The previous thumbnail was a Britney Spears reference. Guess 🤫🎀🎤Make sure to go to: yourparade.com/SHAN-BF and use my code SHAN-BF for 50% off sitewide! (does not apply to Betsey Johnson collection)
I have a question what do you mean you are a disgrace to academia daily? What do you mean by academia who is academia? I know what the clothing aesthetic is but not what you’re talking about.
I thought that we all knew that they were joking? I know that I'd laugh believing this to be the case. Unless it's a conservative woman that's trying to get laughs to distract people from her actual agenda or something.
my main problem with the whole trend is that “just a girl” has become associated with incompetence, subjugation, and unintelligence. so YES, it is misogynistic.
It's not.. the entire point of it was it being a response to men saying 'boys will be boys'. Y'all will literally do anythingggg to fuck up something girls do in retaliation to MEN being weird.
Plus, the entire song was about how annoying it was to be infantilized as a GROWN ASS WOMAN solely because you're a woman. Nobody's getting that point omggg
I think of that text exchange someone had with their dad where they said "I'm just a girl" and he responded "I don't know what that means but it sounds like it minimizes you as a person."
People making the “Just a Girl” song the anthem of this ~movement~ reminds me SO MUCH of red-pilled men using “American Psycho” as inspiration… like babes the play is about you…
@xhypiseepyx yep. If I remember correctly, just for the line "I was born in a messed up century". I would love to see their reaction, if they would ever see the MV
@fallenangel6419 how do conservatives lack media literacy this badly (literally one of the next lyrics is "my daddy put a gun to my head, said if you kiss a boy im gonna shoot you dead so i tied him up with gaffa tape and locked him in a shed then i went out to the garden and i fucked my best friend" what about that screams conservative values 😭😭)
the fact that the part of the "just a girl" song that always gets cut out goes "i'm just a girl in the world, that's all that you'll let me be" has always irritated me bc the whole point of the song is quite literally RIGHT THERE and everyone is ignoring it
Like people saying 'the customer is always right' and forgetting 'in matters of taste'. Or 'blood is thicker than water' and forgetting that it's 'the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb'
Yes! It is weird how something like "girl dinner" starts being like lol' meme and then it's like the gates come blasting off and we are just tee-hee-ing hyper infantilization.
Belle Delphine popularized the e-girl aesthetic based on her DDLG fetishism. Other women copied her, hoping for the same amount of financial success, bringing to the mainstream.. dressing up like underage girls.
It reaches critical mass and goes nuclear. And almost inevitably hurts all the same underprivileged folks that all the other hate groups love to hunt down.
No matter how sanitized and sweet it seems, I dont think anyone can deny that this culture of female infantilization was part of the general cultural shift rightward we're seeing! How long can someone joke about being inferior before we have to acknoweledge that they might actually have an inferiority complex?
Honestly. I feel like it started fine with "i love being like other girls/its okay to be girly, actually, I don't have ti prove myself by being against those things if I don't eant to" to a subset if the tradwife pipeline
Something I've noticed about this trend is how very class specific and race specific it is. A lot of "girlhood" is specifically the experience of upper middle-class white girls. As a poor muslim girl, it has been very strange to see all of these experiences touted as universal that I completely missed out on due to my family's religion and income.
It's got me wondering though, is there a universal "girl" experience that would transcend race or class? I mean an experience that's worth celebrating, not one that's centered around shared trauma.
I saw a tiktok explaining how conservative politics will use irony to actually infiltrate spaces. Like people "ironically" uphold these speeches just to be "quirky" and as a joke... until it isn't anymore. I didn't quite understand it when I first watched it, but now, after this video, I can see very clearly how that's exactly what happened to the "I'm just a girl" trend.
same deal with "the feminine urge" tbh. it started out as jokes like "the feminine urge to dig a hole in the woods" and pretty quickly turned into people posting stuff like "the feminine urge to be a stay-at-home mom and clean the house 🙏" or "the feminine urge to quit my job and make my man the breadwinner" like... if those are your urges that's cool, please don't essentialize femininity as being a tradwife tho?
similar thing applies to the “reject modernity embrace tradition” catchphrase. and if you point this out people will get REALLY riled up and defend that its all just a joke. but like, words still mean things-especially ones as loaded as “modernity” and “tradition”. it applies to so much more than just saying how better you think taco bell’s interior design was in the 90s or whatever. as you said, it’s a joke until it isn’t. disguising conservative messages as a harmless joke is an effective defense mechanism of these being called into question. “god can you believe the woke is calling this silly meme a tool for pushing conservative beliefs? what happened to being able to tell JOKES?” same song and dance every single time.
actually, i have a psycholinguistic answer for you for why this happens! conservatives actually have a harder time understanding irony than less conservative individuals, especially if that ironic statement comes from a person of color or a person with an accent. so it’s far more likely that conservatives saw these “im just a girl” jokes about eating a popsicle for dinner and just took it way too seriously, and instead of a joke it becomes just an actual representation of women instead. it’s a really interesting paper- let me know if you want more info about it!
The problem with 'girlbosses' was NEVER that 'women were laying aside their femininity and acting like men', the problem was that it endorsed the concept that women making money is all that was necessary for liberation from patriarchy. I fully endorse women being financially independent and advancing in business, AND that should be paired with social activism and voting and organizing for feminist causes.
and it didn't do anything to dispel the either/or dichotomy where women can give their lives and energy to their families, or to their careers, but NEVER to themselves. I think it's also super important that we don't forget, even while we acknowledge that participating in the economy as autonomous individuals if we choose to is obviously good, capitalism fucking blows and is trying to disenfranchise and dehumanize all of us.
@@K.C-2049 Exactly. It was never focused on the women as human beings with enriched inner lives but instead as tools to be used in the service of capitalistic structures. The "girlboss" is not a person, but a means of exploitation packaged back to appeal to women.
I agree, this is so real. The criticism of women "acting like men" is so stupid because what is acting like a man??? The issue was the capitalistic hijacking of financial independence, instead of encouraging ambition and drive the "girlboss" in our capitalist context is one who serves capitalism first, women later. Capitalism first, anti patriarchal activism later. That was the issue.
@@roseyoung44 the capitalist context in which she exists allows only that she focuses and cares for capitalism first rather than who she claims to be for, i think the "girlboss" archetype speaks to women's want for independence and success because of human ambition and i agree and resonate with it but the issue is cuz it serves capitalism exclusively, it doesnt tackle the patriarchal challenges that make it so that women cant let their drive and ambition power them the way men can
ironic thing about the "i'm just a girl" song going viral is the fact that people seemingly don't understand its deeper political meaning and now it's being used to aestheticize the stereotypes that the song originally satirized
This happens a lot w tik tok sounds. Ppl will clip a song, remove all its context and use it for a trends that has the opposite meaning of the original song. It's very frustrating sometimes
OMG I KNOW i actually love the song but like the line is literally "im just a girl living in captivity" LIKE HOW DO YOU JUST TAKE "im just a girll tee hee✨️✨️✨️"
This has been pissing me off for a year now. I am very feminine presenting. I have very stereotypically feminine strengths and interests. But I feel like I cannot get behind what this “girl movement” stands for because i feel it somehow tears women down instead of lifting them up by framing starving yourself or crashing cars or being bad at math as a part of the universal feminine experience
FELT! I'm a very feminine woman, like a Disney Princess brought to life, but I don't want to tear others down, or to spout bioessentialist bullshit. I want to find like-minded people, but others who likes the same thing as me tend to fall down that rabbit hole.
@@liliana.6053But the problem, as Shanspeare stated repeatedly, is that they were hardly *actually* actually criticising it. A lot of the viral videos, and indeed every one of the videos I saw, only played into the stereotypes, but offered no alternatives or room for critical thinking
@ScrubLordKyle ironic memes don't need to have a person turning to the camera to explain the lesson we learned from the episode. It's actually pretty infantilizing to ask for memes to pander to people with the media analysis skills of paramecia.
@@liliana.6053 One woman making a joke once is fine. A whole bunch of women making that joke a whole bunch of times suggests the possibility at least one of them isn't joking.
Finding out ppl weren't embracing "I'm just a girl" "girl math" "girl dinner" as like. Post ironic absurd shit that was meant to jokingly justify things like idk eating cereal and charcuterie for dinner and instead being deadass in perpetuating the same ol infantalization and misogyny that's always been there was so frustrating. I think of how Chrissy Chlapecka + the ironic bimbo movement had, at its core, came from indulging in drag style displays of hyperfemininity while subverting the idea that it came alongside being unintelligent or ditzy, and then we had ppl like that one girl trying to explain geopolitical issues in "girl terms" like comparing settler colonialism to being ousted from the sleepover friend group even though they were besties first like??? You were supposed to destroy the sith not join them etc etc
Okay but like, I've never seen any part of that, I'm seriously having doubts about how much of a thing it really is. A few tiktok videos by some people trying to capitalize on some outrage should be hardly considered a movement.
@@liliana.6053 from what ive seen, it was pretty big. the audio of the "im just a girl" line was probably used in 10k+ videos and i kept seeing the line pretty often on different platforms, even heard my friends say it irl
@@asterrrriaaaaaa6926 right like I thought we were saying "I'm just a girl" for stupid lighthearted stuff not for overconsumption or reinforcing gender roles
I hate the “I’m just a girl” trend, being used as “Oh i’m just a dainty little woman, I can’t do big ‘man’ stuff”. My sister told me one of her co workers got one of her tasks wrong and when my sister tried explaining it to her she just went “I’m just a girl!”. Like? The whole point of the song is to call out the misogyny. Now people are playing into it
Women have some respect for yourself, you think the guys you work with are smarter than you? Gurl noooooo. They're just more confident and they're louder.
i’m 4 minutes in and i hope this video mentions that insane “gaza explained 4 the girlies!” tiktok that made me immediately drop any and all cutesyfying “im just a girl” type phrases from my vocab because i realized some people were NOT using it the way i was. lmfao
the whole "I'm just a girl" started as a harmless little trend, but it's slowly becoming the new "boys will be boys," with people using it to escape accountability. it's really sad to see tbh, especially since women did have to do a LOT of work to escape the stereotypes that this phrase is bringing back.
@@byDEVITA absolutely crazy take for someone with an Asian women as their pfp, both groups having tons of negative stereotypes against them. Would love you to elaborate on this some.
I'm 45. When No Doubt released "I'm Just A Girl" it soooo spoke to teenage me & my life. My brother, who is only 10 months older than me, was allowed to go out to events, parties, etc., while I had to stay home because "it's different for girls." 🙄 I called it house arrest; I was sentenced for the crime of being born female. To this day my bro doesn't have as close relationship / attachment to my parents as I do because he was frequently gone & barely visits now.
I like how you write about your experience. maybe you should do a short memoir in your free time if you have any to spare. even if it's just for yourself
I'm an autistic woman who has had to deal with consistent ableism in the form of infantilization. This "I'm just a girl 🥺" stuff has always felt gross to me, even though pink is my favorite color and I love cute things and anime. As recently as a few months ago, I've been placed into situations where I had to beg others to view me as a real adult with a valid and fully developed perspective. I work, live independently, have a college degree, and drive, but plenty of NT people refuse to see me as anything other than an overgrown, petulant toddler. Last time this happened, I went home and cried for a long time. I personally can't comprehend why any adult would want to be seen as "just a girl", being treated like a little girl when you're clearly not is degrading and humiliating.
Autistic young adult here to report! I participate in this weird expression due to lack of self-esteem and positive social feedback! I'm dumb, i've always been dumb and that will never change, when mixed with perfectionism it becomes another level of hell. So joking about it becomes easier on my psyche as i join in on the jokes, keep the good mood and i get to accept my shortcomings as something that doesn't make me unworthy. I don't fail at being an adult yet, because "i'm just a girl", in a big world, being silly, just learning, and it's ok to be so. I still make this type of jokes with people that genuinely love me though, i doubt i'd let myself get bullied for it.
I get the feeling that some people want to be excused from the consequences of their actions. I kinda get it? Especially as some pressure can feel unfair, either as a student or if you're working. What I don't appreciate is using harmful stereotypes to do that. It's already hard enough for girls and women to be taken seriously. Asking people to make allowances for you based off destructive prejudices is icky.
The problem is that online, the ones popularizing the “just a girl 💅” trend are not actually bragging about being “dumb”…. They’re bragging about being rich and pretty. They’re not actually limited or unable to take basic care of themselves or support themselves, they just don’t have to. It’s basic mean girl behavior.
I just turned 38, growing old is a privilege I will not have, I have stage 4 breast cancer. Please ladies value your age. I always thought I'd be able to grow gray hair and wrinkles but I won't and I'm very sad about that
THANK YOU! As a woman who's also a mathematician (I do math research and have a math degree and some physics background) I have always hated trends like "girl math" and others of the sort. It just re-enforces stereotypes about women's potential in intellectual communities that so many of us work hard every single day to dismantle. I have to work so hard just to be taken as seriously as a man in the math community. I've had students I'm tutoring in math refuse to refer to me as a woman or refuse my help at my job for math, classmates laugh at me on the first day of my advanced math courses, I've had professors dismiss proofs that were 100% correct because they hadn't thought of the method themselves so there's "no way I could have thought of it on my own", and I've sat through many advanced math and physics courses where I'm the only woman. All of this because people assume that I'm less capable in the field, for being a woman. That's why I hate the "girl math meme" so much. It's not funny to ironically embrace the stereotype of "te-he I'm just a girl so I can't do basic math when shopping. How cute and quirky!" It's frustrating and just makes the lives of those of us who have to experience the consequences of these stereotypes every single day much more difficult. I just want to be taken seriously in the field I love with all my heart. I don't want to see people embracing and making a meme out of the stereotypes I have to deal with in said field every single day.
Electrical Engineer here and I can second that. I got excluded so often during class stuff or put on a spot because I was the only girl so it was up to me to profe that girls can actually do something or hold a certain oppionion. Like, always the token "girl" and everything I did was put on a silver platter the be examined. And I spent years pushing through just to work in a company with a boss that proudly declared that "engineering isn't really a woman thing so I don't think it would be professional to have a female speaker at our event". I was right there... And not just him, not even just the men, also the woman in other departments. I can't ecen count how often I have been asked to get a second oppinion by a man or just right out ignored because people believe I can't do my job, simply because I'm a woman. I had to find a male coworker willing to present some of my ideas at work, simply because people don't listen to me.
im super super bad at math (im pretty sure i have dyscalculia) and im biologically a woman, but i dont really identify with that. so as u can imagine its a weird feeling having my lacking math abilities being associated with femininity. id rather people just said they were stupid and didnt link it to biology.
The funniest thing about the girl math trend is that some things it depicts as female trait, such as feeling like you are spending less money when you pay with coins, are actually universal experiences that I noticed also my boyfriend and male friends relate to, it is probably a normal psychological bias in how we percieve different kinds of objects and paying methods.
@@rejectfalseiconssame here I’m AFAB and cis for the most part. The part where I said “refuse to refer to me as a woman” happened during the pandemic. I was starting college and was taking my first classes online. For one of my math courses we had a discord server and I would often help people my tutoring them and answering their questions. One day someone asked a question, and someone else in the server suggested the person ask me. The person who suggested this referred to me as “he”, to which I thought no big deal I’ll just correct them. While I thought it was pretty obvious I was a woman, I have a feminine name, when I talk I have a very feminine voice, my pronouns listed in my discord profile were she/her, but sometimes people make mistakes. When I told them “hey actually I’m a woman not a man” they took it as a joke. They kept denying it because I had been helping them in math. They didn’t want to believe that all this time a girl was helping them understand calc 3. It was just so unbelievable to them. It got to the point where I even sent a picture of my face to prove to them that I wasn’t a guy and they just laughed it off and claimed that I must have found a photo online. It was frustrating and humiliating to deal with. I really love helping others learn and enjoy math, but when people can’t even treat me with basic respect because their fragile ego prevents them from accepting help from me because I’m a woman, it can be frustrating. Also I completely agree, the girl math trend didn’t need to be gendered. They could have made the joke without relating it to women.
@@laurazanetti8267yeah when the joke is made outside of any gendered context it can be funny. For example people in the crochet and Pokémon communities have picked up the joke to poke fun at how a lot of us in those communities justify excessive spending. Stuff like that’s perfectly fine and can be funny , I just hate how people felt the need to associate it with “girl hood”, I don’t really see the humor in that version. The concept of the joke isn’t the issue it’s the fact that they made it a “girl thing” when literally almost everyone does those things at some point
'It's girl wound care', I say, plastering it over with a Limited Edition Apocalypse Barbie glitter bandaid (the glitter gets in the wound, but it's so cute)
I think in personal contexts "I'm just a girl" has the capacity to be ironic a la "god forbid women do anything", and even critical, but it has to be built on the foundation of mutual understanding of a woman's agency, responsibility, and capability. And we simply must admit that that context doesn't exist in public forums as a whole right now.
As a black woman who loves hyperfeminine aesthetics while not actually wanting to participate in them, it feels like I'm on a pendulum whenever people talk about embracing and cherishing femininity online. I completely get it when I see examples of society denying black women and girls femininity or protection that white women and girls are mostly used to; and the way society undervalues feminine aesthetics while praising masculine aesthetics instead. But then I'll see people unironically claim Princess Peach furrowing her eyebrows on a video game cover or Rapunzel getting her hair cut short in Tangled is dismissing femininity and bad feminism and then I stop getting it. Rinse and repeat.
Real on the last one, im sick and tired of seeing people go, oh a woman is mad or doing something "masculine", shes acting like a man! Like what even is acting like a man....also the misogyny reinforced when someone goes oh you made a female character not "feminine" enough, thus shes a bad character and youre dimissing femininity, its so stupid because thats reinforcing misogynistic standards on women's behaviours and also women's humanity. Can women be free??? Im sick and tired of hearing from "tradfems" who claim every female character whos not the feminine ideal, is "dismissing femininity" and "is not empowering" because all theyre doing is placing women in a patriarchal box that cant be escaped.
