Little Mix: What Is The Bona Fide Definition and Significance Of Female Empowerment And A Female Friendship Ending Caused By The Lack Of…?

With the recent death of Liam Payne, and One Direction being in the headlines again, it’s no surprise that Little Mix is now talked about too. If you didn’t know, or need a reminder, Little Mix is a girl-group that was formed on ‘The X Factor UK’ in 2011, the year after One Direction was formed. It consisted of Perrie Edward’s, Jesy Nelson, Jade Thirlwall, and Leigh-Anne Pinnock. Similarly to One Direction, they were managed by Simon Cowell, but not formed by Simon Cowell. Instead, they were formed by Kelly Rowland, who was a member of Destiny’s Child in the early 2000’s. If it were up to Cowell, all four girls would’ve gone home. Simon managed the group until 2018, when the four girls left his management company following a business dispute.

The girls were together as a band between 2011 and 2022. Anything that lasts more than a decade is considered to be a lifetime in bands, especially those that consist of women; more particularly, women who started working together as teenage girls. They weren’t nearly as successful as One Direction, but they were successful enough to stay together as a group for that many years. The only reason they disbanded was that they wanted to try different ventures in their solo careers. It wasn’t that they didn’t get along anymore. This could be said about 3 out of the 4 women in the band – Edwards, Thirlwall, and Pinnock. But nothing of the sort could be set of Jesy Nelson, who abruptly left the group in 2020 for mental health reasons.

Nelson had famously gone through mental health struggles while she was in Little Mix, and she never shied away from the discussing it. She even made an entire documentary about it, ‘Odd One Out’ while she was still a part of the group. While describing her time in Little Mix as the best time of her life when announcing her departure from the band, she added, ‘The truth is recently being in the band has really taken a toll on my mental health. I find the constant pressure of being in a girl group and living up to expectations very hard. There comes a time in life when we need to reinvest in taking care of ourselves rather than focussing on making other people happy, and I feel like now is the time to begin that process. I spend some time with the people I love, doing things that make me happy. I’m ready to embark on a new chapter in my life – I’m not sure what it’s going to look like right now, but I hope you’ll still be there to support me.’

Before her official departure from the band, Nelson took a month off from performing and promoting their new album, leaving the rest of the three women to do the ‘heavy lifting.’ And in turn, the trio said of their bandnate’s departure, ‘This is an incredibly sad time for all of us but we are fully supportive of Jesy. We love her very much and agree that it is so important that she does what is right for her mental health and well-being. We are still very much enjoying our Little Mix journey and the 3 of us are not ready for it to be over. We know that Jesy leaving the group is going to be really upsetting news for our fans. We love you guys so much and are so grateful for your loyalty and continued support of all of us. We’re looking forward to seeing so many of you on tour.’

But Nelson was open about her mental health struggles while in the group. In addition to ‘Odd One Out’, where she opened up about her struggles with depression and an eating disorder, she opened up about her mental health in a 2019 interview with The Guardian. She said, ‘I had a routine of waking up, going on Twitter, searching for the worst things I could about myself. I’d type in the search bar: ‘Jesy fat’, or ‘Jesy ugly’, and see what would come up. Sometimes I didn’t even need to do that, I’d just write ‘Jesy’ and then I’d see all the horrible things. Everyone told me to ignore it – but it was like an addiction. I felt that I physically couldn’t tolerate the pain any more.’ She also revealed that she attempted suicide at one point, and credited her family, friends, and therapy for helping her push through.

