Online, women eat âgirl dinnersâ and go on âhot girl walks.â Welcome to the girlouboros.
vox.com/culture CULTURE The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. ð The girlouboros ð¸ âWhat kind of insufferable girl are you?â my TikTok algorithm asked me the other day. The options were âfemcel,â as in someone whoâs pathologically unlovable because sheâs a radical feminist; âcoquette,â as in, someone who wears bows and listens to Lana Del Rey, or âblogger,â as in, I guess, me. The original video appears to have been deleted (too insufferable, perhaps), but it stayed with me not because it was particularly insightful or laden with meaning but because it offered yet another âgirlâ on the internet for me to be, and maybe the only accurate one. Itâs the summer â or the year, or maybe the decade â of mostly made-up microtrends involving the word âgirl.â People on TikTok and everywhere else on the internet are talking about their â[girl dinners](,â which amount to thrown-together plates of whatever happens to be in the fridge. Theyâre going on â[hot girl walks](â (a.k.a. walks). Theyâre having â[feral girl summers](.â They attempt to determine via viral Pinterest mood boards whether theyâre â[strawberry girls](â or âcherry girlsâ or â[vanilla girls](â or â[tomato girls](â or â[coconut girls](â or â[coastal cowgirls](â or [ârat girls](â or â[downtown girls](â or â[okokok girlsâ or âlalala girls](â (donât worry about those last two, it was part of a TikTok thing that lasted approximately five minutes). They [girlboss]( and do [girl math]( with their gorgeous gorgeous girlies during [hot girl summer](. They buy [viral pink paste]( and [powdered greens]( in efforts to become â[clean girlsâ or âThat Girls](,â and when they fail, they become, evidently, âinsufferable girls.â Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images Reading them all in a row, youâd be forgiven for thinking these terms are at best silly and meaningless, and at worst obnoxious and insidious. For one, a solid percentage (if not most) of the people participating in and discussing âgirlâ trends are women, which therefore makes it feel slightly infantilizing and icky and like, why should 30-year-olds care what type of âgirlâ they are? Shouldnât we have figured ourselves out by now? You could make the argument that pathologizing the things women and girls do smells a bit too strongly of gender essentialism; you could say that labeling normal human behavior as âgirl-codedâ only otherizes women in an already patriarchal world. But I would argue that both miss the point, because these supposed âgirl trendsâ arenât really trends at all. Theyâre marketing campaigns. Thereâs an [SNL sketch]( from a million years ago that illustrates this phenomenon, in which the local news invents a harmful teen trend designed to frighten parents. âThey call it âsouping,ââ Bill Hader-as-news-anchor tells the camera. âTeenagers are drinking expired soup cans to get high! Every teenager is doing it, and it will kill them.â (Emma Stone, who plays the teen, says, âThereâs no way teenagers are doing thatâ; the news anchor then invents a new moral panic around teenagers called âtrampolining.â) The gist is that there is something deeply wrong with Todayâs Teens, something unknowable and sinister that the current generation of adults never would have imagined being part of, and if it isnât âsouping,â then surely itâs something else. To figure out what, youâll just have to keep watching. This is sort of what [all trend journalism]( feels like to me these days. A single video goes viral, some people start talking about it, the media picks it up, and suddenly itâs used as fodder for the kind of lowest-common-denominator broadcast news segments where old people marvel about how foreign young people have become â and itâs not a coincidence that itâs almost always young women theyâre referring to here â even though the thing theyâre talking about isnât even really happening on a scale thatâs by any measure newsworthy. The result is a discourse that ends up basically amounting to âgirls = wrong and/or stupid,â even when, half the time, the original video was made for people who already knew it was kind of stupid, or meant to be a joke. Take âgirl dinner,â for instance, which caused outsize controversy because it combined the concept of womanhood with eating. In May, a 28-year-old showrunnerâs assistant named [Olivia Maher posted]( a video of her dinner, a medieval peasant-inspired plate of bread, cheese, pickles, wine, and grapes that she dubbed âgirl dinner.â On the term, she [told the New York Times]( that âit feels like such a girl dinner because we do it when our boyfriends arenât around and we donât have to have whatâs a âtypical dinner.ââ But like everything that goes viral, once it became national news, it seemed as though this was a thing young women were doing en masse, as though putting together a plate of leftovers was a novel idea that could therefore be designated as an eating disorder or otherwise problematized. âGirl dinnerâ is kind of over now. The fact that Iâm writing about in August it is, to use a different made-up [trend from two years ago, âcheugy,â]( or late to the proverbial party. Soon, however, there will be another social media trend for girls, because âgirlsâ sells. If youâll recall all the way back in 2015, another girl trend was pushing its way through the publishing industry. A handful of books, most famously Gillian Flynnâs Gone Girl and Paula Hawkinsâs The Girl on the Train became surprise mega-hits, and suddenly stores were flooded with books marketed in attempts to match their success by [slapping the word âgirlâ]( somewhere in the title. âGirlâ fever wasnât limited to publishing: The early 2010s was the time of the girlboss, of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies, of TV shows like New Girl, Good Girls Revolt, 2 Broke Girls, and, despite how bizarre it is to remember the controversy it caused, Lena Dunhamâs Girls. In [basically all cases](, the girls in question were women. In a 2016 essay called â[What Does It Mean When We Call Women Girls?](,â Robin Wasserman writes that narratives about âgirlsâ are less about the age of the female characters and more about their storiesâ themes. Namely, a âgirlâsâ story is about the transition from girlhood to womanhood â that is, âfrom being someone to being someoneâs wife, someoneâs mother,â whether thatâs the direction their trajectory goes or not. The protagonist of The Girl on the Train, for instance, âis a wife erased by marriage. Once sheâs no longer âwife,â sheâs no one at all. Like the girls of Girls, she is unmoored. Sheâs the girl on the train because everything âwomanâ about her has been stripped away.â Even Golden Girls, âa breathtaking reversal of the marriage plot,â falls within this matrix of girlhood: After the duties of wife and mother are no longer theirs, they can return to the pursuit of self-actualization. They become girls again. If the absence of a spouse or child is the condition of being a girl, then itâs hardly surprising that so many modern women are referring to themselves as such. More of us are free from the assumption that traditional womanhood is something worth aspiring to. âWoman dinnerâ is sad; the phrase evokes an image of a tired lady, having already fed her spouse and children, eating the last scraps of whatever was left over before shoving the plates in the dishwasher. Nobody wants to eat âwoman dinner.â âGirl dinnerâ is, crucially, fun. Women on TikTok know what theyâre doing when they dub their meals âgirl dinnersâ or coin terms like âhot girl walk.â They know what trends have gone viral in the past â [VSCO girls](, [e-girls](, âsoft girlsâ â and that their clickable, immediately gettable names had everything to do with why people care. They know that this year the highest-grossing movie and what may become the highest-grossing musical tour in history center on the very conundrum of [women in their 30s experiencing]( their own versions of girlhood. They know that people will always care about what girls do, because girls are not yet women and therefore less easy to despise. Girls are more available for consumption, and girls have more available to them. In other words, women on TikTok are thinking like the marketing teams at Simon & Schuster, analyzing the data and determining which cute name for an otherwise uninteresting habit or aesthetic has the most likelihood of going viral. What was once the province of marketing teams or journalists or magazine editors to christen cultural trends is now up to the public, and, it turns out, the public does a much more efficient job at this than the traditional gatekeepers ever could. The internet turned us all into publishers, hoping to cash in on the ineffable promise of girls yet to become women, people for whom âgirl dinnersâ and âhot girl walksâ contain a million possibilities â even if we know we all end up insufferable.
Â
[Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Clickbait - A [delightful look]( at how cooking videos took over the internet.
- In the EU, TikTok [users can now turn off]( the For You algorithm.
- What does [gatekeeping even mean](?
- Inside the [wellness-to-fascism pipeline](.
- How an amateur diver became [true crime YouTube's obsession](.
- Do we all [have "opinion fatigue"](?
- The [plane lady meme cycle]( proves we still don't know how to deal with meltdowns on the internet. One Last Thing Here is a[video explaining what it's like]( to have literally any conversation with me.
Â
[Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [YouTube]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=culture). If you value Voxâs unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring [contribution](. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.