I spent a good deal of time last summer trying to work out why bows made me so irrationally angry. Twice, walking while on the phone to my mum, I burst into a rant after just seeing one. To have one bow-induced word vomit on Cornmarket Street is a misfortune, but by the second, I started to feel a little careless. I really struggled to get to the bottom of it – at the time, bows seemed to be fashion shorthand for femininity, for pink, for friendship bracelets and heels. Did my hatred make me a misogynist?
Then I opened Instagram Reels, and it all became clear. I saw pink frilly everything proliferating, and “girl” was being prefixed onto every single trend. Girl math. Girl dinner. Pink jobs. And, of course: “I’m just a girl.” These memes, suggesting women were frivolous and bad at things that require thinking (like maths), that they ate next to nothing because of ‘disorganisation’, and that their careers were meaningless compared to their boyfriends’ ‘big boy job’, really got under my skin. But its most malicious aspect was the way it purported to define ‘girlhood’.
This certainly wasn’t my experience of growing up female. In the top sets, girls outnumbered boys in every one of my classes. True, there were fewer in computer science, but we got the highest results. In primary school, at least, we ate ravenously. My friends all had their own plans for their lives: vets, police officers, West End dancers, speech therapists, psychologists, lawyers. None of us were ‘just’ girls.
The highlight reel of ‘girlhood’ in these posts characterises it in terms of shopping, watching TV shows, and Taylor Swift concerts. It’s fascinatingly consumerist. When I was trying to think about what the aesthetics reminded me of, I kept returning to adverts: to the oversaturated, sparkly world of Barbie, Hello Kitty, and Lelli Kelly shoes. It feels artificial, constructed, and corporate. The closest analogy I can draw from my actual life are the costumes I used to wear in competitive dance. But with tutus and pointe shoes, we knew we were going on stage. No-one was going to pretend this was real life. Certainly, no-one was going to pretend it was a desirable way to be a woman.
Is it sisterhood? Safety and security before the big bad world had a look in? I don’t really buy that. I was catcalled more at 14 than I ever have been at 21. And there wasn’t exactly safety in numbers. My early teenage years were defined by competition – the girls in my year six class would compare breast sizes while we got changed for PE, and those of us who had already started their periods formed a little group, whispering and giving the rest of us knowing glances. I knew of three girls, in my year eight classes, who were ‘dating’ boys above the age of consent. I still cannot eat in front of the girls from my dance class.
The only throughline I can find is control, and power. The online construction of girlhood and the reality dovetail perfectly in how much freedom a girl has: none. When I searched for “pink jobs”, a caption to a reel came up: “Knowing things is a blue job not a pink job”. Mindlessness is a hallmark of girl dinner and girl maths – we’re just so busy thinking about shopping and boys, how could we remember to eat? Around the same time the ‘girlhood’ conversation came up, I saw women discussing how they loved switching their brains off around their boyfriend, and letting him do the thinking. The top post on “pink jobs” had over 300,000 views. A woman explained the “pink jobs and blue jobs” in her relationship – her boyfriend expressed derisive surprise that she “even knew” they had certain bills.
I didn’t realise how little freedom I had as a child and a teenager until I left home. Being able to plan my own day, choose my meals, work out my own goals, have been some of the best parts of being independent. I know everything about my life because no-one else is going to know it for me. The small girl confused at being pulled this way, pushed that way, in an endlessly confusing world, would be thrilled to see the freedom her future self has. That requires thinking, yes. But I wouldn’t trade my independence for anything. You couldn’t pay me to return to childhood and yet, the woman-child, with frivolous interests and little real freedom, is somehow trendy. It goes without saying that body standards evoke childishness, and ‘thin being in’ has been shouted from the rooftops. Hairlessness, doe eyes, helplessness. What’s so attractive about that? What is wrong with being a woman?
To begin with, it’s incredibly frightening. Being a woman means you have power, and that can be taken away. It means you’re likely to have a reproductive system that can invalidate your own right to live. It means you’re likely to be mocked, to be stereotyped, to be harassed. I remember having an existential crisis at 18, because I realised I could no longer call catcallers creeps: I wasn’t underage, so I was officially fair game. At least with the idea of girlhood, you can cling to a pretence of safety. But that facade comes at the cost of independence. If you give up your freedom, your power, and pretend that girlhood is all you ever wanted, as the world becomes more dangerous for women, then there’s a sense in which you’re not losing anything. But that’s a lie.
You can say it’s not that deep, that my entire take is too chronically online, that Instagram is not reality. But trivialisation is the problem. Abortion is illegal in 12 of 50 US states. A woman or a girl is killed every ten minutes by a partner or family member. 62% of the women killed by men in the UK were killed by their partner. In this climate, a trend built on women being stupid and infantile, all tied up in a pretty bow of powerlessness, is simply dangerous. There is no such thing as ‘just’ a girl. Get up.
