Rolling Stone magazine pumped out an impressive interview with acclaimed musician Billie Eilish a few days ago. The interview was more than 6,000 words of thoughtful, honest, and raw reflections, where Eilish discussed her sexuality, mental health, artistic process, and activism. In the voice of one of the most awarded singers of her generation, she poured her aspirations, worries, and discomforts onto pages and pages. At the end of her impressively earnest thoughts, she finished the hefty interview with one short statement: “I’m just a girl.”

This phrase sounds off-putting, coming from a woman who isn’t “just” anything, with nine Grammys under her belt—nor is she a “girl” at the age of 22, with full independence and a career. But however inappropriate the phrase sounds in Eilish’s famous mouth, it certainly isn’t the first time I’ve heard it. For the past few months, hundreds of TikToks I’ve seen share some iteration of the phrase. The videos range in content: Some depict teenage girls messing up their homework or getting into minor car accidents with the bashful comment that “I’m just a girl!” Some show adult women on major shopping sprees, declaring they are participating in “girl therapy,” or ladies who have collected miscellaneous snacks and declared they are eating “girl dinner.” Often, there are clips of women giving silly and juvenile justifications for spending money, namely that they calculated their spendings with “girl math.” There have been TikTok songs, hashtags, videos, comments, and even products produced branding themselves as being for and about “girlhood.”

The trend has fascinated and disturbed me for a few months. What is so captivating about the brand of girlhood? Why do so many adult women latch onto their gender identity through the lens of childhood? And why is girlhood associated with such belittling qualities? 

These questions have been stewing in my head for a while without answers, and the more I thought about it, the more this trend appeared in other places. 

Perhaps the most notable was in the box office. After the 2024 Academy Awards, we emerged with some of the loudest feminist movies in a while. With 11 nominations and 4 wins, “Poor Things” left the award season as a feminist film with critical acclaim. The movie takes place in a surreal version of Victorian Europe, where a mad scientist finds the dying corpse of a young pregnant suicide victim. He transfers the brain of the fetus into the body of the adult woman to create Bella Baxter, a beautiful infant woman. The film follows Bella’s journey as suitors and scientists coerce her, explore her, and chase her. She has the body of an adult woman without the mental and social awareness to understand these corporeal implications. Bella learns, reads, travels, and has tons and tons of sex. The film is, at its core, a story about a girl discovering the world of men. 

The second feminist hit of the awards season won in both the box office and audiences’ hearts, although not the actual awards: “Barbie.” The film takes an iconic doll, complete with a busty adult body and locks of blonde hair, and sets her on a painful journey into the real world to learn about sexism and the full experience of womanhood. But once again, most of the film positions the instincts and knowledge of a child in the body of a beautiful and sexual actress, lost in a new world of information and violence.

Both films have their narrative, cinematographic, and political strengths. And alongside the TikTok trend, each piece of media plays its part in shaping our understanding of gender discussion and feminism. But the particular style of language and visuals— which heavily rely on youthfulness, playfulness, and aesthetic or content-based appeal—can be troubling. Understanding the problem with this trend—which I’ve nicknamed “girlhood feminism”—requires an evaluation of two things: the youth-oriented focus of the language and the thematic and political function of the trend.

At first glance, my eye fell apprehensively on the childlike messaging of girlhood feminism. This feminist trend can be distilled, in its least charitable sense, to totally infantilizing the female experience. Using language and storytelling, it frames our understanding and association of womanhood from the perspective of childhood. Consider this in each example. In Billie Eilish’s case, she tells a reporter hours of stories about sex, mental health, art, and many other decidedly adult matters. To summarize this talk as her being “just a girl” is to frame herself and the perspective that she shares with the world as the opinions of a girl, or a child. The social media use of the branding of “girl” functions similarly. The trend constantly trains women to reflect on childlike mistakes, opinions, and actions as a function of their gender. “Girl” becomes an excuse to mess up, an explanation for failure, a cute shoulder shrug. Even when calling something “girl-like” isn’t explicitly infantilizing, the choice of language is unsettling. Using girlhood, as opposed to womanhood, linguistically binds online identity and community-building to a childlike understanding of self. It also is deeply uncomfortable, because we are very aware that none of these women are, in fact, girls. They are adults, with adult bodies and lives and experiences. So the association is not only belittling, it is unnatural, as women submit themselves to a presentation of their lives that is beautiful and sexual, yet entirely childlike.

“Barbie” and “Poor Things” are culpable of the same crime. Both of them are stories that seek to represent the story of women; they are analogies to everyday suffering and sexualization. Yet they depict their protagonists—the very same who are meant to tell the story of womankind—as infant-like. Bella and Barbie are childlike, slow, confused, and exploited. To give credit to the movies, that certainly isn’t where either of the stories end. But no redemptive arc excuses the films from the reality that they represent women as fundamentally younger and dumber than the scary male world around them. Simultaneously, the protagonists are in fully mature female bodies, with sexualized costumes and plotlines. So the films are not telling the story of real girls, with childhood experiences, but rather a mutated version of adult and child, blended skillfully into “girl.” The writers of the film add nuance and context to this association, in some cases even using the association to make a political point. But both films make a claim about representing the female story. So if the movies take a sexy, dumb, physically mature child and send her on a wild adventure—even if the adventure results in growth and feminism—the initial claim becomes this: The story of women is the story of being a sexy infantlike character in a world of fully developed, fully intellectually, capable men.

