POST-FEMCEL FEMININITY
omnibus version, with a new afterword and musical appendix
For the sake of convenience, mostly my own, I thought it might be nice to have all parts and outtakes of the post-femcel femininity series in one place, like a boxed set. The main parts will come first, then the outtakes, then the new afterword and appendix. The previously posted materials will only be modified from their original versions for the sake of formatting and extra proofreading. For the hypothetical reader who’s already familiar with the series, feel free to command+f your way down to the afterword and appendix/playlist.
Part I
no caps feminine vs. ALL CAPS FEMININE: will you be an adult girl or will you KILL YOUR MASTERS?
(link to the original)
A few years ago, I saw someone on Discord say that if his posts have any capitalisation, you know he’s posting from the toilet. Simply: his phone auto-capitalises and his laptop does not. In other cases, though, there’s something more to capitalisation than autocorrect being on or off. Capitalisation can have meaning.
I’ve seen some discourse recently about the trend of women writing with no capitalisation on Substack. Being as I am, for better or worse, still myself, I want to overthink this topic, subject it to the cold light of literary history, and interpret its countermovement. I want to highlight the seldom-remarked, non-Substack countertrend toward ALL CAPS, which I’ve mostly observed in music. I want to use capitalisation as a lens through which to observe a growing conflict between two ideals of femininity on the post-femcel internet: adult girl femininity and revenge femininity. no caps femininity vs. ALL CAPS femininity.
This note is what finally spurred me to scribble about this topic, from Prester John Andrews, who is not a mostly mythical priest-king despite my initial confusion.
A practical consideration: I saw someone on here mention that not capitalising letters boosted her newsletter’s popularity, statistically. Which I duly noted in PJA’s comments. The question is: why? Why does no caps appeal sometimes, and why does ALL CAPS appeal sometimes? Capslock can be a loadbearing cultural signifier.
I. What is a post-femcel?
“Post-femcel” is my way of referring to a mostly online subculture of young women who are in a vague but discernible way influenced by the appeal and aesthetic of being a loser or an outsider, of being a femcel, but not necessarily in the sense that they aren’t getting laid. A lot of post-femcel posters are in fact married.
I wouldn’t classify every guy who can’t get laid as an incel, since that term is ideologically loaded and often its use has more to do with redpill doctrines than body count. Not every involuntarily celibate guy is an incel, just like not everything that values diversity is DEI. These terms denote one thing yet connote many.
In the same but opposite way, not all people who identify with/as femcels—as in, post-femcels—are involuntarily celibate, or voluntarily celibate. They might be Brat-like, out on the town, unlike our image of the incel, or they might be married, or polyamorous, or engaging nightly in kinky rituals with literal demons. Who knows. In general, the relation of post-femcel status to celibacy is nonexistent. Being a post-femcel is more about an aesthetic and an accompanying worldview. Not a redpill, but perhaps a jagged little one nonetheless.
Core to my conceptualisation of the post-femcel is the popularity of the term girlfailure, which emerged in 2021 and now has a Wiktionary entry and a useful Know Your Meme article. Girlfailure is the reversal of girlboss. Many early posts about girlfailures had to do with the dearth of likeable loser women characters in media, while there’s no shortage of male ones. Think, Rachel Sennott in Shiva Baby (2020).
But girlfailure has become a much broader cultural phenomenon than just a desire for more loser representation in movies. Ideologically, girlfailure is a keystone of a new idea among young feminists that liberal feminism has been a bit of a farce, that a total “choice feminism”1 was always a lie. A bit of edginess has had to return; scoldy Tumblrisms are no longer trendy. But the post-femcel does not tend to go “SWERF ‘n TERF.”
I’ll discuss the femcel reinvention of radical feminism later in this series, but the post-femcel post-libfem subculture has taken a more or less fatalist stance toward patriarchy and their implied solution is to indulge in girlrotting (lying in bed all the time, etc.) and either hyper-gentle cottagecore femininity, or an aesthetic of violent femininity. According to Maya Field at The Spinoff, girlrotting is
the act of wallowing in your emotional turmoil in a grotesque yet aesthetically refined way. Moping, rotting away, but remaining pretty enough to post selfies from your bed, if you had the energy to.
Aestheticised despair.
Post-femcel subculture is split between two sometimes overlapping but ultimately divergent courses of inaction: no caps femininity and ALL CAPS FEMININITY.
ii. anti-capitals-ist influences
To start with some backstory: worldbuilding for the no caps universe.
There are a few major—and many minor—examples of 20th-century writers who preferred to write without capitalisation. Their reasoning is highly relevant to the no caps wave online.
E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), more often styled as e e cummings, stands out as a popular example of no caps in the poetry world. I won’t go into all his poetry, or anything like that, and not all of it was anti-capitals-ist.
Cummings’s poem, [there are so many tictoc], is a good illustration of what’s going on in his verse, thematically. (Poems without a title are often referred to by their first line in brackets, if that’s confusing.) Cummings was a harsh critic of modernity, and it’s a funny coincidence that criticising the “tictoc” of a modern clock happens to punningly vibe with present-day criticism of TikTok.2 Here’s the poem’s first stanza:
there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic3
According to some scholars, Cummings’s frequent and famous avoidance of capitalisation was part of his rejection of modernity and its cultural corruption. Writes Michael Webster:
Cummings found in formal structures a freedom for the child-like vision of the lower-case “i”—a refuge from the imprisoning formulas of mass modernity.4
Cummings’s preference for poetic form is a matter for another time, but in general, Cummings’s use of no-caps had to do with a longing for a more innocent, childlike mentality, as William Blake had desired long before him, and as no caps Substackers seem to want now. Nostalgia for the primitive was a commonplace in the arts during Cummings’s career, but he favoured childhood over exotic influences.
Cummings’s ideal of innocence and childhood will remain relevant throughout this post, so (hypothetical reader) keep it in mind even if I choose not to bring it up ad nauseam. It’s a core motivation in literature for not using capital letters.
