“But get that ice or else no dice.”

-Marilyn Monroe, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” 1953.

When Twentieth Century-Fox coordinated a press opportunity for Marilyn Monroe to be photographed at Van Nuys High School, the studio relied heavily on Valley Girl1 shorthands to communicate her biography. Readers of Look magazine were incentivized to see the newly recognizable face2 with school books and write the rest themselves: a wholesome, white, middle-class suburban girl who just happened to be a sexy actress. But in contrasting a Valley Girl with a burgeoning sex icon, the studio was foreshadowing a very 20th century tension: the valley girl3 as sex worker.

Read more

“Marilyn dons school clothes, goes back to her junior high school for a visit. Back in those days she didn’t even dare dream of a movie career.”

-a photo caption from Look magazine detailing Marilyn Monroe’s return to Van Nuys High School, October 23, 1951.

While it’s common knowledge that international sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, who would’ve turned 100 years old this month, was raised as Norma Jeane Baker, it’s significantly lesser known that Norma Jeane was a true blue valley girl1. These origins proved to be particularly meaningful as Marilyn’s star began to rise circa 1951. Marilyn’s valley girl past—and the Valley Girl2 trope—were utilized in the press to articulate just how far the movie star had come.

Subscribe now

Born Norma Jeane Mortensen to a single mother in Los Angeles, Marilyn went into foster care following her mother’s nervous breakdown3 in 1935. In and out of foster homes and a Los Angeles-based orphanage, she eventually moved with her foster parents, Grace and Ervin “Doc” Goddard,4 to Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley5. From there, she attended Van Nuys High School, the same notorious Van Nuys High School that Los Angeles-based author Eve Babitz explored in her unpublished short story, “Valley High.”

Marilyn’s attendance at Van Nuys High would be brief: the then 15-year-old matriculated between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1942.6 That summer, at 16, she would leave school to marry “valley boy” and Van Nuys High graduate Jim Dougherty.

The incentive for the teen marriage was practical and highly logistical. The Goddards were moving out of state for Doc’s job and could not legally take Marilyn with them as a ward of the state. Faced with the prospect of returning to yet another orphanage, Marilyn opted to marry out of the system instead. This many decades later, it’s unclear how much of a “choice” this was, given that young Marilyn often struggled to find stable caregivers. The inability to have dual access to formative education and consistent housing would stay with her as a kind of shameful remorse long after she left the Valley. Biographers note that, as an avid reader all her life7, Marilyn was always regretful and self-conscious about not finishing high school.8

As a new teenaged wife in 1942, she went straight to work—in Burbank. Like many valley girls of her time, Marilyn got a job at the Lockheed factory9, an aircraft manufacturer, known to employ women at good wages. When her husband was deployed in World War II, Marilyn moved in with her in-laws in North Hollywood. Her mother-in-law helped Marilyn secure a job at a defense plant, Radioplane Company, in Van Nuys, known for producing missiles, explosives, and ammunition. A visiting photographer, commissioned to capture images of female workers, snapped Marilyn at the Van Nuys plant and eventually shared the images with modeling agent Emmeline Snively. From that point on, Marilyn was promptly funneled into modeling jobs and then acting opportunities.

By 1951, Norma Jeane had fully transformed into the blonde icon of Marilyn Monroe. To further tell her backstory to the public, Twentieth Century-Fox arranged a press opportunity for her at her old alma mater, Van Nuys High School. The photos, which ran in a 1951 issue of Look magazine, show a then 25-year-old Marilyn clutching schoolbooks, posing with young male students (or models?), and crossing the campus in a pencil skirt while said boys gleefully look on.

With her platinum blonde hair demurely covered with a handkerchief and white ankle-length socks, Marilyn is perfectly communicating the Valley Girl as the 1950s engineered her to be: white, conventionally feminine, chaste but gorgeous, and from a middle-class home. Twentieth Century-Fox relies heavily on the shorthands of the modern Valley Girl to convey to Marilyn’s emerging fans who she was before her growing stardom: a good girl from a good, nuclear family who would predictably recreate her own before accidentally stumbling into stardom.

The irony, of course, is that Marilyn (or Norma Jeane) was none of these things. She was a foster kid with a single mother who struggled with mental illness and therefore employment, money, and housing. Marilyn routinely changed homes, caregivers, and neighborhoods. For most of this period, her goals were anchored in basic need, as evidenced in her teenage marriage. She was a valley girl, but not a Valley Girl.

Still, this highly staged press moment at Van Nuys High School captures a significant moment of transition in Marilyn’s public perception. Four years before the height of her fame (The Seven Year Itch would premiere in 1955), this manufactured interlude presents Marilyn at a marked midway point. Somewhere between a pedestrian suburban kid and an international icon, she is positioned in front of the camera as something aspirational and pretty, yet somehow also accessible.

That midway point, it turns out, is a Valley Girl.🌴

Next week: Marilyn Monroe & the legacy of Valley sex work.

Share

“Los Angeles is the second-largest food delivery market after New York and was Serve’s founding territory because of its car-dependent culture and high delivery density. It was also one of the first cities to allow the delivery bots.”

-Los Angeles Times, “L.A. neighborhoods see influx of 500 delivery bots,” May 5th, 2026.

Raising my child in Los Angeles has often meant revisiting my own childhood in abrupt, sometimes endearing moments. The formative memories of my own valley girl1 upbringing bleed into the highly urgent present and I don’t always see it coming. Walking by my elementary school means it can suddenly and emotionally be both 1996 and 2026. I’m in the third grade but I’m also holding my toddler’s hand. Memory and place can accomplish this. But there is a routine area where my child’s girlhood significantly breaks from mine. She counts robots on the way to school.

Read more

Valley Girl is on hiatus for Memorial Day in the United States. We will resume with new essays on Thursday, June 4th. This week’s digest focuses on the Valley Girl’s commodification and how divorced her representation is from authentic girlhood.

An enduring marker of the Valley Girl1 across time and space is that she has often been conflated with capitalism. If you’re talking about her, you are often really talking about shopping or mindless consumption or materialistic frivolity. If the local mall needs renovations, this weirdly gets communicated through metaphors of “facelifts,” “makeovers,” and seeking to become “more attractive.” Where the Valley Girl begins and the American shopping mall ends is a question I have been chasing since the inception of this newsletter; they are often presented as one flesh.

