“Girl” Trends and the Repackaging of Womanhood

“What kind of insufferable girl are you?” my TikTok algorithm asked me the other day. The options were “femcel,” as in someone who’s pathologically unlovable because she’s a radical feminist; “coquette,” as in, someone who wears bows and listens to Lana Del Rey, or “blogger,” as in me. The original video appears to have been deleted (too insufferable, perhaps), but it stayed with me not because it was particularly insightful or laden with meaning but because it offered yet another “girl” on the internet for me to be, and maybe the only accurate one.

It’s the summer — or the year, or maybe the decade — of mostly made-up microtrends involving the word “girl.” People on TikTok and everywhere else on the internet are talking about their “girl dinners,” which amount to thrown-together plates of whatever happens to be in the fridge. They’re going on “hot girl walks” (a.k.a. walks). They’re having “feral girl summers.” They attempt to determine via viral Pinterest mood boards whether they’re “strawberry girls” or “cherry girls” or “vanilla girls” or “tomato girls” or “coconut girls” or “coastal cowgirls” or “rat girls” or “downtown girls” or “okokok girls” or “lalala girls” (don’t worry about those last two, it was part of a TikTok thing that lasted approximately five minutes). They girlboss and do girl math with their gorgeous gorgeous girlies during hot girl summer. They buy viral pink paste and powdered greens in efforts to become “clean girls” or “That Girls,” and when they fail, they become, evidently, “insufferable girls.”

Reading them all in a row, you’d be forgiven for thinking these terms are at best silly and meaningless, and at worst obnoxious and insidious. For one, a solid percentage (if not most) of the people participating in and discussing “girl” trends are women, which therefore makes it feel slightly infantilizing and icky and like, why should 30-year-olds care what type of “girl” they are? Shouldn’t we have figured ourselves out by now? You could make the argument that pathologizing the things women and girls do smells a bit too strongly of gender essentialism; you could say that labeling normal human behavior as “girl-coded” only otherizes women in an already patriarchal world. But I would argue that both miss the point, because these supposed “girl trends” aren’t really trends at all. They’re marketing campaigns.

There’s an SNL sketch from a million years ago that illustrates this phenomenon, in which the local news invents a harmful teen trend designed to frighten parents. “They call it ‘souping,’” Bill Hader-as-news-anchor tells the camera. “Teenagers are drinking expired soup cans to get high! Every teenager is doing it, and it will kill them.” (Emma Stone, who plays the teen, says, “There’s no way teenagers are doing that”; the news anchor then invents a new moral panic around teenagers called “trampolining.”) The gist is that there is something deeply wrong with Today’s Teens, something unknowable and sinister that the current generation of adults never would have imagined being part of, and if it isn’t “souping,” then surely it’s something else. To figure out what, you’ll just have to keep watching.

This is sort of what all trend journalism feels like to me these days. A single video goes viral, some people start talking about it, the media picks it up, and suddenly it’s used as fodder for the kind of lowest-common-denominator broadcast news segments where old people marvel about how foreign young people have become — and it’s not a coincidence that it’s almost always young women they’re referring to here — even though the thing they’re talking about isn’t even really happening on a scale that’s by any measure newsworthy. The result is a discourse that ends up basically amounting to “girls = wrong and/or stupid,” even when, half the time, the original video was made for people who already knew it was kind of stupid, or meant to be a joke.

Take “girl dinner,” for instance, which caused outsize controversy because it combined the concept of womanhood with eating. In May, a 28-year-old showrunner’s assistant named Olivia Maher posted a video of her dinner, a medieval peasant-inspired plate of bread, cheese, pickles, wine, and grapes that she dubbed “girl dinner.” On the term, she told the New York Times that “it feels like such a girl dinner because we do it when our boyfriends aren’t around and we don’t have to have what’s a ‘typical dinner.’” But like everything that goes viral, once it became national news, it seemed as though this was a thing young women were doing en masse, as though putting together a plate of leftovers was a novel idea that could therefore be designated as an eating disorder or otherwise problematized.

“Girl dinner” is kind of over now. The fact that I’m writing about in August it is, to use a different made-up trend from two years ago, “cheugy,” or late to the proverbial party. Soon, however, there will be another social media trend for girls, because “girls” sells.

by Rebecca Jennings, Vox | Read more:
Image: Alana Laverty, Girl Dinner via: