The use of ‘girl’ as a prefix to diminish importance and intelligence is not the innocent TikTok trend you may have originally thought. On the back of these trends, the word ‘girl’ is increasingly becoming synonymous with silliness and ditziness. Misogyny wrapped neatly in a pretty little parcel.
Girl maths originated on a New Zealand podcast and has snowballed into a much more sinister ideology about women’s intelligence, and consumerism. Currently, if you look up ‘girl maths’, you will see men with microphones mansplaining and ridiculing the concept while simultaneously delighting in women infantilising and dumbing themselves down. The premise of ‘girl maths’ is a way to justify and rationalise financial spending on clothes, taxis, beauty products and more.
'Girl maths' is intrinsically linked to hyper-consumerism and in a world suffering from the normalisation of materialism, the online trend is adding fuel to the fire. Notwithstanding the economic effect, the sociopolitical impact on attitudes towards women is regressive and diminishing. The age-old stereotype that women are obsessed with material items and are ditsy is reaffirmed with this trend.
'Girl dinner' is a trend where women film their meal, often being picky bits or a simple butter and cheese pasta which seems innocent, but has similarly evolved into an oppressive medium. Already a diminutive trend where gender stereotypes are introduced, these videos have been co-opted into diet culture. Frozen fruit, a diet coke and a cracker marketed as ‘girl dinner’ subtly celebrates restrictive, disordered eating under the guise of a TikTok trend.
"Notwithstanding the economic effect, the sociopolitical impact on attitudes towards women is regressive and diminishing."
The ‘Just a girl’ phenomenon concludes this online movement. It explicitly, and without need for explanation, belittles women and reduces them to an infantilised, docile version of themselves. There are an astounding 1.1 million videos on TikTok hashtagged ‘I’m just a girl’, a few of which being: bad at driving, weak at the gym and not understanding taxes. All of which are age-old sexist stereotypes, that women are now playing into with mass validation, from societies majority who wish to return women into an infantilised, subservient state.
