I love returning items in store and then using the money to buy an iced latte because that makes it free, that’s Girl Maths. If I go online shopping but don’t buy anything in my cart, I’ve saved money today. If I wear that dress 50 times in my life it’s only £5 each time, and that’s basically nothing. OMG I don’t need to know how budgeting works I’m literally Just a Girl. I drive home from my Lazy Girl Job and make myself some carrot sticks and hummus and olives for my Girl Dinner. My Ken’s Job is Computer and I love bringing him snacks! This Barbie is a 1950s Housewife.
Can girls have fun and light-hearted jokes online without someone piping up about how it signals the death of feminism? Seems not. Are we as women smart enough to register the difference between an ironic relatable TikTok trend and a genuine self-deprecation of female intelligence? Yes. Yet, is there a creeping, incessant narrative exposing young people to a gender binary that paints women as girlypop, bad-at-maths, nurturing girlfriends who never eat, and could this have a detrimental knock-on effect on young girls being taken seriously? Two things can be true at once. On a globally popular site where 25% of the user-base are under the age of twenty, and with no age verification mechanism to prevent under thirteen year olds signing up at will, constant messaging like this can have a real demoralising impact, even subconsciously.
Studies show that young girls identify most with adults of the same gender, and that it’s girls who are most vulnerable to picking up maths-related anxiety at a young age. Just hearing women referencing a fear of maths is shown to have a knock-on effect where young girls pick up stereotypes about female underperformance. If these are women that girls look up to, like family members, teachers, even their favourite TikTok creators, the subconscious effect is then far more powerful. It isn’t just a concern about maths-anxiety itself, but the ability of fear to manifest real disadvantages. The fear of maths leads girls as young as seven to begin avoiding practising maths, within the classroom and in everyday life. Every time your little sister, your cousin, or a child in a supermarket queue behind you hears the same casual ‘I’m literally just a girl’ in reference to an avoidance of maths, it leaves its mark. We are creating a generation of women who are maths-avoidant, and therefore unpracticed, unwilling and academically underperforming. In this way gendered stereotypes around maths are a vicious self-reproducing cycle.
Now, do we as casual users of a global social media platform have a responsibility to police what materials children are exposed to or interact with? You could say no, arguing that that’s for the age restrictions and online safety settings of the apps themselves. I don’t want to be misconstrued as Helen Lovejoy wailing ‘think of the children, oh won’t somebody please think of the children”. So maybe we should just let TikTok guidelines step in and adult women and young girls do whatever they want within their respective online circles. As long as you trust the eagle-eyed age-restriction service of a global corporation with over one billion active monthly users and no age-verification mechanism. You could even say, what are kids that young doing on TikTok anyway? But you’d have to ignore each iPad baby you see on the bus, every twelve year old wearing the perfect ‘clean girl’ sleek bun, and all of your Gen-Alpha relatives who are, for some reason, desperate to spend £10 on a PRIME Energy bottle. Just because something isn’t directly our responsibility, doesn’t mean we won’t share a portion of the blame if we help perpetuate a society where maths isn’t a subject for girls, because hey, we just want to have fun.
Meanwhile that potential apathy is also assuming that the associated trends of ‘Im just a Girl’ are only demoralising and dangerous for children. This is assuming that we as early twenty-year olds won’t also be harmed if we start to subconsciously internalise the message that to be a woman is to be ‘just’ anything. TikTok’s largest demographic is female 18-24 year olds (it’s terribly cliché to mention, but our prefrontal cortexes haven’t matured yet; we’re quite literally still growing). It’s a double-edged sword, in our early twenties we are at the precipice of adulthood: mature, capable and determined, and still so very young. So, is the trend infantilising or an appropriate expression of the youth we still have? Is it a reclamation of being young, and fun, and embracing a sense of shared community? Is ‘I’m just a girl’ even, a subtle feminist rebellion against the ‘I’m not like other girls’ era of our adolescence?
Take ‘Girl Dinner’ for example, where the visible dangers of a trend are even more readily apparent. It’s self-evidently concerning to see content online of young women taking three grapes, a coke-zero, and a carrot stick and claiming that’s all they will eat that night. But whilst the trend is vulnerable to co-option from diet culture fads, ‘Girl Dinner’ has variation. Instead of a race to the bottom of ‘who can eat less’, there exist versions where ‘Girl Dinner’ is an entire birthday cake, or a bottle of red wine and a family-size sleeve of Ritz crackers. Unlike many body-checking ‘what I eat in a day’ trends, the calorie content is often irrelevant to the intention of ‘Girl Dinner’; a delight taken by young women in eating whatever they want without external (read: male) input. In short, Girl Dinner rejects the internalised male gaze. When single girls in their apartments decide they do not want to go through with the performance of domesticity, that they are perfectly happy to eat whatever they want, there is a semi-conscious recognition that they are rebelling against an expectation of having to cook balanced protein-dense meals for a man, or for a future family.
The deluge of girl trends and microtrends then, are more than the sum of their parts. Individually, Girl Maths, Girl Dinner, and ‘I’m Just a Girl’ can be demeaning, destructive and even dangerous in the case of promoting diet fads and anti-intellectualism. But these trends also contain genuine female camaraderie and a real sense of joy. It’s all too easy for anything girls and young women are seen to enjoy to be dismissed and ridiculed, and so its easy to feel very protective of our inside jokes and ability to understand irony online, but we can’t allow that protective instinct to blind us from the actual vulnerabilities of these trends to become something harmful. Young children exposed to certain ideas online aren’t as capable of distinguishing satire from a rebirth of gender binaries as adults are, and we can’t ignore the fact that they are now being exposed to these ideas constantly. In short, without ignoring every positive, we should be worried about the ability of harmless, ironic trends to mutate, and we have to be worried about where children are picking up and perpetuating the worse aspects of our jokes online. We just need to be careful where our ‘I’m just a Girl’ morphs from an expression of shared community and humour into an, “I’m just a Girl, don’t expect anything from me”.