Another famous writer who preferred to shun capitalisation was feminist and antiracist writer bell hooks (1952-2021). While hooks did not refuse to capitalise the contents of her works, she chose to not capitalise her name, out of her “desire to direct attention to her work rather than herself.”5 Ironically, one’s name stands out more when it isn’t capitalised, but whatever.
Point is, in hooks’s case, resistance to capitalisation came from wanting to minimise her own presence in her work. Although this reasoning will be less relevant than Cummings’s, it’s still worth bearing in mind. Some activisty writers have followed her example in this way, too, perhaps most notably adrienne maree brown, a major thought leader in the transformative justice movement.
We’ve seen two reasons, based on the thoughts of popular figures in literary and feminist history, for resisting capitalisation: a childlike aesthetic and a desire to downplay one’s individual self.
However, neither E.E. Cummings nor bell hooks is as famous as Rupi Kaur. Perhaps the most blatant influence on anti-capitals-ism is instapoetry, a genre dominated by Rupi Kaur, both in sales and influence.
The genre of instapoetry is named after its viral popularisation via Instagram. It’s often focussed on visual style and accessibility for readers’ quick perusal, unlike certain more elite contemporary poetry that can be all but inscrutable even to scholars. The optimum instapoem fits on a page and looks good on a screen.
To be visually pleasing to its intended audience, instapoetry adopted a few consistent but not universal traits:
All lowercase letters6
Typewriter-styled fonts
Small, minimalist, black pen-like illustrations
Vague and highly universal emotional expressiveness rather than concrete imagery
Simple language
Limited engagement with traditional poetic concerns (notably, rhythm) in favour of a focus on visual aesthetic
Title of the poem goes at the bottom, not the top, if the poem has a title7
Kaur’s poems have higher-effort illustrations than a lot of instapoets bother with, and she does seem to have an interest in illustration. In her famous profile of Kaur for The Cut, written at the height of Kaur-mania in 2017, Molly Fischer quotes her subject as saying:
“This guy is the best,” she says, noticing an edition of Kafka’s complete stories; she’s referring to Peter Mendelsund, the book’s designer. “The dream is to have him design my next book.” His work, she points out, translates well across media — to different sizes, to posters, to digital.
Kaur and her instapoetic kin are likely the most direct source of inspiration for the no caps trend on Substack and anywhere else it’s noticeable. Prester John Andrews is also likely correct in guessing that Tumblr had a role in disseminating the no caps aesthetic, too. It strikes me as part of Tumblr’s “aesthetic” culture.8 Wherever it might crop up, online no caps writing is surely indebted to the same thought processes as Cummings’s and hooks’s, and shares aesthetic sensibilities with instapoetry.
iii. no caps femininity
For many readers, no-caps femininity will be an obvious and familiar aesthetic, even if I’m discussing it in weird terms, because its style and “I’m just a girl”isms get a lot of attention and flak, on Substack and elsewhere.
I want to highlight Celeste Davis’s critique of the themes in popstar Gracie Abrams’s music, especially since I’ll be citing music a lot from here on. I also don’t want to reinvent the wheel or beat a dead horse when I can just cite someone else.
Writes Davis:
Where [Sabrina] Carpenter9 wears her sexuality on her baby-girl-ruffled sleeves, Gracie [Abrams] bottles hers up, stores it in the space behind her ear where she coyly exposes it to the boy of her choosing.
Once chosen, she asks nicely if she can please sit quietly in the corner taking up as little of his time, space and energy as possible. Oh too much? She can be smaller. Too loud? She can be quieter. She’ll be cool, she’ll be chill, just whatever you do, please don’t leave her.
Two of her biggest hits are “I love you I’m sorry” and “I miss you I’m sorry.”
Please God, may neither of those sentences ever escape my girls’ lips.
I don’t think most post-femcel, no caps feminine young women are devoting themselves to anyone other than themselves. They stereotypically yearn for love and so on, but have a contradictory and definitive veneer of abandoning patriarchal pressure to instead rot and/or imagine frolicking in wildflower-spangled fields alone.
Either way, most of this behaviour is just aesthetic. Young western women are typically working or at school. To truly girlrot, they’d need to be NEET: not in education, employment, or training. That lifestyle seems more common among incels than even the truest femcels, let alone post-femcels for whom being a -cel is a state of mind not a dearth of sexual or social activity. But post-femcels are well aware of their desire to be loved and Gracie Abrams’s amoral (immoral?) embrace of seeing herself through the eyes of a potential source of external self-esteem fits the bill for no caps femininity. It’s a type of fatalism, and part of that can be a decision to not try to ditch patriarchal perspectives on oneself.
This contradiction is at the heart of no caps femininity: an all-consuming desire to be loved, an all-consuming desire to be free. The result? Girlrot. Adult childhood.
Ironically, a recent album with ALL CAPS titles is exemplary of no caps femininity. Again, I’m just using these as useful labels, not making a claim that all ALL CAPS art is ALL CAPS feminine.10 MARINA’s (Marina Diamandis’s) new album, PRINCESS OF POWER, despite having a fairly ALL CAPS feminine hit, “CUNTISSIMO,” is very, very no caps in most of its themes.
The track “ADULT GIRL” is the most archetypal statement of no caps femininity I’ve encountered. It’s something of a manifesto, so I’ll quote from the lyrics at length.
Try my best to act my age
But the child won’t behave
She wants to scream and cry and rage
And who am I to dig her grave?
The teenage years I never lived
The innocence of high-school kids
Young romance and endless nights
Of carefree joy and pure delight
Didn’t grow up in a normal world
And now I’m just an adult girl
Ironically, the people who’ve told me that they didn’t have a childhood tend to have been children longer than I’ve been alive. The topic of survival emerges obliquely here, the necessities of her young life having impinged upon her youthful bliss. The influence of the internal family systems model of the psyche is apparent or at least clearly part of the same zeitgeist as this track; the child self who was traumatised lives on as a part of the adult psyche, to be treated well rather than annihilated.
no caps femininity adopts the idea of omnipresent early-life trauma, often vague when it comes to the specifics, as a permanent hindrance upon which to ruminate. The post-femcel no caps zoomer adopts the incel’s mantra, lie down and rot, and justifies it through a vague sense of structural and ineradicable trauma. And then probably goes to work and has a boyfriend, etc. An aesthetic of exhaustion and illness. Aesthetics can be damaging, too. Just like the women of prior centuries who painted their faces with lead to appear frail—and thereby became ill by faking illness, the no caps post-femcel who chooses to girlrot poisons herself.
