Girl-ology

Girlhood, bimbos, hot girls, and more!

Chapter 1: Girlhood

I’ve always been someone excited for the next phase. I was ecstatic when I turned 20, it felt like the end of a fraught era that I have not once wished for since. So imagine my surprise to see the rising trend of 20-something-teenage-girls yearning for a time I can’t imagine having to repeat. The reactions to the Barbie movie are a good example—people saying they want to return to the limitless confidence of childhood make me feel crazy because my own confidence was never more limited. I agonized over if people would realize my leggings weren’t a name brand, I was hyperaware of every inch of fat that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and every hair out of place. I would not wish the experience of being a 12 year old girl on anyone,.

It reminds me of the trend of half jokingly saying feminists should never have made us work, dreaming of the simple existence of being a stay at home girlfriend, wife, or mother (which I’ve written about before). That’s not the reality. The 12 year old girls I knew weren’t happy, just like the TikTok stay at home girlfriends aren’t. It only seems simple cuz we’re not doing it. We know what we’re doing is hard and complicated and so we imagine that something else is easier. Maybe people think that if they could go back with all they know now they could do it better, that they wouldn’t spend their formative years fixated on their body hair or baby fat, that whatever petty middle school drama would roll off their back instead of consuming their lives. But I still stay up some nights thinking about those fights. Every time I look back on photos of myself from every era of my life I think I look better than I do now, that if I could go back and look like that I wouldn’t be self conscious like I was back then. In a year I’ll look back on how I look now the same way. That hasn’t seemed to help me feel any differently. If I was 14 again I know I would still hate all the same things, and upset the same people, and it would be just as hard and painful and messy as it was the first time around. Some days I think I’ve grown up a lot, others I think all I did was get taller.

When I was younger I would see reflections of myself in car windows and be hit with a wave of nausea. I was not a hot girl, and I knew that. Instead of trying to become one, I leaned into that. I was what a certain annoying online subset would now call a pick me, because rejecting femininity and desirability felt more empowering than being denied access to it. Once I got a little bit older, and a little bit prettier, and my hair grew out, I started to dip my toe into being a “hot girl”. I wore tight clothes. I stopped wearing my glasses. I flirted with boys. I threw up when I overate. I was miserable in a way I had never been before and have never been since.

I graduated. I cut my hair. I grew my hair. I shaved it off. I grew it again. I dyed it every colour under the sun waiting for one to magically make feel beautiful. I looked back at old photos from when I felt hideous and lamented that I was actually pretty then, unlike now. I was skinnier, I was too skinny. I gained weight, I lost weight, I think I’ve gained it again, because my clothes don’t fit anymore. I want to be happy about this, and sometimes I am. I want to be able to reject beauty standards, but not as much as I want to attain them.

I made an appointment for jaw botox. I told myself it was to stop my teeth grinding (it wasn’t). I canceled my appointment and took a few weeks to consciously focus on not clenching my jaw. The pain stopped. My face looked the same. I saved £300. I got a Jess DeFino subscription. I stopped using serums and oils and peels. My life got easier, my skin got worse. I think my medication makes my skin greasy, I know it makes me not want to die. This Barbie Takes Lamictal. This Barbie Has Existential Dread. This Barbie Has Credit Card Debt. Hot Girls have stomach problems. Hot girls don’t dream of labour. Hot Girls support gay rights. Hot Girls love women (but not those ones). Hot Girls just don’t understand boy stuff like sports, or finance, or conflict in the middle east.

Is this relatable? Am I doing this right? Am I a girls girl? Do I sound like a pick me? Have you picked me? 

Am I a hot girl?

Chapter 2: Hot Girlhood (aka Bimbo Feminism)

No, I know, I’m not allowed to agonize over whether I’m attractive to men or not (or am I? As long as I don’t tell them that? As long as it stays between me and the girls?) but I still need you to think I’m the right kind of girl. And that’s what a hot girl is now, right? I’ve had dozens of people assure me, when I pointed out equating hotness with morality gives me pause, that a “hot girl” isn’t about attractiveness at all anymore. Everyone can be a hot girl now! So long as she’s confident (but not a pick me), relatable (but not cheugy), and above all, a girls girl (a title that can and will be revoked at the first transgression). See, it’s so easy now!

