#2024 today

[shannendoherty-fans]

Essay

Dear Shannen Doherty: I’m sorry I bought the ‘I Hate Brenda’ newsletter in high school

As a social outcast myself, it felt good to pick on someone else — even if that someone was a celebrity I’d never met.

July 18, 2024, 5:10 PM GMT+1 By Liz Brown

Shannen Doherty, who played Brenda on "Beverly Hills, 90210," in 1990.Vinnie Zuffante / Getty Images

Shannen Doherty, the Gen X icon who played Brenda Walsh on the original “Beverly Hills, 90210,” passed away on July 13, 2024, at the age of 53 after a long battle with breast cancer. It is never easy to hear about one of your teen icons dying young, but I felt an extra layer of dread wash over me when I heard the news.

Doherty and I had a history. She didn’t know about it and she didn’t know me, but I had been holding on to a terrible secret for 32 years. When I was 16 years old, spending weekends alone in my room listening to Morrissey, I saw an ad in the back of an issue of Sassy magazine for something called the “I Hate Brenda Newsletter.” And I bought it.

“90210” was the most important show of my teenage years. My family didn’t have cable when it premiered in 1990, but my cool aunt in New York did. She would record a month’s worth of episodes on a VHS tape and then mail it to my sister and me so we could keep up. We rewatched the episodes over and over until the next month’s shipment.

I wanted Brenda Walsh’s life. I wanted to sneak into a bar with a fake ID and have a hot older guy buy me banana daiquiris. I wanted to live by the ocean and have a cool surfer boyfriend with a Porsche and a trust fund when the banana daiquiri guy didn’t work out. I wanted the most beautiful, popular girl in school to be my best friend and drive me around in her red BMW convertible. I wanted to lose my virginity in a fancy hotel room after the spring dance.

I was incensed that a character like Brenda, some rando from Minnesota with cheesy bangs, an affected voice and an overly confident sense of fashion, got to live this life — even if it wasn’t real and even if Beverly Hills was nowhere near the ocean. Why did she get to love herself so much, when I hated myself so much? I hated Brenda.

Why did she get to love herself so much, when I hated myself so much?

I sent away a money order to a P.O. Box in Hollywood, which was wildly exciting in and of itself, and a few weeks later, I received the six-page mailer. I was elated. I remember hanging it on my wall for the remainder of high school and likely most of college.

As a social outcast myself, it felt good to pick on someone else, even from the confines of my bedroom. It made me feel how I assumed popular people felt: powerful, important and better than those around me who weren’t in on the joke. In a way, it helped me feel empowered against those who bullied me. I was lonely, unpopular and had a lazy eye. In ninth grade, boys in my homeroom class would salivate like wolves, waiting for me to sit down so they could share specific thoughts on how “butt-dog ugly” I looked that day. In 10th grade, when we were doing a science experiment with carrots, one of my classmates collected some extras and flung them at me repeatedly. When I told him to stop he said, “I’m just trying to help fix your eyes!” and laughed himself silly.

I was a desperate teenager at the time I bought the newsletter — trying to squeeze in at the end of the popular girls’ lunch table by offering to buy them desserts from the cafeteria and bags of presents at Christmas. They did not reciprocate. I don’t know if Brenda or Shannen would have either, but now I realize that in so many ways our collective feeling was: everyone for themselves.

A day after the news of Doherty’s death, I thought about the newsletter and dug through old boxes of treasures from my tween and teen years: an English paper on the Gary Hart scandal, pictures from junior and senior proms (unlike Donna Martin, I was blisteringly sober throughout both), and my college freshman year facebook. I found my “I Hate Brenda” newsletter sandwiched between a CD insert for Counting Crows’ “August and Everything After” and a junior high school diary about how sad I was.

The newsletter was so much worse than I remembered.

It barely even touched on the character of Brenda Walsh. It was almost entirely focused on trashing Doherty in real life, calling her a “no-talent with a bad attitude” and a “one-dimensional woman.” It was basically a compendium of people calling her an obnoxious, ugly monster. My heart sank as I turned to page three and saw the headline, “Send Her to Slaughter.” It was an article about how Doherty had reportedly been obnoxious on the set of a video for the hair band Slaughter, but it was more than a play on words. It was hateful, just like the title of the newsletter promised.

This is the first page of the six-page newsletter I subscribed to back in the 1990s. I dug it up after Shannen Doherty's death and was ashamed to remember how cruel it was.