IV. Semi caps intermission
A noteworthy intermediary between no caps and ALL CAPS femininity—mostly iconic among the latter school, but representative of both in almost equal measure—is Elaine Parks, the titular witch in Anna Biller’s film The Love Witch (2016).11 She’s fixated on male affection but entirely aware of the game she’s playing, an obsessive, high-risk, high-fatality quest for heterosexual love at the expense of sisterhood and sanity.
And her backstory is victimisation, which is necessary for both no caps and ALL CAPS femininities.
But she’s also, as they say, feral, yearning but utilitarian, desiring men but viewing them as a means to her own ends.
Elaine is the ultimate post-femcel icon, relatable to both camps. And I think no caps post-femcels often want to be ALL CAPS ones, anyway.
V. CAPS-ITALIST INFLUENCES
As with no caps femininity, ALL CAPS has its predecessors, too. What come to mind immediately are feminist manifestoes, and I won’t belabour this analysis. The Lesbian Avengers’ 1994 “Dyke Manifesto” is an excellent, classic example of ALL CAPS feminist manifesto-writing.12 I’ll quote part of its first section:
IT’S TIME TO GET OUT OF THE BEDS, OUT OF THE BARS AND INTO
THE STREETS
[..]
TIME TO ORGANIZE AND IGNITE. TIME TO GET TOGETHER AND
FIGHT.
[…]
WHERE ARE OUR LESBIAN LEADERS?
WE NEED YOU
WE’RE NOT WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE. WE ARE THE APOCALYPSE.
WE’LL BE YOUR DREAM AND THEIR NIGHTMARE.
The bolding is mine, but the italics are in the original.
The line about getting out of bed is obviously relevant as the opposite of no caps femininity, but this is an activist polemic, not a bit of online discourse. What they’re advocating for is activism, not the aesthetic of vengeance. However, those last two lines strike me as essential to today’s ALL CAPS femininity. Manifestoes’ use of cosmic revenge self-deification for rhetorical effect has carried down into the prime examples of ALL CAPS femininity.
VI. ALL CAPS FEMININITY
As I discuss ALL CAPS art, I want to again make abundantly clear that there are myriad exceptions to the non-rules I’m laying down, and I’m not relying on mathematical claims like, most ALL CAPS content is this way, most no caps content is this other way. But I first observed ALL CAPS femininity as a trend in vengeful feminine music, so it serves as a useful shorthand.
Of course, ALL CAPS is a way to signify yelling or at least high volume speech. For instance, the CAPSitalist title of Femcel’s popular post, “WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS?” makes its volume clear without relying on the punctuation that would usually indicate shouting.
However, CAPSitalism is not always used to signify yelling. Rather, it can more abstractly establish the opposite tone to anti-capitalsism, highkey instead of lowkey, with no necessary reference to volume. This difference is why I think examining CAPSitalism and anti-capitals-ism can be informative in unpacking the new femininity wars. To be loud or to be small: ALL CAPS or no caps: revenge or rot. Which aesthetic will the post-femcel choose in facing her malaise?
ALL CAPS femininity is most familiar to normie crowds from the genre of movie I refer to as “good for her.” With the boundaries of acceptable content in mainstream film growing ever more expansive, revenge horror films are now a mainstay of everyday pop culture. Much of what used to be too disturbing for the mainstream is now tame, compared to the new depths of gore and perversion reached in contemporary horror. Everything gets heavier.
Companion (2025) is a formulaic example of a “good for her” film, essentially acting out Lesley Gore’s classic feminist song, “You Don’t Own Me,” in a heavyhanded way with all the complexity of a children’s book. A female-looking robot has to escape the clutches, mental and physical, of her incel owner. Violence ensues; metaphors are obvious. In good for her movies, one finds new literalism at its most extreme.
Regardless: violence is key to good for her content, and to all ALL CAPS feminine media. In the terms of the present discourse, ALL CAPS femininity is about going “feral,” not becoming cutesy and demure. ALL CAPS is not about waiting for a man, it’s about mauling a man.
Violent sexuality is a big part of ALL CAPS feminine feral aesthetics.
Straightforward examples of CAPSitalist art are easy to find, if you like noisy music that many people claim gives them a headache. (Does anyone actually get headaches from music they don’t like?)
Noise musician Lingua Ignota’s 2021 releases, AGNUS DEI—EP and SINNER GET READY, both have ALL CAPS titles, as do the tracks on them.
“I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES,” on the latter, is exemplary of a number of ALL CAPS tropes, such as divinity and revenge, although the God in the song is male; it’s a prayer addressed to the “Glorious Father,” requesting divine revenge against an abuser. Abuse, and avenging abuse, constitute the main theme of Lingua Ignota’s music.
Take hold of my gentle axe and split him open
Gather up my quiet hammer and nail him down
Use any of your heavenly means, your golden scythe
Your holy sword, your fiery arrows studded with stars
I don’t give a fuck, just kill him, you have to, I’m not asking
That’s a thematically typical verse of ALL CAPS feminine music, and Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota is her old stage name) has always been known for her lyrics about anti-patriarchal vengeance. As she’s disclosed herself, her focus as an artist is all about letting out anger.
So creating this music and putting it in the world has been my only way of finding accountability, first of all, or trying to draw out accountability, or drawing attention to things that have been swept under the rug or invalidated or neglected, and then being able to express this anger and the despair and the hopelessness and all the other boiling feelings. This has been the only way that I’ve been able to effectively exorcize them.