You already mentioned it briefly but I want to elaborate: girlhood trends also exclude based on physical and mental disorders and disabilities.* Disability rights and mad pride activists have often noted how disabled people are degendered by society. Not strong or mentally stable enough to easily access masculinity, not aesthetically pleasing or socially skilled enough to easily access femininity, etc. The social media faces of girlhood pretty much always able in body and mind. I’m going to get a bit weirder with it. I think that social exclusion in general tends to promote disconnections from gender. I sometimes wonder if I might not have identified as nonbinary if I was not autistic. I didn’t get the chance to socially perform as a girl or woman as a child. I couldn’t grasp the social norms which would make me feminine, or participate in girlhood with my childhood classmates. I didn’t get to reinforce being a girl through my peers, nor was I able to connect with the boys as a substitute. I was a girl on paper, and I accepted the definition, but I was more of a girl-adjacent... thing, in practice. Visually feminine enough to not receive any criticisms, but socially some sort of nebulous mass of discomfort. When lockdown came when I was in high school, I lost any reason to perform gender at all, and that was what allowed me to realize I was nonbinary. It was all hollow obligations. The walls were already beginning to crack, I would have given up on being a girl/woman eventually, but COVID definitely sped things along- something I’ve heard other trans and genderqueer people say about their experiences, too. Being a girl/woman was just one more pointless social obligation for me, and I enjoyed releasing myself from it. If I had the chance to socially initiate into girl/womanhood, I feel I might have internalized it instead. I’ve heard people with physical disabilities share similar things too. Idk this is just a ramble and I might be wildly off the mark, it’s late where I am * With some exceptions on the mental health side of things, for romanticized depictions of mood disorders. I could draw a parallel with hysteria but I’ll leave that to whoever reads and feels inspired. Also romanticized depictions of certain eating disorders often gain entry into the list of Girl Experiences for reasons that are fairly obvious- girls are constantly pressured to match unreasonable body shapes.
That's the beauty of existence, everyone is just doing what they have to do, what's right for them. I'm also autistic. And I'm also just a girl. You know why? Cause girls are human beings.
Same (autistic woman who knew she was autistic from my preteen years), half the “just a girl videos” feel like trauma responses and Stockholm syndrome to convince themselves they enjoy the tiny cage of femininity.
For me the rise of “girlhood” to me always felt really bioessentialist. Online especially being a “girl” has been simplified down to a very narrow “traditional” type of woman. I’ve always felt so excluded from this trend because I didn’t have the same experiences as that certain type of woman.
SAME HERE 😭 i mean i love it for everyone else, it felt like being in school agisn because i didn't ",fit in" to what everyone said was rhe and "typical" girl experience Getting older I'm seeing more women who have experiences similar to me, which has been validating (still feel like i was raised more like a son but thats a different conversation) but the whole rise of it has made me just feel even more alienated, even with my friends who embraced the girlhood aesthetic, which i live for them but god i feel like the downer when i get throw myself into it because its really just not the experiences i had
brooo this is so real. i've always been pretty excluded by girls when i was younger, neither do i like anything hyperfeminine, but i feel like i can't even express that because of this new obsession with "pick-me girls" that's come along with this trend where literally any girl who doesn't use the ribbon emoji and wear pink head to toe wants to be special 😭😭 wish i could shake people who think like this by the shoulders and get them to stop viewing girlhood as an aesthetic and to stop alienating and excluding girls who don't fit that aesthetic (because let's be real, that's not being a "girl's girl" either)
💯‼️ lately online it feels like being a woman is reduced to the hyper femme coquette exist, and anyone who exists outside of that is not a real woman/is a "pick-me." And I mean, it's great if you do like those things and all but how is viewing all girls as a hyper femme monolith and excluding the ones who don't fit into that aesthetic any different from 50s gender roles?
this exactly. for me girlhood was realizing over and over again why certain parts of "femininity" didn't work for me. realizing i was "weird" (years before i realized i was neurodivergent). realizing my mom couldn't afford brand new clothes super often. realizing there were clothes and makeup i hated wearing because of my sensory issues. realizing not shaving my legs was easier. realizing i wasn't attracted to boys. going back to a time where i giggled with friends at sleepovers as we did eachothers makeup and gossiped about boys is laughable to me because there was no such time for me when i was a girl.
@rachelle5169 man I feel you on the clothes, core memory of a girl in sixth grade who interrogated me when I mentioned I got my clothes all hand-me-down 😫 she wanted to know when was the last time I shopped, how much my parents made, ect. It's was like "sorry I'm the first poor person you've met AMELIA but I don't see why it matters THAT MUCH"
As a gay trans guy I was surprised by you saying boy isn't used the way girl is by men, but I do think the examples in my communities moreso reinforce your perspective. I thought of "femboy", "pretty boy", "boy toy", etc. They're all used by more feminine men who are considered objects of desire, and often linked to youth. I even feel this when I choose to call myself a trans boy more often than a trans man, in my head it signals youth and desirability. That has a lot of the same issues to unpack as the use of girl.
I think it's a big flare for the support of the theory of social infantilization of women when you notice that men that are closer to femininity stop becoming men and start becoming boys, specifically I mean femboys. It's like the closer you get to femininity the more infantilized treatment you get, and if not infantilized, then treated as disposable, like older women and sexualization of women in general.
honestly its something im grappling with myself now as well.. wanted to be a twink boy toy to be attractive and now have to unpack and unlearn all this
The rise of the girlaissance I feel like goes hand in hand with the rise of trad-wife content on tik tok and twitter cause as soon as the rise of "girl dinner," "girlhood," and "girlmath" dropped on my fyp so did the rise of trad-wives showcasing their homemade fruit snacks for their kids and living lavish lifestyles that many women can not even fathomly afford in the modern age. Then I began seeing many of these women who participated in the trends say that the trad-wives were not pushing an agenda but then come to find out trad-wives like Nara Smith knowingly and inherently conservative and right-wing. These trends seemed to have helped push more young women in Gen Z towards that ideology and pipeline.
No, this is a completely insane way to look at it. Tradwife shit has always been about seeing women having a choice in their family settings as degeneracy, and seeing the subservient stay at home mom as superior. The girlhood meme is just the female exclusive version of the general trend among millenials and younger generations, where we feel lopeless in living up to the adulthood standards of our parents' generation. It's the same as "adulting". We don't have stable jobs, we can barely afford rent, often living with our parents in our 30s, and our mental health is in the shits. It's actually cathartic when your 12 pm dinner of a tuna can with olives on bread is not "look how much of a fuckup I am", but "hey what can I do I'm just a girl".
I think it swung straight past reclaiming being stereotypically feminine as a fine thing to be to "you can't ask too much of my because I'm just a girl and I don't know any better wuwu." I'm not even sure HOW but here we are.
I am in my 30's. Never had a job, boyfriend, lived separately (trying to now). My mental illness just prevented me from all of the experiences of adulthood, good or bad. I will tell you this. Sometimes a lie is pretty and if you repeat it enough, it almost becomes the truth. But it isn't. I wouldn't wish my existence on anyone. Every time I am doing something on my own it gives me so much joy and it gives me my DIGNITY back. Fight for your rights, fight for your life, fight for your dignity. You can find a way that doesn't involve violence, but FIGHT, be a PERSON.
this video essay seriously spoke to me as a butch. even as a cis woman i'm getting excluded from these on the notion that i don't "get it." i've had numerous people tell me how i don't "get it." it highlights such a specific experience that not every girl had. it aligns a lot with TERF talking points, as you said, and gender essentialism. reading that bit about how you can't just put on a pearl necklace and get the girl renaissance hit hard because. I DON'T GET IT. but i WAS A GIRL. it's the dichotomy in their teachings and how it barely even reaches anywhere in my brain.
I can't wait for a trend where people ignore trends, and actually just embrace their uniqueness. It's so tiring hearing about all these trends which don't seem to be doing anything but hurting people. (and the planet)
ah yes, the anti-trend trend But, in all seriousness, trends are not inherently bad. They can teach new skills, offer new perspectives, and allow space for people to be themselves. The challenge is that, as humans (and especially adolescents) seek to take part in society, it can be easy to tweak elements of oneself to harmful degrees in order to better fit in . I could totally see the start of the "girl dinner," for example, being a push against hyper-health focus and instead being about eating what is easy/tasty. Unfortunately, that was co-opted into nearly the inverse In short, trends seem to be a fairly innate element of human society, though even harmless ones can be distorted to spread a harmful message
Trends are just a way for people to try to connect with each other. So if you want to abolish them, you have to replace it with something else. And it goes beyond social media. Pop culture was defined by music trends and dance trends and fashion trends before Facebook or Twitter existed. How does one develop a truly unique and original and authentic sense of themselves while also existing in and engaging in their culture and their communities?
Seeing Popeyes' rendition of "girl dinner" gave me the same visceral feeling as seeing anime referenced in McDonalds marketing. Like watching something you love being morphed into something unrecognizable.
I gotta say, though I can understand part of this trend, specifically, wanting to celebrate girly hobbies and interests in a society where femininity and women are seen as inferior to masculinity; the gender essentialism of it all always rubs me the wrong way. I don't know if I am talking of something too specific or if it has to do a lot with this topic; but some time ago someone posted a photo of the Moon and called it "him" and tons of people were in the quote replies basically chastising the OP for that. Saying things like "The moon is a girl!" "Something that pretty could never be man!" "Don't offend her!" "In all mythologies the Moon is a woman!" even though the OP clarifiied that in their culture and language (which I think it was Arabic), the Moon is referred to as masculine. And I was like "Great job girlies, don't you love when you are so feminist that you circle back to putting men and women in strict boxes and categories!" "Boy, I love women so much that I am completely ignorant to other cultures and languages!" And I understand that there are belief systems where The Moon as a woman/mother is important, I can't speak for them at all. What I hate is this tendency of mystical feminism bull$hit to see women as this otherwordly angelic beings untainted by earthly things. NO! I am a human being before everything, a human that shares the planet with other billions of humans, I can't be restricted to this idealized way of existing, it seems exhausting. And as easy it is to say "The Moon is just a rock in space" My opinion is that Moon Boys deserve as much as Moon Girls. Though in my personal preference, I am more for a Cosmic Horror/ Eldritch approach , by which I think Moon doesn't really care what us mere humans think about them/it. 🤷♀
i agree, i’m of inuit and mi’kmaq descent where we view the moon earth and sea as divine feminine entities. in mi’kmaq spirituality the moon is referred to as grandmother moon(Nogami) and earth as mother earth(Ootsitgamoo) in contrast to inuit spirituality where the sea is controlled by Sedna(also referred to as the Mistress of the Sea or Mother of the Sea, Mother of the Deep(Sassuma Arnaa), Table(Nerrivik), Nuliajuk, Big Bad Woman (Arnapkapfaaluk), Takánakapsâluk/Takannaluk, and old woman who lived in the sea) and the sun(Siqiniq/Malina) is seen as feminine rather than the moon(Taqqiq/Aningaat). despite me following these beliefs it frustrates me to no end that mystical new age feminism bullshit appropriates my ancestors beliefs and oral traditions and use and twist them for their own selfish interests(especially in wishy-washy wellness influencer/neo-hippy/neo-pagan spaces and witchtok). moon boys and moon girls aren’t mutually exclusive they can exist equally i wish people would understand that!
You lowkey slayed. Gender essentialism and just any kind of stereotype based on that mindset is inherently dehumanizing. It robs you of your agency to be perceived as who you are and not as a byproduct of your sex and/or gender.
i'm glad people are also pointing out how it's weird that this culture centers "girlhood" around the white middle class experience. i'm white myself so i can't say anything about the racial aspect, but i grew up significantly lower class and didn't have the same opportunities the people around me did, and i mean as an actual "girl", a child. i had very little toys, forced myself to commit to school because i had nothing else to do, makeup was always stolen from mother's cabinets, room decor was nonexistent because i didn't even have a room for 9 years, i genuinely thought skirts were a "rich person" thing. this isn't even getting into the isolation i experienced by being autistic until i found more "weird" kids late into my elementary years all the essential parts of "girlhood" portrayed and done by everyone was something i couldn't obtain and it upset me, and it may be a catalyst for a lot of "i'm just a girl" types, but to me i didn't even know what "girlhood" was supposed to be anymore if my identity clashed so hard with the girls wearing designer brands, going on beach trips, travelling out of country to places like paris, all of it being emphasized all the time in the stuff i watched and read that's supposed to be aimed at me. a lot of people in my position probably feel similar, my "weird" friends dressed like me for the same reasons regarding finances and having horrible parents, and i've witnessed many nonwhite friends get denied their actual girlhood (again, as children) because of racial stereotypes and implications, all of it is upsetting nowadays i'm genderless and i'm a lot happier with that, performing femininity on my own terms instead of what seems to be expected. i really, sincerely hope these "i'm just a girl" type of girls/women end up finding themselves and growing as who they are rather then excusing their potential because of the mystical "girlhood aesthetic" that is unattainable for most. media idealized it for way too long and i don't want it to seep into more expections of girls and even women perform femininity however you want to, you aren't bad for wanting to wear pastels and pink, look nice for someone you like, being a stay-at-home mother, admit you're not good at math or cooking (hell i still can't cook that well as an adult), or even just being the opposite of those ideas, just build yourself up beyond that and fight alongside your sisters, and i mean all of them. that's just what i take from it
It’s one thing to be bad at math (can’t relate lol) since it’s not everyone’s thing, but why is math being gendered (again) now? Is there a boy math or a nonbinary math? What would those entail? Why are women seen as naturally bad at math? I don’t understand, but I’m just a girl. 🤭
thank you so much for this video, shan, i really needed someone to talk about this. it's depressing how all the progress we fought for is being erased by social media. we're once again promoting harmful beauty standards, eds, overconsumption and infantilizing women. at face value, the "girlhood" jokes may seem harmless, but it's just a bunch of grown women infantilizing and objectifying themselves while encouraging others to do the same. with the rise of tiktok and instagram reels, women stopped being seen as people with their own ideals, desires, aspirations and lives and became an unattainable idea of hyperfemininity
My idea of embracing girlhood is nurting the little girl that I didn't get to be. Letting her enjoy whatever she enjoy even if it seems childish to other people. Im taking care of little me the way adults should have been, and it's a wonderful feeling. All the "girl" stuff lately has made me sick to my stomach from the beginning, like girl math and girl dinner. Women before us worked so hard just to still get treated as less than; we do not need to be helping the people the people who marginalize us by saying what theyve been saying since forever. I get that it started as parody, but then the people that actually believe we are lesser glommed onto it and supported it wholeheartedly. That's where it goes wrong. It bothers me so much.
This makes sense, and I think that’s probably its root for many women - being a woman can be difficult and taxing on its own, and then adding the other responsibilities of adult life and the realization that your inner child wasn’t nurtured how she should’ve been can make it feel even worse, so maybe you feel like you’ve EARNED the right to be “just a girl” who has to be taken care of and babied. It’s tiring to do math or change the oil or cook a meal and it’s hard to be a woman, so I’m just a girl! Doing girl things! Sort of a tangent but I feel like it’s a similar thing with men who want their wives to be second mothers who take care of them - I feel like it comes from a place of loneliness, of frustration with how hard life is, and when it gets mixed in with the attitude that men inherently DESERVE to be pampered by their wives, it seems like a good escape from how hard life is. The problem is that having a “just a girl” attitude doesn’t make life less hard. Having a perfect trad wife doesn’t make life less hard. Life is just hard sometimes. No amount of patriarchal norms will fix it for anyone. It’s a band-aid. At the end of the day, we all have to take care of our OWN inner child, not ask someone else to do it, and then we have to pull ourselves together and be adults when we need to be. It’s tough at times, but ignoring it isn’t gonna make it easier lol Sorry for this rant apparently I’m passionate about this 😭
Idk why, but we stopped referring to this exact feeling of (robbed innocence) childhood, as exactly that. Childhood (the inner child). Boyhood and girlhood are just gendered versions (that should be abolished) of what in reality it really is, which is childhood. Many people were and are still robbed of their childhood (their transformative, as in literally biologically being robbed of their formative growth) and now adults, immature adults at that, are redefining that as per their already distorted views. Assigning gender and sometimes subjectively, sex to a "canonically" just HUMAN experience (sexless, genderless)
This right here. For me girlhood is healing the internalized misogyny I had as a kid that left me feeling ashamed for liking pink and sparkles by embracing certain aesthetics now because fuck it I’m an adult and I’ll do what I want with me money. But seeing how the trend has evolved into women just feeding into those exact misogynistic stereotypes which led me to avoid girly stuff as a child in the first place is depressing. It’s like “yeah maybe kid me was right to be more tomboyish because embracing this stuff DOES make others look at girls as less than”
This comment section is me!!!! I feel so seen!! I grew up much too quickly, having had bad friends that just didn’t care about me and exposed me to some things I was not ready for. But I have to be thankful in some part to my maturity as I have never fallen into the just on the spot acceptance of what I was shown. Even when I was really young I had moments when I would stop and think of why someone was doing that thing or what something is. I grew up close with my dad and his friends(my mom and dad are not divorced)so I was a tomboy. I loved mountain biking and riding dirt bikes and all of that. I still do. I played video games at the boys table in school. But all the while I wished for that girl group. When I was 10, in 3rd grade I had the bestest friend ever, and her and I made a pact to be together forever. Well, it didn’t last because we were never in the same classes ever again. But she stuck with me and I always longed to be her friend. I still do. I finally talked to her again in senior year and I was so shocked to find out she had a girlfriend because that is right when I realized I had feelings for her all of this time. I have always been a good girl, never going out or anything like that, because I am waiting. I am waiting to be given something that I feel I deserve. School sucked for me, middle school and onwards I lost all of my friends because of a falling out. Covid ruined my high school, and that will forever be a scar in my heart. My life stopped at 13 and I am 18 now. I’m just now realizing I am alive and I can live, but I don’t know how to in this society. I have had a survival mindset for so long, and I still do. But I am learning how to break out of it. I am learning how to take little steps and to slow down. I am letting little me, the little girl in my heart, take a breath of fresh air. I really am still living at 13 because that is when my life stopped for me, and really this new embrace of being a girl and liking the things I never let myself like before, it almost feels like a cry for help. My girlhood is not because I am spoiled and used to it, but because I need, desperately need, the little girl in me to heal.
