The day before my eighteenth birthday felt like the embodiment of yearning. A grasping onto adulthood that came all too soon. The age of seventeen had been marketed to me as a sweet point of perfect youth, a moment in time when nothing is balanced, when it is normal to feel hysterical, when the tumultuous feelings of youth are romanticized. One can love without consequences, mistakes are welcomed, all leads to something larger than oneself. Nothing you’re experiencing has ever been experienced by anyone ever before. Yet, everything you’re experiencing has been echoed for decades by millions of other girls. Seventeen is paradoxically both lonely and communal.
My year of being seventeen had started as most other girls’ does, with ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” blasting. I had made a playlist appropriately titled “seventeen” at fifteen years old, crafting an idyllic image of what this golden year could look like for me. Which girl would I be? The lover girl? The heartbroken girl? The girl who fights with her mom and rebels? All of these girls were represented in my playlist. As I shuffled, Wallows’s “1980s Horror Film,” released in 2018, asked me “Why are girls in songs always seventeen?” and I believed I had the answer. Seventeen felt sweet in the mouth—the perfect three syllables of dichotomy. There were endless possibilities in the gap that being seventeen provided: enough of an adult to experience things, not enough of an adult to be at fault for the things you experience. It’s a conscious ignorance.
A day before turning eighteen, in a fruitless attempt to grasp the very last seconds of legal childhood I had, I shuffled my playlist. This was the last time I’d be able to relate to these songs, to be a seventeen-year-old girl and listen to songs about being a seventeen-year-old girl. It was almost as though, by turning eighteen, all of these possibilities of the person I could be would disappear. My personality would be solidified once the clock struck midnight and I turned eighteen.
But the girls represented in my playlist were not the girl I wanted to be. They were all over the place—all exaggerated and unattainable versions of seventeen-year-old me, and mostly written by men.
First, there was the mysterious seventeen-year-old girl, the distracted object of attention who seems to be disconnected from her relationship presented in “Cigarette Daydreams” by Cage The Elephant. She “hides behind [her] baby face,” an elusive figure to the male protagonist of the lyrics. She makes the boy in the song fall for her by being coy and slightly mean. Her flirty tactics are admired by the boy, who sees her confusion as something beautiful; she is presented as invincible and perfect. Despite her lack of interest, the boy continues to be obsessed with her.
The 1975 presents another version of this flirty girl in their song “Girls,” but in a much more promiscuous manner. The song insinuates sexual relations between a seventeen-year-old girl and older men, expressing the changes in maturity she undergoes as she passes from man to man. At first, she’s “worrying about my brother finding out,” next she’s “living in my house.” The girl is unafraid of the consequences her seduction may have. Though the singer tries to resist her, telling himself “she can’t be what you need if she’s seventeen,” he continues to argue with her playfully, unable to free himself from her tactics.
Both of the aforementioned songs were released in 2013; this trend of romanticizing seventeen-year-old girls, however, dates back further. In The Beatles’s “I Saw Her Standing There,” released in 1963, the girl absolutely captivates the much-older singer, suggestively asking “you know what I mean?” after mentioning her age. He refused to “dance with another” after seeing her.
These are just a handful of the plethora of songs about the attractiveness of seventeen-year-old girls. Deana Carter’s “Strawberry Wine” from 1996 compares the loss of a girl’s virginity to the sweetness of wine, Meatloaf’s 1978 rock anthem “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” paints the girl as the ultimate object of sexual desire, and Blink 182’s “Rock Show” presents the lead singer falling in love with a seventeen-year-old girl spotted in the crowd of a concert. At seventeen, when I listened to all of these songs, I didn’t consider myself an object of sexual desire. I struggled with confidence and with making friends. I could hardly talk to boys, most of my attention was on my schoolwork, and hearing these songs made me feel unworthy of my age. As if being seventeen and not seductive was a waste of time. As if I was expected to behave in the ways the girls in the songs did.
Eight months into being seventeen, I discovered a different genre of seventeen-year-old girl presented in music, one who is angry at her condition and pitied by those around her. Olivia Rodrigo’s “brutal” screams in agony: “I’m so sick of seventeen / where’s my fucking teenage dream?” The 1975’s titular song, placed at the beginning of each of their albums, directs itself to the girl, saying “I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re seventeen.” Ladytron’s “seventeen” speaks angrily to the feeling of wasting away, “they only want you when you’re seventeen, when you’re twenty-one, you’re no fun.”
Meatloaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” presents this anger from the perspective of the seventeen-year-old girl’s boyfriend, who is frustrated at losing her to adulthood. Singing “It was long ago and it was far away / And it was so much better than it is today,” the singer explains that being seventeen is comparatively better than womanhood, triggering fear in seventeen-year-old girls who listen and wonder if they’ve reached their peak in life.
I knew I wasn’t seductive when I listened to this music, but I wasn’t angry either. I didn’t feel the need to be pitied for my age. So I turned instead to the perfectly happy girl representation, one comprised of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers’s “Nothing New.” She was “young and sweet” and has “the kind of radiance you only have at seventeen.” Alessia Cara’s “Seventeen” painted a girl frolicking through fields, enjoying every perfect moment of her age and wanting to “freeze the time at seventeen.”
By the end of the playlist, I realized I had been none of these girls during my year of being seventeen. I was neither desirable nor flirty, I wasn’t angry, and I also wasn’t completely happy. I searched for a median among all of these feelings, a balance that could represent how I truly felt at an age when nothing felt permanent but everything did at the same time. I found none.
What I did find, however, was a deep sense of alienation. It was impossible to reconcile wanting to stay seventeen forever out of fear of losing public value, and wanting to experience eighteen to its fullest. Acting older than seventeen felt inauthentic to who I was, but acting seventeen felt unfitting to who I thought I should be. I also felt I couldn’t identify with most of the songs that described the experience of being a seventeen-year-old girl, resenting their instinct to fetishize me. At the same time, however, I longed to be the muse. In my mind, once I turned eighteen I would never be able to relate to these songs; my expiration date would have passed. Would I stop being worthy of attention? If I didn’t fit into who these songs told me to be, was I living seventeen correctly?
Why, then, do we present such a polarized, unrealistic version of the seventeen-year-old girl? Why is our society so obsessed with the idea of youth that we feel the need to immortalize it in song, and why are we so blinded by the potentials of youth so as to represent what it means to be young inaccurately? Not only is the portrayal of youth incorrect, but it is the portrayal of female youth that is particularly misrepresented. The lack of songs about seventeen-year-old boys, especially songs provoking feelings of angst and presenting sexualized ideals, demonstrates the one-sidedness of fetishizing the sexes in music and media more broadly.
To the media, the seventeen-year-old girl is a lens through which to represent young girls more broadly. The combination of sexualized youth, idealized teenagehood, and exaggerated human emotions that it presents are true of all age groups represented by the media, with seventeen especially being obsessed over both phonetically and conceptually. This general audience of young girls is an impressionable one—an audience aware of its possibility and who is desperately trying to find themselves before they reach adulthood, so its representations are particularly impactful.
