So many things lately seem to be for girls: dinner, math, even the men we're collectively crushing on get the highest honor of being baby girls. The word "girl" has become a suffix online that one can use with almost anything: hot girl summer, hot girl walk, girlypops (as in friends), girl-coded, and so on.
However, some argue that these kinds of terms can be icky and infantilizing. Lillian Stone writes for the BBC that there's nothing inherently gendered about these things. Girl dinner is just snacks and side dishes thrown into a "meal." Hot girl walks are just that, simply talking walks.
Critics agree that "girly" trends can build community and drive positive conversation. Professor of marketing Shilpa Madan explains that they fulfill a need to belong. "As human beings, we have an innate desire to belong to social groups. When something is labeled as a 'girl' thing, it creates an immediate sense of relatability, fostering a feeling of community and shared sisterhood."
In that way. even the memes in this list labeled as relatable for girls are similar. Critics also warn that these types of trends reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. It's almost similar to razors and their pink tax or the giant Stanley Tumbler trend. If there's something "girly," capitalism is sure to jump on it immediately.
Rebecca Jennings argues that these trends are not trends at all but marketing campaigns. She says women on social media dub things "girl dinner" and "hot girl walks" because they know it has the potential to go viral.
"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," Jennings writes.
Jennings also proposes an interesting idea: that being a "girl" means self-actualization. She draws from Robin Wasserman's 2016 essay "What Does It Mean When We Call Women Girls?" and suggests that in a lot of popular culture, women are "girls" when they're on the road to self-discovery. They're not yet wives or mothers, they're still transitioning from girlhood to womanhood.
Similarly, in The Girl on the Train, the main character is, as Wasserman notes, "unmoored," just like the girls on HBO's hit show. She is a wife erased by marriage, and when she loses her identity as a wife, she's no longer a woman. Or, as Wasserman writes, "no one at all."
