'Girl, so confusing': Who is defining our femininity for us?

From 2023’s viral ‘Barbiecore’, to the ‘brat summer’ of 2024, our idea of girlhood is increasingly, dangerously being shaped more or less by the content we consume.

Social media narratives seem to be telling us, more and more, how to be a woman - or, more accurately, how to be a girl.

Last year, we wanted to be girly, hot pink, and all dolled-up to align with the Barbiefication of everything. Cut to 2024, and we’re struggling to be as obnoxiously and nonchalantly ‘brat’ as possible. These ‘manuals’ are handed to us through reels and memes and everything in between that capitalise on the many contradictory notions of our girlhood.

All of this gives a sense of our ambiguous, undefinable, and most importantly, fluid concept of ‘femininity’ being moulded and shaped and stretched and downsized - by forces that directly or indirectly end up controlling us.

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Exercising our ‘power’ as consumers - not just of tangible products, but also of content - seems to give us a sense of satisfaction in trying to solidify an identity for ourselves. Which is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing to occur in the whole process of consumption and absorption - this wilful handing over and surrendering of our personalities, likes, dislikes and wants to the media that only reduces, categorises, and repackages it back to us, all the while profiting off it. 

We are buying into labels and boxes without so much as trying to challenge the narrative. We fit ourselves into an ‘aesthetic’ to feel cool (which can only mean to feel ‘different’), not realising that the media is, bit by bit, feeding off our futile, failed attempts at developing the ideal notion of our femininity.

Because it urges us to try on different versions of it, only to turn us into mannequins.

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And it is important to remember that our struggle to be ‘different’ also comes, ultimately, from the idea that our girlhood is something to be embarrassed about.

Because for a long time, everything ‘girly’ irrevocably carried the weight of being frivolous, unimportant, something to be embarrassed about. So by the age of 13, our dolls were gathering dust in the backs of our cupboards and we were replacing our pinks with blacks and blues. And perhaps that’s when the self-sabotaging, destructively misogynistic urge to be ‘different’ from other women was first born in us. Even that young, we wanted, somehow, to break free from our girlhood.

(When, at 13, I bought a bicycle, I got a purple one simply because I didn’t want the pink Ladybird one everyone else had. And now? You can find me lingering in the hot-pink back aisle of a Hamleys, smiling and staring up at all the Barbies they’ve got.)

Which is why we flocked as a herd to the Barbie summer of 2023, and subsequently to trends like ‘coquette’ and ‘girl math’ - it was empowering to finally not be laughed at for trying to save some aspects of our girlhood. 

All of us, collectively, were suddenly ready to be girly again. We wanted to put sparkly lip gloss and wear dresses and skirts and bows. We were okay being “like other girls”, which brought with it a sense of solidarity in girlhood that we hadn’t felt in so long, because we were conditioned to be ashamed of our femininity.

It was a big “fuck you” to the patriarchy - at first.

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At closer look and with clearer perspective in retrospect, it dawns on you that you might have played right into the age-old, reductionist construct of femininity that was built on the patriarchy. The more I think about it now, the more I wonder if, by wilfully accepting the ‘conventional', we inadvertently end up placing ourselves back in the pretty pink box that the powerful - the suits, the media - created to better access and manipulate us.

Brat summer, then, was our chance at redemption. Now, we wanted to be messy, obnoxious, obscene - this was liberation. This loud, lime-green version of girlhood was unabashed and reckless, and far from the girliness that preceded it. So we hungrily grasped at another chance to rebrand ourselves.

But it seems the only thing we’re really doing as we jump from one trend to the next is finding ways to free ourselves and our femininity from something. 

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And looking back after a year of so much cultural and especially political chaos, we are reminded of our destructive tendency to use social media and all these ‘trends’ as escapism. The sad part is that blasting either ‘Just a Girl’ as we do our makeup or ‘365’ by Charli xcx as we dance like no one’s watching helps us forget.

Somehow we always end up using the media to forget all that we see in the media.

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What the trends are doing, essentially, is making us want to rebrand ourselves uniquely to make us feel like we’re reconnecting with our femininity, all the while detaching us from the political and economic sphere of it. We want to be this or that kind of girl, and that makes us think a certain way, act a certain way, consume and purchase a certain way. The feeling of liberation and empowerment we get from buying and buying into this femininity is really just a way for them to distract us from the things we’re supposed to be paying attention to.

And the very depoliticization of all the girlhood trends is precisely where the problem lies. In a society so submerged in crisis, in war, in tyrannical governments, in constant subjugation of female bodies, can we really afford the privilege of removing ourselves from the politics of it all? 

Is it really the time to be “demure and mindful”? Or even, really, to be so nonchalantly ‘brat’?

The thing is, we can’t help but fish for some twisted version of our truth - about our femininity and thus about ourselves - in the media submerged in half-lies. And so instead of resisting, we give ourselves away to any new trend that helps us escape ourselves - all the while fooling ourselves into believing that we’re getting closer to our truth. 

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So one thing we do need to do is stop taking things the way they are given to us, start reading between the lines, and question everything that is thrown at us - even something as seemingly trivial and frivolous as a trend, a term. 

Don’t say you want to be “demure” unless you really know what it means. Don’t be a ‘brat’ if it implies turning a blind eye to the world that’s going to shit all around you. Don’t buy into every new colourful refashioning of girlhood that is marketed as ‘revolutionary’.

Be it your favourite brand, influencer or pop icon, no one has the right to choose your ‘ideal’ version of femininity for you. 

Above all, remember that our femininity is not something that can or ever should be defined, reduced, categorised, or sold. Don’t let anyone tell you that.