Girlhood, Interrupted
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.”
“Mom brought me into the world / Sister taught me how to girl / Best friend coached me how to text / The boy toy that I'm dating next / Girls who helped show me the way / They're why I'm an It girl today”
For the past couple of years, my TikTok For You Page has looked something like this: This is girlhood. How I love being a woman. Hot girl summer. Hot girl walks. Hot girl shit. Girl math. Girl dinner. Clean girl aesthetic. Strawberry girl. Tomato girl. The year of the girl. Buckle up girliepops. You’re not a girl’s girl. You are a girl’s girl, and you’re slaying. Barbie invented feminism. Barbie destroyed feminism. I need more Barbie merchandise. I need a BBL. I need a boob job. I need filler. I need botox. You need filler, and botox, and a face lift, and here’s a plastic surgeon to explain why. I’m hot. I’m not hot enough. You’re hot. That’s hot. This is girlhood.
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Also during the past couple of years, we’ve been watching 21st century feminism move away from the liberal feminist optimism of the late 2000s and 2010s; the kind of feminism championed by women who campaigned for Hillary Clinton to be president, the kind of women who marched in pink hats in 2017 following Trump’s election. I think this species of liberal feminism died two deaths: first, it died when Clinton lost the election to a notorious misogynist, and the final nail in its coffin was in June 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, one of the most important decisions for feminists in the 20th century.
Coinciding with these massive political moments were a number of smaller, but still influential, cultural ones: ‘Bimbo Feminism’ gained traction on TikTok, popularised by creators like Chrissy Chlapecka and Nikita Dumptruck, who claimed to be empowering and educating their audiences while reminding them that above all, they have the right to be hot.
‘Hot Girl Summer’ by Megan Thee Stallion inspired women to begin prefacing their every mundane action with a ‘hot girl’ modifier: for example, there is now an international Hot Girl Walking club, born from countless women taking hot girl walks for their mental health during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Eventually, ‘hot’ was dropped, and ‘girl’ became a modifier all on its own: girl math (because women be shopping and lying to themselves about their spending habits) and girl dinner (because girls prefer to eat like birds, grazing on nibbles, rather than enjoy full meals) were major examples that took TikTok by storm in 2022 and 2023.
At the same time, the early 2000s were coming back and bringing their Y2K aesthetic with them. For many millennials who had actually lived through this decade, the nostalgia was a double-edged sword: reliving your youth and rediscovering trends you might not have been able to fully enjoy at the time can be fun, but they’re also trying to bring back low-rise jeans and the associated eating disorders one must adopt in order to acquire the type of body that can confidently wear low-rise jeans without fielding mountains of verbal abuse about your hideous body shape.
Amidst all of this, Greta Gerwig’s highly anticipated Barbie movie was released in the summer of 2023. Unsurprisingly, it quickly took the world by storm thanks to its stellar cast, memorable soundtrack, and iconic production and costume design; for many, however, the highlight was the movie’s central message, delivered to the audience through America Ferrera’s Gloria’s speech to Margot Robbie’s Barbie.
Like anything even tangentially related to feminism, this monologue inspired discourse: it was described as revolutionary and groundbreaking, it was derided as shallow and insufficient, catering to an imagined audience who have had zero exposure to feminism rather than thoroughly addressing, and perhaps critiquing, our current cultural moment. The way many chose to engage with the movie did make sense for our current cultural moment, however: Mattel being Mattel pumped out endless amounts of Barbie movie merchandise, which fans happily stocked up on while producing Barbie makeup tutorials and Barbie-inspired costumes of their own. If summer 2023 had to be assigned a colour, it would be pink.
The videos about girlhood went into overdrive on TikTok: you couldn’t scroll for two minutes without encountering a video using a sound from Netflix’s Anne with an E in which a character cries, “How I love being a woman!” before Hozier’s “Would That I” kicks in. Bows were everywhere, thanks in part to singer Gracie Abrams and her fandom adopting them as a symbol. Friendship bracelets were everywhere, thanks to Taylor Swift fans adopting the practice of exchanging them with one another at her Eras Tour shows. Women of all ages were reverting to a simpler, more childlike expression of girlhood, and Barbie and its feminism-101 level message inadvertently encapsulated the current moment in its effort to balance radical politics with a message Mattel would approve of.