Subscribe now

This isn’t an entirely surprising link given how commodified the Valley Girl ultimately was. This artificially constructed girlhood, initially used on the modern marketplace to sell records, had to be performed though extensive makeup, sterile TV sets, and with the awareness of cameras. In 1982, Moon Unit Zappa, the highly publicized then-14-year-old, had to embody the Valley Girl as if cast in a role. A prominent part of this process was not being an actual 14-year-old girl at all, but rather functioning as a teenage girl that the marketplace would recognize. This proved be a lucrative, profitable, and enduring strategy.

Within all these dynamics—performing, profits, products, and press—there wasn’t much room, if any, for the valley girl.2🌴

Next week: the robot invasion.

Share

“Goat’s milk, thigh gaps,

rose petals, bone caps,

truffle oil, bitch slap

blood clots, juice press.”

-Induction ceremony chant, Forbidden Fruits, 2026.

From the opening scenes of Forbidden Fruits, a campy, witchy, satire horror film produced by Diablo Cody, it’s easy to see the influences. This is The Craft (1996) meets Mean Girls (2004) meets Clueless (1995) meets Jawbreaker (1999). Set in a shopping mall, Forbidden Fruits focuses on a trio of friends, Apple (Lili Reinhart), Fig (Alexandra Shipp), and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), who work in a fictitious women’s apparel store called Free Eden. In addition to being co-workers, they are also secretly witches who use the store after hours to cast spells, control each other’s lives, and enact revenge. Through the course of the film, they recruit and induct new hire Pumpkin, played by Lola Tung.

Subscribe now

The shopping mall, a dying marker of commerce in the United States, serves as an essential setting for this premise. It’s within this highly commercial, female-centric space that the Free Eden ladies are able to erect their own fantastical world with their own witchy rules.

Suspension of disbelief is essential for Forbidden Fruits; this is an alternate, all-female dimension where outside rules do not apply. This division with the outside world is communicated through the singularity of the shopping mall: femmy stores, shopping bags, the food court, and, of course, female friendships set across consumption. The men who do exist in the film wander in and out, sometimes as fleeting romantic and sexual interests, inconsequential to the central premise. The witches’ drama, conflicts, and utmost anxieties remain solidly within their platonic female friendships.

This dynamic is reflected through location. The mall is literally their whole world: the entire film, directed by Meredith Alloway, occurs at the fictitious Highland Place mall1, set in Dallas, Texas23. We seldom see the witches outside of the mall because who they are on the outside is irrelevant. It’s at the mall, with their curated outfits, body mists, competitive female bonds, and astrological references, that Apple, Cherry, and Fig assume their personas. This fusion of female identity and commerce is achieved through the shopping mall.

Valley girl accents are abound, a choice reflective of young, female communication rather than regional dialect. iPhones and cultural references (“I Googled it”), suggest the witches live in the present day. But their respective personal styles4 and the mall’s stores imply a different time: is it 2005? Is it 1998? Does it matter? The blending of retro style and recent technology does not read as anachronistic, but rather as a larger cultural statement about the Girls at the Mall. The high-femme queen bees with highly-coveted bracelets and a “sisterhood” loyalty are timeless. They have always been at the cool store, surrounded by other cool girls, whether that’s on social media in 2026 or at a suburban mall in 2006.

In tandem, Highland Place mall could be any mall in any American town or city. The homogeny of the stores and the universal mall layout convey nothing regional and, perhaps, that’s the point. Within the economic Disneyland that is the modern shopping mall, there is no uniqueness or local character to be found. Commerce flattens. The ultimate artifice of the shopping mall is that you are nowhere and everywhere.

Importantly, consumption punctuates these formative female friendships. As salespeople, their ability to sell, price, and influence customers is a key component in how they relate to each other: as friends, coworkers, and witches. Obtaining or wearing certain items shifts hierarchy, asserts dominance, and inspires envy. To handle money and coveted merchandise, to tap credit cards and rack up gargantuan sums is portrayed as a kind of sovereignty, an extension of the spells they cast in the basement of Free Eden.

At the same time, the mall is ultimately their physical undoing. This might be the strongest metaphor of all. Perhaps intense, deeply-bonded female friendship set across terrains of capitalism will always be doomed to violence. But while the women themselves meet their gory end, the structure itself still stands.🌴

Next week: everything but the girl.

Share

💗Thank you to for inviting me to see this film.💗

"My fans truly are a part of me, we share something that most people will never experience.”

-Michael Jackson, 2001.

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, I would often spend time at my grandparents’ house in Encino. On the short drive, my family and I would always pass one house that stood out to me: there were people sitting outside with handmade signs. I started to notice that it didn’t matter what time of day my family and I were arriving or leaving; there were always people there. With signs.

When I asked my father why, he told me that the house was Michael Jackson’s home. The people waiting outside all day and all night were “fans.” I was about four years old. This is one of my first memories of where I’m from.

Read more

“The freeway system … is the only secular communion Los Angeles has…Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway.”

-Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979.

I’ve spent most of my life terrified of the freeway. The speed, the cars, the dissolving lanes; all of it seemed like the quickest route to death. I attribute this to a girlhood shaped by Los Angeles.

As a child in the passenger seat, I remember slowing past so many accidents, an elaborate contortion of smashed hoods, caved in driver doors, and shattered windshields. Streaks of tires on the closed off road begs the only question worth asking: how did that car get all the way over there? To begin to work the configuration is to see the horror; a moment when one or both parties feared for, or perhaps even lost, their life.

Subscribe now

Read more

Dear Readers,

Next Friday, I’ll be in conversation at Skylight Books here in Los Angeles with my friend and former colleague about her newly published memoir. My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, which publishes today, details Tracy’s investigation into finding her long lost half-sister, Kathy. In the 1960s, prior to Tracy’s birth, her pregnant teenage mother was sent to a home for unwed mothers where Kathy was placed for adoption. Tracy finds this shuddered “home,” along with her sister, and many other pieces of family lore, braided with racism and sexism.

