Being a teenage girl is like having a stamp across your forehead that says "vapid, overcomplicated, and naive." Somehow having female anatomy and being young equates to drama queen or indie individual or, worse, the invisible. We’re split into these three categories and then right into the sub-categories beneath those. It’s like we can’t catch a break; from our parents telling us we’re too old then too young, to boys who seem just as overcomplicated as we are, to the various news outlets saying we’re growing up too fast.

I hate to break it to news shows but girls are growing up fast because we’re a faster society. We’re no longer patient and innocent. We’re constantly listening to death tolls in Iraq or getting upset when a meal takes more than 15 minutes, so why shouldn’t girls be allowed to grow up along with their ever changing society? And why is there such a focus on girls?

The old double standard between women and men is getting to be just a little ridiculous. Boys aren’t being judged for sending sexts or receiving them but if a girl sends any, then, oh no! I mean take Taylor Lautner, for instance; his claim to fame are his abs and no one seems to be complaining this 17-year-old is taking off his shirt constantly for the camera. So why are people so quick to judge Miley Cyrus and her revealing clothes? She’s not going shirtless like Lautner, yet she seems to receive more bad press than he does. Taylor Momsen runs around in lingerie and constantly gets complaints from parents and Gossip Girl guest star Tim Gunn for her lifestyle, while Aaron Johnson of Kick-Ass fame had a baby with a 43-year-old. He’s 20 and was only 19 when they got engaged. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’d rather see Momsen in raccoon makeup than think about Johnson and his fiancée.

It seems that no matter how far our society has come, people still have traditional ideas when it comes to females. I know that my dad is irrationally strict with me and my sister and yet he’s more relaxed with my male cousins. For example, he wouldn’t get my annoyingly responsible, straight-A sister a phone until she was 14 but, when my nine-year-old boy cousin got a phone, he was all "text me!" Maybe I’m just a little melodramatic but being a girl, a teenage girl, in the 21st century with twenty-thousand outlets for how we should act and look is more infuriating than it seems.