A letter to my freshman self: Isabella Madruga
Dear Isabella,
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Dear Isabella,
Growing up, I never really played — or liked — video games. I didn’t get the point. Watching my 4th-grade crush play Portal in his bedroom was boring. Okay, you get to the next level, and then you get to the last level and then what? You just play it all over again? Never mind the fact that I didn’t particularly enjoy games that hurt people violently. Games on the Wii were more tolerable, but then whenever I’d win (or more likely, lose), I’d think, “What’s next?”
While the patriarchy is certainly still strong in Western countries like the U.S., it is a different beast in South Korea. Among all countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), South Korea is at the bottom in gender income disparity rankings, with a whopping 31% difference in pay between men and women, despite its high GDP and standing as a developed country.
Another day, another TikTok trend. Yesterday it was the “clean girl” aesthetic, and today it’s “mob wife.” What do these things have in common? They’re both ploys to get impressionable young girls to buy into a new trend. This makes these girls a cog in the capitalist machine — it makes rich influencers richer, rather than giving girls the space to carve out their own lifestyle and sense of fashion.
TikTok, which started as a platform to share dance and lip-sync videos, has now become a hotbed for political and social movements, subcultures and ideologies — one of which is the “tradwife” movement. Tradwife videos often show conventionally attractive white women in picture-perfect homes (or aesthetically “messy” farmhouses) wearing ironed sundresses covered with an apron, tending to their brood of children, making food from scratch and speaking in a feminine lilt. These social media posts have spread like wildfire and have been utilized by the authoritarian right to push misogynistic narratives and legislation.
If you have TikTok or any short-form social media, have walked into a bookstore recently or have simply spoken to someone who likes to read, you’ve probably heard of BookTok.
Whenever I told people I was studying abroad, I felt like I was lying. I felt as if I hadn’t done anything to deserve such a rare once-in-a-lifetime experience — the kind most people don’t get.