Tbh i think it's even worse in the case of gen z, cuz as cringe as the whole adulting thing was, at least it wasnt intrinsically tied to misogyny the same way the whole "i'm just a girl 👉👈" thing is
@@Akiles1008It's not intrinsically tied to misogyny. This type of "crysis" is just as prevalent with gen Z guys, we just tend to go on discord and play games with the boys to ease the pressure of having to grow up. "Just a girl" type popu music has a sizable male listener base because even as a heterosexual guy it's still relatable. As damaging as it is for stereotypes to film your own gender failing at driving or budgeting and showcase it online as "haha I'm just a girl", it's not necessarily better having to "man up" and hide all your shortcomings because you're an "adult man" and you should act like it.
I was initially very enthusiastic about girl culture but then it started to feel predatory and then consumerist and then gender essentialist. I stopped relating to it because being a girl isnt literally just that anymore, its being a gender conforming, hyper feminine, material driven nymphet. Being a girl (overall) means you're perpetually scrutinized but thats not a justification for participating in patriarchal and consumerist practices just because its pinkwashed.
There's something really sinister about people who are unwilling to interrogate the trends they're participating in. Like as long as you're having fun that's all that matters? You're not concerned about who you might be excluding or harming? You're not interested in how this might be used to manipulate you or empower people you disagree with? Perhaps this is why I am also no fun at parties.
Absolutely - it shows a stunning lack of empathy & self awareness, but is very common, alas... This is also why people who say things like "Can't we just watch movies to have fun" are truly being intentionally obtuse IMO? Most people really do get their views of the world primarily from popular and social media, not from academic research. Pop media content & social media trends are not inherently 'neutral' or harmless. Questioning them is not 'party pooping' or 'taking things too seriously', it's basic sociology for survival! 😬
I've seen a lot of new "trends" that are just lowkey bigotry like the girl-aissance. being "fruity" or "zesty" is funny or wrong. The "big-back" jokes made by skinny girls as a form of bodyshaming. Like wtf is going on
Girlaissance itself isnt bigoted, cuz it can be embraced in a way thats affirming but those who use it to reinforce traditional gender roles and traditional ideas of femininity are mad weird, i dont like the big back jokes from skinny people its so urghhh also the zesty jokes my friends and i make those jokes as we are all queer but seeing str8s say it is so odd
@espeon871 I don't think people who participate are not inherently "bigoted" but like shanspeare says, the undertones push a trad wife kind of ideal that maybe on the surface doesn't seem harmful, but actually is. My point isn't that everyone participating is a bigot, but is in fact helping to move the cultural needle right like some of these other trends
Honestly, “girly” has taken on a whole new meaning in the last year or so. I noticed just online it felt like it was a way to describe a person as dumb, in an infantilizing way.
Even before I started to really try to think about this trend more deeply, my first clue that it sat on an underlying conservative politic is when I saw it being causally paired with a return of a more vocal push back against gnc women/androgynous women/"tomboys"/masc presenting women, etc. Granted, these are anecdotal and from personal and friend's experiences but ... we are seeing "normative" women just say the quiet part out loud again. Within the last 2-3 years, we've had people just like ... say that non-girly girls/women were suspicious, anti-women, "pick me", not an "ally" (????), etc. with no grounds at all besides their presentation. To our faces. Shit we haven't heard out loud since middle school. And when met with even just a raised eyebrow, it's all just ha ha ha. A "joke"! Her "vibes' are just off, you know? Just a feeling! Woman's intuition! I didn't mean YOU, you know? Basically, the bio/gender essentialism of it all and the good old return to proudly narrowing down the "acceptable" presentations of women/girls being snuck-in along with these trends that are meant to "reclaim" an already very narrow definition of femininity. And on this trend itself being a pushback to the 2010s ... I think people sometimes genuinely forget that, even at the peak of "Not Like Other Girls", the dominant overwhelming societal demand for women (especially adult women) to be "appropriately" feminine, if they are to be considered and treated as proper women, never really went away. It was successfully challenged and broadened somewhat, yes, but not only are we seeing a tangible societal regression on that front (public policing of women's presentation in the name of our "safety"), that same conservative societal demand is being repackaged as either harmless silly fun or outright progressive by capitalism. And that's before we even get into the Transphobia of it all which, of course, permeates every facet of this discourse.
thank you! ask a masc lesbian this trend feels so weird to me. like i’m by default not included (tho i do identify as nonbinary, but i think even if i didn’t it would by default not include me.) the quiet part is that if you don’t like men, or you aren’t very feminine then you don’t get to be apart of this newfound return to “girlhood”. because you don’t meet the “basic requirements”. people aren’t gonna say that out loud, but it’s true. it’s just so weird to see all these women defining “girlhood” as this hyper feminine thing, it’s like they’re enforcing that gender box. there’s no room for gnc women here
Those women don't realize how conservative their politics are clearly. But any trend that tells women to be more feminine and follow gender roles more closely was going to be, and i love being feminine! but i don't love forcing it onto people
agreed as a trans man who is perceived as a masculine woman/butch. people have taken "patriarchy bad" to mean "anything masculine/read as masculine is bad". and when trans men/mascs, intersex people, butches, or masculine women try to push back on this, we are told to shut up because we have "sided with the enemy". it's more gender-essentialist TERF bullshit being pushed by the mainstream in this decades-long culture war against anyone "different".
I'm autistic and these feel like the exact same things girls in school would say to me to remind me how much I didn't fit in. Your vibes are off; you never talk about boys (I'm asexual, which is a whole other story); and most importantly, you do well in school/are quiet/have unpopular interests/don't do makeup/dress differently from us, so you must think you're better than us. They were wrong at first, but it became a self-fulfilling prophecy once I started associating traditional femininity with bullying. I started to lean into "not like other girls" culture as it became popular because I finally thought I'd found something mainstream I could relate to, but even that didn't fully capture my experience because of all the unspoken requirements. You can be ""different"", but not TOO different to the point where you become undesirable to men or stray too far from the acceptable bounds of femininity. And now it's even worse because as you said, they're saying the quiet parts out loud. I'm done with NLOG culture, but I understand the appeal - no one can possibly live up to all the standards of being a ""perfect woman"". It's just so tiring to feel like you have to jump through hoops for the bare minimum level of acceptance.
As someone who grew up with the older Barbie movies, that were pink and fantasy, but also had elements of resistance and transformative change (allthough with it's problems, but still much more than what the barbie brand has become), I am so sad to see the high femme aesthetic being coopted in this regressive way. I love the bright colours, the glitter and the glamour, it contrasts with a very harsh, dark and monotone world by bringing some softness and warmth into it. That softness and warmth is not to be underestimated. I hate that the aesthetic is becoming a signifier for docile, conservative, capitalist and infantalizing values and used against those drawn to it. I see the bright aesthetic as a resistance in itself, and I use them while still thinking critically for myself and the world around me to the best of my abilities.
I had interests that were more boyish, but whenever I tried to participate, they told me I couldn't because I was a girl. This made me hate myself for being a girl, hate all girly things, and eventually I developed pretty serious internalized misogyny. It took me getting into high school and meeting certain people to really accept myself as a girl. I willing wore a dress for the first time in college! With that in mind, my reclamation of my femininity DID NOT include me wanting to be incompetent with basic life skills. The idea that being a girl inherently makes you useless is something my elementary school self would have believed.
Sounds like you're completely normal. Elementary/middle school boys are just the meanest things that exist. And I say this as a former mean elementary school boy lol
@onam3000 Perhaps being told repeatedly through childhood that you aren't allowed to participate in things you love shouldn't be normal? Also, it was adult men and women that told me the same thing. I started being mean to girls so that I could be accepted as "one of the guys", and I started hating myself for being born a girl. It messed me up for awhile. That shouldn't be normal.
Also on the gender conservatism topic, I’ve noticed an increase of the bioessentialism and exclusion around men as well. Like many woman saying “you wouldn’t get it your a man” or “being a girl is more fun” (in the context of a woman doing her makeup & wearing dresses) etc. I also saw a titkok of a gay guy taking part in the I’m just a girl trend and was bashed by many women. It’s so alarming to see this exclusion of femininity from men.
People act like being feminine is a club and if you don’t fit the requirements to a tee, you are not only excluded but ostracized. The fact is that few people truly meet all requirements for perfect peak femininity… leaving us never content with ourselves and feeling like we cannot just simply exist as the complex organisms we are.
@@seaurchinted As a cis woman who has never been good at makeup and has PCOS that causes unwanted facial hair, I have been ostracized or othered by cis and trans women who have been conditioned to believe in a correct version of femininity. It's insidious.
as a queer, something-in-between person, this whole feminine club, as the other commenter called it, is so exclusive toward queer people too. i personally hate how they hijack random hobbies and try to make liking those things inherently feminine, and it's made looking for communities around my interests online so uncomfortable.
I think its the queerphobia of it all, because a lot of those who do engage in this bioessentialism do it in a very "cishet manner (like the structures of gendered roles)" rather than a way of teehee my personal experience. I think the reiteration of traditional gender roles by some people engaging in the trend makes this so clear.
never been so early to a video in my life and I’m very excited seeing the title bc we NEED a thoughtful and meaningful response to the “I’m just a girl”/girl math/girl dinner phenomenon and if anyone can do it it’s you :)
As a man I don't know if it is my place to comment, but I love the message of the video, and the idea of women reclaiming feminist liberation from the infantalizing recuperation of neoliberal trends. You go ladies!!!
Whats even more infuriating is that when u call the influencers out on this type of jokes, they just respond with 'its not that srs' but they dont get that it IS that serious!!
i think that most people who claim that the “girl trend” is harmless fun either forget or are trying to hide the fact that thousands of young, impressionable girls watch their content. during my tween years, i read countless books about how the tweenage girl experience is an ongoing competition of who’s more “womanly” based on physical milestones (first period, first bra, etc.) . despite knowing that these characteristics were out of my control, i still adhered to the messages that these books perpetuated because they were my main source of sex education and social-emotional education. this trend is essentially doing the same thing: manipulating young girls into believing that their worth is based on how well they fit society’s definition of a woman. furthermore, it perpetuates an idea that the early stages of puberty are the best years of a girl’s life, discouraging kids from growing out of consumerism and forced competition with other girls. there is one tiktoker who makes videos for teenage girls, primarily about maintaining a good appearance and attracting boys. i tried to give this seemingly harmless girl the benefit of the doubt until she posted a video about “how to be a pretty girl” in which she describes the process of getting discounts on jewelry, claiming that owning a full supply of $4 necklaces will immediately elevate a girl’s appearance. what she didn’t say is that this brand paid her to advertise their product, and all of the “pretty girls” at the viewer’s school probably weren’t using her exact promo code to buy their jewelry. it makes me genuinely sick that straight up consumerist brainrot is advertised as essential to a girl’s worth. at the end of the day it’s a method of manipulating one of the most vulnerable demographics into adopting very specific lifestyles and purchasing their way into fitting in - almost in the way that redpill content manipulates young lonely men into excusing genuinely messed up behavior as a means of being socially accepted.
Speaking purely linguistically, I wasn't comfortable calling myself a "woman" rather than a "girl" until probably my thirties, and I don't think it had to do with self-infantiization, per se, as much as feeling like I wasn't sufficiently "adulting". Like, women are the people who have grown up, and I didn't feel like I was a real grown up yet, completely different from thinking I was still a child. I honestly ony started calling myself "woman" not because I felt any more like a real adult (note that I have unique circumstances that make me less independent than others my age), but because I was getting to the age where I was just getting too far past 18 and too close to 40 to justify sticking to "girl".
Same with me right now. 19 (graduated high school this year), pretty much a NEET, still dependent on my parents for a lot of things. I was always in my own world, my own interests. I’m introverted, socially awkward & hole myself up in my house a lot of the time. Being neurodivergent also will make it harder for me to “adult” the normative way. (Not that being neurodivergent makes you inherently childish, obviously.) “Woman” feels a bit too mature for me at this point in my life.
As a 25 year old I’ve had the same issues, despite me understanding that the people we would see as objectively “adults” don’t always have it together. I’ve been trying to consciously move more towards considering myself as a woman, albeit a young woman with still lots to learn, but still a woman rather than a girl. I mean, I have a full time job, I pay my bills on time, I’m trying to save for my emergency fund, like I definitely have the major essential elements of adulting down. To continue to call myself a girl would be to discount my burgeoning maturity and invalidate the life that I’ve been able to build for myself so far.
@@gooseberries608i think this is the key. Being a woman does not mean you have it all figured out just like being a man is the same. If you are of adult age it is your responsibility to acknowledge that and act accordingly. Being an adult does come with responsibilities, not prerequisites. So nothing will make you a woman other than being an adult, especially 20+. Legal age is a different story, but I think we can all agree that once out of your teens, you are an adult. That's it. AND it can mean whatever you want it to mean. Im an adult woman and i am still currently in college and with no job and i like to play around and be silly and dance and shit. But that doesnt take away from the fact that i am a woman and wear it with pride
This discussion definitely makes me wonder at what ages young adult women who are able-bodied and neurotypical vs different types and degrees of disabled feel comfortable referring to themselves as woman, and to what degree internalized ableism plays a role in that.
Thank you so much for bringing a little happiness in such a scary time. I live in the Deep South so your videos are like a breath of fresh air. This whole channel is an amazing reminder that there are people who think like me out there and really keeps me from going crazy. Thank yo Shan!
I agree. Even when it is not a topic I generally engage with, I appreciate their videos - especially since they are generally well articulated, well-rounded (that is, take looks into different perspectives) and include sources
this is so real to me. i'm fat and average height, so sometimes i feel like i'm not feminine enough, and seeing hundreds of edited pictures of perfect slim thick bodies and people shaming people like me on social media has made me force myself to present as impossibly feminine as i can, so i can feel pretty and valid too. i've been trying to avoid these conversations for so long because i feel like no one gets what i'm going through and i'll always be a failure because of my body and identity. social media has ruined what it means to be a woman. not only are cis women being shamed for their bodies for literally no reason, trans women aren't even considered when we're talking about femininity
I was born and raised in a Spanish-speaking Latin American country, and it’s very *interesting* (for lack of a better word) to see how this type of US cultural export has affected and influenced misogyny and the patriarchy in my country, and how it interlaces with class and race within our communities. I think of how I hear white-passing middle/ upper class adult women refer to each other as “niñas” (the word in Spanish for Girl). I think of how women try to emulate US-centric trends/ looks/ stereotypes (in their clothes, hair, incorporating English words and phrases into our language) as signifiers of status and education. I think of how Americanized digital spaces have become, and how that impacts our own cultural identities. It’s jarring to see these US-flavoured misogynistic trends be added on top of our own localized problems. And I wonder, in this “age of information” apparently dominated by US standards, is there going to be any digital (and maybe even physical) space left for other types of girlhoods and womanhoods? Or are we all supposed to aspire to these flawed US standards as our new normal?
i never liked the girlhood trend for a reason i didn’t understand until recently the whole movement is very hetero,comparing the less competent GIRLhood to the more competent MANhood and how the whole “girls supporting girls” where about relationship issues and never about actually creating community for those who need it.i would also like to mention that the movement was used in isre4li military propaganda to clean the image of the women in it “they are just girls who love their country not war criminals!!”
@@mariblue7201 ppl always thought I was making it "too deep" but the fact that we call grown women (and they themselves "girls" and grown men... men... is really strange idc
@SuperMiIk I believe girlhood ends at 18 (where adulthood begins), thus becoming a woman. I think it's due to the screwed image of feminity, that it is inherently docile and "youthful." True feminity can be practiced at any age. However, girlness is fleeting 🤷🏽♀️ I hope womanhood will be embraced more. I'm 17, turning 18 shortly, and I will definitely be leaving the girl label unless I'm being ironic or just silly.
@@SuperMiIksadly you have to pick ur battles most women are not as progressive as we like to think they are and they very much like the idea of benevolent patriarchy that infantilizes them
as a butch who never got, or ever really wanted this kind of girlhood, I just look at this whole trend and I feel nothing but confusion. Not because it doesn't appeal to me, but because the idea of just. never taking responsibility, ignoring those who may have less than you bc you want to remain blissfully ignorant, to be completely unappealing
I feel similarly. I don't relate to this new "girlhood" trend, I don't understand it, and I don't want to be a part of it. There's nothing about being "just a girl" that appeals to me, not in the least because I never had or desired the experiences of girlhood that this trend fixates so hard on.
being a trans man really adds a new layer to the girlpocalypse. experiencing my childhood as a girl and my mid to late adolescence as a boy gives me a more clear understanding of the problems associated with gender essentialism for men and women. the whole thing is weird, it infuriates me to no end that people are willingly acting ignorant, clueless and even dumb or unintelligent.
10:04 I think another reason why women in their early 20s might want to participate in these trends is that for so long, once a woman reaches that age she's seen as 'ripe' bordering on 'rotting'. If a woman doesn't have a husband or atleast a boyfriend by that age, it means they're doing 'womanhood' wrong, and have failed their role in society which is to reproduce. But 'girls' are kids; you can't expect a girl to mother as well. You can't expecte a 'girl' to fulfill a 'womans responsanility', so I beleive it's an escape from all that.