An edgier, less self-conscious (not to say stupider, just less MFA-art-theory-inclined) ALL CAPS musician is DeathbyRomy.13
DeathbyRomy’s latest album, HOLLYWOOD FOREVER, has an ALL-CAPS title, as do all its songs. “KOBK (FEAT. TEAM DEATH),” on which DeathbyRomy is joined by Jayden Hammer, is a classic CAPSitalist revenge fantasy, and gets at the point of the genre. For instance, this verse responds to patriarchal social pressures:
You wanna breed me, brand me, start a pretty family
Drain the light inside my eyes and use me for your fantasy
I’ll break you, split teeth, cut you open, raw meat
KOBK stands for “kill or be killed,” a phrase that’s also in the song’s chorus. A later verse essentially the summarises the thesis of ALL CAPS femininity:
Surrendering got you nothing
Bloody knees should’ve been good for something
Kill your masters, kill your pastors
VII. WHITHER POST-FEMCEL FEMININITY?
If I had to state the opposition of no caps and ALL CAPS post-femcel femininities in as few words as possible, I’d say: the former promotes consciousness of patriarchy with no action, and the latter promotes action against patriarchy with no conscience. Both are almost purely aesthetic. If ALL CAPS femininity were as popular in real life as online (and in art), the homicide rate among zoomer women would be astronomical.
Although many no caps post-femcels have lives outside their pretence of girlrotting, I worry that many are enabling their own and others’ emotional stagnation, aesthetic misery becoming reality. Maya Fields writes:
[The girlrotter] rolls her eyes at political arguments online, considering herself too intelligent to be tied down by the quotidian debates of the day. You could argue that the girl rotter is more feminist than her counterparts – unlike the tradwife, she doesn’t follow traditional gender roles; unlike the girlboss, she’s not a capitalist shill – except that she is decidedly unpolitical; she refuses to take action.
Aestheticised weakness isn’t great, but at the same time, is it really better to linger on impotent rage, ALL CAPS-like?
Many post-femcel artists and posters crisscross the lines between no caps and ALL CAPS. They don’t leave capslock on all the time, nor do they always leave it off. The decision between the two isn’t a choice between mutually exclusive options, in the practical sense. One can post both kinds of content, listen to both kinds of music.
Ideologically, no caps and ALL CAPS femininities are radically different worldviews, even if their impact is primarily emotional. Although the two post-femcel femininities find their basis in the same perception of victimhood, their resultant worldviews—and ethical frameworks—differ wildly. At their most absolute, no caps encourages internalisation and endless wallowing, while ALL CAPS encourages externalisation and frustration.
I may seem more sympathetic toward ALL CAPS than no caps femininity, but I’m well aware that a seething resentment toward perceived oppressors is not healthy. And even if ALL CAPS rage were righteous, and an ALL CAPS revolution were possible, it wouldn’t make things right. As Emilie Autumn—herself a queen of ALL CAPS—writes, “There is not enough revenge in the world for that.”14
Neither seems healthy, nor does post-femcel existence seem healthy, to be honest about my own stance. I can find both a bit cringeworthy, although I prefer ALL CAPS music. But both certainly reflect a general sense of malaise among zoomers and the middle class, driven by economic and other forces.
I think the conflict on the Left over what femininity is, or should be, plays a larger role in the contemporary cultural maelstrom than has been acknowledged. It can help us pose interesting questions about our vibe-shifting moment and the futures of feminism, pop culture, and middle-class lifestyles. The post-femcel conflict between no caps femininity and ALL CAPS FEMININITY is terminally online women’s struggle with intra-gender dysphoria.
Part 2
what it means to be “just a girl” in a post-maiden world
(link to the original)
I’ve been behind on my writing schedule, but after all, I’m just a girl!
Grown women’s use of the word “girl” to refer to themselves has been a frequent object of criticism in The Gender Discourse™️ for a while, especially as it’s seen in the phrase “I’m just a girl.” To get a sense of the chaos, I did a basic search for recent pieces on the phrase “I’m just a girl.” Almost all of the (many!) writers whose work popped up were negative toward the rise of “I’m just a girl,” to put it mildly. Even viral, memed content tends to dole out harshly critical takes on “I’m just a girl.”
A lot of college newspapers have run opinion pieces on “I’m just a girl,” and since I write a column on the culture wars for my own school paper, I can imagine why. It’s a juicy topic, and it seems like it would be easy to write a little opinion piece on it, a quick and punchy putdown. When the word limit is tight—like, you only have 800 or so words to get to the point—taking a hardline stance on one short phrase, especially one word in the phrase, seems like an easy option. I’ve found that it isn’t.15
I don’t think the issue is so simple. If “girl” were so obviously misogynist a word to use for a woman, why would women I know who don’t hate themselves or other women use it? And why would “I’m just a girl” appeal to women to begin with? The phrase’s meaning has changed so, so much over the last 30 years, too.
“I’m just a girl” is a major battleground in the contemporary conflict over what femininity should be among the introspective, very online, aesthetically-inclined, young women I refer to as post-femcels. The post-femcel is not necessarily celibate, but adopts the partially despairing, feminist, cynical stances of femcels toward patriarchy and sometimes toward men as people. However, many many women outside post-femcel subcultures use the word “girl” to refer to adults, so the stakes of the word extend to the world beyond online sadgirls.
It’s important to look at the use of “girl” to refer to adults critically, taking both historical and a political points of view. More specifically, I’m going to explain the origin and evolution of the phrase “I’m just a girl.” My stance is that the use of “girl” to refer to women is mostly the English language’s fault, not a feminist issue, but that “I’m just a girl” is a politically complicated phenomenon. Girl, so confusing.
im just a girl: origins
The impact of the phrase “I’m just a girl” stems from the chorus of No Doubt’s still-iconic 1995 track, “Just a Girl.”
The chorus varies, but for one instance:
Oh, I’m just a girl, living in captivity
Your rule of thumb makes me worrisome
Oh, I’m just a girl, what’s my destiny?
