Creativity Quote by Siobhan Fahey

There is a whole business model smuggled into Fahey's choice of words, and it hinges on containment. "Signed to a label" is the passive voice of pop: agency outsourced the moment the contract is inked. The label doesn't just market songs; it curates a version of the artist that can be safely sold, and "wanted us to remain" gives the game away. This isn't about sounding young. It's about freezing time, keeping women in a profitable pre-adulthood where desire, anger, and complexity can be edited out.

The double "little girls" lands like a bruise. Fahey isn't being poetic; she's describing a narrowing of the audience and the self at once. "Appealed to other little girls" frames pop femininity as a closed circuit: girls performing girlhood for girls, supervised by adults who control the money. It's an image of consumption designed to look innocent, which is exactly why it works. The industry gets to profit from femininity while disavowing the messier parts of being a woman.

"cute and non-threatening" is the corporate euphemism that does the real damage. Cute sells, non-threatening stays on radio, non-threatening doesn't challenge male executives, tabloids, or cultural gatekeepers who punish women for ambition. In the 80s and 90s, when female pop groups were packaged with precision, the demand for harmlessness was a leash disguised as a brand strategy. Fahey's line reads like a retrospective refusal: she names the infantilization plainly, stripping the gloss off a fantasy that was never meant to be hers.