I’ve never really been able to get into the girl movements because it never resonated with me. I’m a dark skinned black woman from one of the most well known hoods in the country. Girlhood and innocence was never afforded to me. I understand the desire for women in their early adulthood who just want to be a girl. Might be the first chance many of them have felt in control over theirs lives enough to do so.
Did a show with my cover band last night and we did “just a girl. seeing all the girls come closer to the front and genuinely mosh and scream sing along to the song felt really powerful. And made me hate the TikTok trend using just the chorus of that song even more lol
i hate the "im just a girl" stuff and i have since the beginning. It's right there in the quote: "just". a lesser thing than human. a penny to everyone else's dime. as if agreeing with being diminished would get the world off of our backs. i mean jesus christ, i wish we had some self-respect
@@fernschiffer9471 THANK. YOU. People in these comments keep insisting that it "started as a harmless little trend" but for those of us who knew that it wasn't harmless from the start, they said "you hate fun 🙄 god forbid women joke"
@SuperMiIk we can see where things are going since the beginning..and it's to tiring waiting for others to realize too and them to see you aren't crazy and overdramatic
This is a fantastic analysis! I also think a lot of this “return to innocence” and “girlyness” is classic psychological regression. A stress response to the overwhelming… (gestures wildly) everything that’s going on.
its exactly this. the pandemic, BLM, palestinian genoc*de, everything. the blame is not towards these women who have stumbled upon this trend and unfortunately added to its flames-its the system itself. but of course its harder to blame something that doesn’t have a face.
The thing I don't get about this trend is that how does "liking pink", "soft aesthetics", "embarrassing femineity" even relate to "not knowing math", "crashing cars" "being immature and unresponsible"??
hey! that was my article! I appreciate your commentary so much and I absolutely agree with a lot about what you said in relation to girlhood. I do want to add that this article was written after I turned 20 and felt like the media’s definition of girlhood was ending for me, and I explored those feelings further in my article. Womanhood and everything it encapsulates is just as wonderful, but I definitely wanted to touch on the fact that, as you mentioned, there is another aspect to the trend dealing with race and ethnicity that I did not get into very much. at the time, I wanted to explore the trend at a base level and give commentary from the perspective of age, specifically how women are viewed as they get older and the pressures that all young people face during their 20s as their expected to get their life together. I only had so much time and space to say what I wanted, but both race and social class do play a huge part in this trend, which I full acknowledge as a Latina myself. If it were up to me, I would have included significant detail into how these aspects perpetuate the trend and adhere to the aspects you touched on in your video as well, but again, I wrote this through a very specific lens. Our journeys through girlhood are special in each and every way, and I just wanted to highlight that!
i'm a cis woman, but even as a kid i identified as more of a tomboy and into my adulthood i still don't feel like a part of the whole "girlhood" club. any deviation from that very specific type of hyperfemininity is not welcome.
as a trans man, it will take random things i might do and then be like “GIRL BEHAVIOR” no matter how much i try to escape it it feels like i’m always catching strays
I always struggled with the “just a girl, girl dinner, girl math” and what i didnt like about it and this said it so nicely. They are never laughing with us always at us
I really liked your point about femininity being a commodity that is only available for purchase. It really hammers home the classism and inherent racism within our ideas of femininity, that it is an exclusive club that isn't afforded to all women but rather those who can foot the bill. Overall, I think women are living through a particularly interesting time. Our recognition within society is so recent and still incomplete, we are still trying to define ourselves as individuals and as a group within the patriarchy. I think that makes your video particularly relevant: we need to be careful of how we define women's identities in any social context because we're still tied to a role that has been imposed to us for thousands of years.
The beginning lyrics are of “Just a girl” are Take this pink ribbon out my eyes.” It's so funny seeing this in tangence with tiktoks of people putting pink ribbons on everything with the phrase “I'm just a girl."
As a trans masc who doesnt pass very well, this entire trend has been infuriating to me. I keep being included in it by people against my will. I was never a girl and I am certainly not a woman. The only "girlhood" I experienced was moments in my childhood where I was suddenly made uncomfortably and pervasively aware of how my gender was perceived. On top of all that, I really dislike how this trend infantalizes and demeans my friends who are women. I hope we can move on to the next trend soon.
As a queer unwoman, it can be a helluva lot of fun to respond with "oh, no, didn't you hear? That turned out to not be a girl thing. Sorry." Being deliberately obtuse about not understanding when people try to include you in the girl group can also be a hoot. Some people will give you guff for being "not like other girls" bit that's an easy one - tell 'em yes, you're not like *any* girls. That's the point.
I'm not a transmasc but this speaks to me. I grew up feminine until I'm in high school and I realized that I'm much happier when I don't look/feel feminine. It's kinda uncomfortable to see the things I enjoy being gendered so heavily (wearing makeup, nail polish, perfume) and perceived as "proof" that I will always, in the end, be a "girl". Just because of what's between my legs, everything I do and experience is automatically seen as part of a very curated version of "girlhood" :/
it’s so deeply misogynistic to say that “i’m not a woman because of this” we should be saying “im a woman and i can still do and feel this.” all there is to be a woman is to be female. stereotypes are not what make you a woman, stereotypes are not what make you a man. there is no feeling in the mind of being a woman.
This video really made me think. As a disabled trans man, my relationship with girlhood is very complicated. I was born with a facial disfigurement that can't be "corrected" so I never got to be just a girl, I never saw my reflection in culture's depiction of girlhood, but I didn't see myself in the depiction of boyhood either, so I had to build my own ideals. In some ways it made me stronger, but in most ways I was just severely lonely. Not fitting into girlhood or boyhood meant I was barred from a lot of childhood in general. I don't think I can ever romanticise that.
Also, there are so many women who simply do not identify/particularly connect with the brand of "girlhood" being touted, and that's being immediately dismissed as internalized misogyny or NLOG behavior, when we could be celebrating the diversity of what it means to be a "girl". My early girlhood was not pink, was not dainty, was not submissive, but I was still very much a girl. It wasn't until I started school and became aware of the "correct" way to be feminine that I began to feel inadequate as a girl. My version of womanhood is not an attack on anyone else's version of womanhood. My expression of feminity is not better or worse than anyone else's. It's just different and, honestly, isn’t everyone's?
As someone who has recently come to terms with their nonbinary identity girl dinner, girl math and the like has always rubbed me the wrong way. Like I love that we’re embracing girlhood now but do you have to do it under the lens of bioessentialism? It has always felt like a way to reinforce gender norms. It’s always like omg look at me I’m a woman who can’t drive or do math!
I've been thinking about calling grown women girls and how I do it because I feel like there isn't a female equivalent of guy. I think we as a society tried to incorporate gal but it just hasn't stuck for some reason. Like I would say there was a guy over there, as opposed to boy which would imply a child or a man which sounds a bit formal. But with women there's either girl or woman and that's it. Basically I need a female or gender neutral equivalent of guy.
I think this can be linked to the idea that girls/women/gals are simply not allowed to be teenagers/there's not a transition phase where you go from begin a girl to a adult woman you're either a girl (a begin without agency more reminecent to a doll or a pet) or a woman (a begin that's tasked to work and do adult chores that's often linked to a man or those with power around you), it might be why there has not been a similar word for girls/women/gals (This thought is a little undercooked but you can see where I'm going)
Gender neutral words are always coded masculine, it HAS to be explicitly feminine or people will imagine masculine people/concepts with it. There's actually been a lot of studies on this.
@@silliestbillyXD I feel like "gal" is closest thing we have to feminine equivalent of "guy". my only thing is it sounds like retro slang, but that might just be me.
I'm a queer studies researcher whose been looking at queer girlhoods since 2022 and I'm so excited to watch you take on girlhood and infantilization. I'm analyzing girlhood through the question- if we disconnect girlhood from a bodily configuration and age group, what is left? What is being accessed by queering girlhood? I've been having sooooo much fun deconstructing gender considering whats left of these identities as lines of sex and gender fall apart. Part of my thesis is that anyone can access girlhood. I've been watching the girl renaissance closely, gender essentialism is getting crazy out here! A lot of feminist identifying people in my life hold to the assumptions of "boys will be boys" and it's been jarring! edit: finished the video- incredible as always!
When i was in my 20s it took me a long time, and being actively conscious about it, to get accustomed to calling myself and other women "women" instead of girls. It felt weird and unnatural. I'm sure part of it was just that I wasn't used to it, I'd been using girl my whole life, but i do really think another part of it was a fear of aging. Also, "girl math" really started getting on my nerves after a while. It started as something funny and relatable to anyone regardless of gender. Something we all do, like if you pull out cash for something and you have cash left over, using the rest of it for a Starbucks or other treat feels like getting a free treat because the cash doesn't feel real. We all do that, and it's obviously a joke like we don't actually believe the money is free. Over time though it more and more was just dumb offensive stereotypes about girls being stupid & bad at math, irresponsible & bad with money, vapid, shallow, and materialistic. ..And the bad driving ones are the most annoying 🙄 ugh
6:16 see, you want to butter the toast so it melts before you put the beans on, sprinkle cheese on top, then use cutlery and eat the toast in little cronchy beany-goodness soaked pieces. You will be a ✨️ *changes woman* ✨️
I've just recently read the autobiography of Kathleen Hanna, the Frontwoman of Bikini Kill, who started the Riot Grrrl movement and there were a lot of echos in this video to things she said in her Book. She also saw a lot of exclusionism in the Movement and became pretty disillusioned with it. One chapter is titled "White Riot" for example (go figure what the subject of that one was) and in a later chapter she called the movement a "hydra monster - super complicated, at times beautiful, but also potentially destructive". It's a very good Book and this video just reminded me of that.
Thank you for posting this! I’ve been struggling to put my frustration with the phrase “I’m just a girl” into words. My peer, a fellow woman in a university engineering program, says this CONSTANTLY and I couldn’t quite understand why it boiled my blood every time. We struggle to be taken seriously and be respected as is and going around the department infantilizing ourselves and pushing off responsibility just seemed off.
This video made me realize I do use the term "girl" to talk down to other people. especially my mother. I rarely use it in a positive way. I think I use it most when i am frustrated with the other person or they acted in a way that was dumb or they seemed confused. so ya defs a good call out for me! great video thanks :)
i really loved the "girl" trends in their beginning phases. i'm already in my late 20s, but i grew up pretty lonely, not really having a lot (or any close) girl-friends. on top of that, i was also in the era of "im not like the others, im one of the boys", so it kinda made me feel like im catching up or belonging somewhere, even if i'm merely participating in a meme trend with online strangers.
My interpretation of "girl dinner" is a meal I can just throw together for myself without having to worry about feeding anyone else. If my husband is out of town, you better believe I'm throwing random crap together for my meals vs cooking. 😂
I saw a video saying "men will never get it" and it was just makeup. I commented saying that men can also enjoy makeup and most of replies were just insults. It's when I realized that "girlhood" trend isn't for me
Thank you so much for calling this shit out. Glad you mentioned the age issue in the midst of all the others. Women don't need yet more dividers; unity is strength. Imagine if the Manosphere was called the Boyosphere.
I've hated "girl money" from the moment I heard it, just seemed like a really sexiest way of phrasing individual womens bad or ridiculous financial decisions & thoughts as being a product of their gender, from there I started to hate any kind of "girl" trend because I couldn't ignore the harmful ideas underlying the trends
Especially because most of the videos I saw were from women who clearly had hundreds if not thousands of dollars to freely spend, it seemed like a class thing
I’m a speech and debate teacher for nationally ranked middle school and high school students and I am giving them this topic and having them watch your video. Beautifully broken down and explained and so interesting throughout!
THANK YOU. it’s been very strange to witness feminism doing a complete 180 and becoming blatant misogyny… i think it’s important you addressed how capitalism fits into all of it, too. i myself am disillusioned by capitalism and so desperately want an escape, but i think this “girlissiance” is angry at the wrong thing. be mad at capitalism, not feminism.
As an Arab, it is offensive to call an adult boy or girl because only slaves are called that. After slavery ended, it was used to call people who are beneath you like servants and hand crafts apprentices, i.e., welder, woodworker, etc. I work in health care, and older patients call me "girl" instead of " doctor" while my male colleagues are called doctors. It's used to minimize me and to passively "put me in my place" #misogyny
The previous thumbnail was a Britney Spears reference. Guess 🤫🎀🎤Make sure to go to: yourparade.com/SHAN-BF and use my code SHAN-BF for 50% off sitewide! (does not apply to Betsey Johnson collection)
Britney?
I have a question what do you mean you are a disgrace to academia daily? What do you mean by academia who is academia? I know what the clothing aesthetic is but not what you’re talking about.
britney spear’s rolling stone debut??
@@lazygirl486 academia, as in education. People tend to call me uneducated, which I have the misfortune of seeing constantly.
@ You are definitely not uneducated every video I see that you post. I watched all the way, and I agree with you silently in my mind. 💖😊👍
reminds of how i kept seeing women online saying "feminism is the reason i have to go to work so i dislike it" and oh no.....that's not....
I thought that we all knew that they were joking? I know that I'd laugh believing this to be the case.
Unless it's a conservative woman that's trying to get laughs to distract people from her actual agenda or something.
exactly! like, you're mad at the wrong things!!! it's capitalism making you hate your job, not feminism!!!!
@@averagetwinkenjoyerpeople who say this are usually not joking lmao
@@averagetwinkenjoyer100% conservatives, but in their own community it’s not for laughs
@@CHEEZE369 oh💀 so i've been in a comment section of women thinking that we were all wearing cute clown makeup. No one told me the theme 😣
People hear "im just a girl" but not "thats all that youll let me be" so sad
Some women cry, "that's all I want to be"... Sad indeed.
Literally!!!
so that
Does she also say "living in captivity" ? I can hear it
Destroying the most ancient language u shit@@ville-c4u
my main problem with the whole trend is that “just a girl” has become associated with incompetence, subjugation, and unintelligence. so YES, it is misogynistic.
Literally
It's not.. the entire point of it was it being a response to men saying 'boys will be boys'. Y'all will literally do anythingggg to fuck up something girls do in retaliation to MEN being weird.
Plus, the entire song was about how annoying it was to be infantilized as a GROWN ASS WOMAN solely because you're a woman. Nobody's getting that point omggg
@@asterrrriaaaaaa6926 that's why i don't engage with tiktok, it takes everything out of context, it's like the video version of twitter
Peddled by women to other women though lol
I think of that text exchange someone had with their dad where they said "I'm just a girl" and he responded "I don't know what that means but it sounds like it minimizes you as a person."
like how can a man understands it better than you
oh... :( the fact that a man understood what that meant is absolutely heartbreaking
People making the “Just a Girl” song the anthem of this ~movement~ reminds me SO MUCH of red-pilled men using “American Psycho” as inspiration… like babes the play is about you…
Or conservatives using "Parents" from yungblud
@fallenangel6419 conservatives are using yungblud songs?? jesus christ
@xhypiseepyx yep. If I remember correctly, just for the line "I was born in a messed up century". I would love to see their reaction, if they would ever see the MV
@fallenangel6419as a black woman I know exactly why they like that line the most 🙄.
@fallenangel6419 how do conservatives lack media literacy this badly (literally one of the next lyrics is "my daddy put a gun to my head, said if you kiss a boy im gonna shoot you dead so i tied him up with gaffa tape and locked him in a shed then i went out to the garden and i fucked my best friend" what about that screams conservative values 😭😭)
the fact that the part of the "just a girl" song that always gets cut out goes "i'm just a girl in the world, that's all that you'll let me be" has always irritated me bc the whole point of the song is quite literally RIGHT THERE and everyone is ignoring it
Politicians have been dumbing down the population for decades, and this is a result of it bleeding into other parts of life
i love florence and the machine's cover of the song because it goes for a much darker tone that really makes you see the lyrics in a new light
Like people saying 'the customer is always right' and forgetting 'in matters of taste'. Or 'blood is thicker than water' and forgetting that it's 'the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb'
Or ‘just one bad apple’ while leaving the spoils the whole bushel off.
@@ginger_L3 Samee they're both good in their own rights whether you're in a more pop-ish mood or not 🙏
Yes! It is weird how something like "girl dinner" starts being like lol' meme and then it's like the gates come blasting off and we are just tee-hee-ing hyper infantilization.
Tysm for sharing this video on your channel. Idk if I'd have seen it if not
Belle Delphine popularized the e-girl aesthetic based on her DDLG fetishism. Other women copied her, hoping for the same amount of financial success, bringing to the mainstream.. dressing up like underage girls.
Also, this trend is suspiciously big within ed community...
It reaches critical mass and goes nuclear. And almost inevitably hurts all the same underprivileged folks that all the other hate groups love to hunt down.
It’s NOT women’s fault when MEN mock women’s trends, hobbies or interests
No matter how sanitized and sweet it seems, I dont think anyone can deny that this culture of female infantilization was part of the general cultural shift rightward we're seeing! How long can someone joke about being inferior before we have to acknoweledge that they might actually have an inferiority complex?
Honestly. I feel like it started fine with "i love being like other girls/its okay to be girly, actually, I don't have ti prove myself by being against those things if I don't eant to" to a subset if the tradwife pipeline
@@Starburst514rightt thats the issue
that was kind of a punch to my face, thank you
lol AS IF WOMEN control the media or how MEN THINK, how asinine. This video and the comments are just blaming WOMEN for being themselves and misogyny
@@gothgammy666 you fell for the antifeminist conservative psyop, take the L and get fixing your damn self
Something I've noticed about this trend is how very class specific and race specific it is. A lot of "girlhood" is specifically the experience of upper middle-class white girls. As a poor muslim girl, it has been very strange to see all of these experiences touted as universal that I completely missed out on due to my family's religion and income.
