Gay Son or Thot Daughter? What started as a rage-bait hypothetical, forcing people to pick between homophobia and slut-shaming, found itself reimagined as its phonetic cousin: the 'thought daughter'. Only here, instead of a promiscuous young lady, parents end up with a brooding, deeply introspective, and intellectual girl who sees too much, thinks too much, and feels too much; a spiritual sister of Sylvia Plath herself. The term emerged as the polar opposite of 'thot', which is problematic in itself since women don't just lose their depth because they sleep around. Nevertheless, it is now the label of choice for all those who find kinship in the 'sad girl' aesthetic.
Overthinking is a fairly common part of the human experience. So why has thought daughter become such a resonating trend across the world? Perhaps it has to do with the culmination of a lifetime of excessive thinking; something that's central to growing up as a woman, especially in India. Her thoughtfulness is a survival mechanism. A girl child is taught to bear the burden of accountability before she even understands the concept.
She must think about social etiquette; about her family’s honour; about being a bearer of tradition; about love that often times comes with unreasonable compromise; about her own safety. She grows up learning that she must work twice as hard to reach a fraction of what a man achieves. She is told that she must study hard — sometimes, as a means to live an independent life and delay marriage, other times to make herself more 'suitable' for it. The mix of this hyper-awareness and a push towards academia from a young age sets her on a path that inevitably leads to a deep philosophical examination — of herself and her place in the world.
She turns into a thought daughter — the girl whose mind is never silent; replaying conversations, analyzing pasts, and calculating futures. She walks on eggshells around people and is burdened by her own attachment issues and twisted notions of intimacy. She hoards old letters; scraps of poetry; receipts from insignificant days, because everything holds meaning. She leans towards dark media, be it music, books, or films because she understands tragedy.
This tragedy is her own. It comes from the labour of assimilating strained dichotomies. She loves her father, but she has seen him disrespect and in some cases even abuse her mother at home. She loves her mother, but she has watched her become a bitter enforcer of patriarchy that ails her the same. She has grown up with the constant drone of news channels reporting on rapes, acid attacks, dowry deaths against the conversations at home turning to what the girl could have done differently. She bets against her self esteem to have a chance at some kind of connection with people around her, which leaves her in an isolating pit within herself anyway. Her pursuits of love be it romantic, platonic, or familial are tainted by her gender and all that comes with it.
So instead of letting this unpalatable truth eat at her, she accepts it. This "it is what is it" outlook lets her intellectualise her fractured existence and maybe even romanticize it. She turns into the girls' version of Ryan Gosling from 'Blade Runner' — haunted by existential dread yet achingly poetic in the way she moves through the world. She's drawn to intensely feminine voices like Lana Del Rey or Fiona Apple in the West or Parveen Shakir and Bano Qudsia within South Asia.
Shakir’s verses on the quiet suffering and unspoken desires of women, and Bano Qudsia's depiction of the psychological complexity of womanhood, the weight of tradition, and the quiet endurance of love and loss ground her. These voices resonate with the thought daughter because they reflect her own existence that's torn between beauty and disillusionment.
This melancholia is a sweet poison that she sometimes get hooked on. She soaks in the decay it brings, even at the cost of her own mental health. The thought daughter is self-aware enough to know she is performing sadness, yet she leans into it anyway — because what is femininity if not an elaborate, wistful performance?
However, like the greatest performers have constantly admitted, acting can be an enlightening experience. A lifetime of inquiry into this role gives her a rare insight into her womanhood: a feminist one. Fluent in all the definitions of a woman, she learns the futility of them; how each one of them is yet another box. She awakens to the trappings of rebellion itself; one that rewards women that can act more like men and be cut-throat instead of making space for a kinder world. Pop culture feminism is winnowed off, leaving something more post-feminist behind. And if that comes at the cost of a whole lot of wallowing in self-pity, so be it.
The thought daughter is an aestheticised personality defined primarily by her media influences. She is the amalgamation of stories told through the lens of the tortured femme. But to view her as a self-mythologized entity would be to dismiss her history. Like all the caricatures society creates of women, from the dumb blonde to the 'thot', the predecessor of the term itself, thought daughter is a result of a broken system that fails women despicably. We just happened to reclaim it and make it our own.
If the curse of a thought daughter is that she'll likely spend her life analysing the world, the gift is that because of this, she'll be uniquely equipped to change it.
If you enjoyed reading this here's more from Homegrown:
Calling All Women: Escape The Horrors With A One-Of-A-Kind Homegrown Self-Gifting Guide
Nirali Naik's Short Film Highlights The Ripple Effect Of Women's Empowerment
Ullarivu: Sumi Mathai's Short Film Questions The Gendered Nature Of Reality