What I’ve succumbed to is making me numb
Oh, I’m just a girl, my apologies
What I’ve become is so burdensome
Oh, I’m just a girl, lucky me
Twiddle-dum, there’s no comparison
After her song was featured in the MCU’s Captain Marvel (2019), Gwen Stefani went on The View and explained the inspiration behind the song’s lyrics:
I just kind of wrote this song because I felt like I was just getting in touch with that feeling that when you’re born, if you’re a female, you don’t think about it, you’re just human… Then, through life, you sort of start to realize, “Oh wait, someone just whistled. What does that mean?”
The phrase “I’m just a girl,” in addition to being a sarcastic barb, also reflects the way that Stefani saw women mature into a grimmer world than they had known as girls. Stefani meant “Just a Girl”’s lyrics to express the strength women kind find in their sexuality, as well as women’s vulnerability under patriarchy. It cuts both ways.
“Just a Girl” has long been a feminist anthem, but recently, Gwen Stefani has lost favour among her politically progressive former fans for her turn toward right-wing politics and conservative Christianity. Although “I’m just a girl” may once have been a sarcastic feminist catchphrase, many now take it as antifeminist. It’s as if the lyric has changed alongside its writer, in the eyes of many pop culture critics.
is “im just a girl” a slippery slope to that margaret atwood book?
I’ll start by looking at the main argument against “I’m just a girl” and girlspeak in general: it demeans women by infantilising them, in a close to literal way. I think there’s a strong case to be made for this angle of attack, but I don’t totally buy it. By “girlspeak” I’m referring to use of “girl” to refer to adult women, whether in “I’m just a girl” or not.
“Girl math,” for instance, plays into a misogynist stereotype about women’s alleged ineptitude in math and irrationality for the sake of humour. “Girl math,” in Know Your Meme’s summation, refers to “women using wonky math to justify a purchase.” The purpose of the phrase “girl math” is to jokingly call out irrational ways that women think about money or other kinds of math related to consumption.
“Girl math” is a joke almost always made by women about themselves, and is meant to be relatable, pointing out everyday silliness one may not have noticed in oneself. However, it plays off—perhaps indulges in—the misogynist stereotypes of women as bad at math and obsessed with shopping. An example from my favourite non-politics podcast, below.
At the end of my research for this post, I came across a Christian finance site that claims girl math contradicts “God’s math,” so there’s that. Not sure how to work that into the grander analysis but I couldn’t resist.
Back on track. Often, girl math jokes crop up in tandem with “I’m just a girl.”
The venerable yet nigh forgotten meme website I Can Has Cheezburger? came in handy when I was searching for a convenient archive of “I’m just a girl” content. The first listicle that came up, from which I sourced the above meme, is titled “32 ‘I’m Just a Girl’ Memes to Satisfy Your Inner Princess,” unsurprisingly fusing princess-ness with adult girlhood.16
Looking through the above listicle and another from the same cheeseburger site will give an overdose of brainrot to an unwitting reader, but to summarise, they contain a representative sampling of the usual just a girl content: women being inept at everything from finances to organisation to figuring out life in general, while nostalgically basking in the aesthetic of early-aughts Barbie and pink decor from stereotypical girls’ bedrooms of that era.
It makes perfect sense to me that feminists would criticise girlspeak and other adult girl aesthetic content. The content either at-best-vaguely satirises or outright perpetuates misogynist stereotypes that feminists have fought against since the movement’s first wave. Plus, smelling blood, some male right-wingers have adapted convenient girlspeak phraseology to insult women.
Francesca Martin aligns with many other critics when she argues that “[y]elling out ‘I am just a girl’ and laughing with friends may seem funny at the moment, but it bolsters the mindset driving far-right policies[.]” I don’t think it’s worth arguing that girlspeak phraseology is a silly joke and therefore harmless, because feminists justly tend to hold that jokes are worth serious political scrutiny.17 But it is worth noting that meme-info sources Know Your Meme and The Daily Dot both state that the phrase “just a girl” is often used ironically and as an implicit, critical counter to the traditional and oft-criticised phrase “boys will be boys.”
Before I get into my own, more positive take, I have to pause and acknowledge my one bone to pick with “I’m just a girl.” According to the below post, it excludes me because I’m 5’9”. Rude!
our maidenless language
It’s worth noting that women often refer to other women as “girl[s]” in a way totally separate from post-femcel aesthetics or “I’m just a girl” memes. I think that this usage stems in large part from English being a feminine-poor language.
When people refer to English as “rhyme-poor,” they’re describing its paltry selection of rhyming words relative to Romance languages, in which many more words can end the same way because the languages themselves work differently. Some would hold that English is therefore better for rhyming because its rhymes are less coincidental and more intentional, but whatever. I’m just adopting the phrase’s style. Feminine-poor.
When I refer to English as “feminine-poor,” I mean that it has a dearth of (polite) words to refer to women and girls. The list of words for women and girls has narrowed over time. We don’t use terms like “maiden” anymore,18 nor “gal,” and “lady” seems a bit odd most of the time. (Nor do we say “lord” very often, or other feminine formal terms like “mistress” to refer to a young woman rather than an affair.) “Dolls” has seemingly made an unfortunate comeback, but only as self-slang for trans women. “Lads” seems in common use, particularly in British contexts and often with an ironic twist, but not so much “lasses.” We’ve lost some old, formal terms for women and we have so few casual terms, too.
There’s no totally satisfactory feminine version of “dude” or “bro” or “guys.” I agree that they can be gender neutral in very narrow cases, like when “guy” is used to address a mixed-gender group, but that gets tricky: addressing a mixed-gender group as “guys” can be gender neutral, sure, but in the third person it would seem strange to tell someone that “there’s a bunch of guys over there” in reference to a group with women in it, let alone a group that’s mostly women. So the slang is very case dependent.
“Girl” fills the linguistic gap for feminine slang, albeit imperfectly, and with other purposes, such as when addressing another woman.
“Girl you won’t believe how many times I’ve had to type ‘girl’ and ‘femininity’ lately!”
“I’m going ghost-hunting with the girls tomorrow.” (Note: “the girls” is a direct equivalent to “the boys,” which isn’t viewed negatively for the most part.)
