Why I Love Sophia Grace’s “Best Friends” Video

Eleven year-old Sophia Grace’s “Best Friends” is the perfect girl anthem to start off 2015, and I am not ashamed to say that I have been blasting it. The music video for the song is full of hot pink, pop beats, and adorable pre-teens just having fun with one another. The lyrics talk about girls that I know I loved as a young girl: “Stupid boys come around/me and my girls shut ‘em down” and “If the world’s against us/and if our back’s against the world together/no one to defend us, no one to defend us/we’re gon’ make it through singing like we do.

All of us girls have experienced the reality of a society not totally on our side, and Sophia Grace, at age 11, is calling for girls to have one another’s backs. Fearlessly facing life is possible when you have your friends with you along for the ride. .

It’s also important to look at her call to ignore boys in the context of their girls’ day out video—there are no boys in the video at all, and her group of friends and she go to K-Mart to shop, then put on make-up and their new clothes to have a fashion show. The key thing here is that they do all this primping for themselves. These pre-teens put on make up for fun and to feel confident, to play up a fashion show, not to look cuter for any boys.

There have been public outcries against Sophia Grace’s actions, saying that these kids are acting older than they are, but on the contrary—they put on their mom’s clothes like we all wanted to do as kids and try on make-up for fun in crazy shades around the house. One Twitter user calls her video “creepy,” but honestly, it’s not Sophia Grace’s fault that we have fostered this crazy idea in society that ladies wear make-up and dress up only for men, and that if they’re putting effort into their appearance, it’s because of some inherent self-consciousness. These girls aren’t trying to look sexy; they’re being incredibly cute and having a ton of fun. Get your head out of the gutter: This video has stolen my heart and is definitely the pop song I needed to start off this year.

Watch the vid yourself!