Girl World: Rebranding Womanhood

By Megan Ybarra | Photos by Betty Kifle |

If I buy a $50 dress and wear it five times, it’s only $10 each! With the money from returning my clothes, I can buy a smoothie from Erewhon, and it’s free, right? Girl math is the best. I love curating my social media to fulfill my Pinterest girly dreams while my boyfriend works his big man job. I’ll have a “girl dinner” of crackers and olives while I make his meal. My driving is so bad, I sit as his perfect “passenger princess.” My history homework is so confusing—I wish there was a History Channel for the girls… I’m just a girl!

Both comedy and propaganda can exist in tandem. What first started as an ironic trend, serving as a reaction to the “boys will be boys” narrative, has devolved into the self-deprecation and infantilization of women. Still, on a site like TikTok, where age verification is nonexistent and demographics show a majority of users are under the age of 25, the indirect effects of sexist rhetoric can prove damaging for impressionable and unsuspecting consumers. 

One could argue that online users are not responsible for restricting content and diluting media for children and that parents (and the applications themselves) are to blame. But girl math, girl dinner, and all the other facets of being “just a girl” are more than just microtrends. We’ve seen tradwives gain major followings romanticizing the idea of being a “kept” woman, and the subsequent flood of ex-tradwives exposing the reality of living a life of gender inequality. It doesn’t take an internet historian to trace the evolution (or devolution) of these trends. Women post about how they’re “obligated” to care for their male partners and keep a home together while weaponized incompetence is demonstrated shamelessly, and is reinforced by such trends in behavior and home culture.

Take “girl dinner,” for example. What was first a trend of girls living alone, eating whatever they please, was a positive change of pace from the diet app adverts and the body-checking influencer “What I Eat in a Day” guides. If a girl wanted to eat leftover garlic bread and grocery-store birthday cake paired with wine, she did—it’s girl dinner! If she wanted to cold pizza and popcorn on the couch, fuck it: girl dinner. But soon, videos of “girl dinner” being turned into a bowl of pomegranate seeds, a diet Coke and a bowl of ice were popping up. Girl dinner became synonymous with the glorified content of eating disorder creators.

TikTok’s major demographic is young adult women—humans that do not have fully developed brains—who are still at risk of negative influence in such a malleable stage of growth. Microtrends that have created this “girl world” are more than just an amalgamation of posts into the ether. These behaviors point towards the greater trend of anti-intellectualism in modern society, and the infantilization of women is a multifaceted, deeply-rooted thorn in the side of female existence.

From anti-aging products being used by children to women trying on children’s clothing, the portrayal of women as pre-pubescent, childlike dolls in need of a strong (male) hand to guide them is subliminally prevalent. Even the use of “girl” in self-identification subconsciously infantilizes a woman. A senator is not “just a girl.” An award-winning actress is not “just a girl.” A mother of four who has raised her children into successful members of society is not “just a girl.”

“The use of these childlike nicknames reinforces the internalized bias about what women are capable of – and how much they should/can be taken seriously. The subtle hint when men ‘girlify’ women in high power situations is to put across a very simple message: that they do not belong here and nor is their power/status equal to that of their male peers.”

The prevalence of female fragility in Western culture has been near-constant since the 1970s onward, but these online trends further serve to perpetuate intellectual insecurity—a 2023 study from The Journal of Chinese Psychology examined this concept in academic performance, with the stereotyping of male students being more likely to score higher in mathematics and various STEM subjects impacting the social expectation of female students, with findings showing that academic performance (in math) was based more on gender roles and cultural framework, and not a “favoring” of male students over females.

“Males are the beneficiaries of gender stereotypes,” writes Guihua Xie and Xinyu Lu in their conclusion, and this applies to more than the world of mathematics.This new emergence of anti-woman, pro-”girl” content further enforces stereotypes that, in the end, only serve to benefit men and denounce female voices in the world of academia.

In the words of Dr. Elisabeth Loose: “There is nothing wrong with being an actual girl – enjoy it to your heart’s content. But maybe more importantly – there is nothing wrong with being a woman either; and we should acknowledge, own and fight for that.”