just girly things!
preliminary materials for a theory of the online girl, feat. notes on barbie, historiography, and tiktok
The line from Greta Gerwig’s Barbie that made me feel the most Seen was a throwaway gag. It’s during the sequence in which the newly enlightened Barbies begin enacting their plan to destabilize the patriarchal Kendom, feigning ineptitude and/or wide-eyed curiosity in stereotypically bro-ish pursuits to lull the Kens’ egos into complacency. Emma Mackey’s Physicist Barbie nods and smiles at Ncuti Gatwa’s Ken while he picks up a record (just barely identifiable, from context and its dark red corner, as Pavement’s 1992 debut album Slanted and Enchanted). “Stephen Malkmus really harnessed the acerbic talk-singing of Lou Reed with post-punk influences such as Wire and The Fall,” he says with didactic confidence. After the movie, I immediately texted a friend, “ok this is a VERY minor spoiler for barbie but there is like a .5 sec line referencing pavement the band that made me feel. insane.”
I went to see Barbie slightly buzzed on opening night with a group of friends, dressed for the occasion in head-to-toe bright pink, and wholeheartedly enjoyed myself. Later, while trying to articulate to my (patient, non-Pavement-listening) boyfriend why that part had made me feel slightly hysterical, I felt like I was just re-enacting the bit. Was it the randomness and specificity of the reference that had gotten me? My late adolescence was scaffolded by the sour self-assurance of Malkmus’s lyrics, and their lexicon of melancholy was crucial to my 21-year-old self’s conviction that recognizing the absurdity of certain desires could be enough to make them less painful (it was not). I’ve never said Ken’s exact line out loud—but I’ve definitely been That Guy, babbling about how I think Wowee Zowee is unfairly perceived as incoherent or why “Spit on a Stranger” makes me cry to someone who was, at most, politely humoring me. In any case, I was not expecting that feeling to get invoked in a $145 million summer tentpole about a toy.
Conversely, the earnest monologue from America Ferrera’s Gloria about all the fraught contradictions at the heart of womanhood left me relatively unmoved—not because it was saying anything untrue, but because its enumeration of “actually, this is why women can’t have it all!” platitudes felt too obvious to be genuinely revelatory. This is probably an uncharitable reaction—like, just because I’m a bitter, withered 25-year-old hag who’s long since compartmentalized the reality that there’s no hope for women doesn’t mean other people don’t need to hear this! In any case, I found it banal in a pretty benign way. I understood the function of the moment, and again this was a film about a literal toy that I did find deeply fun and entertaining. I did not go in expecting or wanting it to be the cinematic equivalent of a Nancy Fraser book.
Nevertheless, it did feel weird that I’d gone to see a movie ostensibly meant to exalt the joyous complexity of being a human woman, and yet the only part that actually made me go “wow, that’s so me!” was … the mansplaining? And I say this as a bona fide Barbie girl who does not consider myself “above” any of this, to be clear! If Barbie had actually stooped to Marvel-esque fanservice and featured, I don’t know, a live-action cameo appearance of Raquelle from the similarly metatextual Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse1 or Martin Short’s terrifically cunty Preminger from Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper, I probably would have started clapping like a trained seal. Anyway, this isn’t really about Barbie lore.
It’s more about the presumption that certain traits—an imperviousness to shame, a sincere interest in anything perceived as “difficult,” an assured (and maybe unearned) faith in your own good taste and the compulsion to impose it upon others—are the unique province of Guy Stuff. It’s one thing to acknowledge that these behaviors end up disproportionately gendered because of the differences between how men and women are socialized, but it feels like a profound failure of imagination to posit this as the default way of being.
I was thinking about this while scrolling through the recent glut of “Why Are So Many Men Obsessed with the Roman Empire?” / “Roman Empire TikTok Prompt Explained” / etc. content that inevitably springs up online whenever there’s a new microtrend offering unique SEO keywords to latch onto—and, following those, “Ladies, What Do You Think Is The Girl Version Of The Roman Empire?” / “We asked women for their equivalent of the Roman Empire trend” and so on. Among the top contenders I’ve seen proposed as the “girl version of the Roman Empire”: Taylor Swift; Princess Diana; Tom Holland’s performance of “Umbrella” on Lip Sync Battle; Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Mescal, and Daisy Edgar-Jones’s attendance at the 2022 Met Gala; that one thing that happened seven years ago. Of those engaging the prompt on its own terms (i.e. an actual historical milieu/event of widespread, generalized fascination to women): Tudor England; the Salem witch trials; Regency England; the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; the Titanic; the fate of the Romanovs.
