2023: The Year of The Girl
I Never Grew Up, It's Getting So Old
January 23rd isn’t too late for a year-end retrospective, is it?
This past year we talked about being a girl a lot. We have looped together several cultural events both minor and major into a yearlong narrative about “girlhood”. In lulls of time between “girl” events, we talked about the general concept in vague terms and stereotypical imagery. The conversation as a whole is a little flat. It scratches the surface so lightly because it is soft and delicate like a girl, or so those talking would have you believe. To me, it lacks the teeth and nuance of previous years. Girlhood on the internet used to be about the monster inside and pretending to be a witch and the anger many of us have no idea what to do with. If we’re being honest, the only accurate depiction of girlhood I saw in media this year was the 3 little sisters in Astroid City. This is also a simplistic and stereotypical conversation but at least it goes against the grain of the gender stereotypes we’ve been sold since we were children.
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The Year of the Girl does not exist without Barbie and Taylor Swift. Those two cultural forces began a year-long discussion and celebration of Girlhood. In another year, or at another time, these two events would have sparked discussion and dissection. These would have been entry points into investigations, but we’ve gotten soft. In public, we could only discuss these things positively, lest we be seen as traitors to our gender. Barbie was good and girlhood was good. Any discourse to the contrary was seen as counterproductive, stupid, or misogynistic.
The more people talk about Barbie the less I understand how I felt about Barbie. I don’t know if Barbie is a good movie. I think it’s an interesting thing to study, in terms of breaking down its ideology and politics. It’s a good ad for Barbie and it was good to have Event Cinema that was different from Marvel movies. I enjoyed watching it but I have no desire to watch it again. I’m glad I participated at the time but it has no lasting hold on me. I think a mark of good popcorn cinema is that it could be endlessly replayed on television, and I just don’t see Barbie having the same kind of shelf life as Legally Blond, The Intern, or Talladega Nights. Movies I consider to be masterpieces of their genre. I hoped Barbie would enter this classification but unfortunately, I think it will simply make a billion dollars and be quickly forgotten from the public imagination. There’s fun to be had semiotically with Barbie but it seems no one wants to have it.
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No one seemed to have the same take on Barbie that I did, which is that it’s a movie about girls who were raised by feminists in institutions of single-sex education (which Greta Gerwig was). It’s what happens when those girls enter the world of men, and realize that other women will happily go with these boys as if the promises made to us by the nuns, our mothers, our professors, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg mean nothing. Barbieland is the land of girlhood in an NPR household, complete with idyllic neoliberal power structures and ostracized lesbians. America Ferrera's speech is the one you give your friend freshman year of college when you learn her parents are Republicans. Viewed through that lens it's a fun romp that falls apart in the third act. Too bad no one else viewed it through that lens.
The crux of Barbie, both its death knell and raison d’etre is that it's an ad. For the past 70 years, women, children, and feminism have been contending with Barbie as an object. No Barbie movie would make everybody happy, mostly because they already made Life Size. Anything that showed the ugly evil part of Barbie couldn’t be made by Mattel and any movie that really wanted to make a real statement about Barbie, needed that sweet sweet copyright. Whatever ideology the movie wanted to espouse had to be basic enough to still work as an ad. It’s one of the most direct ways we’ve ever had to look at the Art versus Commerce debate that lies at the heart of American Cinema. The push and pull of the artistry of the medium versus the funding required to make something on that grand of a scale. But all the artists abandoned it and all the capitalists defended it, split right down the middle.
There were conversations to be had about Barbie that we simply didn’t have because it was written off too easily as an ad. Its supporters were too ardent to accept, or thoughtfully argue, criticism. It fell under the rule of girlhood, celebrated with surface-level conversations, when I think if we really wanted to sink our teeth into it, there was something there. It’s not fine dining but perhaps it was more complex than the Big Mac we all decided it was.
If Barbie started the girlhood conversation, Taylor Swift continued the conversation. The weekly installments of the Eras tour led to countless videos tweets and Instagram posts about girlhood. If I had to divulge all my thoughts on Taylor Swift and gender and girlhood, we’d be here all day. Both of these women have longevity on their side and the reason they were so successful this year is because they waited long enough to cash in their checks.
I have always said that I am the perfect age to be a Taylor Swift fan. To be born in 1997, plus or minus two years is to be primed to have Taylor Swift come out with an album about your experiences, or desired experiences, right when you need it most. All of her music is pitched younger than she is and all media for children is for kids older than them. Her albums about childhood and growing up that come out when she’s 20, come out when I’m 12. Her album about moving to the big city experiencing new things and growing up came out when I was 17. Etc, etc, and so on and so forth. Taylor Swift has grown up with us and now we’re 26 and have credit cards and Big Girl Jobs. She’s also released 4 new albums and 2 rerecords since she had last toured. Every album brought new fans and reaffirmed the old ones. Since 2019 she had been building up kinetic energy, and her fans were able to grow older and accumulate more wealth. The Year of Taylor Swift is a lesson in timing, not some unquantifiable change in attitude. People didn’t magically change how they felt about her because they wanted to celebrate women. They just got older, though Taylor Swift herself is not really allowed to age.
Taylor Swift is popular because she makes good clean sentimental music about growing up. It is not an overall win for feminism that she has harnessed this power to be a superstar. She makes money off marketing girlhood and is trapped in arrested development of her public image because of it. “Girl” is a safe idea to market and ”grown up” is a little bit more edgy. She didn’t really grow up until Reputation, an album that came out when she was 28. She’s not a celebration of girlhood, she’s a suspension in it. We never want to see Taylor Swift grow out of girlhood. It is her prison. But that’s another essay.