I got the opportunity to read an early draft of My Mother’s Daughter as Tracy was working and was deeply struck by the interrogation into not just her own family, but broader cultural themes of institutionalized gender shame. Fusing memoir and cultural criticism is not simple, but when executed well, it reads that way. Tracy has accomplished this.

Subscribe now

Share

This is not the first writing of Tracy’s that has been impactful for me. Before I knew her personally, when we were both in our 20s, I used to diligently read Tracy’s reporting on sex, “hook-up culture,” and sex work. (Much of this time in her career is recounted in her previous book, Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire.) Her writing on these topics was part of an online chorus that was deeply formative to my own feminist consciousness, particularly on topics that were often deemed much too contemporary (or taboo) for my elite women’s college education.

Tracy was also familiar with this environment. I learned, years later, that she was three years ahead of me at our private liberal arts women’s college in Oakland, California. I did not know her then, but it was such a small school; I like to think that we were often sitting at the same fountains at the same time, staring off at the same white-frosted building.

Ten years after I graduated, we would be formally introduced over email regarding a new job opening. I was working in New York City and she was based in California. I’d spend the next year talking to her on the phone or Slack or email about #MeToo, workplace conditions on adult film shoots, sexual coercion, and talking points for porn stars. When she filed these drafts from the West Coast, I was always eager to read her pieces, even if I was not the one editing them.

Years later, we’re meeting again in Los Angeles to discuss the intimate family story that has loomed in the background for most of her life. And you can join us.

Love, Koa

“It was one of those hot, smoggy days in the Valley. The kind of day where the air is so bad they cancel PE.”

-Gina Gershon, AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs, 2026.1

Long before actress Gina Gershon was starring in cult classics Bound (1996) and Showgirls (1995), she was the youngest—and often unsupervised—daughter in a Jewish family in the San Fernando Valley. In her new memoir, AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs, Gina recounts a 1970s girlhood set across strip malls, pinball machines, sexual predation, skateboards, “high-class weed,”2 and parents who can’t be bothered. Her independent, and somewhat feral girlhood furthers the longstanding perception that just beyond the manicured lawns, the Valley has been a seedy and, often, unsafe place. And the valley girl3, in all her myriad incarnations, has frequently been a target of these local dynamics.

Subscribe now

Born and raised in Woodland Hills, Gina outrightly identifies as an “original”4 valley girl with parents who were always working and an older brother and sister who didn’t include her. As a young girl, her Valley is one of constant danger. Sexual violence and harassment arrive in the distinctly suburban sheen of a powder-blue Chevy Malibu, a benign-looking grandpa, and a nearby ice cream shop; markers of outwardly wholesome family life are the backdrop of gender-based violence, threats, and intimidation.

What’s most consistent about the threats and violence Gina captures about the 1970s Valley is the pedestrian nature of the brutality. She walks streets she knows in neighborhoods she understands intimately among neighbors that she is comfortable with. These routine rhythms of home, familiarity, and public places offer little to no protection from the predators who loom. In the Valley, danger is looking for exactly her—a young girl—like this encounter when she is a child:

One day, a thirty-something, greasy-haired dude in a powder-blue Chevy Malibu pulled up beside me and asked about the whereabouts of Collins School. I walked a bit closer to the car and helpfully told him there was no Collins School, but that there was in fact a Collier Street School, when I noticed he was butt naked with his hard dick in hand. I didn’t lose my cool. I just pretended that nothing was weird and gave him directions to the elementary school he was inquiring about. “Next time I see you, I’m going to shove this up your ass,” he told me before speeding off in his car…Within two weeks of the ‘incident,’ two young girls were raped on that very street. Fucking Valley. Always had to be on your toes.5

Later, when Gina is around 14 years old, she recounts another violation while riding her skateboard to the local Carvel ice cream shop. Much like the Chevy Malibu, it’s the car that she remembers: Gina begins to notice a Volkswagen Beetle wherever she goes. She is soon confronted by the driver:

As I got off my board one day, ready to enter my ice cream haven, an older man with an odd smile on his face came right up to me like a long-forgotten grandpa. He reached out, cupped his hand over my tube top, and shook one of my boobs as if he were shaking the hand of an old acquaintance. I was so shocked—and his friendly demeanor was so baffling—that without thinking, I just knocked his hand away, jumped on my board, and rode straight home. I didn’t feel threatened, necessarily, since he was such a frail little thing, but I definitely felt invaded…For the next bunch of days, his VW was parked across the street from our house.6

The most enduring image of Gina after these invasions is of a young girl running and hiding in her own community: after the Chevy Malibu, she runs to a neighbor’s house and watches from the window. After the Volkswagen, she sneaks out of the side of her own home to avoid being seen and watches the road. In a middle-class neighborhood, she hides from entirely visible predators, a critical commentary on the “safety” of the suburbs, especially for children.

Most notably though, these idealized neighborhoods house peril that take the form of their quaint surroundings. For Gina—and I’m sure other valley girls—that means threats don’t initially present any differently than the environment in which you are raised. It’s not until you walk up to the innocuous-looking car or enter into the beloved ice cream shop, that you’re confronted with the scope of your endangerment.

I see this as a salient appraisal of one of the Valley’s most enduring mythologies. Homogeny does not actually mean safety. It just makes everything look the same.🌴

Next week: How I learned to drive the freeway.

Share

“Peter gets out looking for an address. Ah, there it is: an archway framing a narrow cobblestone courtyard with a fountain, surrounded by a profusion of blooming flowers an [sic] an ivy-covered building that must be three hundred years old. But it’s only forty; this is West Hollywood.”

-The Flute, a screenplay by Eve Babitz and Michael Elias, undated1.

While going through Eve Babitz’s papers at The Huntington Library2 in the summer of 2022, it was immediately clear to me how varied her talent was across so many forms of writing: unpublished short stories and personal pieces to articles and essays. And yet, across all genres, her voice is so singular. Even across quick letters to friends and professional correspondence with editors at The New York Times, that narrative on the page could only be hers.

The same can be said of her screenplays.