“I’m a Mahler girl, not a Wagner girl.”
And so on. It’s not great that the alternative for casual male terms is age-associated, but that’s not totally disqualifying for “girl.” And looking at the historical context of the word “girl” and what it’s replacing, it may not be such an age-specific term after all.
how can a woman be a “girl?”
If “girl” is our primary substitute for casual male terms like dude/bro/guy/boy/lad/absolute unit, then we need to think about the words it’s standing in for—or rather, the cultural roles of past words for young women. In other words, if “girl” is filling a gap, we need to know the extent of the gap to know what “girl” now needs to mean. And it’s best to figure out what “girl” used to mean, too, to see how its role has evolved. And singling out the history of a mostly dead term it’s supplanted, “maiden,” helps us get to the crux of the cultural confusion.
girl: origins
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED),19 “girl” as a noun (rather than as an antiquated verb to do with boats or excitement) has had more than a few meanings over the centuries, changing in gender and in its other implications. In the 14th century, “gurles” was a gender neutral term for children. Instead of “boys and men,” we see “gurles and Men” in one example the OED gives.
For most of its history, though, “girl” has referred to girls in the modern sense—and to young women. Or especially to young women. In the early modern period, “girl” was often used to refer to young women of marriageable age. The contemporary, non-derogatory, slangy use of “girls” for adult women dates back to around a century and a half ago, too.
To be clear, I don’t mean to claim that a word’s history determines its current meaning. As I’ve stated before, that’s not how I view language. I think how a word is used determines its meaning; as philosopher J.L. Austin put it, “words are our tools.” That a tool was initially designed to massage muscles is no guarantee that it’ll be used that way by most buyers now.
My point in discussing the history of “girl” is to show that its past usage is not all that different from its present usage by young women to refer to themselves, regardless of what else they mean to imply by it. Saying “I’m just a woman” is degrading too, I’d argue, meaning that the issue is mostly in the word “just” and the speaker’s intent/delivery.
maiden: a world tour
Based on what we just read from the history of “girl,” especially in its use to refer to young women, it makes sense that the word would come to replace “maiden.” Per the OED,20 “maiden” goes all the way back to Old English and—in its relevant usage—always referred to older girls and especially young women who are not married, and/or are virgin. The “and/or” is not an error; we’ll shortly look at an instance of a famous maiden who was married but virgin. “Maiden” also once referred to all kinds of things, including a guillotine-like device that was used to dole out the death penalty to elite criminals in Edinburgh until the early 18th century. (Slay..?)
However, the dictionary does note that the specific use of the word “maiden” to refer to a virgin is not always clearly distinguishable from its broader use as referring to a young woman who’s not yet married. And that brings us to a bit of broader cultural-religious context. Firstly, we’ll look at the use of “maiden” and older equivalents to refer to Mary and the Jewish G-d; secondly, we’ll see how “Maiden” can be an abstract term for qualities by seeing how Wiccans describe their tradition’s Goddess. It’s (briefly) Bible study time.
The Maiden/Virgin Mary
The Christian idea that the mother of the Jewish messiah would be virgin is rooted in the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Septuagint. In Hebrew, a verse in Isaiah (7:14) refers to the mother of the coming messiah as an almah, a young woman who might be a virgin. The Septuagint translates almah as parthenos, equivalent to “maiden” in that a parthenos could be a young woman and possibly a virgin. Although it wasn’t the wrong pick for the Greek translators, parthenos almost always referred to a virgin, so I won’t belabour that point. Athena, famously virgin, was also a parthenos.21
Because of the Septuagint’s influence on the language and content of the Christian New Testament, the gospels refer to Mary as a parthenos, which we’ve tended to translate into contemporary English as “virgin.” In the past, when “maiden” was more common, English works would sometimes refer to her as a maiden. Whether an almah is necessarily a virgin is highly debatable but the likely answer is no, so non-Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible tend to translate an almah as a “young woman.”
The religious-cultural idea of almah, though, is pretty far removed from simply referring to a woman who’s not gotten laid. One of the central books of Judaism, the Zohar (2:94b), refers to G-d as a “beautiful maiden who has no eyes,” using the Aramaic word elamtah, equivalent to Hebrew almah. But it does not use the Aramaic word solely meaning a virgin, betultah.
As far back as our earliest and most culturally important language around maidenhood, then—from ancient Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic to English—it’s been an ambiguous term. Does “maiden” or one of its ancient synonyms mean someone’s a virgin or just young and a bachelorette???
Most importantly for our purposes, we know “maiden” refers to an older girl or young woman. “Girl” was once essentially synonymous with “maiden,” fell off a good bit, and now has to reclaim all the semantic turf lost when “maiden” faded. Plus, whether “maiden” refers to virginity is up in the air, so that’s not a serious difference between it and “girl.” Not that I’m judging, either way: my name literally means “virgin,” so...
Wicca
Now we can leave behind Bible study. As we saw just now in the Jewish context, ideas of maidenhood in religion can have more to do with women’s youth and spiritual symbolism than anything as plain as literal human virginity. In introducing readers to the Wiccan Goddess, popular author Scott Cunningham writes:
As Wicca know her, she is often of three aspects: the maiden, the mother, and the crone, symbolized in the waxing, waning, and full moons. She is at once the unploughed field, the full harvest, and the dormant, frost-covered earth.22
The Wiccan Goddess is a Triple Goddess figure, embodying the stages in women’s lives. The metaphor of an “unploughed field” certainly calls to mind human virginity, but in general, the Maiden aspect represents a woman’s stage of life before motherhood and all of feminine youth’s attendant symbolic possibilities.
