Opinion

Girls have feelings too

March 15, 2018
Girls have feelings too

Samar Al-Mogren

Al-Jazira newspaper

I VERY well remember that it was common for girls of my generation to fall in love with cartoon characters and I am open about it. I also remember that my cousin and I had a fistfight when she declared her love for the protagonist of Grendizer because I was so jealous, and when our mothers asked us why we were fighting we could not tell them the real reason. Perhaps now they will know why. It was common for kids in the 70s and 80s to ask who your favorite character in a certain cartoon series was but girls wouldn›t disclose it, whereas boys would openly declare their fascination for the character Samira from Grendizer.

It was normal for teenage boys to flirt with female celebrities, but teenage girls would hide their feelings for male celebrities or express them only within a close circle of friends. This had led to many negative trends among young girls, which I would not mention today.

I also remember that I used to take magazines after my father finished reading them and I would cut out pictures of celebrities and stick them in my notebook. If any woman of my generation denied doing such things in her teenage years, then she is not being honest about her life.

What I would like to point out is that if fancying the opposite sex was normal, but it was not normal for a girl to express her fascination in our society, a society that was wont to only men voicing their feelings toward the opposite sex. If a girl expressed her fascination, she would be considered of having no manners, which was probably why female poets were afraid of penning flirtatious lines while a male writers would wax lyrical about their love and their fans would shower them with praise.

Less than a year ago I wrote about what happened when Ivanka Trump visited Riyadh and I said everyone reserved the right to express their fascination for someone and we should not be too curious about it.

The same thing happened less than a year later to the society›s utter shock. It was the turn of girls to express their fixation with the «Klejah Guy» at the Janadriyah Festival. People had much to say about this through their tweets and posts on social media that shamed the girls and accused them of having no manners or of being heretical. All of that because they openly said they liked a celebrity guy. Let us not forget Umm Naif who was bitterly abused and rubbished just because she complimented a handsome man while marketing her dishes.

We need to realize society is changing from the 70s and 80s when the girls shied away from expressing their innocent crush on someone because they were too afraid to do so even though they did have the same feelings as the boys did. The new generation is not afraid to express themselves and we need to learn to live with this new reality as long as such expressions are innocent and polite.


March 15, 2018
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