And it’s worth being fair to films and TikToks: There is absolutely a place for them! “Barbie” reminds us that womanhood doesn’t have to be the constant pursuit of success or growth, and the TikToks allow us to enjoy and laugh at silly moments in our lives. “Poor Things” aims to highlight the uncomfortable exploitation of women’s bodies through the lens of a stunted adult. These feminist perspectives can give us peace and understanding. But I worry that there might be an overcorrection: We are told to be comfortable with our screwups and imperfections as women. But instead of just embracing those mistakes without shame, our language has turned blunders and naivety into a distinctly feminine quality. We aren’t just accepting our flaws—we are making them a fundamental characteristic of what girlhood or womanhood means. So being “just a girl” is a form of self-flagellation disguised as feminist self-empowerment.

This introduces the second component of this feminist trend: its social and political function. Aside from the problems of representing women as children—dumb, ditzy, and illiterate—this norm in gender conversations has a more pernicious underbelly. Girlhood feminism makes modern gender activism and conversations necessarily inactive and non-disruptive, never transforming into political action or even feminist literacy. 

This problem is most easily highlighted comparatively. I came of age during Trump’s 2016 campaign and eventual election. This moment was marked by a very distinct style of feminism: Hillary Clinton pantsuits, glass ceilings, and “nasty women.” There were certainly problems with the language and advocacy of the time. But I can say distinctly that the feminism of my adolescence was not passive—it asked women every day to consider their power, their intellectual capacities, and their political responsibilities. Protest signs and quippy headlines at the time demanded women fight back, organize, challenge the patriarchal roles and norms that Trumpian politics were putting front and center. For whatever gaps sat between the ideas, feminism was the enterprise of participating, intellectual adults. 

Compare this to girlhood feminism. It has no shortage of social media coalescence, headline-grabbing, or engagement. But it seems to produce no political, social, or intellectual output at all. Girlhood feminism from TikTok is almost entirely about creating funny or relatable content, with no critical reflection about gender experiences. We are told that this style of feminism is about personal acceptance and celebration—getting to be a woman who has nothing to prove—and there is certainly a place for this conversation! But it doesn’t strike me as a coincidence that for all the community building on TikTok around womanhood, seemingly none of it translates to political action or even more thoughtful and evocative reflections about what womanhood looks like today.

There are a few components of girlhood feminism that produce this problem. The most clear is that it is necessarily a reflective and passive form of feminism. It takes part of the female experience—shopping, being cute, being dumb, being confused—and vocalizes and celebrates them. Girlhood TikTok and girlhood movies don’t ask women to change or improve or reflect, but rather to enjoy and celebrate the silly and youthful parts of their experience as a woman. For whatever strengths this type of conversation might have, it’s notably void of any intellectual or real community-based direction. As a result of its infantilizing language, the massive community-building of the internet doesn’t link our everyday concerns into social and political problems or encourage us to talk about and think about improving the world. Girlhood feminism doesn’t lead anywhere, except back into a cycle of content and laughs.

It’s worth adding, in this vein, that girlhood feminism is highly aesthetics-based. This isn’t to say, necessarily, that the visual aesthetics of the trend are inherent to a more fun form of feminism. However, the emphasis on visuals and content seems to appear in a great deal of these pieces of media and seems to be, perhaps accidentally, shifting our focus. “Barbie,” for all its interesting feminist reflections, received much of its acclaim and attention for the outfits on the press tours, quippy songs, and funny Ken remarks. “Poor Things,” for whatever the complexities of Bella’s journey, dominated Oscar categories about makeup, costume, and set, which all relate to aesthetics. In the funky and captivating styles of storytelling, which certainly have artistic merit, aesthetics have the danger of becoming the subject, not the transmitter, of a message. When we walk away from theaters, the songs get stuck in our head, the outfits get placed on our Pinterest boards, and we return to a passive life under patriarchy. Of course, these films have more social and political interpretations. But it becomes much easier for everyone to find comfort in telling a feminist story that is catchy and beautiful without focusing on a concrete political or even intellectual point.   

TikTok becomes the same. Community building and catharsis turn into obsession with views and trends, more focused on generating a laugh or viral video than a principled obligation to feminist discourse. The reason for this? Girlhood feminism lets its participants enjoy the guilty pleasure of being silly and young. Any more advanced intellectual exchanges about gender identity, more troubling reflections, or more organized and political videos become less interesting content. Girlhood feminism makes people feel good, which makes good content, and the cycle continues.

So, the implication of this style of feminism becomes this: People watch movies about women, they talk about their gender, they reflect on girlhood. We feel, after a long day of talking about girlhood and watching feminist movies, that we are active participants in the feminist movement. But the entire time, all this engagement never brought us to a concrete social or political conclusion. Consider, for example, that we are living through perhaps the most egregious and comprehensive assault on reproductive freedom this country has seen. In months of female-focused trends and interviews, why hasn’t Roe come up? How can we walk out movies about assaults and exploitations and not translate those messages into political engagement about reproductive justice or sexual violence prevention? Is there a possibility that girlhood feminism, for whatever catharsis it gives us, is distracting us from practicing feminism as an active activity where we think critically about our gender, where we aid our community, where we apply intellect and action to making our lives better?

Womanhood doesn’t always need to be about organizing and activism. Sometimes, we absolutely should sit back, call ourselves girls, and enjoy Barbie. I have days where I need this, and I absolutely believe we should make space for this. But girlhood feminism weaponizes our desire for peace into a desire for passivity, so we are told to find comfort and catharsis in a style of gender discourse that doesn’t push us to think harder and reckon with some of the worst parts of the female experience. We get to be young, beautiful, aesthetic, non-disruptive, and cool—all while calling it feminism. But as we experience the relaxation of not being called to action, I wonder if we are robbing ourselves of a chance to talk like grownups, get to work, and build a better future. 

Julia Schroers is a member of the class of 2027 and can be reached at jschroers@wesleyan.edu.