Not all Wiccans take the Goddess to be connected solely to women in a limiting way. The Wiccan use of “maiden” wording refers to a an expansive, non-literal, symbolic ideal of a woman’s stage of life—just getting started, not yet establishing a family of her own. In her popular introduction to Wicca, Thea Sabin takes a more fluid approach to describing the Wiccan Goddess:
Some Wiccans think of the Goddess as having three aspects—youthful maiden, fertile mother, and wise crone—and that she shows each of these faces in turn as the cycle of the year progresses. Others, like me, believe that she possesses and shows all of these attributes all the time. She is the constant, eternal feminine principle.23
Maidenhood here grows still more abstract, an aspect of the Wiccan Goddess’s self that courses through everything simultaneously. If “maiden” is so closely equivalent to “girl,” and can have such grand and gorgeous meaning, I’m interested to see how our usage of “girl” changes in the coming decades.
in sum: a woman is often a “girl”
“Girl” serves an increasingly important role in the English language in a way that has nothing to do with politics. Since English has lost a lot of its words for women and girls, “girl” has arisen to take the place of previous terms for young women while maintaining its usefulness in referring to female children. It’s not that confusing.
In particular, “girl” now occupies the role of “maiden,” a term that once flexibly referred to young women at an early stage of life, as we see in linguistic and cultural histories. “Maiden” can refer to quite abstract concepts, too, such as the Jewish G-d and an aspect of the Wiccan Goddess. Plus, “girl” itself used to mean the same as “maiden” with less of the vague virginal connotation. That’s not new.
Anyway, that’s the nerdiest I could’ve possibly made this part, let’s get to the politics.
women can be girls, but at what cost
I’ve considered the language of girlspeak, and I think it’s a maybe unfortunate fact that “girl” is serving a necessary gap in our language. When young women refer to themselves and each other as girls, it’s normal and there’s not much of an alternative. When older women call one another girls, they’re just using a youthful and complimentary word. It’s not nefarious. And nobody is super into criticising men for calling their friends “boys,” which is an inconsistency I’ll let slide for now.
The issue that I’ve left untouched for a while is that the phrase “I’m just a girl” does have political connotations. It seems infantilising and lines up neatly with the learned helplessness of “girlrotting,” which I discussed in part 1 of this series. Again, to be loud and clear: from a rhetorical perspective, the issues with “I’m just a girl” are the intent of the person using it and the word “just,” but I’m going to discuss the phrase’s broader cultural meaning rather than linger on that angle.
Girlrotting is an aestheticised kind of despair, looking glam while succumbing to hopelessness. Being just a girl means giving up, acknowledging defeat, and excusing surrender by claiming—more or less implicitly—to be a smol bean. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy explains:
What is smol bean? [...] It’s a certain stance, a way of presenting oneself as the tender, gentle, too-delicate-for-this-world party in interactions. The other people are the meanies.
A smol bean who’s just a girl is never to blame for her misdeeds, including in social interactions, but also in all areas of life. Inability to manage finances, inability to find purpose, and so on; these are the properties of a girl, in this framework. I assume she can’t throw well anymore, either. Learned helplessness serves as a moral shield.
However, I have a few concerns when I’m tempted to fully lean into criticising just a girl, beyond the general linguistic points I made above.
in defence of adult girls
One reason I can’t make myself hate “I’m just a girl” too much is that proper language never guarantees proper politics, nor does wrong language guarantee wrong politics. After Gwen Stefani’s rightward swing, Matt Bernstein made a convincing case on his podcast that she had never been consistently progressive-feminist. I disagree with Bernstein on a lot, but I think he’s mostly right about Stefani. Although I think calling her “fascist” is a bit over the top.
That Stefani coined “I’m just a girl” as a feminist zinger never meant she was a pure-of-heart feminist. In the same way, young women’s current, maybe misogynist use of just a girl doesn’t mean much about their actual views. It’s a joky meme, for one thing, and people don’t often mean everything in the jokes they tell, but also, just a girl is simply a common phrase in the zeitgeist, joky or not. Again, I take jokes seriously, but sometimes they’re not that deep.
My other major qualm with total negativity toward just a girl is that diagnosing a problem is a good thing, and the phrase can do just that. Something I think a few people misunderstood about part 1 of this series was that I wasn’t arguing that no caps femininity, which is in part the femininity of being just a girl, is inferior to the angry, revenge-focussed ALL CAPS FEMININITY. Both are usually mere aesthetics, both can entail girlrotting, and bottled ALL CAPS frustration isn’t great. A positive trait shared by both post-femcel femininities, as I’ll expand upon here, is that they can stem from an acute awareness of the world’s flaws.
In expressing a sense of helplessness with the phrase “I’m just a girl,” the post-femcel is diagnosing a social ill. The question of what she will do with this awareness remains open.
Maybe her value system is reeling in the face of a host of possible threats—maybe she’s a radfem, or Marxist, or kinda centre-right and just wants to grill and ignore politics, or maybe she’s more focussed on her faith and its fate than on the stonk market. Regardless, I think it’s better that she be able to notice the problem, a schism between her values and the world, than keep Pollyanna-ing along, wading in fake-ignorant bliss. Some might think it’s better to be happy than honest, but I don’t.
the return of “im just a girl”
The recent resurgence in popularity of the phrase “I’m just a girl” has not come about because Gwen Stefani has suddenly become a zoomer fav (which would be unlikely), but at least in large part because of Charli XCX’s 2024 song, “Girl, so confusing.” Here, Charli gets to the heart of the matter. “I’m just a girl” no longer means that “I’ve had it up to here,” as Gwen Stefani belted 30 years ago. It’s now a recognition that life can be, as Charli puts it, “so confusing.” And that’s fine.
How do you feel being a girl?
Man, I don’t know, I’m just a girl
“Girl, so confusing” describes the sometimes opaque nature of friendships between women. Mixed feelings, envy, constant over-reading of the friend to see if she also has mixed feelings (or worse), and so on.