Perfectly summarising in The Cut the Year of the Girl that was, Isabel Cristo wrote, “Instead of politics, can I interest you in some blissful, childlike ignorance? In Vanity Fair, the writer Delia Cai asks, “Is it reactionary or radical … to don the pink dress and beribbon ourselves in spite of what we know?” The answer is: Neither, and that’s exactly the point. Finding an answer to that question is the purview of womanhood. Girlhood, instead, is an opting out of the whole calculation, a low-risk way to participate in mass cultural femininity.”
For TikTok users uninterested in Y2K bimbo Barbie pink feminism, there was an alternative offered by creators like Nara Smith, a Mormon TikToker and model married to former Tumblr heartthrob Lucky Blue Smith, and best known for videos in which she makes entire meals from scratch. Smith’s videos portray an idealised form of early womanhood - she is 22 - that many have criticised for veering too close to tradwife content (with others in turn critiquing those critiques), with all its associated right-wing undertones; the fact that she’s Mormon, and Mormonism is known for conservative values, large families, and encouraging adherents to promote Mormonism however they can, is a major driving factor behind the critiques. Circling the wagons around their favourite influencer, the majority of TikTok comments and videos appear supportive, and supporters condemn critics for their racism, sexism and jealousy - you’re just jealous that she has enough free time and childcare support to spend all day every day making elaborate meals from scratch, and jealousy isn’t very feminist of you.
There were some moments of respite from both of these strains of feminism - Paris Paloma’s “labour” and numerous viral videos about female rage helped women articulate and express their frustrations with the patriarchy and society through Paloma’s powerful lyrics or through montages of women in cinema screaming their lungs out. For the most part, this rage was directed towards men, or the patriarchy, or society at large; to point the finger and criticise other women would be unfeminist, and would mean you were not a girl’s girl.
As we learned this week, this solidarity does not extend to trans women. Dylan Mulvaney, a TikToker famous for her ‘Days of Girlhood’ video series in which she documented her transition, as well as the torrents of abuse she received from conservatives after she was featured in a beer campaign, released her first single entitled, fittingly, “Days of Girlhood”, referring to the TikTok series that made her famous.
The song isn’t necessarily my taste, although it’s grown on me enough now that I can definitely see myself drunkenly dancing to it at a party, but some of the lyrics managed to incense an entire subset of TikTok users - who up until this point had little interest in modern feminism - to the point that they came out in droves to condemn Dylan for, amongst other things, not having earned the right to sing about girlhood; as one TikToker put it, “Hasn’t she only been a woman for like 3 years?”
Despite her popularity - Mulvaney has 10 million followers on TikTok - Dylan suddenly found herself receiving a tonne of backlash once again, not from conservative transphobes this time, but other women who, like herself, claimed to care about misogyny. A quick look at the profiles of several of the most popular videos critical of Dylan shows that the majority of them come from conservative women who primarily post about Christianity, conservative politics, or ‘wokeness’ when they aren’t getting triggered by pop songs - hardly the feminist vanguard, and certainly not the people anyone should be looking to when it comes to critiques of supposed misogyny.
Unfortunately, radical feminist rhetoric has been subtly influencing discourse on TikTok for a while now, appealing to anyone frustrated by the lack of options available to them. Liberal feminism is dead, bimbo feminism is alienating, and the tradwife lifestyle seems feminist only in that the women involved claim to be participating of their own free will - where can young women who don’t feel represented by these options turn to? Radfems have identified this vulnerability and swooped in, and there’s no one they love to criticise more than well-known trans women like Dylan Mulvaney.