Read more

“You’re dead in the valley on foot, dead.”

-Eve Babitz, “Tarzana,” an unpublished piece, circa 1977.

Author Eve Babitz’s unpublished musings on the San Fernando Valley were not just limited to treacherous teenagers. Within her papers at the Huntington Library1, I found another draft recounting 33-year-old Eve’s arduous task of driving to Tarzana to visit her best friend’s new home. And like any over-the-hill2 elitist, Eve is decidedly over her journey to the Valley before it even begins.

Read more

Dear Readers,

A year ago today, I published Valley Girl’s very first post to warm reception and highly-engaged readers. Since the spring of 2025, we’ve gone many places together, from the original Indigenous valley girl1 to the Japanese incarceration camps to valley girl speech patterns to the Bravo TV show, The Valley. Every week, I’m tremendously thankful to have found such a dedicated readership that is willing to explore the Valley Girl2 gender trope with me—and across concepts that are often presented as unrelated. You’re willingness to analyze this enduring gender stereotype, regardless of where you’re reading from, bodes well for rethinking what you think you know about gender and the mythologies that often propel these beliefs.

Subscribe now

A friend recently shared with me (Hi Unita!), that she could immediately tell Valley Girl was an Aries from all the hot pink within her text. After reviewing her first year of publication, I can see that. Aries women are known for being confident, bold, independent, and “trailblazers” in their lives, careers, and relationships, and I can see a lot of those traits within the tonality and subjects of these essays. I also don’t find it a coincidence that my late grandmother—and the first valley girl in my family—was an Aries. When she moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s with my late grandfather, she was setting out on a life that was completely different from that of her entire family. Many of the women documented in these essays set out on terrains, lives, and battles that often distinguished them from their origins, even when they were in defense of their origins. Spiritually, perhaps, the valley girl is always an Aries.

To mark Valley Girl’s first year on the internet, I officially put up the paywall on yesterday’s piece: an analysis of one of Eve Babitz’s unpublished short stories that I found in her papers at the Huntington Library3 here in California. More paywalled pieces are coming that reflect not just my own analysis but, also, my effort to procure them: going through archives, original reporting, and spending time with personal papers. Behind the paywall, I’ll also be sharing more personal writing about my experiences as a valley girl.

As I wrote last month, I’m also introducing Valley Girl Office Hours for paid subscribers: an informal weekly video meeting with me to discuss that week’s piece. If you’ve been eager to ask me any questions about how I write these essays, my research, or what this work has prompted in your own reading and contemplating, this office hours is for you. Loosely held opinions are welcome.

Our first Valley Girl Office Hours is today at 12-1pm PT. I hope I see you there.

Love, Koa

Share

“The Valley, of course, is the San Fernando Valley—the joke place.”

-Eve Babitz, “Valley High,” an unpublished short story, circa 1970s.

If there is anyone who can understandably exercise geographical disdain for the San Fernando Valley, it’s Eve Babitz. The very L.A.-based author of books like Sex and Rage, Black Swans, L.A. Woman, and Eve’s Hollywood, is known for writing almost exclusively about the distinct glamor of the over-the-hill1 set: rock stars, chic parties, groupie politics, drugs, and of course, fame. Eve embodies the exact demographic of someone who wouldn’t deign to come to the Valley for anything but a DL abortion.

But when I found an unpublished short story of hers in her papers at the Huntington Library2, I learned that Eve approached the Valley with a lot more nuance than I would have expected.

Read more

“Some say the centers are ugly.”

-Los Angeles Times, September 23rd, 1985.1

Derision for strip malls is not just for those outside of Los Angeles. Although I have fond memories of them as a little valley girl2, the disdain for their aesthetic and their proliferation is actually endemic to the city. For the Valley specifically, criticism of the strip mall’s appearance is a window into the suburb’s distinct racial dynamics and politics.

Strip malls, or “mini-malls” as they used to be called in the 1970s, are as common to the San Fernando Valley as palm trees. And like its signature topography, modern strip malls are not exactly native to the area. Following the 1973 Oil Embargo that caused hundreds of gas stations in Southern California to go bust, developers bought the abandoned properties and offered cheaper rent to small businesses at busy intersections. Smaller stores with ample parking then started cropping up everywhere a gas station once lived3. By 1985, as many as 3,000 mini-malls had been built in Los Angeles County4.

Subscribe now

For immigrants in the Valley, the strip mall boom represented a tremendous opportunity: the rents were often significantly cheaper, meaning a family could open a small business that they could not afford elsewhere. Families assembled everything from doughnut shops to dry cleaners to restaurants to video stores. The placement of old gas stations meant the new businesses were positioned at corners with lots of traffic, ensuring they would get plenty of visibility and potential patrons.

But their explosive growth and their “aesthetic blights”5 created a laundry list of complaints from Valley residents, which echo the complaints of suburbanites everywhere: the litter was out of control, the loitering by “undesirable”6 persons was questionable, the noise was too loud, and the parking was being usurped. By the 1980s, the scorn of strip malls had reached a local political consensus: they “erode[d] neighborhood character,”7 according to city council members. And to this same cohort, the growth of strip malls was completely out of control, comparing them to “a brush fire” that needed to be contained.8

Not surprisingly, criticism fell along racial lines.

A Los Angeles Times survey circa 1987 found that white residents (across Los Angeles) predominantly wanted growth restrictions on strip malls while residents of color largely advocated for more development9. For different communities, the strip mall represented entirely contrasting realities. And like a lot of the Valley’s modern history as a white haven with middle-class sensibilities, white residents found the aesthetics of non-Americans simply too unattractive. By failing to reproduce the aesthetics of white suburban living, immigrants to Los Angeles would be restricted on their path to upward economic mobility. This wasn’t atypical for the area.

The Valley’s modern middle-class uniformity has often been its first allegiance, duplicating itself across race, class, and gender performance. The regional history of redlining, of exporting specific gender roles, of assuring that homes, families, and marriages exist along very specific parameters, always tell the story of who they don’t want there: groupies and/or sex workers, Black families, immigrant families, and many others.

Those who cannot or will not reproduce the white picket fence, the white middle-class family, the muted female sexuality, have often been the Valley’s first villains.

