Even romance stories privilege female virginity. The cultural script still largely views the sexuality of teenage girls as horrifying. Or watch Heaf try to take tickets for a gig out of Orla’s hands. I’d like to see Clare, the straight A student, challenge Heaf to a history test. This is clearly not true: female history students outnumber male at A-Level and degree level. In an interview with One Direction in GQ, journalist Jonathan Heaf confidently declares girls don’t understand music and “don’t care about history”. We find some men clamouring to devalue the culture associated with girls, assuming that girls have poor taste or what they think is unimportant. Other national leaders were equally disrespectful. The then US president, Donald Trump, famously tweeted that Thunberg being named Time magazine’s person of the year 2019 was “so ridiculous”, labelling her resolute commitment to her cause “an anger management programme”. The treatment of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is a case in point. Girls still make society anxious and it fails to take them seriously.
If there is a cultural problem with sidelining women, then attitudes towards girls are even worse. Seeing a show about four teenage girls (and token boy James) is still groundbreaking TV. Yet audiences who didn’t live through the conflict, or even know much about it, have responded with overwhelming enthusiasm to McGee’s much-loved comedy. Academic Caroline Magennis and blogger-activist Seaneen Molloy have written powerfully about this. I was born outside Belfast and didn’t, in fact, grow up in the North – but others can testify to the enormous pleasure of seeing themselves represented on screen for the first time. Derry Girls showed us a vision of teenage life that we just hadn’t seen before. How joyful to get to see teenage girls challenging taboos just by being themselves and living their lives. This is especially true in an extremely conservative society like Northern Ireland. Historically, society has been unsure what to do with girls and women who aren’t (yet) wives and mothers. Teenage girls are often the centre of moral panics.
This was a fraught process, as was the decriminalisation of abortion. Clare wouldn’t have been able to marry a girlfriend until 2019, when same-sex marriage was finally legalised. She would still struggle now, in 2022.Īlthough Clare is accepted by her friends when she reveals she is gay in the first season, there are still pockets of Northern Irish society that are deeply homophobic. A piece of that fine, Protestant ass.” Her irreverence is refreshing in a culture that still finds the sexuality of teenage girls subversive.īut audiences might not find it so amusing to learn that if Michelle had got pregnant, she wouldn’t have been able to access vital reproductive care in 1997. Horny Michelle gets some of the best lines in the show: “We’re doing it for peace. These tend to centre narratives about paramilitaries, politicians and the British military – all predominantly men.ĭerry Girls gloriously upended these conventions by putting Northern Irish girls firmly centre stage. The writer Eli Davies makes it clear how such stories are “ often flattened out by mainstream conflict narratives”. We don’t often hear about daily life for girls and women during this period. Derry Girls showed us what life was like for one of society’s most marginalised groups in a time and place some academics have described as an “ an armed patriarchy”. Narratives about Northern Ireland, and especially the conflict euphemistically known as “ the Troubles”, focus overwhelmingly on men. The fears of the four girls – mouthy Michelle, stressed-out Erin, eccentric Orla and anxiety-ridden Clare – were played for humour, but the challenges facing them were real and serious. Lisa McGee’s riotous Derry Girls, back for its final season, distilled the power of this hilarious drama in just 10 seconds of dialogue. In between newsflashes and 90s dance hits, 16-year old Clare nervously explains just what is at stake and why these results are so vitally important: “We’re girls, we’re poor, we’re from Northern Ireland and we’re Catholic!” It’s a summer evening in Derry in 1997, the night before four teenage girls and a wee English fella get their GCSE results.