With those two cultural moments, we’re off. They are enough to start a year-long discussion about being a girl. My thing with girlhood is that I can’t tell if there is something interesting to say and we’re not saying it or there’s just nothing interesting to say. We’re obsessed with talking about it but no ones really saying anything. I don’t understand how we can have half of a conversation for a year and no one has put together a coherent idea. We’re all so satisfied with ourselves for saying almost nothing. I am tired of discussing a concept so varied and fraught as the childhood of girls without really addressing anything about it. It feels like so much is unspoken for fear that if anyone says anything concrete we might never be able to go back. It’s not even that I want to talk about the bad parts, which, don’t get me wrong, I always do. It’s that no one seems to be able to articulate the good parts. If we articulate the good parts we have to defend them, which no one wants to do because we all know, it doesn’t hold up under the light.
We all experienced this thing together and now that we’re on the other side of it we have to admit we liked some of it. It wasn’t all bad. It couldn’t be all bad, right? And what would we have done instead? We were given something before we even knew what it was and it changed us and affected us in ways that we couldn’t and still can’t know. If it was all bad, we would have revolted and turned away from it. We would have abandoned all parts of it as we grew up. So, if we did not out and out revolt, our nostalgia must be somewhat worthwhile.
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I liked the items of my childhood as much as everyone else. I loved Eloise and American Girl dolls and playing soccer. I played with Barbies and at least one Taylor Swift song has played at every major milestone of my development as a person. It was all there and I wouldn’t change it but let’s not overstate its importance. It doesn’t need to be celebrated or even discussed the lengths to which it is. I wouldn’t change it mostly because you can’t change the past and if I could, I’d have bigger fish to fry than the toys I played with or the extracurriculars I took part in. There is no great wound there but I don’t think the absence of malice for my past is something to celebrate. I do not believe in collecting all those things under the banner of girlhood and labeling all of it good and necessary.
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Beyond the items we were sold, the part of girlhood that many can articulate is the element of sisterhood. Whatever girlhood was, we were all in it together. As children and adolescents, we banded together and could rely on other girls to help us. The part of it we’re celebrating is our collective experiences. Not the actual experiences, just the idea of them. If we were talking about our actual experiences, we would have to talk specifically about something that happened. Specific memories with times and places, antagonists and protagonists, mean girls, and nice girls.
We seem to be forgetting in these conversations of sisterhood that a large part of girlhood is defining who is and is not in it. Who we want to be in our group and who is decidedly not one of us. Even these conversations of celebrations are filled with a thousand micro calculations of who is not One of Us, with the scope getting smaller and smaller depending on the size of the community. We are ready at a moment's notice to cast aside those of us who did not love Barbie or Taylor Swift or the color pink. Even these surface-level conversations about girlhood have the ulterior motive of rooting out those who did not, will not, and could not participate. The whole endeavor is inherently exclusionary, except we can’t say that.
In this year of the girl, we also have deployed phrases like “pick me” and “girls girl” to identify those we do not feel fit our mold. Anyone can be cast out with the use of the phrase “she’s not a girls girl” While these phrases used to have other connotations related to not throwing other women under the bus in favor of men, they have quickly been adapted to root out anyone with behaviors that deviate from the norm in any way.
A girls girl is a girl who fits the idea that we all decided what a girl should be. The phrase lacks a concrete definition and mostly subsists on vibes. It can be used injudiciously against anyone at any time. There is no set list of behaviors we all agree on. This conversation is allowed to continue because if we all wrote a list of what defines a girl's girl, we would disagree. And we don’t want to disagree because we’re all girls and we all like the same things. This is not a novel idea but the larger we make the swath of people we include in the year of the girl we are bound to disagree. Which is again why we don’t talk about it.
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It seems that in this year of celebrating girlhood, we have brought with us the shame and silence that was intrinsic to all of it. That’s the bad part, the unspoken conservations. The things we weren’t supposed to talk about, in public, in front of boys, in front of other girls, at all. At some point in our lives, we were told we had to stop talking so much. Many of us did and the rest suffered the consequences for not doing so. Now, the celebration requires silence and shame. Don't talk about the bad parts that we actively participated in or the good parts that we are not allowed to do anymore. Don’t articulate the nuances and complexities that now as an adult you can fully comprehend. It’s all toys and games and parties and fun. It is the idea of the sleepover before you get there that we’re celebrating. Not everything that happened after.
It seems odd to me that we can’t discuss everything that happened after considering it is only adults having this conversation. Granted we’re all at different reading levels, but everyone participating has at least left certain parts of girlhood behind. And yet no one could come to these discussions of the year of the girl and talk about the bad parts of any of it, with any kind of nuance or celebration or even understanding. Girlhood is Good. Any detractors will be asked to leave. It just is odd to me that so many smart women gave up having nuanced conversations to decry things as wholly good or evil incarnate. Those of us who cast aside Barbie and Taylor Swift and girl math because we either saw the fun in it and loved it with our whole hearts or could not reckon with it.
The Year of the Girl has been trying to cast a variety of cultural things under the wide net of Girl and Girlhood. It has been trying to make us all get along while we make sense of something we have predetermined the outcome to be positive. It made the conversation stilted and boring, it cut it off too soon. This year I’d like to talk about something else. Not Male Loneliness though. Or the election. Or therapy, or emotional intelligence. Or dating or the autism spectrum. Something new. Something fun. Let’s invent a new kind of alcohol or something. Or get really good at throwing parties. Or talking to strangers. I don’t know, let’s try to have some fun. Instead of talking about only the “Good” ™ parts of our childhood. Being a young girl was fine but it’s by far the least interesting aspect of anything going on. Let’s grow up.
"Granted we’re all at different reading levels,"
Amazing