Most women who grew up in the ever so slightly more enlightened 21st century now know that it’s not good to sincerely place all our value on our appearance and desirability. However, most of us have not been able to actually rip ourselves completely from the heteropatriarchy and therefore still need to participate in it to some degree. We still want all the benefits of being hot but now it’s an activity, a game, see? We want it. It’s for us. As I said to Aalijawijaa of The Hermit, It's performing exactly what's wanted but claiming irony to distance ourselves from the fact we're doing what's easy and upholding the status quo. If everything is ironic we never have to face it, or it's impact, and especially not where it comes from. Bimboism is a way of feeling subversive without alienating people too much. You still get to be feminine and beautiful, you don't lose that currency. You feel in control of your sexualization. Objectifying yourself before they have a chance to. I think there's a reason we see it so much from Americans cuz America is such a haven for commercialism and consumerism—we are all products to be sold.

People prop up bimbo feminism as an antidote to “girlboss feminism” claiming (more or less correctly) that girlboss feminism just encouraged them to uphold capitalism: “In 2022, young people have turned away from the capitalist fever dream that was #girlboss feminism. Instead, they’re focused on something much more positive: Bimboism” However, I would argue bimbo feminism upholds capitalist patriarchy just as much or more. Not only does so much of it promote endless consumption (the TikTok bimbo is the marketer’s dream with her extensive makeup routines and pink clothing that disintegrates after a few wears) but women not working (or not dreaming of labour as the leftist bimbo puts it) is not a revolutionary act under patriarchy. At least girlboss feminism promised a degree of autonomy. It was a pink-washed nightmare but at least it came back to a tenet of the feminist movement— the right to work, financial independence, economic representation. Of course this was quickly coopted into something profitable instead of subversive, and the Buzzfeed articles and tshirts did nothing to meaningfully address the inequalities in the workforce, the barriers that affect women beyond being called “bossy”, the barriers that prevent some women from building their empire while thin white women can walk into a million dollar book deal by telling people to wash their face, but while girlbossery was the glittery ghost of the women’s fight for economic equality and financial independence defanged to not be subversive, there is still the ghost of a point in there. But what, fundamentally, systemically, is bimbo feminism subverting? How is playing dumb and, as more and more “bimbo influencers” are emphasizing, being financially dependent on men, subversive? You can argue that men don’t like the hyperfeminine aesthetic, that they fear a woman who “doesn’t feel the need to be smart”, but disarming does not equal subversive. The brief shock on someone’s face when you call yourself a bimbo is not sending reverberations through the patriarchy. Sure, you’re doing it ironically, but outside looking in, what’s the difference between irony and sincerity here? You wink at the camera while saying you don’t understand math and can’t be expected to join the workforce, but the irony wears off quickly when there’s no longer an audience. See how effortlessly the bimbos not working shifts to *sprinkle sprinkle*, to getting men to pay for your lifestyle (but not in a trad wife way or god forbid a sex worker way, in a misandrist way!) and then that becomes a stay at home girlfriend who becomes a stay at home wife who becomes a stay at home mom who all the way through is dependent on the labour of others to enjoy her lifestyle, even without a man. When you say you don’t dream of labour are you also ignoring the labour of the women who made your very cute outfits? Do you consider the labour you put into marketing yourself? Living is labour. Life is hard work. Womanhood is a full time job.  How can an aesthetic that in so many cases centres an aesthetic and lifestyle based on consumption be meaningfully anti capitalist? When a list of “girl hobbies” without fail will include shopping and skincare and $7 lattes, saying that it’s okay for these things to be central to your sense of identity and personhood, no amount of saying “I do not dream of labour” will turn it into a Marxist statement.

In Morgan Sung’s article “Bimbos are good, actually” we get further claims of irony and self-awareness: “The modern bimbo takes the male gaze that's been unavoidable since birth and creates a caricature of it by performing vanity and cluelessness.” But my question is, who is the performance for? And what differentiates it from reality? If you go through life willfully ignorant and “smooth-brained”, accepting that you’re “just a girl” who needs girl math and girl hobbies and girl dinner and can’t understand the economy or, god forbid, a genocide, without metaphors about shoes and parties and makeup— at what point are you just ignorant? If you seriously place your own smooth-brained peace of mind and Shein wardrobe above the hard work of learning and growing, is your vanity and cluelessness still performative?

Bimbo feminism and “dissociative feminism” (a term that has fallen completely out of fashion, perhaps because of Emmeline Clein’s article The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating or perhaps because it didn’t come with cute outfits) share a lot of similarities in this respect. Both are positioned as foils to “girlboss feminism” which in practice seems to mean a chic way of giving up. As Clein says, “instead we now seem to be interiorizing our existential aches and angst, smirking knowingly at them, and numbing ourselves to maintain our nonchalance [...] On the other hand, giving up on progress is perhaps the epitome of white feminism, and promotes a nihilism that is somewhere between unproductive and genuinely dangerous.”

