In 2017, The Tab claimed there are Ten Types Of Girl Freshers You’ll Meet At Uni:
“The cool girl, The mum, The h*e, The hermit, The northern girl, The one with a boyfriend, The posh one, The bookworm, The woo girl, The free spirit”.
You might meet girls who happen to have some traits that fit them into one of these ten options, like having a boyfriend or being from THE NORTH (are we talking Liverpool or Dundee or anywhere in between?), but these traits are not what defines them. Any activities these girls partake in are not things which may only be done by members of that group. You can be a “bookworm” who is sometimes a “h*e”.
But more importantly just because you are a woman it doesn’t mean that everything you do marks what kind of woman you are, or indeed that everything you do is somehow a feminine act.
According to Social Categorization and Stereotyping. by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani and Dr. Hammond Tarry, there is a “natural cognitive process by which we place individuals into social groups”, so social categories develop, and thus so do “stereotypes and prejudices”. Jhangiani and Tarry expand that “when we see members of social groups perform behaviours, we tend to better remember information that confirms our stereotypes”.
It is a normal thing to categorise people, however if we are steadfast in these categorisations, we limit our ability to fully understand people, as we judge them only by that which reinforces our misconceptions. (This is of course also true of people who are sexist or xenophobic, who see any girly behaviour expressed by a woman as reinforcement of their negative view, or else something unique to a particular nationality as other and so reinforcing that negative view.)
We’ve heard (and may have even said) the phrases: “I’m not a girly-girl”, “I’m not like other girls”, “you know those girls who …”.
We are constantly trying to prove that we are different from X categorisation, because we have seen how negatively those traits/activities have been presented. Being a feminist vegetarian who does yoga will probably put me into some sort of category like basic, as if those are bad things which should be discouraged. It will be implied that these actions are somehow “girly” and so only for girls (and not for boys) or only for a type of girl, all of which is completely untrue.
I experimented with this idea – when I typed “yoga” into google images every single picture was one of women. When I typed in “basic b*tch” dozens of “how to spot …” and “signs that she’s… ” and “how to dress as a …” came up.
These two google searches seemed to me problematic for multiple reasons. The first was the gendering of a physical activity, this is true of most sports – typing “footballer” into google images had the opposite result: exclusively pictures of men (if you don’t scroll a bit). This is a problem we probably already know about: we categorize boys and girls, but then there is the problem of categorizing types of girl.
The label of “basic” and “b*tch” are obviously intentionally negative: this type wears yoga pants, implying that that is basic, implying that yoga is basic, implying that if a boy or girl wants to do yoga then they too will be in this group and be basic. This is just one example. It might be that you have a Chilly’s water bottle and so are branded a “VSCO girl”, or wear flared trousers and so are labelled an “Exetarrrh girl”.
Whatever the action and the subsequent label we must be aware that this is damaging. This promotes girl hate. This promotes othering and stereotyping. This promotes the idea that things women do or like are mockable. This limits what it is to be a woman, implying that if you don’t fit into one of these groups that you somehow don’t count. This implies that being any type of girl is bad and so being a girl is bad, as every type is presented as embarrassing.
Tina Fey said in Mean Girls, “you all have to stop calling each other sl*ts and wh*res, it just makes it ok for guys to call you sl*ts and wh*res”. We have to stop calling certain things “basic” or “girly” (with the implication that these things are bad), it just makes it ok for guys to call you and me “basic” or “girly” as an insult, and cause everyone to avoid buying a coffee from Pret in a reusable cup, lest they be branded “basic” themselves.