City Councilman Mike Woo, who pushed for more restrictions, disagreed with the racial characterization of the strip mall debate. He told the Los Angeles Times in 1987:

“My experience,” Woo said, “has been that this is one of the few issues that unite constituents from all ethnic groups. . . . I don’t think there’s anything about the American Dream that says for-profit development can destroy the quality of a neighborhood.”10

An attorney for a strip mall developer attempted a similar logic, assuring the Los Angeles Times that proposed restrictions on strip mall growth were of economic concern and not “a racial issue.”11 As if there is any space between those two concepts.

After more than four years of local debate and 19 months on a single proposition, Los Angeles City Council voted in 1988 to impose an ordinance on strip malls12. Developers now had to plant one shade tree for every four parking spaces and plant the trees to protect cars on at least half of the parking lot. All new mini-malls were legally required to include “a decorative wall and landscaping”13 and owners were responsible for keeping graffiti off the premises. They could be built up to three stories high.

So, essentially, a mall. A recognizable, acceptable, and deeply legible part of Valley life that fit more homogeneously into the suburbs, particularly for the 1980s. Once again, the Valley wielded image uniformity.

The mom-and-pop stores that could not replicate this image were disadvantaged before they could even start. And when the recession hit in the 1990s, those smaller tenants who had businesses before the ordinance were impacted the hardest14, often forced to close anyway.

Failure to replicate.🌴

Next week: Eve Babitz (Valley Girl’s first piece for paid subscribers only.)

Share

🧁Next week, Valley Girl will celebrate her first birthday. Our girl is an Aries. To commemorate the occasion, I will be launching a paid tier of Valley Girl next week that will put some pieces behind a paywall. I’ll also be launching Office Hours, a weekly video meeting with me to discuss the week’s essay with paid subscribers. To enjoy uninterrupted content and all forthcoming features, please be sure to “pledge” a paid subscription.

“A squat rectangle of stucco and drywall, it offers everything we’ve come to expect in these ubiquitous corner ‘convenience centers’: a pizza parlor and doughnut shop, a music store and forlorn Laundromat. There’s the requisite oil-stained parking lot, the brick enclosed dumpster, some spindly little shrubs that cry for water.”

-Los Angeles Times, “A Brief History of the Mini-Mall,” November 16th, 19971.

It took me a minute to understand the word “strip mall.” I was an adult the first time I remember hearing it, maybe not even in California. What I do remember was that it was said with derision. The type of word that was to evoke a neighborhood or a place that was undesirable. I don’t remember what I said or who said it. But I remember the contours of the dawning realization that they were talking about where I come from.

Subscribe now

As far as I understood it, “strip malls” were just stores with better parking. The smaller, more muted businesses were in sharp contrast to a lot of what the Valley had become by the time I was growing up. Skechers, Burger King, Starbucks, and California Pizza Kitchen are the signs I remember without much recall. But many of my deepest sensory memories fall along businesses with signs that were pretty flat and nondescript. They were all in strip malls.

The small doughnut shop my father used to walk me to when I was five years old; the Mediterranean restaurant down the street from my middle school where I shared crinkle fries with my friends; the local dry cleaners that my family had been patronizing since the 1950s. In a somewhat monolithic girlhood—often punctuated by massive shopping complexes and corporatized everything—I now see strip malls as my very last childhood exposure to small, often family-owned businesses.

I see myself in these 1990s memories, in polka-dotted cotton skirts and purple canvas Keds, and I see myself engaging with a very particular Los Angeles that is always on the verge of being swallowed completely: by high rents or gentrification or the growing cost of living. Buying a single doughnut with money I physically counted out myself was always tenuous. My family’s long-time dry cleaners was always going to be bought out and move to a different strip mall. This is L.A. after all.

The nostalgia for strip malls, often surfacing in new and enduring businesses both in the Valley and over the hill2, engage with this economic precariousness. That’s part of the charm. The lack of permanence and unremarkable exterior remind you that it might not be here for long.

They were also, oddly, respites.

As a little valley girl3, I remember the distinct satisfaction of the driving adult when a parking spot was available: a slight exclamation or a distilled giddiness when pointing to a vacant rectangle. I remember absorbing these wins with little understanding of their significance, just that the adults were happy. And that could be tenuous on the road.

When you spend most of your life in traffic, it’s the small conveniences that feel big and somehow personal: meters that already have money on them, close and easy parking spaces, other drivers that just happen to be leaving when you’re arriving. Adults communicated this across freeways and at stoplights while murmuring frustrations and closely evading accidents that they were never responsible for. Valley girls know the operatics of road rage, however muted, like they know June gloom: it will always burn off later.

Strip malls were a part of this burn off. Near collisions that shake a driver up and down can evaporate when you walk into the right doughnut or taco shop, or nail salon. These were reprieves after hurdling through the freeway with malfunctioning air conditioning, or, worse, inching along while watching the moving surface streets below.🌴

Next week: strip mall wars.

Share

🧁In April, Valley Girl will celebrate her first birthday. Our girl is an Aries. To commemorate the occasion, I will be launching a paid tier of Valley Girl that month that will put some pieces behind a paywall. I’ll also be launching Office Hours, a weekly video meeting with me to discuss the week’s essay with paid subscribers. To enjoy uninterrupted content and all forthcoming features, please be sure to “pledge” a paid subscription.

Dear Readers,

Next month, Valley Girl will celebrate her first birthday (she’s an Aries). To commemorate the occasion, I will be launching a paid tier of Valley Girl that month that will put some pieces behind a paywall.

I’ll also be launching Office Hours, a weekly video meeting with me to discuss the week’s essay with paid subscribers. Given how research-heavy and complex some of these essays are, I’ve been eager to discuss them in a more informal setting (without footnotes).

To enjoy uninterrupted content and all forthcoming features, please be sure to “pledge” a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

Thank you to everyone who has continued to read and share Valley Girl. This newsletter has such a devoted and engaged readership and I see the same email addresses diligently opening every week. You’re a lovely group to write for.

See you on Thursday for our regularly scheduled essay.

