Girls Will Be Girls: A Reading List on Consumerism in the Internet Age 

I have never scrolled through TikTok without hearing the word “girl.” Last year, there were hot girl walks (San Pellegrino, AirPods Max, Alo skirt) and girl dinners (Diet Coke, trüfrü, Lesser Evil Himalayan Pink Salt Organic Popcorn). There were clean girls (TIGI Wax Stick, Gua sha, Glossier You perfume) and rockstar girlfriends (red bomber jacket, Dr. Martens, Valentino liquid liner). There were larger-than-life personalities—the tube girl who swayed on the subway, the interview girl known for being painfully dry—and singular descriptor ones: vanilla girls, coconut girls, Acubi girls, K-Girls, girls who bought the pickle sweatshirt, girls who bought the Skims dupe jumpsuit, white swan girls, black swan girls, and girl’s girls.

But in every iteration of the girl online, one thing remained the same—the slate of products you could buy to become her. A hot girl walk is nothing without the HOKA shoes and matching athleisure set; a chain now offers girl dinners; clean girls run through branded skincare routines; and even the tube girl started to sell us lipstick. You cannot be any type of girl without being monetized, and you cannot follow a trend or a creator without buying into what’s for sale.

These girls—popular online archetypes, but incessant consumers above all else—are constructed so that material goods are as central to her identity as any actual interests. We read about “17 products to help you achieve the clean girl aesthetic” and buy “wellness girl” probiotics, hot pilates subscriptions, and sea moss (instead of going to bed earlier). We invest in products because we are told we can purchase an identity; we can be that girl, online and off.

But why is the internet directing these advertisements toward girls? What is it about a girl online that invites Amazon storefronts, product placements, aspirational wish lists, and slang like “girl math” to make consumerism a frilly joke? Is retail therapy a distraction from something bigger? These articles might not give us definitive answers, but they start a conversation about what girlhood looks like on the internet today—and the price tag we put on it. 

The Golden Age of Gadgets for Girlies (Amanda Mull, The Atlantic, December 2023)

Here are some things we know about the Dyson Airwrap: It is a tool for curling hair. It debuted in 2018. It is $600. And, along with the Supersonic hair dryer, cordless flat iron, and other hair-wrangling appliances, the Airwrap accounts for a third of Dyson’s business in the US market.

The Airwrap belongs to a specific camp of gadgets that markets toward girls and women, writes reporter Amanda Mull. These gadgets are all designed to simplify tasks: the Airwrap simplifies hair care; electric scrubbers, cleaning; and red light therapy, anti-aging (or skincare, if you want to call it that). But what are these gadgets really promising?

On some level, most of these new gadgets marketed to women do make something—usually the fulfillment of a particular aesthetic or domestic standard—easier. Less time and skill needed to perfect your hair and less elbow grease spent making your bathroom fixtures shine offer potential buyers the possibility of, finally, getting it all done. Perhaps most important, those gadgets provide the possibility of relief—if not from the standards themselves, maybe from the sense that fulfilling them all would be impossible.

Gadgets certainly make life easier—or, at the very least, make a show of it. When girls on screen have spotless kitchens tidied with an influencer-approved cleaning gadget, and perfectly curled hair achieved via the latest beauty tool, who can blame us for adding these items to our cart? But then pristine and perfect become the baseline, gadgetry becomes more and more advanced, and what we expect from our gadgets and ourselves—newer, better versions of both—becomes an impossible standard to reach. 

We’ve Reached Peak Girl (Delia Cai, Vanity Fair, July 2023)

Has there ever been a better primetime example of how we package the concept of a girl into something that can be bought and sold than 2023’s Barbie? Writer Delia Cai doesn’t think so. We’re all collectively obsessed with this idealized version of girlhood—a smooth, shiny, perfect Barbie doll—and the commercial means (pink outfits, TikTok filters) we use to live it out. 

At least a part of this infatuation is the fact that the reality of girlhood is anything but Barbie-ish. There is little intrepid youth or naiveté. There’s almost no empowerment that isn’t tied to the erratic impulses of the internet:

The irony, of course, is that while such obliviousness is the whole appeal of this fantasy girlhood, what actual adolescent girls are encountering in real life is a kind of enforced ignorance . . . At the moment, the “girl power” credo of a generation ago, has deflated into the reality of widespread depression amongst teen girls, whose lives revolve around the whims of byzantine algorithms—and whose digital selfhood more or less requires whether or not they can perform girlhood correctly according to those mysterious forces.

