez Hilton, vicious tabloids, and stringent, sexist double standards, the early 2000s weren’t vastly different from today’s world; even so, from the perspective of a post-MeToo America, it feels shocking to look back on the cruelty piled upon women in the name of entertainment, or worse yet, journalism.

By now, there are numerous documentaries and docuseries detailing the blatantly sexist lifecycle of a female celebrity in early-2000s media: from her precipitous rise and inevitable oversexualization, to her demonization and fall from grace. It’s all so predictable as to be practically preordained.

Forever a Britney fan, I watched the New York Times’ documentary Framing Britney with a box of tissues and my fists balled up in anger. The documentary illustrates Britney Spears’ climb to ultra-fame as a teenager—during which time she was asked intrusive questions about her relationships and the status of her virginity, but was still considered a “good” girl—to her subsequent crash in the media, starting with her breakup to Justin Timberlake—the beginning of the “Britney is a slut” narrative greasily adopted by outlets—and culminating in the night she shaved her head and threatened a paparazzo with an umbrella. That’s when people started calling her crazy, thus completing the usable lifespan of a woman.

More recently came Love, Pamela, a docuseries delving into the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee “sex tape” scandal. In reality, the tape was a private honeymoon recording that was stolen out of the Lees’ home safe, in a violating act made far worse by the fact that media outlets and websites gleefully shared the tape in full, treating it like a ploy for fame orchestrated by the Lees—and by “sex icon” Pamela in particular—rather than the deeply invasive crime that it was.

And then there was Pretty Baby, a two-part documentary detailing the systemic violations that were inflicted on Brooke Shields in Hollywood as a very young child actor, continuing through her teenage years and into young adulthood. Those violations—including showing Brooke fully nude onscreen at the age of eleven—were treated as edgy at worst, but were by and large normalized by a titillated media. Brooke speaks at length in the doc about the effect these constant intrusions on her autonomy had on her, which were—quite obviously, and to put it lightly—painful and far-reaching.

I swear I’m getting to my point.

Those stories all brought up feelings I thought, at one point, I’d long buried. Outrage and protectiveness, and sadness for what could have been – not just for Britney or Pam or Brooke, but for all us girls. Where would we be, mentally and emotionally, if we weren’t raised by such a savagely misogynistic society? I see the women around me thriving despite the world we were brought up in, a world of goaded-on “catfights” and manufactured competition, a world where you could only be a Jessica (virgin, polite, smiles a lot) or a Christina (whore, ‘nough said), and you’re invisible by 30 anyway. A world we still live in, even if the sexism is less barefaced.

But here’s a secret I’ve learned over the years: If you’re looking for an out, horror can be an escape route.

As a little kid, I thrilled in watching Jaws and being the only one who wasn’t scared or disgusted when Quint got bitten in half by the shark, blood spewing from his mouth as he gasped his last breaths. I felt brave, and it scratched a tomboy-esque itch of mine that, over the years, was otherwise snuffed out by everything society told me I should be. Ever praised for being “sweet” and quiet, and for never causing a problem, I implicitly learned that I needed to be that way, always.

But horror was always there, too, somewhere on the periphery, whispering in my ear and calling me over to the dark side. It started with the goth girls – Nancy from The Craft, Stokely in The Faculty, Ginger of Ginger Snaps. Oh, and Katie Holmes in Disturbing Behavior – that was a big one. Tosh from Urban Legend was an unmatched fixation. These were the girls I secretly wanted to be or be friends with… or something, to subsume or consume them entirely, I didn’t know. They scared and excited me with their affectless, kohl-rimmed stares, their belly shirts and a flagrant refusal to smile and make nice at the required moments. They were self-possessed and assured in a way I could only dream of at being the time. I couldn’t be them—how could I? It seemed impossible, but I could borrow pieces of them to bolster my own strength.

A smudge of dark eyeliner, a middle finger raised to the boys catcalling me on the street. A skirt my mother wouldn’t approve of, because fuck those guys. Minor things, maybe, but these gestures towards being a certain kind of woman, however put-on, gave me a small, secret confidence. They made me feel more like me, or at least, more like the me I wanted to be. The me I hoped might be in there, waiting to emerge, as long as I took the care not to let her get quashed completely. As if my little rebellions kept her alive.

I kept watching the movies and seeking out more like them. I quickly found that the women I related to weren’t often on my TV screen, and they weren’t in most Oscar-winning movies. I began the slow, years-long process of realizing that all the complex, angry, sexy, twisted, multi-faceted women I saw myself in most weren’t in the mainstream, and more often than not, resided in the horror genre. These characters, these very complicated women, became a lifeline and a blueprint for me over the years, providing alternatives to the status quo, inspiring me to misbehave and more importantly, to behave according to my own ideals and desires rather than everyone else’s.

Turns out they’ve always been there.

(This essay was originally published, in a slightly different form, on Join Me in the Madhouse – thanks to Stephanie Wytovich for giving it its first home!)