In one of the relatively few articles I could find talking about the racial politics of bimbo feminism, A Critique on Bimboism by Mallika Sunder, Sunder states:

“When white women experience sexism, they are often infantilized, thought of as ‘pristine’ and ‘pure’. The bimbo is always unintelligent and in need of a man’s help, which is why the patriarchy has painted the bimbo as a white woman. Women of color, on the other hand, face the opposite consequences of a patriarchal society. In When White Women Cry: How White Women’s Tears Oppress Women of Color by Mamta Motwani Accapadi, the author writes, “while White women have been depicted to be the foundation of purity, chastity, and virtue, Women of Color have historically been caricaturized by the negative stereotypes and the historical lower status position associated with their racial communities in American society.” This distinction is important to make because it shows some of the privilege in even getting to call yourself a bimbo; Even though the sexism white women face is demeaning, they can still weaponize the protection they get under the patriarchy. Pandering to the bimbo stereotype works mostly with them because the stereotype was based off of the patriarchy’s idealized view of white women. Therefore, they are the only ones who can get any meaningful empowerment out of subverting this trope. If a woman of color tried to subvert the bimbo trope, it would not be met with the same ‘#girlboss’ energy as a white woman. We need to recognize that in feminist movements, WOC are constantly at a disadvantage because white supremacy is entrenched in so many mainstream attitudes.”

Another element I see largely overlooked in bimbo feminism is the undercurrent of classism, or at least shaky class politics. You can say all you want that “bimbo” merely referred to someone sexy and vapid, but I was conscious in the 2000s and I remember what “trashy” meant. Sure, Paris Hilton was a millionaire bimbo, but much of the disdain she got was very different from say, Britney Spears. Paris Hilton was the prototype for the modern bimbo in more ways than one, including that her bimbo identity was curated. She herself has talked about how she put on her baby voice and dumb blonde act. When Paris Hilton the heiress wore flip flops or showed her thong it was taken as a fashion choice, a trend she was setting, versus when Britney did it was her falling back on her white trash roots. There are women who didn’t adopt the identity willingly, who hit puberty early or have a speech pattern they didn’t put on for the aesthetic, who got called bimbos from before they could put together an identity of their own. Why, I wonder, do they so rarely seem to be the ones getting articles written about them? If the only bimbos getting famous are the ones with savings accounts and college degrees, what have we actually normalized? Are you reclaiming it because it’s been used against you, or because it’s something you were told not to be?

In Morgan Robinson’ article on Bimbo Feminism she says “Perhaps the pushback against #BimboTok is revealing remnants of long-held internalized misogyny in self-identified feminists. Our movement has fought long and hard to legitimize women as intelligent, autonomous beings, and investment in hyper-femininity and “unintelligence” feels like a threat to that work. Perhaps to its critics, bimbo feminism is altogether much too silly, too lacking in “serious” feminist discussion to be considered a legitimate form of feminist ideology. I argue, rather, that BimboTok is very quickly serving to present intersectional feminism and anti-capitalism to the masses in a way that is much more accessible than feminists of the past”

The claim of Bimboism being a more intersectional and accessible form of feminism is not unique to Robinson. But who is this feminism more accessible to? TikTok Bimbos would have you believe that the greatest issue women face is men being assholes, and that the solution is to just embrace and enjoy stereotypes so they can’t hurt you. How is that accessible or relatable to women in the global south, for whom patriarchy manifests radically differently? How is it relatable to masc women who don’t want to “reclaim” hyperfemininity, who instead have felt it being forced on them their whole lives? And what about the women who cannot opt out of labour so easily, the women who were excluded from the #girlboss movement not because they didn’t dream of a 9 to 5, but because it was completely inaccessible to them?

And again, how can a movement so centered on consumption be meaningfully anti-capitalist?

Chapter 3: Commodification and Dove Real Beauty

*For this next section I’ll be quoting from Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists by Josée Johnston and Judith Taylor which I highly recommend everyone read

I saw a TikTok today that stated more explicitly than anything else I can recall what I believe to be a end point of the girl math saga: “This video is for any girl out there who’s ever been asked what their hobbies are, and you feel like you have none. That’s not true! You just have girl hobbies.”