It has to appeal to middle class white women because it's entirely about consumerism. It's like a feedback loop.
It's got me wondering though, is there a universal "girl" experience that would transcend race or class?
I mean an experience that's worth celebrating, not one that's centered around shared trauma.
White and Muslim aren't mutually exclusive at all. You can be a middle class white woman, but still have your experience being shaped by being Muslim.
It’s your problem
@@daliam8715 i dont think the op was implying it was?
I saw a tiktok explaining how conservative politics will use irony to actually infiltrate spaces. Like people "ironically" uphold these speeches just to be "quirky" and as a joke... until it isn't anymore. I didn't quite understand it when I first watched it, but now, after this video, I can see very clearly how that's exactly what happened to the "I'm just a girl" trend.
same deal with "the feminine urge" tbh. it started out as jokes like "the feminine urge to dig a hole in the woods" and pretty quickly turned into people posting stuff like "the feminine urge to be a stay-at-home mom and clean the house 🙏" or "the feminine urge to quit my job and make my man the breadwinner"
like... if those are your urges that's cool, please don't essentialize femininity as being a tradwife tho?
similar thing applies to the “reject modernity embrace tradition” catchphrase. and if you point this out people will get REALLY riled up and defend that its all just a joke. but like, words still mean things-especially ones as loaded as “modernity” and “tradition”. it applies to so much more than just saying how better you think taco bell’s interior design was in the 90s or whatever. as you said, it’s a joke until it isn’t.
disguising conservative messages as a harmless joke is an effective defense mechanism of these being called into question. “god can you believe the woke is calling this silly meme a tool for pushing conservative beliefs? what happened to being able to tell JOKES?”
same song and dance every single time.
actually, i have a psycholinguistic answer for you for why this happens! conservatives actually have a harder time understanding irony than less conservative individuals, especially if that ironic statement comes from a person of color or a person with an accent. so it’s far more likely that conservatives saw these “im just a girl” jokes about eating a popsicle for dinner and just took it way too seriously, and instead of a joke it becomes just an actual representation of women instead. it’s a really interesting paper- let me know if you want more info about it!
Yes please that research sounds absolutely fascinating! (And definitely like something we need to watch out for as activists & linguistics needs...)
@@daynakindermann141 I'd also love to read that
The problem with 'girlbosses' was NEVER that 'women were laying aside their femininity and acting like men', the problem was that it endorsed the concept that women making money is all that was necessary for liberation from patriarchy. I fully endorse women being financially independent and advancing in business, AND that should be paired with social activism and voting and organizing for feminist causes.
and it didn't do anything to dispel the either/or dichotomy where women can give their lives and energy to their families, or to their careers, but NEVER to themselves. I think it's also super important that we don't forget, even while we acknowledge that participating in the economy as autonomous individuals if we choose to is obviously good, capitalism fucking blows and is trying to disenfranchise and dehumanize all of us.
@@K.C-2049 Exactly. It was never focused on the women as human beings with enriched inner lives but instead as tools to be used in the service of capitalistic structures. The "girlboss" is not a person, but a means of exploitation packaged back to appeal to women.
@@roseyoung44 "...but a means of exploitation packaged back to appeal to women." you ATE.
I agree, this is so real. The criticism of women "acting like men" is so stupid because what is acting like a man??? The issue was the capitalistic hijacking of financial independence, instead of encouraging ambition and drive the "girlboss" in our capitalist context is one who serves capitalism first, women later. Capitalism first, anti patriarchal activism later. That was the issue.
@@roseyoung44 the capitalist context in which she exists allows only that she focuses and cares for capitalism first rather than who she claims to be for, i think the "girlboss" archetype speaks to women's want for independence and success because of human ambition and i agree and resonate with it but the issue is cuz it serves capitalism exclusively, it doesnt tackle the patriarchal challenges that make it so that women cant let their drive and ambition power them the way men can
ironic thing about the "i'm just a girl" song going viral is the fact that people seemingly don't understand its deeper political meaning and now it's being used to aestheticize the stereotypes that the song originally satirized
Right! The girls did not read the full thing, just took what they wanted to hear 🫠
Yeah, she literally says in that song "that's all that you'll let me be!" It's a song about how infuriating it is to be infantalized as a grown woman
Right? I love the song.
This happens a lot w tik tok sounds. Ppl will clip a song, remove all its context and use it for a trends that has the opposite meaning of the original song. It's very frustrating sometimes
OMG I KNOW i actually love the song but like the line is literally "im just a girl living in captivity" LIKE HOW DO YOU JUST TAKE "im just a girll tee hee✨️✨️✨️"
This has been pissing me off for a year now. I am very feminine presenting. I have very stereotypically feminine strengths and interests. But I feel like I cannot get behind what this “girl movement” stands for because i feel it somehow tears women down instead of lifting them up by framing starving yourself or crashing cars or being bad at math as a part of the universal feminine experience
FELT! I'm a very feminine woman, like a Disney Princess brought to life, but I don't want to tear others down, or to spout bioessentialist bullshit. I want to find like-minded people, but others who likes the same thing as me tend to fall down that rabbit hole.
God forbid women ironically joke just once about being seen as inferior by society 🙄
@@liliana.6053But the problem, as Shanspeare stated repeatedly, is that they were hardly *actually* actually criticising it. A lot of the viral videos, and indeed every one of the videos I saw, only played into the stereotypes, but offered no alternatives or room for critical thinking
@ScrubLordKyle ironic memes don't need to have a person turning to the camera to explain the lesson we learned from the episode. It's actually pretty infantilizing to ask for memes to pander to people with the media analysis skills of paramecia.
@@liliana.6053 One woman making a joke once is fine.
A whole bunch of women making that joke a whole bunch of times suggests the possibility at least one of them isn't joking.
Finding out ppl weren't embracing "I'm just a girl" "girl math" "girl dinner" as like. Post ironic absurd shit that was meant to jokingly justify things like idk eating cereal and charcuterie for dinner and instead being deadass in perpetuating the same ol infantalization and misogyny that's always been there was so frustrating. I think of how Chrissy Chlapecka + the ironic bimbo movement had, at its core, came from indulging in drag style displays of hyperfemininity while subverting the idea that it came alongside being unintelligent or ditzy, and then we had ppl like that one girl trying to explain geopolitical issues in "girl terms" like comparing settler colonialism to being ousted from the sleepover friend group even though they were besties first like??? You were supposed to destroy the sith not join them etc etc
Okay but like, I've never seen any part of that, I'm seriously having doubts about how much of a thing it really is. A few tiktok videos by some people trying to capitalize on some outrage should be hardly considered a movement.
@@liliana.6053 from what ive seen, it was pretty big. the audio of the "im just a girl" line was probably used in 10k+ videos and i kept seeing the line pretty often on different platforms, even heard my friends say it irl
Yes this is literally sickening I thought we were all being jokesters not actual freaks
@ I mean just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it didn't exist as a very real niche movement on there
@@asterrrriaaaaaa6926 right like I thought we were saying "I'm just a girl" for stupid lighthearted stuff not for overconsumption or reinforcing gender roles
I hate the “I’m just a girl” trend, being used as “Oh i’m just a dainty little woman, I can’t do big ‘man’ stuff”. My sister told me one of her co workers got one of her tasks wrong and when my sister tried explaining it to her she just went “I’m just a girl!”. Like? The whole point of the song is to call out the misogyny. Now people are playing into it
This! I have a coworker who does this and is near 30
Tell her she's not "just a girl" she's "just a blameshifter"
That would have set me off! Like, "Oh, so being female makes you bad at your job? You want to walk that one back?"
Women have some respect for yourself, you think the guys you work with are smarter than you? Gurl noooooo. They're just more confident and they're louder.
it's literally a reversal of boys will be boys atp (both sayings suck!!)
i’m 4 minutes in and i hope this video mentions that insane “gaza explained 4 the girlies!” tiktok that made me immediately drop any and all cutesyfying “im just a girl” type phrases from my vocab because i realized some people were NOT using it the way i was. lmfao
I am only just now hearing about it from your comment and it has already done irreparable harm to my psyche. What the hell.
People are crazy. I wish people could take serious shit seriously.
That's insane what 😭
Holy shit????
I know EXACTLY who you’re talking about and yeah
the whole "I'm just a girl" started as a harmless little trend, but it's slowly becoming the new "boys will be boys," with people using it to escape accountability. it's really sad to see tbh, especially since women did have to do a LOT of work to escape the stereotypes that this phrase is bringing back.
Yes equality 🥳 men can be irresponsible and not have any accountability then women too.
Dare I say it was never harmless and was always going to spiral into this
If society has allowed boys to just be boys for so long why shouldn't girls create that space for themselves?
All stereotypes based on reality
@@byDEVITA absolutely crazy take for someone with an Asian women as their pfp, both groups having tons of negative stereotypes against them. Would love you to elaborate on this some.
I'm 45. When No Doubt released "I'm Just A Girl" it soooo spoke to teenage me & my life. My brother, who is only 10 months older than me, was allowed to go out to events, parties, etc., while I had to stay home because "it's different for girls." 🙄 I called it house arrest; I was sentenced for the crime of being born female. To this day my bro doesn't have as close relationship / attachment to my parents as I do because he was frequently gone & barely visits now.
"I'll let my son abandon any loser chick he knocks up, but if the daughter that I OWN gets pregnant-"
“I called it house arrest; I was sentenced for being born female”
What a word smith! I’m definitely going to make a patch out of that
I like how you write about your experience. maybe you should do a short memoir in your free time if you have any to spare. even if it's just for yourself
@@snowyetie8799 😁🥰
@@neurdogic8909
Thank you 😁
I'm an autistic woman who has had to deal with consistent ableism in the form of infantilization. This "I'm just a girl 🥺" stuff has always felt gross to me, even though pink is my favorite color and I love cute things and anime.
As recently as a few months ago, I've been placed into situations where I had to beg others to view me as a real adult with a valid and fully developed perspective. I work, live independently, have a college degree, and drive, but plenty of NT people refuse to see me as anything other than an overgrown, petulant toddler. Last time this happened, I went home and cried for a long time. I personally can't comprehend why any adult would want to be seen as "just a girl", being treated like a little girl when you're clearly not is degrading and humiliating.
Autistic young adult here to report! I participate in this weird expression due to lack of self-esteem and positive social feedback!
I'm dumb, i've always been dumb and that will never change, when mixed with perfectionism it becomes another level of hell. So joking about it becomes easier on my psyche as i join in on the jokes, keep the good mood and i get to accept my shortcomings as something that doesn't make me unworthy. I don't fail at being an adult yet, because "i'm just a girl", in a big world, being silly, just learning, and it's ok to be so.
I still make this type of jokes with people that genuinely love me though, i doubt i'd let myself get bullied for it.
I get the feeling that some people want to be excused from the consequences of their actions. I kinda get it? Especially as some pressure can feel unfair, either as a student or if you're working. What I don't appreciate is using harmful stereotypes to do that. It's already hard enough for girls and women to be taken seriously. Asking people to make allowances for you based off destructive prejudices is icky.
I'm autistic too and no one sees me as a child.
this is one of the reasons why I don't tell people I'm autistic
second reason, it's not anyone else's fucking business
The problem is that online, the ones popularizing the “just a girl 💅” trend are not actually bragging about being “dumb”…. They’re bragging about being rich and pretty. They’re not actually limited or unable to take basic care of themselves or support themselves, they just don’t have to. It’s basic mean girl behavior.
I just turned 38, growing old is a privilege I will not have, I have stage 4 breast cancer. Please ladies value your age. I always thought I'd be able to grow gray hair and wrinkles but I won't and I'm very sad about that
Sending love to you.
@@hcfuraigonsame ❤️
Please never say never. Stay strong, mama. :(
sending you lots of love!!🫶🏽
Sending you all the strenght and love in the world!
THANK YOU! As a woman who's also a mathematician (I do math research and have a math degree and some physics background) I have always hated trends like "girl math" and others of the sort. It just re-enforces stereotypes about women's potential in intellectual communities that so many of us work hard every single day to dismantle. I have to work so hard just to be taken as seriously as a man in the math community. I've had students I'm tutoring in math refuse to refer to me as a woman or refuse my help at my job for math, classmates laugh at me on the first day of my advanced math courses, I've had professors dismiss proofs that were 100% correct because they hadn't thought of the method themselves so there's "no way I could have thought of it on my own", and I've sat through many advanced math and physics courses where I'm the only woman. All of this because people assume that I'm less capable in the field, for being a woman. That's why I hate the "girl math meme" so much. It's not funny to ironically embrace the stereotype of "te-he I'm just a girl so I can't do basic math when shopping. How cute and quirky!" It's frustrating and just makes the lives of those of us who have to experience the consequences of these stereotypes every single day much more difficult. I just want to be taken seriously in the field I love with all my heart. I don't want to see people embracing and making a meme out of the stereotypes I have to deal with in said field every single day.
Electrical Engineer here and I can second that. I got excluded so often during class stuff or put on a spot because I was the only girl so it was up to me to profe that girls can actually do something or hold a certain oppionion. Like, always the token "girl" and everything I did was put on a silver platter the be examined. And I spent years pushing through just to work in a company with a boss that proudly declared that "engineering isn't really a woman thing so I don't think it would be professional to have a female speaker at our event". I was right there... And not just him, not even just the men, also the woman in other departments. I can't ecen count how often I have been asked to get a second oppinion by a man or just right out ignored because people believe I can't do my job, simply because I'm a woman. I had to find a male coworker willing to present some of my ideas at work, simply because people don't listen to me.
im super super bad at math (im pretty sure i have dyscalculia) and im biologically a woman, but i dont really identify with that. so as u can imagine its a weird feeling having my lacking math abilities being associated with femininity. id rather people just said they were stupid and didnt link it to biology.
The funniest thing about the girl math trend is that some things it depicts as female trait, such as feeling like you are spending less money when you pay with coins, are actually universal experiences that I noticed also my boyfriend and male friends relate to, it is probably a normal psychological bias in how we percieve different kinds of objects and paying methods.
@@rejectfalseiconssame here I’m AFAB and cis for the most part. The part where I said “refuse to refer to me as a woman” happened during the pandemic. I was starting college and was taking my first classes online. For one of my math courses we had a discord server and I would often help people my tutoring them and answering their questions. One day someone asked a question, and someone else in the server suggested the person ask me. The person who suggested this referred to me as “he”, to which I thought no big deal I’ll just correct them. While I thought it was pretty obvious I was a woman, I have a feminine name, when I talk I have a very feminine voice, my pronouns listed in my discord profile were she/her, but sometimes people make mistakes. When I told them “hey actually I’m a woman not a man” they took it as a joke. They kept denying it because I had been helping them in math. They didn’t want to believe that all this time a girl was helping them understand calc 3. It was just so unbelievable to them. It got to the point where I even sent a picture of my face to prove to them that I wasn’t a guy and they just laughed it off and claimed that I must have found a photo online. It was frustrating and humiliating to deal with. I really love helping others learn and enjoy math, but when people can’t even treat me with basic respect because their fragile ego prevents them from accepting help from me because I’m a woman, it can be frustrating.
Also I completely agree, the girl math trend didn’t need to be gendered. They could have made the joke without relating it to women.
@@laurazanetti8267yeah when the joke is made outside of any gendered context it can be funny. For example people in the crochet and Pokémon communities have picked up the joke to poke fun at how a lot of us in those communities justify excessive spending. Stuff like that’s perfectly fine and can be funny , I just hate how people felt the need to associate it with “girl hood”, I don’t really see the humor in that version. The concept of the joke isn’t the issue it’s the fact that they made it a “girl thing” when literally almost everyone does those things at some point
when someone i know says “it’s girl math” i feel like one of those people in a zombie apocalypse who just noticed a bite on one of my groupmates
'It's girl wound care', I say, plastering it over with a Limited Edition Apocalypse Barbie glitter bandaid (the glitter gets in the wound, but it's so cute)
I love this comment. Then again, I'm old, and I feel like a lot of 20somethings were bitten.
LOL
@bdm483 not Girl Wound Care 😂😂😂
wait that’s actually such a solid analogy /srs
I think in personal contexts "I'm just a girl" has the capacity to be ironic a la "god forbid women do anything", and even critical, but it has to be built on the foundation of mutual understanding of a woman's agency, responsibility, and capability. And we simply must admit that that context doesn't exist in public forums as a whole right now.
It's all silly haha girlhood until Trump got elected and we collectively went "oh fck"
I think that's an important point
I agree wholeheartedly.
As a black woman who loves hyperfeminine aesthetics while not actually wanting to participate in them, it feels like I'm on a pendulum whenever people talk about embracing and cherishing femininity online. I completely get it when I see examples of society denying black women and girls femininity or protection that white women and girls are mostly used to; and the way society undervalues feminine aesthetics while praising masculine aesthetics instead. But then I'll see people unironically claim Princess Peach furrowing her eyebrows on a video game cover or Rapunzel getting her hair cut short in Tangled is dismissing femininity and bad feminism and then I stop getting it. Rinse and repeat.
Real on the last one, im sick and tired of seeing people go, oh a woman is mad or doing something "masculine", shes acting like a man! Like what even is acting like a man....also the misogyny reinforced when someone goes oh you made a female character not "feminine" enough, thus shes a bad character and youre dimissing femininity, its so stupid because thats reinforcing misogynistic standards on women's behaviours and also women's humanity. Can women be free??? Im sick and tired of hearing from "tradfems" who claim every female character whos not the feminine ideal, is "dismissing femininity" and "is not empowering" because all theyre doing is placing women in a patriarchal box that cant be escaped.