When speaking with Cosmopolitan in 2021 following her departure from Little Mix, Nelson opened up about what the breaking point was in her decision to leave the band. She said, ‘The last music video we did (‘Sweet Melody’) was the breaking point. We’d been in lockdown, and it was the first time I could have a break and be at home around people that I love. It was the happiest I’d ever felt and I didn’t realise that until I went back to work. I immediately became a different person. I had anxiety. Whenever we have a music video I put an enormous amount of pressure on myself to try and lose weight. I have a fear of looking back on the camera. If I don’t like what I see, I find it so hard to be in front of the camera and feel amazing and perform. I’d been in lockdown, and I’d put on a bit of weight but I didn’t care. And they said, ‘you’ve got a music video in a couple of weeks’ and I just panicked. I went on this extreme diet, with bloody shakes, and tried to eat as little as possible. On the day of the ‘Sweet Melody’ video I had a panic attack on set because I didn’t look how I wanted to look and I found it so hard to just be happy and enjoy myself. There’s a scene in ‘Sweet Melody’ I’m not in because that’s when I had a panic attack and broke down. I was like, ‘I just want to go home.’I was sobbing in the dressing room. Someone really close to me said, ‘This has got to stop. You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’re going to end up where you were before.’ For me that was the pinnacle point. I was like, ‘I need to start taking care of myself now because this isn’t healthy.’ It wasn’t nice for the other three to be around someone who didn’t want to be there. So I took a break. For so long I worried about other people and letting people down. The only person I should have been trying to make happy was myself and I wasn’t doing that. I needed to do it for my mental health.’

I empathize with her, I really do. But I also think that it’s a load of bullsh*t. Only a few short months after she left the group, Nelson released her first single as a solo artist, ‘Boys’, which featured Nicki Minaj. The music video also featured Diddy. The single was mediocre at best. It wasn’t good, and the music video featured culture appropriation. The public was weirded out by Nelson’s return to the public eye so soon after leaving the band. The ‘Poor Me’ girl was back in the public eye. In the same Cosmopolitan interview, Nelson said, ‘I feel like there’s been a few people who don’t understand why I left Little Mix but am now in the studio making music. A lot of people said, ‘I thought you came out of the band to focus on your mental health?’ I never said when I put out my statement, that I was coming out of the band to never be in the public eye, perform again or do music. I said I was coming out of the band because I genuinely couldn’t deal with the pressure of being in a girl band. For people to think that I would just stop working completely is crazy because me working on my mental health is going to the studio, and creating music that I love. That’s what clears my head and makes me happy. It’s good for my mental health. I didn’t know that I could be this happy. I thought when I was in the group that it was just normal to feel that way. And because I’d felt like that for ten years I just thought, ‘this is life.’ Since I’ve left, I feel free.’

The hypocrisy is uncanny. Marlena Hort wrote of Jesy Nelson’s departure from Little Mix for Medium a few years ago. She had the same take on the matter as me, and it was good to know that I wasn’t the only one who’s questioned Nelson’s authenticity. In fact, short called Nelson’s entire behaviour problematic and even ‘troubling’. While in Little Mix, Nelson had no issue projecting her own insecurities on her bandmates. To a once-anorexic Thirlwall, she said that she didn’t put on any weight, as well as asking Edward’s, who has had trouble with slow metabolism, ‘’How are you not fat?’ Both of these instances were done in front of thousands of viewers during a livestream, which makes matters even worse. And speaking of Instagram Lives, Nelson certainly didn’t make herself look good when she did a livestream with Nicki Minaj to promote their joint single.

The Instagram Live between Nelson and Minaj came after Pinnock, who is Black, voiced her concerns on Nelson’s black fishing in an unverified DM exchange that circulated online. During the livestream, Nelson spoke of the allegations by saying, ‘I personally want to say that my intention was never, ever to offend people of color with this video and my song because like I said, growing up as a young girl, this is the music that I listened to. These are the videos that I watched and thought were the best. For me personally, ’90s/2000 hip-hop, R&B music, was the best era of music. I just wanted to celebrate that. I just wanted to celebrate that era of music because it is what I love. It’s just hard for me because I was in a group with two women of color for nine years and it was never brought up to me up until the last music video I did with them.’

This tone-deaf response to allegations of black fishing and culture appropriation, to which I might add that she also dressed as an Asian woman in her music video for ‘Boyz’, wasn’t even the worst part of Nelson’s actions during the livestream. Instead, it was Nelson’s reaction to Minaj bashing Pinnock and calling her a clown during the livestream. Minaj said, If you was in this woman’s group and you ain’t talk about this s*** for 10 years, and as soon as you see she got a video coming out with Nicki Minaj and Puffy, now you sending text messages and all this s***… print those text messages out, bust your ass open and shove them up your motherf***ing ass. Stop trying to hurt people and kill people’s lives and careers, this is the way people feed their families. Stop—if you want a solo career, baby girl, just say that. Only jealous people do things like this. It makes you a big jealous bozo. I love you guys but please don’t do this. Let these people be miserable all by themselves.’