Here are the Girl Hobbies in question:

Of the 6 “hobbies” listed, 3 are explicitly about consumption, 4 centre possessions, 1 centres men (although she catches herself and says “him AND/OR her” could be the target of social media investigative work, it’s pretty clear what she’s thinking of). At least we have 1 traditional hobby, physical activity, however this must be tampered down and feminized, and, above all, made hot. She says “we don’t need to play sports, we go on walks. Girl hobby”. We don’t need to get sweaty and rough like the boys. We’re hot girls. How radical it would be to have a hobby that doesn’t make us beautiful, organized, postable. Even something as unambiguously beneficial as walking must be sold to us as being for “hot girls”. I know, I know, it’s ironic and just for fun and I’m a nagging boring feminist for taking it so seriously. But if your feminism leaves you terrified to look sweaty and ugly, if it hasn’t given you any sense of self beyond what the patriarchy has already told you, what good is it to you? It’s hot girl feminism. It’s “little treat” feminism. It’s the empty calories, being sold to you because it’ll leave you hollow and needing more, and more, and more.

“Corporations have a long history of incorporating emancipatory ideals into marketing campaigns, often with limited transformative outcomes (Frank 1997; Heath and Potter 2004). Virginia Slims, for instance, promotes an image of feminist independence in the “You’ve come along way, baby” marketing campaign, and yet it sells women highly addictive, cancer-causing product. Consumerism puts forward a worldview in which consumption is “at the center of meaningful existence” (Sklair 2001) and shopping is the ideal form participation in struggles for social change.”

This excerpt is from the Johnston Taylor article about the Dove Real Beauty campaign that I’m sure was as formative for many of my readers as it was for me. That campaign was in some ways very far from Bimbo feminism today—I can’t imagine Dove would’ve advocated for skimpy clothes or fun makeup, and would never have dared to call out men directly. However, as we see from that article, the foundation of both is the same, sometimes eerily so.

“The Dove Campaign, while it contests narrow beauty codes, works within a hegemonic ideology of gendered beauty by refusing to challenge the idea that beauty is an essential part of a woman's identity, personhood, and social success and by legitimizing the notion that every woman should feel beautiful [...] At the end of both commercials, and within the Dove campaign more generally, the social imperative for women to be and feel beautiful is not up for negotiation. Even though the social understanding of beauty is contested, the importance of beauty as a paramount value for women is reproduced and legitimized by the campaign’s explicit and unceasing focus on beauty. Women’s acceptance of their bodies as beautiful is demanded, rather than recognized as an inherently complex, fraught, and contradictory endeavor—particularly in the context of the mass media, the beauty industry, the weight-loss industry, and industrial food complex—or in relation to what women accomplish apart from looking pretty.” (Johnston and Taylor)

The Hot Girl/Bimbo movement and Dove’s Real Beauty share this fundamental truth: women should, or even must feel beautiful. They both recognize that the current beauty standards are harmful, but they also don’t question the idea of beauty or it’s importance. As Johnston and Taylor say, “Because the central importance of feminine beauty is not questioned by the Dove campaign, its architects need not include anger as an emotional stage. Anger would be required only if women were rejecting, rather than coming to terms with, this basic social tenet. Dove’s emotional register erases shame, fear, and anger, making personal pride and social change appear painless, simple achievements—as simple as shopping itself”

Chapter 4: The End

I love blue eyeshadow and bleach blonde hair. I liked the Barbie movie, and I loved dressing up with my friends to go see it. My 24th birthday was Barbie themed. But I don’t think the world would look like Barbieland if we got rid of patriarchy, I don’t think girlhood was anything like Barbieland either. I don’t think it would be that great if it was— the part of Barbieland where anyone depressed or funny looking gets exiled to hang out in the gay outskirts felt authentic, but it didn’t feel great. Even when they let Weird Barbie make her return to society she still had a makeover first. Did they ever let Leather Daddy Ken back in? I discarded my Barbies when the haircuts I gave them made them ugly. I tell myself if I have a daughter I’ll never so much as acknowledge weight around her. I tell her I’ll make sure she feels beautiful but knows that it’s unimportant. I tell myself all these things, just as I’m sure my mother and her mother told themselves, and still I think I’ll come home one day and see her throwing a Barbie to the side after a bad haircut. I got 100% in my grade 12 math class. I did it to prove something to a boy. I don’t have hobbies. I used to, or I think I did. I can’t remember any when someone asks. I don’t even write for this blog anymore. I’m barely writing this. I had so much more I wanted to say, and I wanted to say all of it better, but I don’t know how to. Is this relatable? Do you like me now? Am I still a pick me? Or have I proven myself? Am I hot girl? This Barbie is tired. This Barbie needs to logoff. This Barbie is pressing send.