Don't translate... भवतः हृदयस्य धड़कनं कतिपयेषु घण्टेषु स्थगयिष्यति, अस्य शापस्य मुक्तिं प्राप्तुं एकमात्रं मार्गं....
@@ville-c4u होश
Just go back to Africa
@@ville-c4u touch grass
You already mentioned it briefly but I want to elaborate: girlhood trends also exclude based on physical and mental disorders and disabilities.* Disability rights and mad pride activists have often noted how disabled people are degendered by society. Not strong or mentally stable enough to easily access masculinity, not aesthetically pleasing or socially skilled enough to easily access femininity, etc. The social media faces of girlhood pretty much always able in body and mind.
I’m going to get a bit weirder with it. I think that social exclusion in general tends to promote disconnections from gender. I sometimes wonder if I might not have identified as nonbinary if I was not autistic. I didn’t get the chance to socially perform as a girl or woman as a child. I couldn’t grasp the social norms which would make me feminine, or participate in girlhood with my childhood classmates. I didn’t get to reinforce being a girl through my peers, nor was I able to connect with the boys as a substitute. I was a girl on paper, and I accepted the definition, but I was more of a girl-adjacent... thing, in practice. Visually feminine enough to not receive any criticisms, but socially some sort of nebulous mass of discomfort. When lockdown came when I was in high school, I lost any reason to perform gender at all, and that was what allowed me to realize I was nonbinary. It was all hollow obligations. The walls were already beginning to crack, I would have given up on being a girl/woman eventually, but COVID definitely sped things along- something I’ve heard other trans and genderqueer people say about their experiences, too. Being a girl/woman was just one more pointless social obligation for me, and I enjoyed releasing myself from it. If I had the chance to socially initiate into girl/womanhood, I feel I might have internalized it instead. I’ve heard people with physical disabilities share similar things too. Idk this is just a ramble and I might be wildly off the mark, it’s late where I am
* With some exceptions on the mental health side of things, for romanticized depictions of mood disorders. I could draw a parallel with hysteria but I’ll leave that to whoever reads and feels inspired. Also romanticized depictions of certain eating disorders often gain entry into the list of Girl Experiences for reasons that are fairly obvious- girls are constantly pressured to match unreasonable body shapes.
That's the beauty of existence, everyone is just doing what they have to do, what's right for them. I'm also autistic. And I'm also just a girl. You know why?
Cause girls are human beings.
Same (autistic woman who knew she was autistic from my preteen years), half the “just a girl videos” feel like trauma responses and Stockholm syndrome to convince themselves they enjoy the tiny cage of femininity.
@@ladygrey4113 GETTING OUT OF MY CAGE, AND IM DOING JUST FINE 💃
shit, you're spot on. it was like that for me too
Am also autistic girl-adjacent thing
For me the rise of “girlhood” to me always felt really bioessentialist. Online especially being a “girl” has been simplified down to a very narrow “traditional” type of woman. I’ve always felt so excluded from this trend because I didn’t have the same experiences as that certain type of woman.
SAME HERE 😭 i mean i love it for everyone else, it felt like being in school agisn because i didn't ",fit in" to what everyone said was rhe and "typical" girl experience
Getting older I'm seeing more women who have experiences similar to me, which has been validating (still feel like i was raised more like a son but thats a different conversation) but the whole rise of it has made me just feel even more alienated, even with my friends who embraced the girlhood aesthetic, which i live for them but god i feel like the downer when i get throw myself into it because its really just not the experiences i had
brooo this is so real. i've always been pretty excluded by girls when i was younger, neither do i like anything hyperfeminine, but i feel like i can't even express that because of this new obsession with "pick-me girls" that's come along with this trend where literally any girl who doesn't use the ribbon emoji and wear pink head to toe wants to be special 😭😭
wish i could shake people who think like this by the shoulders and get them to stop viewing girlhood as an aesthetic and to stop alienating and excluding girls who don't fit that aesthetic (because let's be real, that's not being a "girl's girl" either)
💯‼️ lately online it feels like being a woman is reduced to the hyper femme coquette exist, and anyone who exists outside of that is not a real woman/is a "pick-me." And I mean, it's great if you do like those things and all but how is viewing all girls as a hyper femme monolith and excluding the ones who don't fit into that aesthetic any different from 50s gender roles?
this exactly. for me girlhood was realizing over and over again why certain parts of "femininity" didn't work for me. realizing i was "weird" (years before i realized i was neurodivergent). realizing my mom couldn't afford brand new clothes super often. realizing there were clothes and makeup i hated wearing because of my sensory issues. realizing not shaving my legs was easier. realizing i wasn't attracted to boys. going back to a time where i giggled with friends at sleepovers as we did eachothers makeup and gossiped about boys is laughable to me because there was no such time for me when i was a girl.
@rachelle5169 man I feel you on the clothes, core memory of a girl in sixth grade who interrogated me when I mentioned I got my clothes all hand-me-down 😫 she wanted to know when was the last time I shopped, how much my parents made, ect. It's was like "sorry I'm the first poor person you've met AMELIA but I don't see why it matters THAT MUCH"
As a gay trans guy I was surprised by you saying boy isn't used the way girl is by men, but I do think the examples in my communities moreso reinforce your perspective. I thought of "femboy", "pretty boy", "boy toy", etc. They're all used by more feminine men who are considered objects of desire, and often linked to youth. I even feel this when I choose to call myself a trans boy more often than a trans man, in my head it signals youth and desirability. That has a lot of the same issues to unpack as the use of girl.
was looking for this comment, as a fellow gay trans guy
Gay trans man huddle. I think youthfulness and being 'harmless' are very interconnected and it ties into being 'not heterosexual male'
I think it's a big flare for the support of the theory of social infantilization of women when you notice that men that are closer to femininity stop becoming men and start becoming boys, specifically I mean femboys. It's like the closer you get to femininity the more infantilized treatment you get, and if not infantilized, then treated as disposable, like older women and sexualization of women in general.
honestly its something im grappling with myself now as well.. wanted to be a twink boy toy to be attractive and now have to unpack and unlearn all this
Why would you rather be a boy than a man? Do you just not have a spine or any self respect?
The rise of the girlaissance I feel like goes hand in hand with the rise of trad-wife content on tik tok and twitter cause as soon as the rise of "girl dinner," "girlhood," and "girlmath" dropped on my fyp so did the rise of trad-wives showcasing their homemade fruit snacks for their kids and living lavish lifestyles that many women can not even fathomly afford in the modern age. Then I began seeing many of these women who participated in the trends say that the trad-wives were not pushing an agenda but then come to find out trad-wives like Nara Smith knowingly and inherently conservative and right-wing. These trends seemed to have helped push more young women in Gen Z towards that ideology and pipeline.
No, this is a completely insane way to look at it. Tradwife shit has always been about seeing women having a choice in their family settings as degeneracy, and seeing the subservient stay at home mom as superior. The girlhood meme is just the female exclusive version of the general trend among millenials and younger generations, where we feel lopeless in living up to the adulthood standards of our parents' generation. It's the same as "adulting". We don't have stable jobs, we can barely afford rent, often living with our parents in our 30s, and our mental health is in the shits.
It's actually cathartic when your 12 pm dinner of a tuna can with olives on bread is not "look how much of a fuckup I am", but "hey what can I do I'm just a girl".
I think it swung straight past reclaiming being stereotypically feminine as a fine thing to be to "you can't ask too much of my because I'm just a girl and I don't know any better wuwu." I'm not even sure HOW but here we are.
I am in my 30's. Never had a job, boyfriend, lived separately (trying to now). My mental illness just prevented me from all of the experiences of adulthood, good or bad. I will tell you this. Sometimes a lie is pretty and if you repeat it enough, it almost becomes the truth. But it isn't. I wouldn't wish my existence on anyone. Every time I am doing something on my own it gives me so much joy and it gives me my DIGNITY back. Fight for your rights, fight for your life, fight for your dignity. You can find a way that doesn't involve violence, but FIGHT, be a PERSON.
this video essay seriously spoke to me as a butch. even as a cis woman i'm getting excluded from these on the notion that i don't "get it." i've had numerous people tell me how i don't "get it." it highlights such a specific experience that not every girl had. it aligns a lot with TERF talking points, as you said, and gender essentialism. reading that bit about how you can't just put on a pearl necklace and get the girl renaissance hit hard because. I DON'T GET IT. but i WAS A GIRL. it's the dichotomy in their teachings and how it barely even reaches anywhere in my brain.
I can't wait for a trend where people ignore trends, and actually just embrace their uniqueness. It's so tiring hearing about all these trends which don't seem to be doing anything but hurting people. (and the planet)
ah yes, the anti-trend trend
But, in all seriousness, trends are not inherently bad. They can teach new skills, offer new perspectives, and allow space for people to be themselves. The challenge is that, as humans (and especially adolescents) seek to take part in society, it can be easy to tweak elements of oneself to harmful degrees in order to better fit in . I could totally see the start of the "girl dinner," for example, being a push against hyper-health focus and instead being about eating what is easy/tasty. Unfortunately, that was co-opted into nearly the inverse
In short, trends seem to be a fairly innate element of human society, though even harmless ones can be distorted to spread a harmful message
Trends are just a way for people to try to connect with each other. So if you want to abolish them, you have to replace it with something else. And it goes beyond social media. Pop culture was defined by music trends and dance trends and fashion trends before Facebook or Twitter existed. How does one develop a truly unique and original and authentic sense of themselves while also existing in and engaging in their culture and their communities?
@@albertlassiter8608
"Trends aren't inherently bad"
*TikTok caused a rise in micro trends for everything including furniture causing overconsumption.*
@@chairmanm3ow
Okay but like have you seen the state of the world? Maybe we need less trends and more people doing their own thing together.
@@albertlassiter8608 i agree
Seeing Popeyes' rendition of "girl dinner" gave me the same visceral feeling as seeing anime referenced in McDonalds marketing. Like watching something you love being morphed into something unrecognizable.
I gotta say, though I can understand part of this trend, specifically, wanting to celebrate girly hobbies and interests in a society where femininity and women are seen as inferior to masculinity; the gender essentialism of it all always rubs me the wrong way. I don't know if I am talking of something too specific or if it has to do a lot with this topic; but some time ago someone posted a photo of the Moon and called it "him" and tons of people were in the quote replies basically chastising the OP for that. Saying things like "The moon is a girl!" "Something that pretty could never be man!" "Don't offend her!" "In all mythologies the Moon is a woman!" even though the OP clarifiied that in their culture and language (which I think it was Arabic), the Moon is referred to as masculine.
And I was like "Great job girlies, don't you love when you are so feminist that you circle back to putting men and women in strict boxes and categories!" "Boy, I love women so much that I am completely ignorant to other cultures and languages!"
And I understand that there are belief systems where The Moon as a woman/mother is important, I can't speak for them at all. What I hate is this tendency of mystical feminism bull$hit to see women as this otherwordly angelic beings untainted by earthly things. NO! I am a human being before everything, a human that shares the planet with other billions of humans, I can't be restricted to this idealized way of existing, it seems exhausting.
And as easy it is to say "The Moon is just a rock in space" My opinion is that Moon Boys deserve as much as Moon Girls. Though in my personal preference, I am more for a Cosmic Horror/ Eldritch approach , by which I think Moon doesn't really care what us mere humans think about them/it. 🤷♀
i agree, i’m of inuit and mi’kmaq descent where we view the moon earth and sea as divine feminine entities. in mi’kmaq spirituality the moon is referred to as grandmother moon(Nogami) and earth as mother earth(Ootsitgamoo) in contrast to inuit spirituality where the sea is controlled by Sedna(also referred to as the Mistress of the Sea or Mother of the Sea, Mother of the Deep(Sassuma Arnaa), Table(Nerrivik), Nuliajuk, Big Bad Woman (Arnapkapfaaluk), Takánakapsâluk/Takannaluk, and old woman who lived in the sea) and the sun(Siqiniq/Malina) is seen as feminine rather than the moon(Taqqiq/Aningaat). despite me following these beliefs it frustrates me to no end that mystical new age feminism bullshit appropriates my ancestors beliefs and oral traditions and use and twist them for their own selfish interests(especially in wishy-washy wellness influencer/neo-hippy/neo-pagan spaces and witchtok). moon boys and moon girls aren’t mutually exclusive they can exist equally i wish people would understand that!
I feel this completely jfc
It’s not easy to say the moon is a rock. It’s the truth.
This was so funny to read like imagine telling someone 30 years ago that people will use the internet to argue about the pronouns of the Moon
You lowkey slayed. Gender essentialism and just any kind of stereotype based on that mindset is inherently dehumanizing. It robs you of your agency to be perceived as who you are and not as a byproduct of your sex and/or gender.
i'm glad people are also pointing out how it's weird that this culture centers "girlhood" around the white middle class experience. i'm white myself so i can't say anything about the racial aspect, but i grew up significantly lower class and didn't have the same opportunities the people around me did, and i mean as an actual "girl", a child. i had very little toys, forced myself to commit to school because i had nothing else to do, makeup was always stolen from mother's cabinets, room decor was nonexistent because i didn't even have a room for 9 years, i genuinely thought skirts were a "rich person" thing. this isn't even getting into the isolation i experienced by being autistic until i found more "weird" kids late into my elementary years
all the essential parts of "girlhood" portrayed and done by everyone was something i couldn't obtain and it upset me, and it may be a catalyst for a lot of "i'm just a girl" types, but to me i didn't even know what "girlhood" was supposed to be anymore if my identity clashed so hard with the girls wearing designer brands, going on beach trips, travelling out of country to places like paris, all of it being emphasized all the time in the stuff i watched and read that's supposed to be aimed at me. a lot of people in my position probably feel similar, my "weird" friends dressed like me for the same reasons regarding finances and having horrible parents, and i've witnessed many nonwhite friends get denied their actual girlhood (again, as children) because of racial stereotypes and implications, all of it is upsetting
nowadays i'm genderless and i'm a lot happier with that, performing femininity on my own terms instead of what seems to be expected. i really, sincerely hope these "i'm just a girl" type of girls/women end up finding themselves and growing as who they are rather then excusing their potential because of the mystical "girlhood aesthetic" that is unattainable for most. media idealized it for way too long and i don't want it to seep into more expections of girls and even women
perform femininity however you want to, you aren't bad for wanting to wear pastels and pink, look nice for someone you like, being a stay-at-home mother, admit you're not good at math or cooking (hell i still can't cook that well as an adult), or even just being the opposite of those ideas, just build yourself up beyond that and fight alongside your sisters, and i mean all of them. that's just what i take from it
thank you for putting it into words 🫶
As a woman (girl?) In STEM, "girl math" irks me so much
Same! I didn’t learn calculus 3 and statistics to be told about “girl math”
It’s one thing to be bad at math (can’t relate lol) since it’s not everyone’s thing, but why is math being gendered (again) now? Is there a boy math or a nonbinary math? What would those entail? Why are women seen as naturally bad at math? I don’t understand, but I’m just a girl. 🤭
@@ladygrey4113four years of engineering school only to come back to this narrative 🫠
Sameeee, fricking Bessel functions didn't give me that much character development for people to assume I can't do a multiplication
thank you so much for this video, shan, i really needed someone to talk about this. it's depressing how all the progress we fought for is being erased by social media. we're once again promoting harmful beauty standards, eds, overconsumption and infantilizing women. at face value, the "girlhood" jokes may seem harmless, but it's just a bunch of grown women infantilizing and objectifying themselves while encouraging others to do the same. with the rise of tiktok and instagram reels, women stopped being seen as people with their own ideals, desires, aspirations and lives and became an unattainable idea of hyperfemininity
My idea of embracing girlhood is nurting the little girl that I didn't get to be. Letting her enjoy whatever she enjoy even if it seems childish to other people. Im taking care of little me the way adults should have been, and it's a wonderful feeling. All the "girl" stuff lately has made me sick to my stomach from the beginning, like girl math and girl dinner. Women before us worked so hard just to still get treated as less than; we do not need to be helping the people the people who marginalize us by saying what theyve been saying since forever. I get that it started as parody, but then the people that actually believe we are lesser glommed onto it and supported it wholeheartedly. That's where it goes wrong. It bothers me so much.
