Just Girly Things

Girls, let's stop infantilising ourselves.

Girlhood has taken over the internet. We have created a viral insurgency. Meals are now ‘girl dinner’. Logic? No, ‘girl math’. Your favourite celebrity crush — so baby girl. The list continues: hot girl walks for your hot girl summer, girlhood, ‘it girl’, divine feminine, Pinterest board captioned goddess, matriarchy, clean girl aesthetic. Are you brat or demure?

While I love that it is our time to shine (isn’t it always?), some of these trends are mutating and creating a sour taste as they change. Take ‘girl math’. I do have to preface that I’ve been using this a lot recently — “If I miss my daily Taste trip today and tomorrow, I can absolutely afford to go ‘window shopping’ again this weekend.”  Yet at its core, ‘girl math’ is centred around the idea that girls can’t do math or exhibit logic, that we’re irresponsible, we shop too much. Yes, I personally might not be the best counter-example, but having seen a friend of mine spend £200 on FIFA points, I can’t help thinking this might not be a gender thing. On a deeper level, given that it only became illegal for banks in the UK to deny a loan based on gender 50 years ago, and given that there are women around the world who still can’t own money for this reason, aren’t we cutting a bit too close to the core?

Or ‘girl dinner’. Originally these memes were about those frazzled, last-minute, throw-together-anything-that’s-left-in-the-fridge meals, there to make you feel significantly better about the fact that you’re newly self-catered and haven’t put anything into your body other than salsa, stale nacho chips, and instant coffee for the last week. Now, there are 30-year-old women (decidedly not girls) posting one spoonful of low-fat yoghurt and five and a half blueberries artfully spread across a bowl onto TikTok, labelling it as dinner. This glorification of disordered eating across the internet is incredibly harmful, especially when you consider that it's being directed specifically at ‘girls’, and that the algorithms are going to show this content to teens and children who won’t know any better.

My personal favourite: “I’m just a girl.” Used to justify just about anything under the sun — liking your ex’s post from 2017, crashing your car against a bollard in the car park of the big Tesco, rewatching both seasons of Fleabag again instead of studying — it touches on a much deeper construction of layers of responsibility. By saying that we are less accountable than anyone else, you’re saying that we have less reason to be held to account — that women are less capable, respectable, and competent. Since when are we happy to put this image into the world? Since when are women “just” girls?

I will admit that there’s a strong attraction to the idea of being a girl again, for it to be normal to be overwhelmed and messy and for it to be okay to f*** up. The connecting message between the girlhood memes is based on this. It feels like there’s an overwhelming pressure to succeed in every aspect of your life. Being one of the first generations of women to be told that we can be anything when we grow up can make it feel like we have to be everything or risk letting everyone down.

This doesn’t undermine the very scary and infantilising message which girlhood memes perpetuate. The worst of it is there isn’t anyone to blame but ourselves. It is almost exclusively women posting this content, engaging with it, and absorbing it. Why are we putting ourselves down in this way? Laughing along with girl(s can’t do) math and girl(s don’t eat) dinner?

There’s an echo chamber being created around women with this specific brand of humour. Is it not another form of self-imposed othering? Ursula Le Guin, 50-odd years ago, wrote about the concept of the “divine feminine”: “I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know […] All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinity idea of women as primitive and inferior […] Why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up?”

And why should we stay as ‘just girls’ while the rest of our peers are turning into men?