Love, Koa

Dear Readers,

I’m visiting your inbox this Friday morning to share with you an interview I did with Christiana Mbakwe Medina on her podcast . Christiana asks me about the history of the modern Valley Girl1, why she is often communicated in the culture as a white girl, and what she reveals about contemporary influencers.

Subscribe now

Together, we discuss perceptions of Los Angeles well outside Los Angeles (Christiana is British-Nigerian), California conservatism, and how gender and capitalism often work together in the Western world. It should also be noted that this interview was filmed in the Valley (to bring it full circle).

In addition to watching the entire podcast episode above, you can also listen here and here.

For new subscribers, below is some accompanying reading if you’d like to learn more about what is discussed on Pop Syllabus:

When Christiana asserts that the Valley Girl set the template for the influencer economy:

When I say that capitalism is very good at commodifying girls and women:

When I talk about the Valley Girl being an economic figure and reference “Greed is good”:

When I cite how valley girls2 expanded language with their signature accent:

When Christiana asks me about how valley girls sold property and lifestyle to patriarchs:

Share

🧁In April, Valley Girl will celebrate her first birthday. Our girl is an Aries. To commemorate the occasion, I will be launching a paid tier of Valley Girl that month that will put some pieces behind a paywall. I’ll also be launching Office Hours, a weekly video meeting with me to discuss the week’s essay with paid subscribers. To enjoy uninterrupted content and all forthcoming features, please be sure to “pledge” a paid subscription.

“I do live in Encino, as I said. I don’t consider myself a Valley Girl but, like, I live right in Encino and right down the street from the Galleria and I’d be a bitchin’ Valley Girl.”

-Janet Jackson, New York Hot Tracks, 1984.

After her brothers’ colossal success in the Jackson 5, Janet Jackson’s life trajectory would change. The 5-year-old, and youngest of 10 siblings, would be moved from her birthplace in Gary, Indiana to her new home in the San Fernando Valley, engendering a truly iconic valley girl1.

Through the 1970s, Janet would perform with her brothers and appear on their variety show, The Jacksons. She would attend Lanai Elementary School and Portola Middle School2, two public schools in the Valley. But by the 1980s, and still a teenager, Janet and her notorious father, Joe Jackson, were looking ahead at a solo music career for her. It would be in this climate that the press focus would shift from the Jackson family to the singular youngest Jackson, a girl. Her upbringing in such a famous family—the both conventional and yet completely unconventional dynamic—and her girlhood would be important talking points as she was extracted from her brothers’ shadow. What was different about this particular Jackson?

Subscribe now

A lot, actually. Around a decade plus younger than her superstar brothers, the youngest girl, and the most integrated into Los Angeles (and the Valley specifically) given how young she was when the family relocated, Janet was a different Jackson entirely. She was a valley girl.

A solidly Los Angeles girlhood would both map its way onto how Janet presented herself and her music, and influence how she engaged with the press of the 1980s.

The cultural timing was also significant. By the time Janet was promoting her second album, Dream Street, in 1984, popular culture was peak Valley Girl3. Blonde, white middle-class women with a disposable income and a “like, totally” accent had become synonymous with Los Angeles—and its ills. The United States, and beyond, was well-versed in the Frank Zappa song, the Valley Girl movie, and the signature way of both dressing and speaking.

Janet both fit this emerging gender stereotype and didn’t—in a way that would prove consistent with other valley girls of color. The logistical valley girl facts all line up but there was nevertheless a chasm between her reality and the archetypal Valley Girl, underscoring once again how distorted the pop culture gender stereotype was.

The facts present a somewhat familiar geographical profile, albeit exaggerated to accommodate her family’s unique fame: Janet grew up in the affluent neighborhood of Encino in a palatial estate that had been photographed and filmed extensively when she was growing up. This neighborhood is within five miles of the pop-culturally renowned Sherman Oaks Galleria, home base of the Valley Girl and cited in Moon Unita Zappa’s accented monologue about recreationally shopping.

Janet’s childhood home, though, was hardly typically suburban; the estate housed many imported animals, including a giraffe, pythons, deer, a chimpanzee, and many more4. Despite this opulence, a strict adherence to relatability is always presented in the press. A video from the 1970s depict both she and siblings chatting with reporters while draped over a spiral staircase (very Black Brady Bunch). They appear wholesome in a black and white photograph in their living room, surrounded by their many music accolades in the way that another Valley family would be surrounded by family photographs. The messaging is solidly suburban and middle-class: we are a normal family.

These respectability politics are revealing and have important context. The Valley’s first Black family had moved to Northridge the previous decade and their arrival had incentivized both racist and fair housing strategies. To move into an affluent and primarily white neighborhood as a famous Black family undoubtedly incentivized this upper-middle-class forward image of Blackness, however unconsciously.

The suburban packaging of Blackness, specifically for fans, readers, and viewers, reads as inextricable from the Valley’s staunchly middle-class aesthetic and history of nuclear homogeny. The Valley Girl, in her white, blonde, 1980s affluence was shaped by these dynamics—and yet, despite the geographical and cultural alignment in Janet’s own life, she proves to be a powerful example of the racial limits of this gender trope. A Valley Girl was not Black.

Janet, for her part, seemed to be aware of this tension, particularly as she was ascending in the popular culture of the 1980s as a young woman raised in the San Fernando Valley. In a 1984 television interview promoting her second solo album, she laid out the conflict, saying, “I do live in Encino, as I said. I don’t consider myself a Valley Girl but…” proceeding to offer up a spot-on valley girl accent that cites the Galleria and “bitchin’.”

The ease with which Janet can pull out this accent and then, conversely, switch back to her genuine voice5—a kind of code-switching—exhibits a keen awareness of the Valley Girl trope. She’s communicating that she can don this weird, white capitalist drag of Southern California femininity but denies identifying with it. Racial components are implied here, but not directly said.

Later quotes from Janet confirm that her racial identity, Black origins, and Black community were deeply important to her, themes prominently reflected in her music as well. Nine years later when promoting her album janet., she told the Los Angeles Times:

About her own black heritage, she says, “I feel closer to it than ever. I think a lot of it has to do with growing older, being inquisitive. I think some people in the business, as far as African-Americans feel, they forget where they’ve come from.