This makes sense, and I think that’s probably its root for many women - being a woman can be difficult and taxing on its own, and then adding the other responsibilities of adult life and the realization that your inner child wasn’t nurtured how she should’ve been can make it feel even worse, so maybe you feel like you’ve EARNED the right to be “just a girl” who has to be taken care of and babied. It’s tiring to do math or change the oil or cook a meal and it’s hard to be a woman, so I’m just a girl! Doing girl things! Sort of a tangent but I feel like it’s a similar thing with men who want their wives to be second mothers who take care of them - I feel like it comes from a place of loneliness, of frustration with how hard life is, and when it gets mixed in with the attitude that men inherently DESERVE to be pampered by their wives, it seems like a good escape from how hard life is. The problem is that having a “just a girl” attitude doesn’t make life less hard. Having a perfect trad wife doesn’t make life less hard. Life is just hard sometimes. No amount of patriarchal norms will fix it for anyone. It’s a band-aid. At the end of the day, we all have to take care of our OWN inner child, not ask someone else to do it, and then we have to pull ourselves together and be adults when we need to be. It’s tough at times, but ignoring it isn’t gonna make it easier lol
Sorry for this rant apparently I’m passionate about this 😭
Idk why, but we stopped referring to this exact feeling of (robbed innocence) childhood, as exactly that. Childhood (the inner child). Boyhood and girlhood are just gendered versions (that should be abolished) of what in reality it really is, which is childhood. Many people were and are still robbed of their childhood (their transformative, as in literally biologically being robbed of their formative growth) and now adults, immature adults at that, are redefining that as per their already distorted views. Assigning gender and sometimes subjectively, sex to a "canonically" just HUMAN experience (sexless, genderless)
This right here. For me girlhood is healing the internalized misogyny I had as a kid that left me feeling ashamed for liking pink and sparkles by embracing certain aesthetics now because fuck it I’m an adult and I’ll do what I want with me money. But seeing how the trend has evolved into women just feeding into those exact misogynistic stereotypes which led me to avoid girly stuff as a child in the first place is depressing. It’s like “yeah maybe kid me was right to be more tomboyish because embracing this stuff DOES make others look at girls as less than”
This comment section is me!!!! I feel so seen!! I grew up much too quickly, having had bad friends that just didn’t care about me and exposed me to some things I was not ready for. But I have to be thankful in some part to my maturity as I have never fallen into the just on the spot acceptance of what I was shown. Even when I was really young I had moments when I would stop and think of why someone was doing that thing or what something is. I grew up close with my dad and his friends(my mom and dad are not divorced)so I was a tomboy. I loved mountain biking and riding dirt bikes and all of that. I still do. I played video games at the boys table in school. But all the while I wished for that girl group. When I was 10, in 3rd grade I had the bestest friend ever, and her and I made a pact to be together forever. Well, it didn’t last because we were never in the same classes ever again. But she stuck with me and I always longed to be her friend. I still do. I finally talked to her again in senior year and I was so shocked to find out she had a girlfriend because that is right when I realized I had feelings for her all of this time. I have always been a good girl, never going out or anything like that, because I am waiting. I am waiting to be given something that I feel I deserve. School sucked for me, middle school and onwards I lost all of my friends because of a falling out. Covid ruined my high school, and that will forever be a scar in my heart. My life stopped at 13 and I am 18 now. I’m just now realizing I am alive and I can live, but I don’t know how to in this society. I have had a survival mindset for so long, and I still do. But I am learning how to break out of it. I am learning how to take little steps and to slow down. I am letting little me, the little girl in my heart, take a breath of fresh air. I really am still living at 13 because that is when my life stopped for me, and really this new embrace of being a girl and liking the things I never let myself like before, it almost feels like a cry for help. My girlhood is not because I am spoiled and used to it, but because I need, desperately need, the little girl in me to heal.
I'm just a teenage girl is to Gen Z what adulting was to millennials.
"Just ate vegetables for the first time this month. Adulting like a boss." I'm sorry if that sentence gave you any terminal illnesses.
Tbh i think it's even worse in the case of gen z, cuz as cringe as the whole adulting thing was, at least it wasnt intrinsically tied to misogyny the same way the whole "i'm just a girl 👉👈" thing is
@@Akiles1008It's not intrinsically tied to misogyny. This type of "crysis" is just as prevalent with gen Z guys, we just tend to go on discord and play games with the boys to ease the pressure of having to grow up. "Just a girl" type popu music has a sizable male listener base because even as a heterosexual guy it's still relatable.
As damaging as it is for stereotypes to film your own gender failing at driving or budgeting and showcase it online as "haha I'm just a girl", it's not necessarily better having to "man up" and hide all your shortcomings because you're an "adult man" and you should act like it.
I was initially very enthusiastic about girl culture but then it started to feel predatory and then consumerist and then gender essentialist. I stopped relating to it because being a girl isnt literally just that anymore, its being a gender conforming, hyper feminine, material driven nymphet. Being a girl (overall) means you're perpetually scrutinized but thats not a justification for participating in patriarchal and consumerist practices just because its pinkwashed.
There's something really sinister about people who are unwilling to interrogate the trends they're participating in. Like as long as you're having fun that's all that matters? You're not concerned about who you might be excluding or harming? You're not interested in how this might be used to manipulate you or empower people you disagree with? Perhaps this is why I am also no fun at parties.
Absolutely - it shows a stunning lack of empathy & self awareness, but is very common, alas...
This is also why people who say things like "Can't we just watch movies to have fun" are truly being intentionally obtuse IMO? Most people really do get their views of the world primarily from popular and social media, not from academic research. Pop media content & social media trends are not inherently 'neutral' or harmless. Questioning them is not 'party pooping' or 'taking things too seriously', it's basic sociology for survival! 😬
I've seen a lot of new "trends" that are just lowkey bigotry like the girl-aissance. being "fruity" or "zesty" is funny or wrong. The "big-back" jokes made by skinny girls as a form of bodyshaming. Like wtf is going on
Girlaissance itself isnt bigoted, cuz it can be embraced in a way thats affirming but those who use it to reinforce traditional gender roles and traditional ideas of femininity are mad weird, i dont like the big back jokes from skinny people its so urghhh also the zesty jokes my friends and i make those jokes as we are all queer but seeing str8s say it is so odd
@espeon871 I don't think people who participate are not inherently "bigoted" but like shanspeare says, the undertones push a trad wife kind of ideal that maybe on the surface doesn't seem harmful, but actually is. My point isn't that everyone participating is a bigot, but is in fact helping to move the cultural needle right like some of these other trends
highkey. its highkey the point
Honestly, “girly” has taken on a whole new meaning in the last year or so. I noticed just online it felt like it was a way to describe a person as dumb, in an infantilizing way.
that’s how it always has been. it’s just that women are now perpetuating that idea.
100%
Even before I started to really try to think about this trend more deeply, my first clue that it sat on an underlying conservative politic is when I saw it being causally paired with a return of a more vocal push back against gnc women/androgynous women/"tomboys"/masc presenting women, etc. Granted, these are anecdotal and from personal and friend's experiences but ... we are seeing "normative" women just say the quiet part out loud again. Within the last 2-3 years, we've had people just like ... say that non-girly girls/women were suspicious, anti-women, "pick me", not an "ally" (????), etc. with no grounds at all besides their presentation. To our faces. Shit we haven't heard out loud since middle school. And when met with even just a raised eyebrow, it's all just ha ha ha. A "joke"! Her "vibes' are just off, you know? Just a feeling! Woman's intuition! I didn't mean YOU, you know?
Basically, the bio/gender essentialism of it all and the good old return to proudly narrowing down the "acceptable" presentations of women/girls being snuck-in along with these trends that are meant to "reclaim" an already very narrow definition of femininity.
And on this trend itself being a pushback to the 2010s ... I think people sometimes genuinely forget that, even at the peak of "Not Like Other Girls", the dominant overwhelming societal demand for women (especially adult women) to be "appropriately" feminine, if they are to be considered and treated as proper women, never really went away. It was successfully challenged and broadened somewhat, yes, but not only are we seeing a tangible societal regression on that front (public policing of women's presentation in the name of our "safety"), that same conservative societal demand is being repackaged as either harmless silly fun or outright progressive by capitalism. And that's before we even get into the Transphobia of it all which, of course, permeates every facet of this discourse.
amazing comment, you said everything I wanted to!
thank you! ask a masc lesbian this trend feels so weird to me. like i’m by default not included (tho i do identify as nonbinary, but i think even if i didn’t it would by default not include me.) the quiet part is that if you don’t like men, or you aren’t very feminine then you don’t get to be apart of this newfound return to “girlhood”. because you don’t meet the “basic requirements”. people aren’t gonna say that out loud, but it’s true. it’s just so weird to see all these women defining “girlhood” as this hyper feminine thing, it’s like they’re enforcing that gender box. there’s no room for gnc women here
Those women don't realize how conservative their politics are clearly. But any trend that tells women to be more feminine and follow gender roles more closely was going to be, and i love being feminine! but i don't love forcing it onto people
agreed as a trans man who is perceived as a masculine woman/butch. people have taken "patriarchy bad" to mean "anything masculine/read as masculine is bad". and when trans men/mascs, intersex people, butches, or masculine women try to push back on this, we are told to shut up because we have "sided with the enemy". it's more gender-essentialist TERF bullshit being pushed by the mainstream in this decades-long culture war against anyone "different".
I'm autistic and these feel like the exact same things girls in school would say to me to remind me how much I didn't fit in. Your vibes are off; you never talk about boys (I'm asexual, which is a whole other story); and most importantly, you do well in school/are quiet/have unpopular interests/don't do makeup/dress differently from us, so you must think you're better than us. They were wrong at first, but it became a self-fulfilling prophecy once I started associating traditional femininity with bullying.
I started to lean into "not like other girls" culture as it became popular because I finally thought I'd found something mainstream I could relate to, but even that didn't fully capture my experience because of all the unspoken requirements. You can be ""different"", but not TOO different to the point where you become undesirable to men or stray too far from the acceptable bounds of femininity. And now it's even worse because as you said, they're saying the quiet parts out loud. I'm done with NLOG culture, but I understand the appeal - no one can possibly live up to all the standards of being a ""perfect woman"". It's just so tiring to feel like you have to jump through hoops for the bare minimum level of acceptance.
As someone who grew up with the older Barbie movies, that were pink and fantasy, but also had elements of resistance and transformative change (allthough with it's problems, but still much more than what the barbie brand has become), I am so sad to see the high femme aesthetic being coopted in this regressive way. I love the bright colours, the glitter and the glamour, it contrasts with a very harsh, dark and monotone world by bringing some softness and warmth into it. That softness and warmth is not to be underestimated. I hate that the aesthetic is becoming a signifier for docile, conservative, capitalist and infantalizing values and used against those drawn to it. I see the bright aesthetic as a resistance in itself, and I use them while still thinking critically for myself and the world around me to the best of my abilities.
I had interests that were more boyish, but whenever I tried to participate, they told me I couldn't because I was a girl. This made me hate myself for being a girl, hate all girly things, and eventually I developed pretty serious internalized misogyny. It took me getting into high school and meeting certain people to really accept myself as a girl. I willing wore a dress for the first time in college!
With that in mind, my reclamation of my femininity DID NOT include me wanting to be incompetent with basic life skills. The idea that being a girl inherently makes you useless is something my elementary school self would have believed.
Sounds like you're completely normal. Elementary/middle school boys are just the meanest things that exist. And I say this as a former mean elementary school boy lol
@onam3000 Perhaps being told repeatedly through childhood that you aren't allowed to participate in things you love shouldn't be normal? Also, it was adult men and women that told me the same thing. I started being mean to girls so that I could be accepted as "one of the guys", and I started hating myself for being born a girl. It messed me up for awhile. That shouldn't be normal.
oh lets lock in my minecraft terraformings about to go hard
how did it go danny
@@trash752 i have been radicalized against the word girl and also my dirt mounds look like SHIT
Danny, please tell us how it went
@@trash752 @BruceForte i've been radicalized against the world girl and also my dirt mounds look like shit
@ i just fell to my knees in despair
Also on the gender conservatism topic, I’ve noticed an increase of the bioessentialism and exclusion around men as well. Like many woman saying “you wouldn’t get it your a man” or “being a girl is more fun” (in the context of a woman doing her makeup & wearing dresses) etc. I also saw a titkok of a gay guy taking part in the I’m just a girl trend and was bashed by many women. It’s so alarming to see this exclusion of femininity from men.
People act like being feminine is a club and if you don’t fit the requirements to a tee, you are not only excluded but ostracized. The fact is that few people truly meet all requirements for perfect peak femininity… leaving us never content with ourselves and feeling like we cannot just simply exist as the complex organisms we are.
@@seaurchinted As a cis woman who has never been good at makeup and has PCOS that causes unwanted facial hair, I have been ostracized or othered by cis and trans women who have been conditioned to believe in a correct version of femininity. It's insidious.
as a queer, something-in-between person, this whole feminine club, as the other commenter called it, is so exclusive toward queer people too. i personally hate how they hijack random hobbies and try to make liking those things inherently feminine, and it's made looking for communities around my interests online so uncomfortable.
If bio essentialism were true, we wouldn't have to work so hard to fit it, or police it so hard from birth
I think its the queerphobia of it all, because a lot of those who do engage in this bioessentialism do it in a very "cishet manner (like the structures of gendered roles)" rather than a way of teehee my personal experience. I think the reiteration of traditional gender roles by some people engaging in the trend makes this so clear.
never been so early to a video in my life and I’m very excited seeing the title bc we NEED a thoughtful and meaningful response to the “I’m just a girl”/girl math/girl dinner phenomenon and if anyone can do it it’s you :)
As a man I don't know if it is my place to comment, but I love the message of the video, and the idea of women reclaiming feminist liberation from the infantalizing recuperation of neoliberal trends. You go ladies!!!
Nah, you good. 😊
Whats even more infuriating is that when u call the influencers out on this type of jokes, they just respond with 'its not that srs' but they dont get that it IS that serious!!
Yeah, the idea that just bc something is a joke it can't be criticized infuriates me.
i think that most people who claim that the “girl trend” is harmless fun either forget or are trying to hide the fact that thousands of young, impressionable girls watch their content.
during my tween years, i read countless books about how the tweenage girl experience is an ongoing competition of who’s more “womanly” based on physical milestones (first period, first bra, etc.) . despite knowing that these characteristics were out of my control, i still adhered to the messages that these books perpetuated because they were my main source of sex education and social-emotional education. this trend is essentially doing the same thing: manipulating young girls into believing that their worth is based on how well they fit society’s definition of a woman. furthermore, it perpetuates an idea that the early stages of puberty are the best years of a girl’s life, discouraging kids from growing out of consumerism and forced competition with other girls.
there is one tiktoker who makes videos for teenage girls, primarily about maintaining a good appearance and attracting boys. i tried to give this seemingly harmless girl the benefit of the doubt until she posted a video about “how to be a pretty girl” in which she describes the process of getting discounts on jewelry, claiming that owning a full supply of $4 necklaces will immediately elevate a girl’s appearance. what she didn’t say is that this brand paid her to advertise their product, and all of the “pretty girls” at the viewer’s school probably weren’t using her exact promo code to buy their jewelry. it makes me genuinely sick that straight up consumerist brainrot is advertised as essential to a girl’s worth.
at the end of the day it’s a method of manipulating one of the most vulnerable demographics into adopting very specific lifestyles and purchasing their way into fitting in - almost in the way that redpill content manipulates young lonely men into excusing genuinely messed up behavior as a means of being socially accepted.
we live in a 'its not that deep' culture unfortunately. especially on tiktok
Speaking purely linguistically, I wasn't comfortable calling myself a "woman" rather than a "girl" until probably my thirties, and I don't think it had to do with self-infantiization, per se, as much as feeling like I wasn't sufficiently "adulting". Like, women are the people who have grown up, and I didn't feel like I was a real grown up yet, completely different from thinking I was still a child. I honestly ony started calling myself "woman" not because I felt any more like a real adult (note that I have unique circumstances that make me less independent than others my age), but because I was getting to the age where I was just getting too far past 18 and too close to 40 to justify sticking to "girl".
Same with me right now.
19 (graduated high school this year), pretty much a NEET, still dependent on my parents for a lot of things. I was always in my own world, my own interests. I’m introverted, socially awkward & hole myself up in my house a lot of the time. Being neurodivergent also will make it harder for me to “adult” the normative way. (Not that being neurodivergent makes you inherently childish, obviously.)
“Woman” feels a bit too mature for me at this point in my life.
As a 25 year old I’ve had the same issues, despite me understanding that the people we would see as objectively “adults” don’t always have it together. I’ve been trying to consciously move more towards considering myself as a woman, albeit a young woman with still lots to learn, but still a woman rather than a girl. I mean, I have a full time job, I pay my bills on time, I’m trying to save for my emergency fund, like I definitely have the major essential elements of adulting down. To continue to call myself a girl would be to discount my burgeoning maturity and invalidate the life that I’ve been able to build for myself so far.
@@gooseberries608i think this is the key. Being a woman does not mean you have it all figured out just like being a man is the same. If you are of adult age it is your responsibility to acknowledge that and act accordingly. Being an adult does come with responsibilities, not prerequisites. So nothing will make you a woman other than being an adult, especially 20+. Legal age is a different story, but I think we can all agree that once out of your teens, you are an adult. That's it. AND it can mean whatever you want it to mean. Im an adult woman and i am still currently in college and with no job and i like to play around and be silly and dance and shit. But that doesnt take away from the fact that i am a woman and wear it with pride
This discussion definitely makes me wonder at what ages young adult women who are able-bodied and neurotypical vs different types and degrees of disabled feel comfortable referring to themselves as woman, and to what degree internalized ableism plays a role in that.
I'm 27 and kinda feel that though I prefer the term "Young Lady"
Thank you so much for bringing a little happiness in such a scary time. I live in the Deep South so your videos are like a breath of fresh air. This whole channel is an amazing reminder that there are people who think like me out there and really keeps me from going crazy. Thank yo Shan!
this is so real amen
I agree. Even when it is not a topic I generally engage with, I appreciate their videos - especially since they are generally well articulated, well-rounded (that is, take looks into different perspectives) and include sources
saw the title and froze i've been trying to ignore this topic for so long in regards to myself but it's shanespear so i'll listen to their thoughts
this is so real to me. i'm fat and average height, so sometimes i feel like i'm not feminine enough, and seeing hundreds of edited pictures of perfect slim thick bodies and people shaming people like me on social media has made me force myself to present as impossibly feminine as i can, so i can feel pretty and valid too. i've been trying to avoid these conversations for so long because i feel like no one gets what i'm going through and i'll always be a failure because of my body and identity. social media has ruined what it means to be a woman. not only are cis women being shamed for their bodies for literally no reason, trans women aren't even considered when we're talking about femininity
i’m really obsessed with your dedication to keeping “that’s a big word for elmo” alive. you’re single-handedly ensuring it stays in my vocabulary
I was born and raised in a Spanish-speaking Latin American country, and it’s very *interesting* (for lack of a better word) to see how this type of US cultural export has affected and influenced misogyny and the patriarchy in my country, and how it interlaces with class and race within our communities. I think of how I hear white-passing middle/ upper class adult women refer to each other as “niñas” (the word in Spanish for Girl). I think of how women try to emulate US-centric trends/ looks/ stereotypes (in their clothes, hair, incorporating English words and phrases into our language) as signifiers of status and education. I think of how Americanized digital spaces have become, and how that impacts our own cultural identities.