In turn, Nelson kept quiet and giggled, which sparked outrage amongst Little Mix fans. One X user, formerly known as Twitter, wrote on the platform, ‘JJesy Nelson made an entire documentary about the importance of kindness and online trolling, but happily sat there and laughed as Nicki Minaj ripped Leigh-Anne Pinnock to shreds in front of 100k people on their Instagram live. That shit makes me uncomfortable.’ Another wrote, ‘Jesy sitting there quietly while Nicki Minaj talks shit about Leigh Anne the same way she sat there quietly while Leigh Anne was going through racism and hardships as a black woman.’ And a third wrote, ‘Not Nicki painting Leigh-Anne as the angry, jealous black woman in order to help a white woman continue to be a culture vulture… This rrally the hill you wanna die on?’

As a result, the rest of the Little Mix bandmates stopped all contact with Nelson. They never said a word about their side of the story on the end of their respective friendships the her. The most the band ever said about it was that they try not to dwell on the fallout when Thirlwall said in an interview with The Telegraph, ‘We’ve dealt with it in the best way that we know how, and got each other through it.’ Nelson was the one that was doing most of the talking. This type of public attitude hurt the career she so desired to have after her departure from Little Mix. Aside from ‘Boyz’, Nelson released another single called ‘Bad Thing’. It wasn’t good. She was recently mocked by her fans for associating her music with Diddy, as well as her newly released music that she did with her now ex-boyfriend, who’s 9 years her junior. To make matters worse, she was dropped by her label.

The three remaining, now former, Little Mix members are very supportive of each other to this day. Just recently, Edward’s and Thirlwall supported Pinnock by attending her concert at one of her tour stops in London. Nelson got herself involved in a frenzy again, and not in a good way, as she was heard speaking in a Jamaican accent. Her three bandmates, as well as the official Little Mix Instagram page, all unfollowed Nelson on Instagram, and it’s safe to say that they won’t be following her or wanting to associate with her again anytime soon. And even though they’re no longer friends, it doesn’t mean that the end of the friendship doesn’t hurt. While making an appearance on Fearne Cotton’s ‘Happy Place’ podcast, Perrie Edwards emotionally opened up about the end of her friendship with her former bandmate. She said, ‘I wrote a song about it, and it’s about a friendship that I had, which I no longer have. I mentioned it in an interview, and so many people reached out to me. “It’s not really spoken about. When you hear a heartbreak song, it’s about a relationship or a significant other, and it’s like, ‘Unbreak my heart’. But when it’s a friend, you don’t hear about it much in music, so I was like, ‘I am going to write something about it because it’s just as heartbreaking, if not worse’. When you have been in that person’s life for years, and they have had your back, and you have been through highs, lows, everything and all of these experiences, it’s a wild ride, but you are in it together, and then poof, they’re gone … That is hard to deal with. I struggled a lot with that. It was really sad, but at the same time, these things happen, and it makes you think, ‘Do we try to rectify the situation? Do I reach out? I feel like I should just stay away.’ It’s a really horrible dynamic to be in. You can’t force somebody to be friends with you. If they don’t want to be friends, they don’t want to be friends. But, yes, it’s really hard.’

I watched Edwards’ entire hour long ‘Happy Place’ interview, where she also touched upon Liam Payne’s passing, being a working mom, and meeting her current partner, footballer Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. I usually don’t watch podcast episodes fully. Mostly, it’s because I just don’t have the attention span for it, and I’d much rather read about it. This one, however was different. I could relate to Edwards’ testament on a friendship ending; especially one that lasted almost a decade. It’s heartbreaking. I never myself had a romantic heartbreak as I was always so happy to get rid of my exes. My former relationships were never long enough for me to care, and I was never in love with my exes. Therefore, I couldn’t tell you from experience whether a friendship ending is more difficult than a romantic relationship ending. For me, based on my own personal experience, it most certainly was.

I met one of my very best friends during my second year of college. I consider her the first person in the world that really saw me; like, really saw me. She was the first person who saw me for who I was rather than what I was. She saw me for my quirks, and she had no interest in treating me any differently than she would any other person. That’s what I loved most about her. I always had trouble finding people in my life who didn’t want to somehow save me or change my situation. But it wasn’t her. She just wanted to spend time with me; to get to know me; to have fun with me. She knew that there was more to me than my disability. We also went to the same high school together. We never actually knew each other back then, but I remember she walked right passed me, and I said to myself, ‘This will be my future friend for life.’

My now-husband and I met two years into my friendship with my college friend. We were still close, but as years and years went by, I started feeling a distance between us; a disconnect. Nevertheless, I still chose her to be my maid of honour when I got engaged. That was the beginning of the end for us. I saw something different in her. I saw a shift in the way she treated me. She didn’t seem to care as much for me, nor for my happiness. In fact, it didn’t seem like she wanted me to be happy anymore. She didn’t make an effort to be my friend anymore, and treated the friendship as if it was a chore. She didn’t help me at all with the wedding planning, nor did she plan a bachelorette party. Another friend who wasn’t even part of the wedding party did. There was a sense of jealousy and anger out of her. She couldn’t handle the fact that I wasn’t the same person she met anymore. I was changing and evolving as a person; as a woman, whereas she wasn’t. There was an unhealthy codependency that was built between us over time, to the point that it became toxic.

Things turned for the worst after the wedding. I saw her less and less, and when I did see her, it wasn’t much of a happy occasion. She was rude, obnoxious, and self-absorbed. She also started treating my new husband if he were trash. By the time that a year had passed since I got married, we stopped making plans to see each other in person. We still texted from time to time, but the more time passed, the less and less we talked. By the two year mark, our communication had stopped entirely. She wasn’t my friend anymore. It was the most heartbreaking thing to ever happen to me. I didn’t lose a friend. I lost someone I considered family. There was nothing I could do, though. I just had to accept the fact that I had to let go, and that I did. I went on with my life without her in it. That was until she and I randomly started messaging each other again years later. It felt good. It felt like old times. After some time, she invited me over to her house. She’d just moved in to her new place, so it was an exciting time for her. I agreed to meet with her, though I was somewhat hesitant and nervous to do so. So much time had passed since I last saw her. Our reunion ended up being the best thing to happen for me, as it marked a closure and a realization that the friend that I once knew just wasn’t there anymore, and I couldn’t force the friendship any longer.

More recently, I lost a longtime friendship that lasted 12 years. We became very close throughout the years despite our ups and downs. She always repeated herself that my husband and I were like family to her. She was so good to me throughout my pregnancy, and then to my son. She was the aunt that everyone wished to have, and one that he’d never have. I credit her for getting me through my postpartum depression during my first year of motherhood. That was how good she was. Once the first year of my son’s life passed, things between us shifted. She wasn’t the same person as I once knew her to be. She was somewhat cold and indirect. Things worsened between us when I said to her that the first year of motherhood was very, very hard for me after something had happened to another friend and her son that made the news, and that a lot of times I thought I wouldn’t survive it. It was then that she completely ghosted me. I hadn’t had an actual conversation with her since. Someone who continually kept telling me that my husband and I are like family to her suddenly became a stranger. When I asked her directly if she had an issue with either me, my husband, or even our son, she just said she was busy. It was then that I knew that it was over between us. It was then that I realized that I was a friend by convenience to her, based on all of our ups and downs.

It was sad. It was heartbreaking. It was the end of an era. And maybe these two longtime friends of mine that I thought were closest to me meant more to me than I ever did to them. The end of those friendships gave me a lot to think about. It made me realize that no matter how much I try to control the events of my life, I can’t. It made me realize that Perrie Edwards was absolutely right when she spoke about the end of her friendship with Jesy Nelson; that you can’t force people to be friends with you; that you can’t force anyone to be the version of themselves that you want them to be; that people change and evolves, and sometimes, it’s not in a good way. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself and your family is let go, and know that you did everything you possibly could to make it work, no matter how hard it might be. Some friendships have an expiration date, and that’s okay. No matter the case, and no matter how hard it might be, just know that you’ll survive.