“You can get too involved in what you are doing and never look back. I think it is important to sit down and think about where you came from and to help your people by extending your hand to bring someone else along.”6

To resist the caricature of the Valley Girl as a valley girl is, in and of itself, a critique of its racial limitations (among others). And that’s primarily what I’m seeing when I look into 18-year-old Janet’s face as she demonstrates a Valley Girl accent as quickly as she drops it: a consciousness and a recognition for the whiteness she does not embody as a valley girl.

But, true to this tension, pieces of her valley girl upbringing punctuate her aesthetic as a young artist. The iconic key that she would wear in one of her hoop earrings, here in 1984 and then later during her Rhythm Nation years, was a reference to her childhood in Encino. As a child, Janet’s chores consisted of caring for the copious animals on the property. She would keep the key to the animal cages in her hoop earring so she wouldn’t lose it, a memory she later shared on The Tonight Show in 2020.

One of her first photo shoots as a solo artist (and not the Jacksons’ little sister) would be at her Tudor-style home in the Valley. In one photo from the series, she stares back at the viewer from the red brick entrance with her key prominently displayed from her left hoop. All the elements are there: the suburban Valley, the 1980s silhouette, stone-washed jeans, hoops, Nikes, relaxed hair, and soft pink makeup.

She’s undeniably a valley girl, but not in the way you think she is.🌴

Next week: the strip mall.

Share

🧁In April, Valley Girl will celebrate her first birthday. Our girl is an Aries. To commemorate the occasion, I will be launching a paid tier of Valley Girl that month that will put some pieces behind a paywall. I’ll also be launching Office Hours, a weekly video meeting with me to discuss the week’s essay with paid subscribers. To enjoy uninterrupted content and all forthcoming features, please be sure to “pledge” a paid subscription.

“There was a lot of farmers in the San Fernando Valley that lost everything. It’s terrible.”

-Roy Muranaka on what Japanese Americans returned to after WWII ended, March 23rd, 20041.

When WWII ended in the fall of 1945, Japanese-American incarcerates were notified that they could finally leave the makeshift camps. After immigrating to the United States, establishing successful and sustainable businesses, and then given sometimes mere days to sell their growing capital at a loss, the question loomed: where would these valley girls2 and their families live? Turns out, the U.S. government didn’t give this inquiry too much long-term thought either.

By the time the war had ended, many prisoners had been incarcerated for three to four years. In that time, property had passed hands, lucrative farms had fallen into disarray or to other owners entirely. By 1945, there weren’t always homes to go back to.

Jane Muranka, a valley girl whose family ran a flourishing flower farm, remembers that her father was allowed to leave Manzanar earlier than others to get his enterprise in order. They were an anomalous case: “I don't think anyone else came, in fact, I know that a lot of families didn't have anywhere to go, so they tried to prolong their stay at the camp.”3

Subscribe now

This sudden need for housing could not have come at a worse time. Post-WWII saw a massive housing shortage already; the population of Los Angeles had surged to accommodate those recruited for aircraft manufacturing4 and GIs returning home (some of whom were Japanese-American themselves). The numbers were both staggering and deeply competitive: about one out of every 100 Americans (more than 1.3 million people) moved to California between 1940 and 19445. And after years of racist propaganda during the war, homeowners and lenders weren’t eager to step in and help such a maligned population. Redlining6 remained an open, legal, and rampant practice.

Hayako Kihara recalled in an oral history archive that, after WWII, she and her family attempted to buy a house in the San Fernando Valley. Ideally, they wanted to be in the Granada Hills area. Their real estate broker reframed his services along what he would and would not do: “He says I won’t look for anything on the other side of Sepulveda. You better buy something that’s on this side of Sepulveda,” Hayako recalled in 20047.

And by “this side of Sepulveda,” he most likely meant the Pacoima area, a Valley neighborhood that was already being designated for Black and Mexican families. The undesirables—families that weren’t white and/or middle-class—would be relegated to one area so as to protect growing property values of white suburbia above all else.

For most incarcerated valley girls and their families, though, the question of housing remained much more urgent than eventual home ownership. There was literally nowhere for them to go upon release. Racists would not even rent to them, let alone sell. The U.S. Government, eager to close down the camps, erected temporary housing all across Los Angeles: army barracks, airfields, and trailer parks.

At the very edge of the Valley in Burbank, the War Relocation Authority erected a trailer park known as the Winona Housing Project. This would be the largest temporary housing for Japanese Americans in Southern California: within a month of opening, Winona became home to 478 “returnees.”8

Much like the camps from which these families had just been released, the conditions were hardly livable. Burbank officials confirmed that Winona did not meet building code. There were frequent power outages, little access to medical resources, and not enough storage space. With racism towards Japanese Americans still at a fever pitch, employment opportunities were just as scarce as housing. This inability to retain employment meant the families of Winona could not secure the means to procure permanent housing. Meanwhile, the U.S. government wanted to move on from the racist housing shortage they promoted. The War Relocation Authority, and the support that came with it, would soon be disbanding, despite the over 2,000 Japanese Americans still living in emergency trailer camps.

Winona would eventually become a “long-term housing facility” for families in need, but only after the Federal Public Housing Authority and the War Relocation Authority uprooted Japanese Americans yet again. About five hundred residents were sent to other camps further south of Los Angeles while the Winona Housing Project was refashioned to accommodate 1,000 residents (or 300 trailers). In addition to the indignity of being moved again, families were charged for this effort; the trailers did not have wheels and so the Federal Public Housing Authority offered to move them for $25 (a third of what the trailers were even worth.)

