It feels like not too long ago, all young women wanted to be was ‘not like other girls’. Kudos (particularly from men) was given to those who rejected feminine stereotypes: the ‘tomboys’ who preferred cargo pants over mini skirts, contact sports over crafting, and listening to anything except for vacuous, mainstream pop music. At one point or another, many of us were guilty of buying into this twisted brand of ‘feminism’.
Then in 2014, Gone Girl’s antihero Amy Dunne dropped the ‘Cool Girl’ monologue: “Me always use that, don’t they? As their defining compliment. She’s a cool girl. Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man.”
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There it was in front of us, the patriarchal standard so many of us had internalised and perpetuated, unwittingly. Once Gone Girl’s author, Gillian Flynn, spelt it out – both its impossibility and absurdity, but also its unwavering grasp on contemporary feminism – that sentiment began to shift.
With TikTok as the platform of choice, the younger generation turned against the cool girls and coined a new term, ‘pick-mes’, a shorthand for those vying for male validation through baggy clothing and a faux interest in skateboarding. After so many of us realised we had been shaping ourselves for the male gaze, the pendulum started swinging right back into the pink, diamante-encrusted world of femininity. This time though, it was for the girls.
Just girly things
The counterculture icon had arrived and she was, above all, exactly like other girls. Sporting hyper-femme outfits and pigtails, the new, self-proclaimed ‘bimbos’ took to social media, speaking in breathy whispers about sexual liberation, misogyny and gender expression.
One Greta Gerwig-directed Barbie film later and bimboism snowballed, welcoming ‘girl humour’ into the zeitgeist. Girl dinner, girl math, hot girl summer, delulu girls, silly yapper girls and “I’m just a girl” girls all became culturally relevant, particularly for a chronically online subset of women.
As Danielle Cohen wrote in a 2023 article for The Cut, “The word ‘girl’ is carrying a lot on its back these days, endlessly tacked onto other words to make them cute, empowering and sociologically meaningful, all at once. There are so many girls to be, and so many things to girl.”
Remembering my years as a (millennial cusp) pop music-loving, highly emotional, uncoordinated square peg seeking validation in a round hole, girl humour felt refreshing at first. I identified as a ‘yapper’, justified ‘little treats’ with carefully calculated ‘girl math’ and saved memes of tiny fluffy animals with bows on their heads and captions like ‘This is who ur being mean to btw’ and ‘Your honour, I’m literally just a girl’. If these examples mean nothing to you, that’s because they’re endemic to a very specific, TikTok-centric depiction of girlhood.
It felt pithy and unserious yet self-aware, and I related. I eagerly agreed that yes, I love making frivolous purchases and talking too much! My eyes do feel hot and watery when an authority figure is scolding me!
All that glitters is not girlhood
Like all internet trends that inevitably hit saturation point, it was fun until it wasn’t. As much as I believe memes are sacred (made to be enjoyed in slack-jawed silence, scrolling in bed hungover or on your work commute), girl humour has become too prolific for the pattern to go unnoticed. Melbourne-based culture writer and producer, Eilish Gilligan, feels the same way.
“Funnily enough, one of the most irritating things about the whole girl humour trend to me is that it doesn’t pay an ounce of respect to the source material,” Eilish says. “I’m talking about the song ‘Just A Girl’ by No Doubt. I feel pretty confident this is where the phrase originated.”
Looking at the evidence, Eilish may be right. The chorus of Gwen Stefani’s tongue-in-cheek ’90s anthem accompanies a large portion of the girl humour videos on TikTok.
“The whole point of that song is the crushing weight of the patriarchy and trying to give it the finger,” Eilish explains. “The dripping sarcasm in the lyrics has been so properly diluted through incorrect usage over the last few years that it’s pretty much completely disappeared. These days, the words ‘I’m just a girl’ kind of just mean exactly that. It’s such a shame.”
Thirty years after the release of the song, saying ‘I’m just a girl’ often feels more pitiful than patriarchy-crushing. For me, at least, it became an excuse I used when faced with arduous tasks – like job applications or early-morning flights – and then later, something I just said when I couldn’t be bothered to think of anything more interesting. Like when you repeat a word over and over again, the phrase ‘I’m just a girl’ began to lose its meaning entirely.
Are we all in on the joke?
Before you start to think I’m taking an internet trend far too seriously, let me clear something up. I think humour – particularly the dark, subversive, ironic and downright stupid kind – is deeply important. I’m committed to the bit like it’s my full-time job, embracing my predictability as a hot girl with IBS and proudly hanging a shirt that reads ‘Passenger Princess’ in my wardrobe. But is everyone else in on the joke?
“I’d argue the line between self-deprecating humour and self-infantilisation has well and truly been blurred when it comes to modern, zeitgeisty jokes about womanhood,” Eilish says. “Obviously, this is a huge generalisation, but when we infantilise and trivialise ourselves and our own abilities, we make it much easier for bad-faith actors to make those jokes, too. And suddenly they’re much less self-deprecating and much more, say, a bunch of men making fun of women.”
Sometimes, your nuanced, tongue-in-cheek humour isn’t going to land the way you want it to. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from the last five years, it’s that a facetious jab about the female experience can be taken at face value by the wrong people. It’s almost like for every sexually liberated bimbo on the internet, there’s a conservative ‘trad wife’ counterpart – and they’re both saying: “I’m just a girl”.
In reality, living as a woman often means being subjected to constant scrutiny from all angles, no matter what you do. It can be oppressive and mentally taxing in a way men will never understand – and that’s without adding intersecting factors like size, race, sexuality or disability. For that reason alone, sometimes surrendering to a difficult day with ‘I’m just a girl’ feels liberating. But say a phrase often enough, and you’ll start believing it. So might those around you.
“We can’t expect people who have biases towards women to hear us laughing at ourselves, saying ‘girl math’ to justify buying stuff on sale, and think ‘Oh, well, they’re saying that sarcastically as a response to suffering under the patriarchy,’” Eilish agrees.
In 2025, girl humour is beginning to feel more like internalised misogyny. In some ways, we’ve taken a tool of empowerment and weaponised it against ourselves – it feels like a real-life equivalent of the meme, ‘This is why we can’t have nice things.’ But women should be allowed facetiousness in the face of a scary, shifting world.
You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, so you may as well tie a bow on it. Buy all the little treats, approach the difficult days with levity and remember, the next time you infantilise your abilities by saying ‘I’m just a girl’, the phrase was once screamed into a microphone as a rebellion against the constraints of girlhood.
This article was originally published in Fashion Journal issue 195.
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This article “I’m just a girl”: Why are we dumbing ourselves down for the bit? appeared first on Fashion Journal.
2025-03-11 04:35:00
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