When our current state of girlhood has been relegated to arbitrary digital metrics that determine how well we perform as girls, there is nothing Barbie Dreamland about it, says Cai. So we cash into the one on screen.

It’s More Than Just “Instagram Face” (Freya India, GIRLS, March 2023)

In her column, Freya India writes about “Instagram Face,” a mash-up of beauty standards dictated by social media and achieved through filters and editing. But India has noticed that it’s not just appearances but personalities that are slowly converging to a destination of wholesale commodification: a neatly marketable girl who subscribes to one subculture and loyally peddles its wares.

E-girls, for instance, have the same blush, freckles, eyeliner, and mannerisms. Trad Wives, too, behave and present the same way online, with the same outfits from the same brands, and promote the same lineup of products. So do cottagecore influencers, the woke, and the edgy creators. Our “personalities and interests,” India argues, silo us into internet subcultures that feed us near-identical memes, videos, TikToks, tweets, and advertisements as the next user:

It’s as if any trace of individuality is now categorised, mainstreamed and assimilated into online identities like “cottagecore”, “Insta Baddie” or “Trad Wives”, each of which come with a list of products, outfits and personality traits. Our subcultures aren’t organic and subversive; they’re commodified and marketable.

Yet here we are, allowing these apps and algorithms to dictate the way we look, the way we think, to the point where our personalities are becoming inseparable from the content we consume, the products we buy, the identities that flash up on our For You page. The market is so embedded in our lives that it doesn’t just decide what we like and what we should buy anymore, but who we are.

The Joy of Communal Girlhood, the Anguish of Teen Girls (Jessica Bennett, The New York Times, December 2023)

How are girls feeling these days? Journalist Jessica Bennett reminds us that the current situation is . . . bleak. The year 2023 may have been the year of the girl: Of Beyoncé, Barbie, and Taylor Swift. Of “girl dinners” subverting the domestic expectation to serve full meals. Of “rat girls” who scurried around independent of the patriarchy. But Bennett suggests that all of it might’ve been skin deep:

Of course, that idea of girlhood is—and perhaps has always been — a fantasy . . . They’re anxious. They are inundated with conflicting, and constant, messages about whom they should dress like, look like, act like, be, on platforms that have been shown to be toxic to them and where they also face frequent harassment. In the real world, even amid celebrations of so-called body positivity and endless reminders (usually in the form of product placement) that you are enough, girls face record rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia; they’re wearing anti-aging products designed for middle age.

Celebrating girlhood, Bennett argues, is the safe fix. It is much easier to emphasize online connections than to acknowledge that girls feel lonelier and more isolated than ever. It is less painful to buy skincare products than to face the fact that internet filters have warped our idea of beauty to the point of dysmorphia. But as girls sway to the beat of the Eras Tour and wear pink for Barbie, they’re allowed for a brief moment to believe they can be the girls of the content that they consume.

“Girl” Trends and the Repackaging of Womanhood (Rebecca Jennings, Vox, August 2023)

What do strawberry girls, cherry girls, vanilla girls, tomato girls, coconut girls, coastal cowgirls, rat girls, and downtown girls have in common? Supposedly, they’re all girl trends, but writer Rebecca Jennings thinks they’re something else altogether: marketing campaigns.

The concept of girlhood is almost too easy to sell, writes Jennings, because being a girl is fun. A girl is untethered from the condition of being a wife or a mother—a woman. A girl’s story is her own:

If the absence of a spouse or child is the condition of being a girl, then it’s hardly surprising that so many modern women are referring to themselves as such. More of us are free from the assumption that traditional womanhood is something worth aspiring to. “Woman dinner” is sad; the phrase evokes an image of a tired lady, having already fed her spouse and children, eating the last scraps of whatever was left over before shoving the plates in the dishwasher. Nobody wants to eat “woman dinner.” “Girl dinner” is, crucially, fun.

Women on TikTok know what they’re doing when they dub their meals “girl dinners” or coin terms like “hot girl walk.” They know what trends have gone viral in the past—VSCO girls, e-girls, “soft girls”—and that their clickable, immediately gettable names had everything to do with why people care. They know that this year the highest-grossing movie and what may become the highest-grossing musical tour in history center on the very conundrum of women in their 30s experiencing their own versions of girlhood. They know that people will always care about what girls do, because girls are not yet women and therefore less easy to despise. Girls are more available for consumption, and girls have more available to them.

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Zoe Yu is a writer from Texas. You can find her on Twitter here.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens