RELATIONSHIPS RELATIONSHNIP EDITOR OTTY ALLUM DEPUTY RELATIONSHIPS EDITOR position VACANT

There are always trends floating around, and these often originate on the internet. The trends can be with anything - fashion, music, books, but recently I’ve noticed certain words and phrases being overused and oftentimes I feel that these words have lost or become disconnected from their original meaning.

Words and phrases related to mental health and abuse have always been misused and overused, words like ‘narcissistic’, ‘sociopathic’, ‘bipolar’ etc., the list is literally endless. Gaslighting, by definition, is a form of abuse, described as a victim being manipulated into doubting their perception of reality. The term is often used by people when another person disagrees with them, or when someone is being insensitive or ignorant towards them, obviously these are not nice things to experience, but they aren’t gaslighting or abuse. Gaslighting is something that happens gradually over a long period of time, often in very close or intimate relationships. Terms related to mental health and abuse need to be treated very carefully - when used in the right context they can be so useful to a victim in claiming a sense of authority by putting a name to their experience. But when these words are thrown around and used incorrectly, it can cheapen the word and make it harder for victims to make sense of their experiences.

The term ‘pick-me’ has gained traction in the last year, particularly on TikTok, where users act out the common traits of a pick-me girl or call out female celebrities for being pick-mes. I first heard the term a few years ago in feminist commentary YouTube videos - the idea is very similar to ‘Not Like Other Girls’, and it is used to describe a woman who acts unpleasantly towards other women to appear more desirable to male partners. I’ve noticed people on TikTok, and in real life, throw around this word, using it as a name to call women they deem overly annoying or ‘quirky’. It’s often used in situations where men are not even involved so it has nothing to do with gaining their approval, making the phrase basically redundant in this context. Identifying a woman’s actions as harmful to other women is valid, at the same time I’ve seen people mocking and ridiculing these same ‘pick me’ women and citing harmful patriarchal stereotypes. Both people in this situation are reflecting their internalised misogyny and are just as bad as each other. I’ve seen people calling girls ‘pick me’ for eating a salad, suggesting the belief that anything a woman does is for the approval of men; a classic misogynistic trope, these ideas are harmful and perpetuate the already high standards that women must live up to. Policing women’s behaviour in this way is reductive and helps no one. I believe that we need to look at the pick-me within all of us and have open discussions about the topic of internalised misogyny; we are all victims of misogynist rhetoric because it is so deeply ingrained in our culture.

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud developed a theory called the Oedipus Complex, where a young boy will unconsciously desire to have sex with his mother and envy his father for his sexual relationship with the mother. Carl Jung built on this idea with his theory of the Electra Complex. Sometimes these complexes are unresolved for whatever reason, in the case of the Electra Complex, it results in a woman being submissive and hyper-sexual, in other words ‘daddy issues’. These ideas are highly contentious and rooted in heteronormativity and gender roles. Unfortunately, the narratives around the concept of ‘daddy issues’ still seem so intertwined with the theory of the Electra Complex. There are now whole subcultures dedicated to the romanticism of daddy issues, it seems that this may be because men fetishize women with daddy issues, they assume a woman will be more sexually promiscuous and more eager to please. At the same time, women with ‘daddy issues’ are seen as untrusting, jealous, insecure, and needy. Throughout all of this, ‘daddy issues’ are constantly framed as a woman’s problem that should be dealt with by women, yet it fails to acknowledge the cause; a neglectful, emotionally distant or even abusive father figure. Not to mention that anyone, regardless of gender, can experience the trauma associated with a neglectful parent of any gender. ‘Daddy issues’ is a catchall term that fails to identify the nuances of dysfunctional parent-child relationships, where a child re-enacts the same unhealthy attachment in their adult life.