I think the most interesting takeaway from this whole meme is that even if we accept the premise that men, on the whole, think about ancient Rome regularly and women don’t, this doesn’t necessarily denote greater expertise or even insight on the subject! Like, there’s a prolific genre of guy whose interest in imperial Rome is filtered entirely through Gladiator and Rome: Total War and the Great Man-flavored romanticization of the Pax Romana that’s been percolating in the Western imagination for ages. If you are a girl craving similarly heroic representations of your own subjectivity, there is objectively much less masscult historical media to latch onto. With that in mind, it’s much more interesting to observe which works became collectively formative—like, there is a nonzero number of young women who can trace the genesis of their radicalization to reading the Dear America book Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City, 1909 when they were nine.
Anyway, I am someone who is both in a relationship with a man and decidedly the one in our dynamic who thinks more about the Roman Empire, albeit purely on an armchair level—like, Julia the Elder was among my numerous teenage tragic-historical-lady hyperfixations and I do periodically ponder the logistics of the naumachia and what contemporary sporting events (if any) might be meaningfully comparable to their scale! And I did bristle a bit at the “girl Roman Empire” prompt’s underlying implication that the girls, as a category, do not contemplate the Roman Empire.
I understand that the vast majority of people (excepting marble-statue-icon trad grifter types) engaging with this meme do not actually believe female brains to be biologically incapable of comprehending ancient Rome. This is also just the latest species among a genus of increasingly overdetermined Girl Things—Megan Thee Stallion’s paradigmatic hot girl; clean girl; that girl; coconut girl; strawberry girl; girl dinner; girl’s girl; tomato girl; girl math—that have been proliferating online for some time now. I've enjoyed some of the more hyperspecific riffs on these (I am absolutely a pickled red onion girl), and I am in no way immune to the pleasures of Girlposting myself.
But the force of the Girlieverse seems incessant, interminable, and ever-accelerating, as the next christened Girl Thing (even it is not actually a Thing that warrants hand-wringing reportage) is cursed to become a butterfly under glass and spawn its own round of zeitgeist-baiting explainer pieces, each successive hype cycle cannibalizing the former. For example: “feral girl summer” peaked in early summer 2022, supposedly as a corrective to the unattainable self-discipline of the “that girl” regimen. It wasn't really about beastliness or ungovernability, more so a broadly defined mandate of carefree, hedonistic club-rat fun. Sure, whatever! But the attention economy is insatiable, and the trend’s visibility sparked inevitably inane backlash. A columnist for The Independent proclaimed ‘‘‘Feral Girl Summer’ is the latest dating trend to make single women feel inadequate.” By the time Rolling Stone interviewed the girl who popularized the TikTok hashtag, a Glamour UK headline was boldly asking, “Feral Girl Summer: Why Is Everyone Mad About It?”
This ultra-saturation of Girl Stuff isn’t so much because girls have an innate predisposition for particularized frippery, but because (for better or worse) the world has historically always been obsessed with what girls are doing. As Rebecca Jennings at Vox observes, these posters recognize that “girls are more available for consumption, and girls have more available to them.” And yes, at the end of the day, nobody’s forcing you to buy into all this.
But the membrane separating online detritus from the substance of “real life” is increasingly porous, if it ever existed at all. In the same way that the experience (however passive) of ads plastered across bus stops and highway billboards and shop window displays is inextricable from public life, it’s impossible to maintain a hermetically sealed online presence. On the platform fka Twitter, Elon Musk’s updated monetization policy incentivizes pure quantity and not quality of engagement—and even if you possess enough serene wisdom to leave obvious bad-faith takes alone, virtual rubbernecking still counts for clicks. If I go down a TikTok rabbit hole following, say, tradwife influencers, the algorithm doesn’t care whether I’m watching out of morbid fascination or earnest curiosity or dogmatic endorsement—it just knows I’m susceptible to consuming more stuff like that. And even if virality doesn’t necessarily equate to material significance, isn’t it worth examining why this material is forming the stuff of Girlness on an aggregate scale?
In Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, the French collective Tiqqun defines the titular Young-Girl as “the model citizen as redefined by consumer society since World War I.” She is a prismatic “vision machine,” both figurehead and foot soldier of the endless war waged by capital and empire.2 I think the Materials are an illuminating but not necessarily pleasurable read—while Tiqqun insists that the Young-Girl is “explicitly not a gendered figure,” it’s hard not to read a snide soupçon of gender into assertions like, “Deep down inside, the Young-Girl has the personality of a tampon.”
Ariana Reines, who translated the work into English, suggests that the Young-Girl is most productive as a diagnostic figure; my understanding of Girlness as constituted by TikTok operates similarly. The Girl is Argos Panoptos with all hundred of her eyes lovingly coated in Tower 28 MakeWaves™ Mascara! She is a girl’s girl, of course, and is only looking and listening everywhere in order to look out for you—unless you are a pick-me girl, in which case you have been marked for indelible and eternal damnation. She is aspirationally brainy but never pretentious, an impeccable curator but never a gatekeeper. She is infinitely acquisitive and effortlessly digestible.