When they returned to Winona—often their fifth “relocation” in less than six years—they encountered conditions that brought them right back to the incarceration camps: insufficient sewer lines, little to no light, no cooking facilities, no gas, no heat. The situation was so bad that food couldn’t even be prepared on the premises. The Red Cross had to deliver meals prepared elsewhere. A resident is quoted in a 1946 federal report as saying, “It is worse than a relocation center."9

And yet, still, Winona residents made an optimistic effort at homemaking, according to this scene in The New York Times Magazine:

The process of rebuilding began again: new children, more gardens, renewed hope for stability. Homeowners erected picket fences around their tiny trailers, and this time the move stuck. For the next eight years the corner of San Fernando Road and Olinda Street was a bustling Japanese-American community.10

The post-WWII “prosperity” that is often espoused in historical narratives did not extend to these valley girls and their families. Their losses during the war would continue to ripple out in generations of poverty, financial instability, and losses. In 1983, a congressional commission investigation estimated that total property loss due to Japanese incarceration amounted to $1.3 billion11. The net income loss would be about double that: $2.7 billion. It was probably much higher.

And yet, even when Congress agreed to offer partial restitution, along with a formal apology, the best they could come up with was $20,000 to each formerly incarcerated person.🌴

Next week: Janet Jackson.

Share

🧁In April, Valley Girl will celebrate her first birthday. Our girl is an Aries. To commemorate the occasion, I will be launching a paid tier of Valley Girl that month that will put some pieces behind a paywall. I’ll also be launching Office Hours, a weekly video meeting with me to discuss the week’s essay with paid subscribers. To enjoy uninterrupted content and all forthcoming features, please be sure to “pledge” a paid subscription.

“My mother was devastated because the neighbor who lived three blocks away, her husband was taken away into prison camp or whatever. Not the camp like we went. The FBI came and just took 'em away. And so my mother was afraid that my father was gonna be taken away.”

-Sumiko Yamauchi on when her family and neighbors had to start reporting to “relocation centers” in 1942, July 23, 20131.

As valley girls2 and their families started to get notices to report to “relocation centers,” details about their new living conditions were murky. For the immigrant families who had to sell their life’s work and booming capital in a new country, they were given sometimes mere days to relinquish any property, valuables, and coordinate travel accordingly.

After Pearl Harbor, Sumiko Yamauchi, a then 14-year-old valley girl whose Japanese parents farmed flowers, remembers her mother starting to pack. Her parents had begun speaking with neighbors about what anyone knew and what they could expect. She would hear them on the phone in Japanese always arrive at the same conclusion: “Well, what can we do? We just have to go.”

Subscribe now

In an oral history interview, Sumiko specifies that nobody ever personally communicated traveling logistics to her family. Her parents were sent a tag with a number on it and given a location of “a Greyhound bus, dozens and dozens of them, and you had to go walk down and see where your number matched this bus that you were on.”

In the face of this sweeping unconstitutional incarceration—and unaware of what awaited her children— Sumiko remembers her mother mandating that she and her siblings dress in their Sunday best and wear new shoes to board the bus. “We didn’t know whether we were gonna all be together,” Sumiko recalled. “And we were all, fortunately we were all in the same bus. And we were, we kind of knew where Manzanar was, but we didn’t know what it was like.”

They learned very quickly. Manzanar War Relocation Center3, based in Inyo County, California, is about four hours outside of Los Angeles by car. The open and dry area had been drained of its natural resources by the Los Angeles Aqueduct4 . Sumiko remembers arriving during a brutal dust storm to a meal of a hotdog and bread. The living conditions were bleak: when she and her family found their room, there was nothing there for them but an army cot. Upon arrival, prisoners were given a canvas bag and told where to stuff the bag with hay. This would suffice as their bedding:

Fortunately they did give us a couple of wool blanket[s] which was nice and warm. We used the one to cover the bed, and used the other to cover ourselves. And we had to actually cover our heads because the wind was blowing so hard, the barrack wasn’t finished yet, the wind was blowing in and the dust was coming in. And you walked on the floor, and the floor had openings and the wind was blowing through there, and it was whistling all night. You had the lights going, and searchlights going back and forth in the window, through the window, and you had to hear the jeeps going up and back. It was really a nightmare that first night, and I thought to myself, “Oh my gosh, what are we into?” I think that was the most scary thing there was, was trying to, that first night, everything is very strange anyway. And I think that dust was coming in, and when we got up, our blanket on top was just thick with dust. I don’t know, I think... we thought nothing could get any worse than this.5

Sumiko was right in her assessment that her barracks wasn’t yet completed. Historians now identify Manzanar, and other camps like it, as “makeshift”6 with “terrible” living conditions.

Eighty years later, another generation of Californians are enduring similar conditions under institutionalized white terror. ICE immigration stops of non-white people, which the Supreme Court affirmed is legal in Southern California7, continue to grow. As do the number of arrests. Last month, L.A. TACO reported that detainees at the Otay Mesa Detention Center near San Diego were strategically throwing tiny shampoo bottles to organizers outside. Inside the bottles, organizers found handwritten notes detailing horrendous living conditions. One detainee who has been imprisoned with his wife since April 2025 wrote:

“It’s cold here all the time and the food is poor,” the missive continues. “For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick.”8

Other notes detail very limited or no access to legal counsel, endless case postponement, and English-only resources. The facility is suspected to be exceeding capacity; the limited data available would confirm it. Immigration arrests in San Diego increased 1,500 percent between May and October of 20259.

Much like the Japanese incarceration of the 1940s, what is happening in California is indicative of a broader reality: as of January 2026, a record high of 73,000 people are being detained by ICE across the United States10. And similar to the last time our nation did this, the aggressive strategy has yielded a 2,450 percent increase in the number of people with no criminal record being held in ICE detention on any given day11. Some are even American citizens.

The glut in funding for these incarcerations from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act means that more locations are needed. In February 2026, The Guardian reported that ICE is scouting industrial warehouses to use as detention centers for anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 people12. ICE documents suggest that the federal agency plans to “channel individuals into a network of large centralized facilities where they would remain until deportation.”

The aerial view of a warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia looks like Manzanar.🌴

Next week: coming home to nothing.

Share

🧁In April, Valley Girl will celebrate her first birthday. Our girl is an Aries. To commemorate the occasion, I will be launching a paid tier of Valley Girl that month that will put some pieces behind a paywall. I’ll also be launching Office Hours, a weekly video meeting with me to discuss the week’s essay with paid subscribers. To enjoy uninterrupted content and all forthcoming features, please be sure to “pledge” a paid subscription.