British Actress Millie Bobby Brown recently clapped back and named names in a recent video she posted to her Instagram accusing journalists from a variety of publications of bullying her. The thing is? She’s completely right and her video highlights a cultural zeitgeist that I’m not comfortable about perpetuating. The only crime she has committed to make her such a subject of scrutiny and vitriol? Growing up. The Millie Bobby Brown bullying backlash has reignited a much bigger conversation about how young women in the spotlight are treated as they transition into adulthood.
A tale as old as time
If I found out one of my fellow colleagues in journalism was actively bullying a minor, it would literally be a crime, but when said child has grown up in the spotlight, it’s open season. The pressure of growing up with the world watching is a subject that is slowly being discussed; with Nickelodeon star Jeanette McCurdy and pop sensation Britney Spears’ devastating autobiography releases, both mainly explaining the pressure of child stardom and the permanent scar it has left on both of their lives.
This discussion has only become more relevant as tech evolves and children’s right to privacy often falls on the parent. It was embarrassing when my mum posted on Facebook about me leaving a lasagna in my school locker for a week when I was 14. I can’t imagine how embarrassing it is for children who grow up with a parent who puts every tantrum, failed potty attempt and silly thing you say on the internet for everyone to see.
But I digress, the moral failings of influencers who use their children for clout is an article for another day, this is about more than that. This is about the internet, journalists and womanhood.
Eleven’s life has just gotten stranger
Millie Bobby Brown Bongiovi rocketed to fame on the hit Netflix TV series Stranger Things, playing Eleven, a girl with supernatural powers. Netflix did one thing right by hiring actual children to play children, unlike some shows (I’m looking at you, Euphoria). She was 10 years old when she was hired in the role and her character had a very distinct look; a shaved head, an often bleeding nose and she said very little. Her recent video wasn’t about being bullied for how she looked as a child (though that does happen) but about how people treat her now that she’s an adult
The loss of girlhood
Girlguiding UK released a study all the way back in 2008 that revealed that girls as young as 10 are suffering stress, anxiety and unhappiness as they struggle to cope with the pressures of growing up. This was before the era of Instagram, TikTok and constant online comparison so I can’t imagine how pressured young people (girls specifically) feel about coming across as grown-up.
In a discussion I had with a friend, I lamented about how young girls don’t seem to have the ‘awkward blue eyeshadow phase’ anymore. What I meant by this is that we have almost lost the art of girlhood. Many girls hit their teenage years, start going to secondary school and are thrown into a lion’s den of unregulated internet usage, bullying, and cultural and class divides, all while dealing with the most intense hormones you’ll ever experience.
Most tweens will not have an awkward blue eyeshadow phase because there are millions of TikTok tutorials for how to do your makeup perfectly, and there are millions more videos with the lipstick/skincare/item/top that’s going to change your life linked directly to the app. The videos the girls who are 12-17 are seeing are the same ones I’m seeing aged 23. The playing field has been levelled. I babysat a 12-year-old girl not too long ago and was genuinely taken aback by how her skincare routine was not only more extensive than mine but higher quality and from brands that I, up until that point had considered for ‘adults’.
Now, I’m not going to say that the loss of girlhood is a good thing-far from it, but it is 100% up to us as adults to see that we’re at a crisis point. Laws and regulations need to be changed, especially advertising on social media that is targeted at young people. TikTok can say children under the age of 13 aren’t allowed on the app, but what are they really doing to stop them?
It’s up to parents to not discuss how they feel about their bodies around impressionable teenage girls, it’s up to us as a society to big up the things that we would have loved as girls and not put them down as trite and uninteresting. I’m someone who needs to work on this myself, as someone staunchly anti-booktok, I know that I would have loved some of the books pushed on there at 14.
We also need to make life more friendly for young people. In the UK, funding for youth work has been cut by half in the last few years and social groups for young people are shutting down one by one. Often the only place where young people can hang out, socialise and work out who they are as people is online, a place full of predators and massive faceless corporations trying to target the next Drunk Elephant face cream at them.
What has any of this got to do with Millie Bobby Brown though?
Millie’s video has gone viral, calling out journalists by name for writing articles about her appearance. The most disappointing fact of all is that three of the four journalists she named are women. While Millie is no longer a child or even a teen, at the age of 21 she has spent the last 11 of her most formative years becoming a woman in the spotlight. These journalists thought it was okay to call her out on her looks because they’ve been doing it for so long, ironically this will be one of the first times they weren’t actively bullying a legal child.
The thing is, the journalists could use the defence I did and say they are only worried about the effect fame has probably had on her and she probably lost her childhood and was forced to become a woman too quickly. But this isn’t that. It’s just bullying. The journalists were using the defence that she ‘just looks so old’, but the thing is, it’s probably worse for Millie because these writers had a point of reference. Of course, she looks older, she’s not a 10-year-old with a shaved head anymore. She’s now a woman in her twenties glammed up for a red carpet, she’s literally married.
She actually looks exactly like what she is, which is a woman in her twenties, but these journalists made the mistake of still treating her like she was a defenceless child and now she’s clapped back, the tables have turned.
Journalists, do better
Throughout the 90s and early 2000s in particular, the tabloids were known for their horrendous and invasive treatment of young women, see the death of Princess Diana and Britney Spears’ now-infamous breakdown. As someone in the industry, I would like to say that it has got better, there are more media laws in place about how we cover minors. However, if the minor is in the public interest, i.e. a child star, the boundaries become extremely blurred.
Again, Millie Bobby Brown is not a child, but people still see her as one because there’s footage of her as a 10-year-old on pretty much every TV screen in the whole world. She will be no stranger to public scrutiny, but in this case, the journalists were just straight-up being nasty.
One particular thing to point out was comedian Matt Lucas sharing an Instagram story comparing a recent look from Millie with a satirical character from his frankly offensive TV show Little Britain. I got some thrill from watching how quickly Lucas became a grovelling mess when the A-Lister called him out. Suddenly she grew from a defenseless child to a powerful woman, with a mass following behind her and he was panicking. One of the named journalists has turned off the comments on their social media too.
All of this is to say that they messed with the wrong girl, but we can easily hide behind a facade and mess with the right person at the wrong time and genuinely cause hurt. How girls and women present themselves has literally nothing to do with you. How they dress and act and speak is up to them, but most importantly, how they grow is up to them. All you need to do is make sure that the world is a safe and welcoming place for anyone of any age, and to the journalists that wrote those things? Do better. Three of you were teenage girls once and you forgot the agonising reality of being a young woman. Frankly, how dare you.
To Millie? Carry on, you’ve opened up a can of worms that was a long time coming.