It’s jarring to see these US-flavoured misogynistic trends be added on top of our own localized problems. And I wonder, in this “age of information” apparently dominated by US standards, is there going to be any digital (and maybe even physical) space left for other types of girlhoods and womanhoods? Or are we all supposed to aspire to these flawed US standards as our new normal?
i never liked the girlhood trend for a reason i didn’t understand until recently the whole movement is very hetero,comparing the less competent GIRLhood to the more competent MANhood and how the whole “girls supporting girls” where about relationship issues and never about actually creating community for those who need it.i would also like to mention that the movement was used in isre4li military propaganda to clean the image of the women in it “they are just girls who love their country not war criminals!!”
@@mariblue7201 ppl always thought I was making it "too deep" but the fact that we call grown women (and they themselves "girls" and grown men... men... is really strange idc
Omg thank you like?...why are you calling yourself a girl at 25.@@SuperMiIk
@@sunshyn1825 exactly. Like people's refusal to separate women and girls endlessly harms girls
@SuperMiIk I believe girlhood ends at 18 (where adulthood begins), thus becoming a woman. I think it's due to the screwed image of feminity, that it is inherently docile and "youthful." True feminity can be practiced at any age. However, girlness is fleeting 🤷🏽♀️ I hope womanhood will be embraced more. I'm 17, turning 18 shortly, and I will definitely be leaving the girl label unless I'm being ironic or just silly.
@@SuperMiIksadly you have to pick ur battles most women are not as progressive as we like to think they are and they very much like the idea of benevolent patriarchy that infantilizes them
Omg guys wake up new Shanspeare video dropped
as a butch who never got, or ever really wanted this kind of girlhood, I just look at this whole trend and I feel nothing but confusion. Not because it doesn't appeal to me, but because the idea of just. never taking responsibility, ignoring those who may have less than you bc you want to remain blissfully ignorant, to be completely unappealing
fellow butch here, seconded
I feel similarly. I don't relate to this new "girlhood" trend, I don't understand it, and I don't want to be a part of it. There's nothing about being "just a girl" that appeals to me, not in the least because I never had or desired the experiences of girlhood that this trend fixates so hard on.
being a trans man really adds a new layer to the girlpocalypse. experiencing my childhood as a girl and my mid to late adolescence as a boy gives me a more clear understanding of the problems associated with gender essentialism for men and women. the whole thing is weird, it infuriates me to no end that people are willingly acting ignorant, clueless and even dumb or unintelligent.
10:04 I think another reason why women in their early 20s might want to participate in these trends is that for so long, once a woman reaches that age she's seen as 'ripe' bordering on 'rotting'. If a woman doesn't have a husband or atleast a boyfriend by that age, it means they're doing 'womanhood' wrong, and have failed their role in society which is to reproduce. But 'girls' are kids; you can't expect a girl to mother as well. You can't expecte a 'girl' to fulfill a 'womans responsanility', so I beleive it's an escape from all that.
I’ve never really been able to get into the girl movements because it never resonated with me. I’m a dark skinned black woman from one of the most well known hoods in the country. Girlhood and innocence was never afforded to me.
I understand the desire for women in their early adulthood who just want to be a girl. Might be the first chance many of them have felt in control over theirs lives enough to do so.
💯
Did a show with my cover band last night and we did “just a girl. seeing all the girls come closer to the front and genuinely mosh and scream sing along to the song felt really powerful. And made me hate the TikTok trend using just the chorus of that song even more lol
i hate the "im just a girl" stuff and i have since the beginning. It's right there in the quote: "just". a lesser thing than human. a penny to everyone else's dime. as if agreeing with being diminished would get the world off of our backs. i mean jesus christ, i wish we had some self-respect
@@fernschiffer9471 THANK. YOU. People in these comments keep insisting that it "started as a harmless little trend" but for those of us who knew that it wasn't harmless from the start, they said "you hate fun 🙄 god forbid women joke"
@SuperMiIk we can see where things are going since the beginning..and it's to tiring waiting for others to realize too and them to see you aren't crazy and overdramatic
@@chrissy138 yup. We're right but right "too early"
you get it.
"I'm a 22 year old girl. He's a 14 year old guy. I've probably lived just about the same amount of life as him." I'M SORRY, WHAT?
This is a fantastic analysis! I also think a lot of this “return to innocence” and “girlyness” is classic psychological regression. A stress response to the overwhelming… (gestures wildly) everything that’s going on.
its exactly this. the pandemic, BLM, palestinian genoc*de, everything. the blame is not towards these women who have stumbled upon this trend and unfortunately added to its flames-its the system itself. but of course its harder to blame something that doesn’t have a face.
I lied, put your clothes back on, we're watching Shan's new video
When the world needed them most.....
just a heads up, shan goes by they/them!
@@almond-dt8mnin their yt bio it says she/them so it might be correct
I’m half sure I follow you on Pinterest 😭
@@parkerbarker2099 oh really? the last time i checked they went by they/them, im sorry! thank you for telling me! :D
@@almond-dt8mnyw bro
I love the britney reference in the thumbnail 💕 especially relevant with the way they forced her to use a baby voice that messed up her vocal chords 💔
The thing I don't get about this trend is that how does "liking pink", "soft aesthetics", "embarrassing femineity" even relate to "not knowing math", "crashing cars" "being immature and unresponsible"??
i’m not sure whether this is rhetorical or not, but it’s misogyny. femininity = immature and irresponsible. basically “dumb blonde” stereotype
hey! that was my article! I appreciate your commentary so much and I absolutely agree with a lot about what you said in relation to girlhood. I do want to add that this article was written after I turned 20 and felt like the media’s definition of girlhood was ending for me, and I explored those feelings further in my article. Womanhood and everything it encapsulates is just as wonderful, but I definitely wanted to touch on the fact that, as you mentioned, there is another aspect to the trend dealing with race and ethnicity that I did not get into very much. at the time, I wanted to explore the trend at a base level and give commentary from the perspective of age, specifically how women are viewed as they get older and the pressures that all young people face during their 20s as their expected to get their life together. I only had so much time and space to say what I wanted, but both race and social class do play a huge part in this trend, which I full acknowledge as a Latina myself. If it were up to me, I would have included significant detail into how these aspects perpetuate the trend and adhere to the aspects you touched on in your video as well, but again, I wrote this through a very specific lens. Our journeys through girlhood are special in each and every way, and I just wanted to highlight that!
people dont realize that the girlhood club always excluded intersex people like me, or if you dont “fit the bill” etc 😭
i'm a cis woman, but even as a kid i identified as more of a tomboy and into my adulthood i still don't feel like a part of the whole "girlhood" club. any deviation from that very specific type of hyperfemininity is not welcome.
It’s your problem. The majority should not adapt to people like you, change with this
as a trans man, it will take random things i might do and then be like “GIRL BEHAVIOR” no matter how much i try to escape it it feels like i’m always catching strays
44:17 I remember this. I kept thinking "No, you are an adult who attacked a child."
I always struggled with the “just a girl, girl dinner, girl math” and what i didnt like about it and this said it so nicely. They are never laughing with us always at us
I really liked your point about femininity being a commodity that is only available for purchase. It really hammers home the classism and inherent racism within our ideas of femininity, that it is an exclusive club that isn't afforded to all women but rather those who can foot the bill.
Overall, I think women are living through a particularly interesting time. Our recognition within society is so recent and still incomplete, we are still trying to define ourselves as individuals and as a group within the patriarchy. I think that makes your video particularly relevant: we need to be careful of how we define women's identities in any social context because we're still tied to a role that has been imposed to us for thousands of years.
The beginning lyrics are of “Just a girl” are Take this pink ribbon out my eyes.” It's so funny seeing this in tangence with tiktoks of people putting pink ribbons on everything with the phrase “I'm just a girl."
As a trans masc who doesnt pass very well, this entire trend has been infuriating to me. I keep being included in it by people against my will. I was never a girl and I am certainly not a woman. The only "girlhood" I experienced was moments in my childhood where I was suddenly made uncomfortably and pervasively aware of how my gender was perceived. On top of all that, I really dislike how this trend infantalizes and demeans my friends who are women. I hope we can move on to the next trend soon.
You want to escape misogyny and feminine expectations... not your body. Denying reality won't be good for you long term.
As a queer unwoman, it can be a helluva lot of fun to respond with "oh, no, didn't you hear? That turned out to not be a girl thing. Sorry."
Being deliberately obtuse about not understanding when people try to include you in the girl group can also be a hoot. Some people will give you guff for being "not like other girls" bit that's an easy one - tell 'em yes, you're not like *any* girls. That's the point.
@@BYCloe-uoh honey, that's called a feminist. Not trans masc. Trans mascs do know the difference, even though you don't. ❤
I'm not a transmasc but this speaks to me. I grew up feminine until I'm in high school and I realized that I'm much happier when I don't look/feel feminine. It's kinda uncomfortable to see the things I enjoy being gendered so heavily (wearing makeup, nail polish, perfume) and perceived as "proof" that I will always, in the end, be a "girl". Just because of what's between my legs, everything I do and experience is automatically seen as part of a very curated version of "girlhood" :/
it’s so deeply misogynistic to say that “i’m not a woman because of this” we should be saying “im a woman and i can still do and feel this.” all there is to be a woman is to be female. stereotypes are not what make you a woman, stereotypes are not what make you a man. there is no feeling in the mind of being a woman.
This video really made me think. As a disabled trans man, my relationship with girlhood is very complicated. I was born with a facial disfigurement that can't be "corrected" so I never got to be just a girl, I never saw my reflection in culture's depiction of girlhood, but I didn't see myself in the depiction of boyhood either, so I had to build my own ideals. In some ways it made me stronger, but in most ways I was just severely lonely. Not fitting into girlhood or boyhood meant I was barred from a lot of childhood in general. I don't think I can ever romanticise that.
I actually hate when people feel that their childhood forced them to be "stronger". You were a child, you deserved to be cared for.
That sounds really hard, hope you can continue to have love for yourself ❤
I feel that, I'm Enby and my disability is other, but I can relate. It's hard to be different
( つ ◕‿◕ )つ
Also, there are so many women who simply do not identify/particularly connect with the brand of "girlhood" being touted, and that's being immediately dismissed as internalized misogyny or NLOG behavior, when we could be celebrating the diversity of what it means to be a "girl". My early girlhood was not pink, was not dainty, was not submissive, but I was still very much a girl. It wasn't until I started school and became aware of the "correct" way to be feminine that I began to feel inadequate as a girl. My version of womanhood is not an attack on anyone else's version of womanhood. My expression of feminity is not better or worse than anyone else's. It's just different and, honestly, isn’t everyone's?
As someone who has recently come to terms with their nonbinary identity girl dinner, girl math and the like has always rubbed me the wrong way. Like I love that we’re embracing girlhood now but do you have to do it under the lens of bioessentialism? It has always felt like a way to reinforce gender norms. It’s always like omg look at me I’m a woman who can’t drive or do math!
I think about this every time I open a video of an adult doing a makeup routine with ‘girl’ in the title.
I love when I have complex thoughts about something and then you make a video articulating it perfectly and expanding on it beautifully
I've been thinking about calling grown women girls and how I do it because I feel like there isn't a female equivalent of guy. I think we as a society tried to incorporate gal but it just hasn't stuck for some reason. Like I would say there was a guy over there, as opposed to boy which would imply a child or a man which sounds a bit formal. But with women there's either girl or woman and that's it. Basically I need a female or gender neutral equivalent of guy.
I've thought about this too! It bothers me quite a bit lol
I think this can be linked to the idea that girls/women/gals are simply not allowed to be teenagers/there's not a transition phase where you go from begin a girl to a adult woman
you're either a girl (a begin without agency more reminecent to a doll or a pet) or a woman (a begin that's tasked to work and do adult chores that's often linked to a man or those with power around you), it might be why there has not been a similar word for girls/women/gals
(This thought is a little undercooked but you can see where I'm going)
Gender neutral words are always coded masculine, it HAS to be explicitly feminine or people will imagine masculine people/concepts with it. There's actually been a lot of studies on this.
i say “gals,” but ik that’s kinda adjacent to the word girl.
@@silliestbillyXD I feel like "gal" is closest thing we have to feminine equivalent of "guy". my only thing is it sounds like retro slang, but that might just be me.
I'm a queer studies researcher whose been looking at queer girlhoods since 2022 and I'm so excited to watch you take on girlhood and infantilization. I'm analyzing girlhood through the question- if we disconnect girlhood from a bodily configuration and age group, what is left? What is being accessed by queering girlhood? I've been having sooooo much fun deconstructing gender considering whats left of these identities as lines of sex and gender fall apart. Part of my thesis is that anyone can access girlhood. I've been watching the girl renaissance closely, gender essentialism is getting crazy out here! A lot of feminist identifying people in my life hold to the assumptions of "boys will be boys" and it's been jarring! edit: finished the video- incredible as always!
This is so interesting! If you have any reading recommendations (including your own work) please do share!
When i was in my 20s it took me a long time, and being actively conscious about it, to get accustomed to calling myself and other women "women" instead of girls. It felt weird and unnatural. I'm sure part of it was just that I wasn't used to it, I'd been using girl my whole life, but i do really think another part of it was a fear of aging.
Also, "girl math" really started getting on my nerves after a while. It started as something funny and relatable to anyone regardless of gender. Something we all do, like if you pull out cash for something and you have cash left over, using the rest of it for a Starbucks or other treat feels like getting a free treat because the cash doesn't feel real. We all do that, and it's obviously a joke like we don't actually believe the money is free.
Over time though it more and more was just dumb offensive stereotypes about girls being stupid & bad at math, irresponsible & bad with money, vapid, shallow, and materialistic.
..And the bad driving ones are the most annoying 🙄 ugh
6:16 see, you want to butter the toast so it melts before you put the beans on, sprinkle cheese on top, then use cutlery and eat the toast in little cronchy beany-goodness soaked pieces. You will be a ✨️ *changes woman* ✨️
I want to be a ~changes woman~
I’ve also heard that American baked beans are different to the ones Heinz uses so perhaps that’s why Shanspeare doesn’t like it
I can’t believe Tiktok pulled a "I think Coolsville sucks" on Gwen Stefani
I’ve never been this early and I’m living for this!!!
I've just recently read the autobiography of Kathleen Hanna, the Frontwoman of Bikini Kill, who started the Riot Grrrl movement and there were a lot of echos in this video to things she said in her Book.
She also saw a lot of exclusionism in the Movement and became pretty disillusioned with it. One chapter is titled "White Riot" for example (go figure what the subject of that one was) and in a later chapter she called the movement a "hydra monster - super complicated, at times beautiful, but also potentially destructive".
It's a very good Book and this video just reminded me of that.
I LOVE Bikini Kill. I have to read that autobiography!
Thank you for posting this! I’ve been struggling to put my frustration with the phrase “I’m just a girl” into words. My peer, a fellow woman in a university engineering program, says this CONSTANTLY and I couldn’t quite understand why it boiled my blood every time. We struggle to be taken seriously and be respected as is and going around the department infantilizing ourselves and pushing off responsibility just seemed off.
This video made me realize I do use the term "girl" to talk down to other people. especially my mother. I rarely use it in a positive way. I think I use it most when i am frustrated with the other person or they acted in a way that was dumb or they seemed confused. so ya defs a good call out for me! great video thanks :)
I let out an audible gasp at the Hakim mention. Love both your channels and seeing that made me happy.
i really loved the "girl" trends in their beginning phases. i'm already in my late 20s, but i grew up pretty lonely, not really having a lot (or any close) girl-friends. on top of that, i was also in the era of "im not like the others, im one of the boys", so it kinda made me feel like im catching up or belonging somewhere, even if i'm merely participating in a meme trend with online strangers.
My interpretation of "girl dinner" is a meal I can just throw together for myself without having to worry about feeding anyone else. If my husband is out of town, you better believe I'm throwing random crap together for my meals vs cooking. 😂
That was the originally intended meaning of girl dinner. But it's turned into something that is very much not that.
@@rinesserinYes. I always thought it was a cheap simple meal.
I saw a video saying "men will never get it" and it was just makeup. I commented saying that men can also enjoy makeup and most of replies were just insults. It's when I realized that "girlhood" trend isn't for me
Thank you so much for calling this shit out. Glad you mentioned the age issue in the midst of all the others.
Women don't need yet more dividers; unity is strength. Imagine if the Manosphere was called the Boyosphere.
I've hated "girl money" from the moment I heard it, just seemed like a really sexiest way of phrasing individual womens bad or ridiculous financial decisions & thoughts as being a product of their gender, from there I started to hate any kind of "girl" trend because I couldn't ignore the harmful ideas underlying the trends
Especially because most of the videos I saw were from women who clearly had hundreds if not thousands of dollars to freely spend, it seemed like a class thing
I’m a speech and debate teacher for nationally ranked middle school and high school students and I am giving them this topic and having them watch your video. Beautifully broken down and explained and so interesting throughout!
THANK YOU. it’s been very strange to witness feminism doing a complete 180 and becoming blatant misogyny… i think it’s important you addressed how capitalism fits into all of it, too. i myself am disillusioned by capitalism and so desperately want an escape, but i think this “girlissiance” is angry at the wrong thing. be mad at capitalism, not feminism.
As an Arab, it is offensive to call an adult boy or girl because only slaves are called that. After slavery ended, it was used to call people who are beneath you like servants and hand crafts apprentices, i.e., welder, woodworker, etc.
I work in health care, and older patients call me "girl" instead of " doctor" while my male colleagues are called doctors. It's used to minimize me and to passively "put me in my place" #misogyny