It’s radfems who have influenced groups of young women to exclusively define womanhood (and girlhood) through the lens of suffering: Dylan cannot write or sing or speak about girlhood because she’s never had a period, or given birth, or dealt with period pain or endometriosis, and this kind of bodily suffering is what defines our lives as women. (For their purposes, women who don’t menstruate or haven’t given birth or don’t experience period pain do not exist.) If it’s not bodily pain, then it’s emotional: the pain caused by loving sexist men, the pain caused by heartbreak when those men inevitably disappoint you. (For their purposes, women who do not date men do not exist.)
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There’s a fixation on universalising womanhood that radfems engage in and that younger women inexperienced in identifying transphobic dogwhistles will happily swallow and regurgitate as if they were their own original thoughts. Even the less insidious but even more pervasive girlhood memes engage in this kind of universalisation - girlhood is almost always hyper feminine, white, thin, and able-bodied. Because everyone around them is universalising girlhood and they are too, they assume Dylan is doing the same, despite logic suggesting that the title “Days of Girlhood” refers to her TikTok series and not the concept of girlhood as a whole. Out of all these women, Dylan is the only one not universalising her experience, but rather singing about her particular experience as a trans woman.
As someone who remains an afterthought whenever girlhood is discussed, whether it’s due to my weight, my disability, my sexuality, or my Larry David-style crabbiness where I should be coquettish and coy, the only kind of content described above that doesn’t leave me feeling completely alienated is Dylan’s. She isn’t trying to represent all women, but instead give all women a glimpse into her life and an understanding of her experiences; at no point does she say that in order to be a woman, your life must mirror hers exactly.
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But that’s what her critics are doing, over and over and over again - if you haven’t suffered in the precise way I’ve suffered, then you know nothing of suffering and thus nothing about being a woman. It’s reductive, it’s transphobic, and it’s boring. Girls just wanna have fun unless it’s a trans woman having fun, in which case she’s insulting all of the women who aren’t having fun at this very moment. It’s a hot girl summer unless you’re a trans girl, because you don’t know what it’s like to have a period when it’s 35 degrees out and you can’t go swimming, and that is the defining experience of girlhood for some reason. How I love being a woman unless I have to imagine myself in another woman’s shoes for five seconds.
Like the Bud Light backlash, this recent backlash against Dylan is driven by similar forces - transphobic conservatives - who’ve since learned from their mistakes and learned enough to couch their complaints in the language of feminism in order to appeal to younger audiences who haven’t learned how to identify things like ragebait and crypto-TERF rhetoric and are more easily taken in and potentially radicalised by their videos.
For my part, I would love to see this attempt to find a universally-applicable encapsulation of girlhood and womanhood abandoned; there simply is no one way to define the experiences of all 3.95 billion women on the planet, and we need to resist the social media-driven urge to simplify and flatten everyone’s experiences in order to please the whims of the algorithm. It would undoubtedly be easier to advocate for women’s rights if we all had the exact same political and personal concerns, but we don’t. Much like these women can’t relate to Dylan’s weekly routine (“Monday: can’t get out of bed, Tuesday morning: pick up meds, Wednesday: retail therapy”), I can’t relate to the experiences of a hateful conservative woman living in the deep South who’s decided that embracing sexist ideology is the best way to move through life without incurring the ire of the misogynistic men around her.
What I can do is practice empathy; try and find some common ground or common concerns, and imagine myself in their shoes: how would I feel if all I’d known was a deeply conservative and traditional Christian culture that told me my only value came from being a vessel for human life? Once you start empathising with others, it’s hard to stop, but you have to want to start. Once you do, you’ll realise women have more in common than not, regardless of our other identities.
Gloria’s monologue in Barbie was basic, but she wasn’t entirely wrong: almost every woman has felt, at one time or another, that it’s impossible for them to be a woman successfully, to be a woman the way society or our families or our partners or our friends want us to. By remembering this, and using empathy as a starting point, it’s easy to find common ground with even the strangest of bedfellows, but you have to want to try.
Shout out Matilda Eklund for the title - if you enjoyed this newsletter, you read her own piece on girlhood here.