Back in 1995, No Doubt released “Just A Girl”, a song that criticized the infantilization of women. The track captured the frustration of being treated as delicate, incapable, and in need of protection—and here we are, nearly thirty years later, willingly embracing cutesy labels that reduce our entire existence to ‘girl dinner’ and ‘girl math’. The damaging effects of ‘girl’ trends extend far beyond trivialising women’s activities – they actively perpetuate the sort of limiting, essentialising stereotypes that women have been fighting against for decades. These trends don’t just romanticise incompetence; they actively reinforce the idea that women are less capable, less serious, and less adult than men. We’re essentially performing the same diminishment that No Doubt was raging against. Except now we’re doing it to ourselves, wrapped up in the aesthetics of empowerment.
The negative effects are insidious: we’re normalising the idea that women’s work doesn’t need to be substantial, that our eating habits should be disordered and performative, and that our interests and activities are inherently less valuable when labelled with ‘girl’. It’s infantilization dressed up as reclamation, and it’s doing precisely what patriarchal attitudes have always done – keeping women small, trivial, and not quite real enough to be taken seriously.
The internet’s determination to use this trend for everything was bound to return to subjects that contained a history of gendered prejudice. For example, ‘Girl math’ implies that women make stupid financial decisions, and it’s men who are naturally better at handling money. So many of these trends reinforce harmful ideas. Take the ‘girl dinner’ trend, which romanticises the lazy meals that ‘girls’ make. In the case of the more problematic videos, where someone’s ‘girl dinner’ comprises a Diet Coke and a vape, the trend seems to imply that disordered eating is a cute thing, and that women should be preoccupied with being thin. These trends don’t even try to hide the misogyny anymore; they’ve just repackaged it as irony and self-awareness. The “I’m just a girl trend” accompanies girls making cute poses to the lyrics from the No Doubt song “I’m just a girl—I’m just a girl in the world,” and completely ignoring the lyrics that come directly after, “I’m just a girl in the world—That’s all that you’ll let me be.”
There’s a peculiar irony in the fact that, at the height of our ‘girl’ trend avalanche, No Doubt’s “Just A Girl” remains a feminist anthem—one that directly critiques the very limitations we now seem to be voluntarily celebrating. The song’s protagonist rages against being patronised and underestimated because of her gender, rejecting the idea that being a ‘girl’ means accepting a smaller, more trivial existence. Yet here we are, decades later, seemingly rushing to attach the word ‘girl’ to minimize or make cute every activity, from our financial decisions to our dinner choices. Where we all once sang along about the restrictions imposed on women, today’s ‘girl’ trends appear to romanticise those same limitations, packaging them as cute, relatable content rather than the gendered constraints they actually are. Yes, some argue we’re reclaiming ‘girl’, reframing it as something empowering rather than diminishing. But there’s a crucial difference: true reclamation challenges the systems that weaponised these words in the first place. ‘Girl math’ doesn’t dismantle the stereotype that women are financially irresponsible; it leans into it, gives it a hashtag, and calls it empowerment. We’ve somehow mistaken the performance of our own infantilization for resistance to it.