“Because I’m pretty when I cry,” a refrain in Lana Del Rey’s melancholic, gray-washed album “Ultraviolence.” It has been over 10 years since its release, and even longer since the iconography and aesthetics associated with it first surfaced, yet the “Sad Girl” remains a beloved and debated cultural icon today. While her media portrayal has been of great comfort and a place of belonging for many young women grappling with similar emotion, the “Sad Girl” easily becomes fetishistic and reductionary of mental illness. She exists in many ways in an exclusionary and appropriative bubble.
Cleopatra, as a divine, tragic beauty, can be seen as an early example of the “Sad Girl.” Although an incredible beauty and femme fatale, she was reckless and died an untimely death, making her the blueprint for the key features of today’s “Sad Girl. “Jumping ahead around 2000 years, “Sad Girls” permeate nearly every space of popular culture, from authors to musicians, cinema, and television. Most recently, the “Sad Girl” has taken over social media. Take the “crying girl makeup” on TikTok or Spotify’s popular “sad girl starter pack” as examples. In media, she is Lux Lisbon, — “The Virgin Suicides” — Effy Stonem — “Skins” — and Cassie Howard (“Euphoria”), characterized by her dark emotion, melancholic beauty, and traditionally feminine appearance. Influential figures associated with the “Sad Girl” include author Sylvia Plath, director Sofia Coppola, and musician Lana Del Rey.
Audrey Wollen, artist/writer, coined “Sad Girl Theory,” explaining the Sad Girl as a symbol of resistance against the patriarchy that expects women to sit and smile. “It’s OK, even honorable, to be a ‘sad girl.’”
While the “Sad Girl” has been a consoling and identifying character for many young women and self-defined “girlbloggers,” she is frequently defined by her whiteness, seeing as there is little representation of women of color in the trope. The aspects of the character’s roots in Latina/x culture go unacknowledged. Heather Mooney, author of “Sad Girls and Carefree Black Girls: Affect, Race, (Dis)Possession, and Protest,” describes a scene in Lana Del Rey’s short film “Tropico” that embodies this thoughtless consumption of marginalized culture. This is a scene where she inhales the smoke exhaled by a Latina/x character. “Del Rey ‘breathes in’ racialized space and embodied ‘authenticity,’ animating her position as a ‘real’ Sad Girl,” Moony writes. She describes the physical breathing in of smoke exhaled by Del Rey’s character as symbolic of a larger issue of cultural erasure — embodying something and pretending it is yours.
Additionally, expression of Black women’s emotion is often depicted differently in the media. While intense emotion from white women tends to be glamorized, Black women’s emotion is often grouped into the harmful “Angry Black woman” stereotype. This creates a dynamic where a Black woman’s expression of emotion is viewed as angry, while a white woman’s is viewed as soft and beautifully tragic.
In addition to its both direct and indirect racism, the “Sad Girl” trope can encourage unhealthy behaviors such as self-harm, anorexia, and depression in young women. After Plath’s death became widely discussed, Frieda Hughes criticized the romanticisation of her mother’s suicide. “The point of anguish at which my mother killed herself has been taken over by strangers, possessed, and reshaped,” said Hughes.
In the midst of the trope’s glaring negative impacts, it is important to consider that the harmful nature lies not in the central characters and creators themselves, but rather in how they are appropriated into a symbol of beauty by the media. “Lolita” for example, is viewed by many as endorsing pedophilia, negatively impacting young women. However, Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita”, did not wish for it to be glamorized the way it is today. Nabokov did not even want a beautiful little girl with heart-shaped sunglasses to be on the cover of his novel, as he believed it would be difficult to portray a girl on the cover without framing her as the temptress. In retrospect, choosing a different cover would have been wise considering the sex symbol the heart-shaped-sunglasses girl has turned into.
The allure of the “Sad Girl” harms both those included and excluded from it, raising serious questions about harms on girls and women. Discussion around this trope, who it impacts, and how it impacts them can hopefully begin to deconstruct its glamorization.