She is capable of demystifying any subject, no matter how daunting—one video in this “explainer” category with 3.9 million views and almost 400,000 likes, billed as “Russia/Ukraine explained ✨for the girls✨,” analogizes Russia to Ukraine’s toxic ex-boyfriend and refers to NATO as a “group of besties.” It’s not that the Girl is incompetent, but that her transcendent character chafes at modernity’s crass demands—she is simply too pretty to work, or do math, or understand the stock market. Sometimes the doctrine of Girl isn’t invoked by name, but it has an implied antithesis in the elitist sensibilities of the much-maligned “bro”—as in a TikTok depicting a girl with mouth comically agape and the overlaid text, “Film bros when you tell them you want to watch a Marvel movie and not a two-hour black and white movie about the Serbian government shown through the eyes of a pigeon.”
I’m not really interested in pouncing on any individual participants in these trends, especially since this demographic is predominantly girls and young women speaking to other girls and young women whose interests are already mocked and diminished. I also don’t think the girls posting this kind of content are vapid or lacking in self-awareness—clearly, they’re adept operators who have succeeded in tapping a lucrative algorithmic nerve!
But none of this exists in a vacuum. (Also, even if none of this is that deep, the satire itself is also frequently … kind of unfunny? Like, things do not have to be ontologically evil in order to justify your annoyance with them. Once you’re scraping the bottom of the content barrel to make the nth possible Barbenheimer or Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce joke, the punchline amounts to little more than the warmed-over, hacky-stand-up-circa-1995 observation that Girls Are Like This And Boys Are Like That. In the words of @jaboukie: “what if i said the gender binary is to gen z as harry potter houses are to millennials.”) In any case, what does it mean when Girl Stuff writ large is understood to be the realm of the unserious, comfortable, palliative, and fundamentally feel-good, while Guy Stuff gets to be intense, difficult, discerning, and unsettling in its provocations?
It’s true, yes, that women have consistently devised new forms of meaning-making in response to their systematic, violent exclusion from male-dominated disciplines like history, geopolitics, and film—and that even if these paradigms seem trivial to those in power, they’re no less insightful for it. Also, many men are obtuse enough to misread a woman being humorously self-deprecating as mere stupidity. But that’s the whole point, right? We don’t seek out the gatekeepers’ validation. In fact, their disdain is probably validating in and of itself. It’s not for those guys, it’s for us. But who actually gets to identify with that universalized “us?” Who actually gets the last laugh?
Like, are we really furthering feminist epistemology by equating precision and depth with pretentiousness? By framing global conflicts purely through the lens of facile interpersonal metaphor? By rebranding the exclusive consumption of designed-by-committee IP cash grabs as egalitarian feminism? The obvious corollary to the “why can’t you just let people enjoy things” apologia for incuriosity is that many people, including women and girls, enjoy being observant haters! Also—if your aesthetic convictions are so insecure that any critique whatsoever elicits this lazy, kneejerk defensiveness, maybe they do warrant reconsideration.
Anyway, I recognize that Girlness will remain a staging ground of hotly-contested symbolic meaning as long as gender exists, but I think that even in a purely pragmatic way we could make our collective perception of its difference a bit more interesting. After all, the act of becoming a girl is a rigorous art! It teaches you how to cultivate embarrassing depths of ardor, the tendency to attempt divination from the most arbitrary signs, and attentions so profound that they often calcify into diamond-grade delusions. It allows you to realize that living under the conditions of misogyny can be a generative (but not inevitable) formal limitation that prompts you to become a more visionary freak and meticulous sicko.
Sure, these are also abstract generalizations, and maybe the sublime variance of Girlness is bound to thwart apprehension in any medium, whether it’s a glib TikTok or slapdash Substack post like this! Maybe all efforts to distill Girlness into a comprehensible essence are doomed to inadequacy—but if there’s anything that I really love, As A Girl, it’s an interminable quest for meaning that might nevertheless produce glimpses of something strange and radiant and true.
This is a genuinely delightful series and its treatment of the Barbie mythos ought to be placed in conversation with Gerwig’s iteration. I also think it’s extremely funny that Barbie isn’t even the first piece of Barbie media to reference 2001: A Space Odyssey—the 2012 B:LitD episode “Closet Princess 2.0” marks the first appearance of Barbie’s evil AI closet (essentially a pink HAL-9000), who traps her and her friends inside when they refuse to heed his sartorial suggestions.
RIP Tiqqun … you would have loved hearing Olivia Rodrigo sing “I am built like a mother and a total machine” in “all-american bitch.”