Girl, Stop: Let’s End the Tyranny of 2023’s ‘Girl’ Trends

Girls, I think, existed before the internet. Louisa May Alcott called them “Little Women,” and 18th-century painters depicted them as elderly children. The ’80s had the geriatric Golden Girls, and the ’90s had the 20-year-old Spice Girls, which is to say: Some of our most famous girls were never girls at all. These were women who decided—with all their adult knowledge—to revisit the camaraderie of girlhood. Because a girl is never a woman, but a woman can, of course, be both. And over the past 12 months, it feels like a similar sense of yearning has permeated culture. There was the resurgence of Barbie as a popular protagonist; there were Taylor Swift friendship bracelets; there was a Sofia Coppola film; and there was the rise of Sandy Liang and all her bow-festooned designs, dovetailing with a mainstreaming of school shoes and the omnipresence of TikTok’s girl trends.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of those trends: Vanilla Girls and Rat Girls, Girl Math and Girl Dinners, Tomato Girl Summers and Babygirls, Lalala Girls and OKOKOK Girls. There were Coconut Girls and Hot Girl Walks, Lazy Girls and Coquette Girls, Sad Autumn Girls and Snail Girls, Blueberry Girls and Pickled Red Onion Girls. The trends themselves were unremarkable—going on walks with friends, eating tomatoes in Europe, barhopping like an excitable rodent—but the added suffix of girl gave these innocuous, hyperspecific experiences a sense of outsized import. The phrase “I’m such a chair” does not make sense, but “I’m such a chair girl” feels like a genuine assertion of someone’s lifestyle. Much like 2021’s -core, girl is a rubric to transform life into digital content, a hashtag for anyone to participate in. It helps too that The Girl is one of culture’s most consumable, ubiquitous archetypes.

All this reached a psychic break when people started tying pale pink ribbons around inanimate objects—croissants, cacti, bottles of kombucha—on TikTok. It was fun, and it was guileless—because girls are fun and guileless, right?—and it meant that all of us—even old, cisgender men—could momentarily access the sweet naivety of a shared girlhood. It’s kind of neat: To be a lighthearted schoolgirl in a serious world is to pirouette when you’ve been told to push your shoulders back and stand up straight. Yes, women can have it all, but it’s the girls who have the freedom to make childish decisions, like eating a plate of olives and crisps as a meal. Millennials know this—that “adulting sucks”—but when so many of the traditional mantles of adulthood are systematically delayed and denied (like buying a one-bedroom flat within an hour’s commuting distance to the workplace), it can be tempting to stick your fingers in your ears and retreat into to the Malibu Beach House in your mind.

And yet what might have started out as a tongue-in-cheek reclamation of the most obvious feminine clichés—deploying Paris “Do they sell walls at Walmart?” Hilton’s pseudo-bimboism—has, for some, ended up buttressing the precise stereotypes they aim to send up. Girls are too delicate to stomach a substantial meal; girls don’t have the logic to do math; girls are just lickle babies that need constant reassurance. This isn’t the problem—the people making these TikTok videos know that it’s all a bit dumb, it is literally a meme. The problem is that The Girl has become insufferable through constant repetition, used as marketing slogans and low-hanging Instagram captions and clickbait headlines. Girls just wanted to have fun, but girls have also become successful, if not meaningless, viral commodities. See: Tube Girl, Subway Girl, and Hailey Bieber coining the term Strawberry Girl Summer to coincide with the launch of Rhode’s Strawberry Glaze Lip Peptide Treatment in August.

“In a near and predictable future, all of the surplus value of the capitalist regime will be produced by young girls,” a French collective of authors and activists known as Tiqqun wrote in 1999. “Every young girl is an automatic, standard con­verter of existence into market value.” Of course, the urge to label ourselves has always been a part of online culture, be it through star signs or aesthetic -cores—niche categories that provide us a sense of belonging. But The Girl works in the opposite direction. It is an abstraction, specific enough for anyone to relate to (anyone eaten a random assortment of things for dinner before?) and broad enough to accommodate vast swathes of people. As someone who has written this, this, and this and therefore contributed to the oversaturation of the word girl on the internet, I would like culture to experience life through a new lens in 2024. And so my New Year’s resolution is therefore both an external and internal plea: Girl, stop!

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