'i'm just a girl'

ribbons, girlcore, pedophilia and the infantilisation of women

Throughout 2023 and 2024 there’s been a resurgence in embracing girlhood and girly things, from celebrating female friendships or wearing more pink to naming just about everything with the prefix ‘girl’ (think girl dinner, girl math…). We can’t forget the feminine urge to slap a ribbon on every single item we own either.

On a surface level, there’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s lovely and healing for the inner child to accept and cherish this side of ourselves that so many have oppressed. I too unfortunately went through a ‘I’m not like other girls’ phase.

But there’s a darker side to this trend, or at least specific aspects. I’m not saying that honouring female friends is potentially harmful (but who knows? JK), but focusing on the particular word ‘girl’ is crucial to understanding the more insidious roots hiding beneath a benign veneer.

Sometimes (a lot of the time) we who partake in trends on the internet lack critical thinking/wilfully ignore the warning signs of something that purports to be an innocent, fun and fleeting moment. To be fair, we aren’t completely to blame because that’s exactly how trends work—they distract us with bells and whistles whilst promoting something beneath it all; usually an exclusionary beauty standard, product or mindset that often is just consumerism but repackaged.

But surely we should know this by now, seeing as it’s happened time and again and on a faster and faster basis, becoming just plain ridiculous. Tomato girl, blueberry milk nails, etc etc etc. There’s the appropriation of the clean girl in her slick back bun and gold hoops taken from Black and Brown communities in 60s & 70s America (who were mocked at the time).

With girlcore, it’s a slightly different story. As I mentioned, the key word here is ‘girl’. While it’s primarily women who are taking part in this trend, it’s not called ‘womancore’ or ‘woman math’ (yes I’ll admit the names sound silly, but so does girlcore, doesn’t it?) Why do grown women want/have to refer to themselves as girls and not women? I’m not putting the onus solely on women here—society wants us to act influences how we perceive ourselves. That is, the patriarchy benefits from women acting ‘silly’ and ‘childish’ in the way girl math reinforces the stereotype that women are bad at maths. It seems harmless in a joking sort of way, and it may be hard to criticise the trend for being sexist as it was created by women. But of course internalised misogyny is a tricky beast and can show itself in many different forms, manifesting as a light hearted joke with not-so-funny implications.

Coming back to the topic of women’s obsession with youth: Western culture, particularly America, seems to be shamefully but openly obsessed with pedophilia. All the women must look like young girls and the young girls themselves must stay that way forever. We see it in fashion, culture, the glorifying of movies/books like Lolita (which so many romanticise, despite it being a criticism towards pedophiles—why do so many interpret this with empathy towards Humbert?). It is also seen in one of the seemingly timeless beauty standard (in the past 100 years or so, at least) that requires women to look like their prepubescent selves; delicate, petite and perhaps just a little too naive.

a tweet that angered me—on sabrina carpenter’s lolita photoshoot.

This aligns with the ideal woman’s behaviour, particularly in the context of her relationships with men. Traditional gender roles rely on the submissiveness, docility and deferential behaviour of women to men still makes the building blocks of our society and subconsciously informs the everyday actions of those who live within. Unless you’ve found a way to stop that, which I understand takes years of persistent unlearning (please share with the class).

Furthermore, passive and subservient behaviour can be linked to the infantilisation of women. When women talk about how ‘dumb’ they are and justify their purchases by denying having spent ‘real’ money, this creates the idea that grown women have similar financial skills to those of children. Which in turn assumes that women are incapable of supporting themselves without the help of an adult—who would almost always be a man. Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh here, but some of these declarations go a bit further than just delulu. Their intention probably isn’t to demean women (as they are joking ironically) but when people consume lots of content from trends, they can start to internalise this rhetoric and actually adopt this mindset for their own lives. Particularly young girls (and boys) who are especially impressionable may start to take this as fact, leading to negative assumptions and stereotypes that change the way people approach or treat others.

There is something sickening about how women are socialised to act like a child. A child has not developed mentally or physically, and is vulnerable and easily influenced. Exploiting those characteristics for adults to perform is disgusting: reducing a grown person with their own autonomy to someone who is still heavily dependent on others for food, shelter, money and education is a demeaning act. But they are also expected to be mature in other ways; despite relying on men, they must take care of the men in their lives and please them. They must be mother and child at once. This dichotomy defines our culture. Men are not subject to this particular standard—there are others for them, too, but none quite so restricting as this performance women are expected to carry out till the day they die. Men are rewarded with this act. They get to have their desires fulfilled, they get to be looked after while still being the strong, dominant one in the relationship. They get to have their cake and eat it too, all the while encouraging and fostering this mindset in women. Who will teach it to generation after generation after them.

It is hard to break the cycle. Margaret Atwood said,

‘Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.’

I still have that horrible, peering man inside my head. I think a lot of us do too. It takes questioning these seemingly harmless trends to try and question him, try and board up the keyhole. It’s fun to enjoy these things, but always to take it with a grain of salt. And all of us forget that sometimes, and the trend goes a little too far, past the point of innocuous. As I’ve said in my previous essays, we must always think critically about what we consume. Reading and writing things like this is a good start to locking out the ever-watching man. Take care of yourself. <333

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hi! thank you for reading <3 i’d love to hear your thoughts—agreements, disagree, a bit of both, all of it! it’s you who makes this newsletter possible, thank you for your support. if you’d like to leave a like or a comment that’ll fuel me to write xoxo