On a small island inside the internet — governed by @joan.of.arca, Binchtopia and Ottessa Moshfegh — lives a world of literate young women.
They exchange Sylvia Plath novels for coffee and diet Pepsi, berate the islands around them and build homes of books and Jeff Buckley look-alikes. Nightly, they sit around fires of torn Ayn Rand novels, burning them for warmth.
The roots of the “thought daughter” phenomenon are actually quite pure. Though often misconstrued into discussions of aestheticism, a thought daughter is really nothing more than an online depiction of the thoughts and feelings of a complex “real girl.”
The term morphed out of a joke within a joke of the tired TikTok trend, “Would you rather have a thot daughter or gay son?” — a question most internet users have heard in those uncomfortable streeter interviews.
I beg you, do not go down the Reddit rabbit hole for this question. The current status of the thought daughter has become quite separate from its originator, now used to reflect on the thoughts and inner workings of women and femmes.
The “thought daughter” characterization was no more than a public call into the void for other young women with deep attachments to specific literature and media who are known for “feeling deeply.”
Most likely this is my interpretation, so you’ll have to forgive me. But in my eyes, I see it as a common understanding of post-teen melancholia — we are no longer “woe is me” 13-year-olds who have just read Twilight or watched Lost in Translation, but we still hold many of the same attachments to those characters. When we engage in the belief that “nobody thinks how I think,” “nobody understands how I feel,” we choose to establish ourselves as outsiders. It’s much like how a socially awkward boy who prefers Star Wars to social engagement will in some ways see himself through that lens forever.
Humans are not so complicated after all, and if you (or I) at 14 believed ourselves as reincarnations of Joan Didion — the silent viewer, the holier than thou, the mighty vessel into the world — we might always see ourselves that way. My apologies to the thought daughters in the Instagram reels, but men also get emotional looking out of train car windows.
It’s often depicted that a woman or femme in this archetype is highly introverted and has developed an ability to repress their feelings. And it is within the community of old female writers, archive interviews and conversations with other young women like them that they feel represented.
Let’s zoom out a bit though — aside from general personality differences, why do some women brand themselves as intelligent, complex thinkers and others do not? Why is nobody calling a male introverted philosophy major who reads Bukowski a “thought son”? What makes this branding only applicable to not only women, but one version of a woman?
What happens if we take the thought daughter away from its associated authors, musicians and movie characters — is anything left aside from general feeling?
In essence, the thought daughter holds one mental framework: deep reflection. And don’t we all do that? From one thought daughter to (possibly) another, I think we need to give everyone more credit. We can all manage complex emotions, be introverted at times and — listen hard for this one — think deeply. If we don’t want to end up in another iteration of the “not like other girls” mentality, we need to notice the complexities in each person’s individual experience.
This is not to say you can no longer read Patti Smith or Eileen Myles, and yes, they can still be aspects of your identity. You are still allowed to see yourself in Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — too much damage has been done from her to reverse that, anyway. Yes, you can still watch Lady Bird (and can still prefer Greta Gerwig’s earlier work). Identifying ourselves through interests is not the debate in question, rather that we should acknowledge how these feelings are not independent of this brand of young girls turning into young women.
While we can write and read moody books on deep reflection, we do not own this emotion. That is the beauty and truth of complexity. This brand of female characters may never go away, and we may continue throwing pages into the fire to warm our island. But we must admit that someone does not have to look like us or read like us to think like us.
I’ll hold your hand when I say this — you and I are not so unique after all.
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