Doherty was 21 years old in 1992. Tabloids painted her as demanding, entitled, explosive and moody. And a few years after I bought the magazine and turned 21, I was exactly the same way. But I didn’t have the eyes of the whole world focused on me and my every move.

Since the birth of social media, I’ve been profoundly grateful that I got out of high school long before I could be cyberbullied. “Things are so much worse now than when I was in high school,” is the narrative I’ve told myself. The truth is teen bullying was always awful, but now it’s out of the shadows.

In some ways, the ’90s were an amazing and empowering time to be a teenage girl. There was the birth of Lilith Fair, “The Vagina Monologues” and “Thelma and Louise.” In other ways, it was a horror show, with ridicule of victims of sexual harassment and violence like Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky. And of course, there was that ever-present feeling that we should all look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel. The ’90s weren’t fair to Shannen Doherty and I don’t know that the 2020s are much better for women in the spotlight, or women in general. A 2022 Pew Research study showed that nearly half of U.S. teens have experienced cyberbullying, with older teen girls reporting the highest rates of bullying.

When I look at Doherty’s career now, as a grown-up who has lived in Los Angeles for over 20 years, I’m blown away. She was a working actress at age 10 in 1981, in an industry that has always been and continues to be predatory toward young women in particular. She starred in some of the most important films and series of a generation, like “Heathers” and “Charmed.”

I should have written this apology years ago, and now it’s too late. It doesn’t matter how you treat people when they’re gone. It matters what you say when they’re still here. But I needed to say this for me — and for the 16-year-old version of myself who thought treating others the way she was treated was the solution. I guess the best I could do at this point is create a time capsule filled with random stuff for her, like the gang did for Scott Scanlon after his accidental death in the Season 2 episode about gun control, but I sure wish I could take her out for a banana daiquiri instead and tell her I’m sorry.

[brainrotcharacters]

When irl pisses me off, I rewatch the Honda Odyssey scene to relax

[ottosbigtop]

I think we as a society should bring back brotps. I think we should be weirder about characters being friends the same way people are weird about ships. Make those two characters who interacted once or twice besties. Make it difficult for them to get rid of each other even if they want to. Go nuts

[kensatou]

"we know how to move our bodies, but i didn't know how to manage my heart, so you need help for this"

hi we need to talk more about judo gold medallist christa deguchi.

[proxycrit]

Linktober day 13, Skull Lake!

The trip to the lake’s thwarted by the weather. Oh well. We need more quiet moments of rest between action packed adventure, after all.

(Masterlist for this TOTK AU, Familiar Familiar!)

Plus patreon

[foreverfearlessred]

my favourite genre of post-race Charles Leclerc win is Charles finding Arthur at the barrier, seeing Arthur looking at him with such joy in his eyes and then Charles messing up his hair

[shinesurge]

did yall know cricut put a metal strip in the back of their newer Maker 3 that doesn't do anything except pop out after like six months of regular use and force you to call customer service so they can tell you to replace the machine

well they did and instead of calling them and replacing an entire functional fucking machine you can just cut the bar out and put tape over what's left

fuck offfff,

[why-the-heck-not]

understanding academic concepts got me blushing swinging my legs giggling

[fcbalding]

spiderman is real and he’s indonesian

[seaside-tropical-sun]

AU where they both died and now have to cooperate to get their bodies back but lqg is too busy having a crisis to be useful

[blueskittlesart]

Linktober day 23: element

a few doodles of the elemental monsters from eow :)

[charbies]

linktober day 8 - tunic

[otaku553]

Luffy week day 4:

Emotion

[honehonn3honey]

Birthday boy 🎂

[americanmarketplace]

Time for a reminder: We are a (CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC) NOT A DEMOCRACY LET IT SINK IN !!!!!!

[proxycrit]

Linktober, Day 12: Tarry Town!

You defeat the final boss in the volcano causing the floating islands to float! Congrats. Unfortunately, with the destruction of the said monster, the islands are no longer floating and are, in fact, slowly coming down enmass as the magnesis scatters.

Zelda would like to point out people are much more likely to survive walking around slow giant rocks from the sky versus dodging flaming lava. She’s practicing this new thing called positive thinking.

(This is a totk au called Familiar Familiar where zelda does not go back in time! Click here to see the full comic masterlist)

(Plus my patreon!)