Girlhood is getting Woman’d
Writing about the writing about girlhood…and how some of you need to get a grip
I’m trying to supplement Notes for Twitter more often. It’s definitely not the same and I’m not sure anything ever will match the pre-Elon vibes, but today, something caught my eye. I was seeing one Note after another snarking girlhood essays. Some Notes were from last week, some were from a few days ago, some were from 12 hours ago. So, I opened Twitter and searched ‘girlhood substack’ to find that people have been snarking on the girlhood essay for months. It seems to have started at the top of the year, with some complaining that ‘girl’-core (or whatever the hell it’s called) has been beaten to death. People begging for something new and interesting.
This is a pretty common occurrence for any cultural moment. It feels like concepts are introduced into the zeitgeist, abused and misused by illiterate clout chasers, and then we all begin to panic about it, no one more than the “thought daughters.”
As this year goes on and on, I keep seeing more cases for cultural gatekeeping, but it’s near impossible to gatekeep from dummies, they’re everywhere. They’re the holes in the cultural sieves who leak solid concepts or ideas to the masses, who beat ideas and misappropriate terms to death for views on TikTok. Some are doing it intentionally, others because they don’t know any better.
The same thing is happening on Substack. People (from what I see mostly other women and femmes) seem to be upset that the site is becoming littered with middling, shallow, unrefined essays about girlhood. With Carrie Bradshaw and Bridget Jones and Rayne Fisher-Quann wannabes. Substack is also littered with neo-Nazis and TERFs, but let’s focus on girlhood. Eliza McLamb points out that:
The idea that creative inspiration must have a copyright each time and be upheld scrupulously is one that best serves corporations, not artists. We do not need to defend the source of our art because it does not belong to us. It does not belong to anyone.
In 2022, Rayne Fisher Quann tweeted that the author Ottessa Moshfegh was “getting woman’d” a term she coined when “everyone stops liking a woman at the same time.” With the rise of “girl” culture, the concept of getting woman’d can now be applied to the mere thought of a girl doing anything, even writing her thoughts down.
An essential part of making the transition from girl to woman is realizing that people hate anything women do. As I’m sure a man has said at one time or another, “if a woman is doing it, it’s being done wrong. And she’s stupid for even trying in the first place. Where the hell is my sandwich?”
People are banding together, getting upset at the 19–27-year-old reflecting on how they were indoctrinated with misogyny, duped by patriarchy, and are now disenchanted with reality. I don’t have an essay on girlhood. This is probably the closest I’ve ever gotten and I don’t even know how close it is really. I don’t even read a lot of them because they are middling, shallow, and unrefined, it’s usually easy to tell from the first paragraph. But we can’t keep hailing Substack as the retirement home for Tumblr girls and then get upset when they exhibit retired Tumblr girl behavior.
We lapped up text posts about feminism and reblogged black and white images of tortured sad girl aesthetics. These aesthetics often sprinkled in romanticized ideals of eating disorders, self-harm, intimate partner violence, mental illness, and never strayed far from white femininity. The girls coming out of adolescence now may have had it worse with Instagram and TikTok. Some of them are reflecting on the impact it left, I know I definitely have. Leave some room, (especially for women of color!!) and if you don’t like it, if you have no desire to offer constructive criticism or build community with aspiring young writers, leave it alone. I’m not saying don’t critique, but if your critique is only offered up because you’re annoyed of reading another headline about girlhood, what are you bringing to the table?
Sure, I bet there are some bad faith actors, some literary it girl clout chasers, and plenty of girls who have absolutely no reason to be writing on Substack, at least not until after they’ve reflected with their thoughts a little more, gone to a few therapy sessions, or took a sociology class or two, but just don’t read the essays then. Or do read them and offer a guiding hand where it is accepted.
I think the worst thing people with experience can do is gatekeep their knowledge and shun people away from even the chance at building and strengthening community. How precious does something have to be to you to shame anyone else that dares to come near it or look in its direction? Calm down Gollum1.
Something else happened on my Notes scroll: One good essay was recommended to me after another, all of which are referenced here. Thoughts were developing in my brain, the cogs were turning, kicking up dust and grinding cobwebs into oblivion. I haven’t been this motivated to write something since five minutes before when I started my writing ritual2 to talk about something else entirely.
And that’s probably how those girls writing their essays about girlhood feel. They read well-tailored, eloquent, sentimental words and it was like a revolution in their minds. They’re inspired and even if that inspiration doesn’t go anywhere past making a Substack just to write a post about girlhood, it still builds a steppingstone to them figuring out who they are and how they want to move through the world.
I think the worst you can say about these essays is that they’re indicative of the overly-introspective, severely analytical, hyper individualistic culture that we’re currently steeped in. That’s true, and bad enough. The ones you’ve seen are probably mostly written by young, thin, white women chasing after the illusive “literary it girl” aesthetic. In the growing era of influencer fatigue, it’s very easy to criticize her, whatever aesthetic or vibe she may be peddling. In The Socially-Conscious Mean Girl, McLamb makes the case that:
There is something inherently enraging about a thin, white, cisgendered influencer who makes her money off occasional brand deals, embodying the hegemonic standard of beauty and trying to sell it to everyone else. It’s natural, and probably healthy, for people to release the pressure valve.
But we are so busy shooting down these white women, you may not stop to think about the intersection of women (black, Latina, Asian, disabled, queer, neurodivergent, and so many more) that never fit into that Tumblr girl mold are getting a breath of fresh air and encouragement from Substack. That they are reading your words, second guessing their foray into a new opportunity, a new career, a new hobby, a new anything that was previously unreachable for them. All they hear is “girlhood essay bad.”
I remember reading a short story in freshman English class. The details are foggy because that was over a decade ago (I’m getting old…fuck!!!) but it was basically about a boy on vacation. He went swimming and found himself caught in a narrow tunnel and the only way to get out of it, to come up for air again was to continue swimming through it. What if to get to the point of getting over ourselves, some of us need to go through the girlhood essay tunnel rather than avoid it? And why would you block the tunnel? What purpose does that cruelty serve? McLamb says it really well here:
The first-ever works of any artist are usually no spectacular feat of ingenuity. And I’m not talking about a debut album or novel here. I mean the first time some kid ever picks up a guitar it’s probably going to sound like if Pink Floyd got blended up and put through a washing machine. Go ahead and look back at your old poems from middle school (I know my audience, I know you have them). They probably have a line or two stolen from Sylvia Plath or a Tumblr text post. They’re probably very bad but also earnest and clearly trying to be good. This is how anyone learns at all. It is a good thing for art and ideas to remain, in most circumstances, public goods available to take and make use of and create more things.
What slightly worries me is that what this really comes down to is people getting on the internet to shame girls for reading and writing, something women, and especially women at different intersections of race, class, and ability were not always allowed to learn how to do. Sure, some of them just want to seem smart without putting in any actual effort and that plays into the dangerous, ever-growing anti-intellectualism culture prevalent on social media.
But what about the girls who have every intention of making a career out of their writing? The girls who are looking for community online? The girls who publish their essays and wait for someone to say, “I get where you’re coming from” or even better, to get constructive feedback. Surely there are not so few of them that it warrants everyone being shouted down by people who were afforded the grace to write their own shitty essays about a cultural moment that resonated with them. As Helena Aeberli wrote:
I worry that if we’re not careful, writing by women itself, not just individual female writers, will be ‘woman’d’. If it gets too messy, too ugly, too unlikeable, too boring, if it starts to sound the same, or worse, if it sounds just a bit too different. If it’s no longer hot, no longer on trend, when it loses the ‘it factor’ and goes back to just existing.
I say all of that to say this: If you are a girl writing an essay on girlhood KEEP WRITING! If you are a girl doing anything (that isn’t causing harm to yourself or others and even then…maybe), KEEP DOING IT! And as a Nobel Peace Prize winner once said:
Never seen Lord of the Rings! Hope I’m using this right! Don’t care if I’m not!
open a Word document, stare at it for an inordinate amount of time, open Substack to look at Notes and my dashboard stats for at least 3 hours, close all browser windows, turn my laptop off, watch Seinfeld reruns, fin.
I also feel like putting thin White women in the center of this boom is just to disparage the entire niche of girlhood articles under the guise of calling out performative hobbyists. Like you said, girls of colour are also partaking in the fun! Aligning girl-coresque writing to Whiteness just makes us WoC feel more estranged in enjoying the same things.
Well said! Thank you for articulating such thoughtful insights into this ongoing saga of “to write, or not to write’ girlhood essays. Your careful analysis looks at the more nuanced and complicated aspects of what it means to write as a young person, especially as a girl, in this postmodern era. And I agree, some of the harsher critics need to give the girls a break! Let them be free to write their hearts out. I’d much prefer to read 100 more girl essays than yet another snarky comment hating on a young person who dreams of being a writer. When you wrote about how ideas are not owned by any one person, that statement definitely struck a chord with me. I believe that a collective of writers thrives when people share and exchange their ideas (with kindness and respect); oftentimes writers reach a new, previously unknown realizations through listening and sharing their thoughts with other people. I recognize the quotes you sited, and I enjoyed reading those writers’ recent posts as well. Thank you for speaking up for the girls. I appreciate your excellent piece of writing created with such a sense of empathy, humor, and brilliance!