I don’t know if you like me
Sometimes I think you might hate me
Sometimes I think I might hate you
Maybe you just wanna be me
Fans speculated that “Girl, so confusing” was about Charli’s relationship with Lorde, which was confirmed when Lorde featured on the song’s remix. I don’t like the idea that songs always have to be about a real situation, but in this case, that fans’ guesswork proved valid speaks to the clear expressiveness of the song. It seemed impossible that it wasn’t real. We’ve all been there.
beyond girlrot
A hard lesson I’ve been striving to put into practice in my own life comes to mind as I approach the end of this reflection: the expert critic also has an obligation to be a healer; the people who are best at pointing out flaws should do their best to right the wrongs they find. I get this value from my faith, but I don’t think you have to be a religious Jew, or religious at all, to see its point. In the Hebrew Bible, G-d commands the Israelite priests both to diagnose sickness in members of their tribe and to provide healing and comfort to the people they’ve diagnosed as they struggle through their illness.24
I bring up this value, religious but secularly sensible, for two reasons. Firstly, girlrot and being “just a girl” are often the result of the sufferer intuitively diagnosing a social problem. As I’ve said, I view this aspect of just a girl as a good thing, and I think it’s never good or helpful to try to avoid the truth about reality. But eventually the girlrot seeps deeper until it hits your girlbones, and then you have to “shake off the dust”25 and “arise to your destiny.”26 Okay, I’m done with Bible references, I swear!
The second reason I bring up the moral notion that diagnosticians should be healers is that many people endlessly hurl vitriol at young women’s habits and preferences for no justifiable reason—especially girls, in the sense of teenagers, but also young women in general. (Maidens?) There’s been quite enough one-sided criticism of “just a girl.” Let dead horses horserot in peace. When criticising a young woman’s cope, one that’s often derived from an awareness that something’s wrong with society, it’s irresponsible to tear down without also building up.
“No more girlrotting, no more just-a-girl-ing, that’s antifeminist and cringe. Instead, do…?” Instead, do what? That question mark is where critics who are serious about improving the lives of young women should redouble their efforts, not call it a day and hit “send.”
I don’t feel that saying “I’m just a girl” is great, exactly, but I do think it’s a critical, if simplistic, side-eye toward a world that isn’t always lovely, a symptom by which the post-femcel diagnoses the symptoms of a sickly world.
Part 3
BIMBOCORE vs [B]IG [D]UMB [S]TUPID [M]EN: spectacular femininity or DOMINATRIX FEMINISM?
(link to the original)
Welcome to Bimbo Nation
Where tits are the sensation
All the girls have been so patient
In sluts, we trust
Welcome to Bimbo Nation
This is orientation
Please go read our declaration
In sluts, we trustChrissy Chlapecka, “Girlie Pop”
“Bimbo feminism” is one of the most notorious and least understood movements on the contemporary feminist landscape. Which is not to say that it’s good. It also misunderstands itself, which helps nobody. Those not immersed in the canon of bimbocore do not typically realise that bimbo feminism doesn’t advocate for women to return to stupidity and docility—quite the opposite, sometimes to a fault. In fact, bimbo feminism is almost synonymous with what I’ll refer to as dominatrix feminism. To give bimbo feminism its due, I need to establish where it comes from and what its actual stances are. Then can I figure out my take on whether it’s good or bad, and an adequate answer ends up being a lot more complicated than I’d expected, and is pretty much entirely distinct from an answer of good or bad.
What, like it’s hard?
Legally Blonde v. Mean Girls
The original, if slightly heterodox, bimbo feminist classic is, in my mind, Legally Blonde (2001). Legally Blonde is all about how hyper-femininity does not equate to unintelligence. And it’s not just the men who have to come to terms with this—the film’s secondary woman character does, too. Like Barbie (2023) a few decades later, Legally Blonde makes the points that one can be feminine and smart, and that femininity does not have to entail submission to men. It parodies the “dumb blonde” stereotype, as described by Susan Brownmiller in 1984:
In the American tradition, blondeness is not associated with strength or intelligence. On the contrary, “dumb blonde” is practically one word on the lips of some people, and her innocent vapidity and daffy humor is counterposed to the loud, emotional intensity of know-it-all dark-haired women.27
Legally Blonde embraces the choice of its protagonist, Elle Woods, to remain hyper-feminine, to retain traits stereotypically associated with stupidity, while nevertheless proving herself more intelligent than her law school would-be rivals. I’ve known many women like this, personally—women who talk or visually present themselves in ways that tend to be stereotyped as unintelligent but who are the smartest people in just about any possible room.
In this way, Legally Blonde subtly diverges from another classic of its moment, Mean Girls (2004), which shows how the protagonist’s aesthetic feminises to match the shallow Plastics as she loses sight of her virtues. The Mean Girls musical leans into its criticism of what one might consider bimbo feminism, as its version of one of the Plastics, Karen, ditzily parodies the idea:
I can be who I want to be
And sexy…
Sexy Eleanor Roosevelt
Or sexy Joan of Arc
I can be a sexy pirate
Or a sexy ballet dancer
I can be a sexy doctor
And cure some sexy cancer…
This is modern feminism talking
Watch me as I run the world
In shoes I cannot walk in
One can read those last lines either as praising “modern feminism” for allowing women to be bimbos and leaders, but in the context of the rest of the musical and of Karen and of the song itself, I think not. Legally Blonde’s Elle vs. Mean Girls’s Karen: the micro sex war.
Feminist criticisms of stereotypical femininity go back a long time, achieving mainstream notoriety by the early 20th century, and reaching their peak in the second wave of feminism. Second-wave feminists such as Brownmiller tended to view most aspects of femininity as patriarchal tools by which to control women. Brownmiller points out how feminine clothing restricts bodily movement, and how evolutions in women’s fashion continue to serve this purpose in new ways:
A major purpose of femininity is to mystify or minimize the functional aspects of a woman’s mind and body that are indistinguishable from a man’s, and our legs have borne the brunt of this more than we care to admit… voluminous hoop skirts of the 1860s made it close to impossible for a lady to climb a narrow staircase, while hobble skirts of the 1880s were so tight that she was even more poorly equipped to mount a steep flight of steps. One hundred years later, miniskirts presented a similar problem, but in our day the inhibition was a matter of exposure—what a voyeur might see from his vantage point down below.28
Brownmiller also compares heels to corsets:
As the whalebone corset once was a solemn rite of passage, in our time the teenage girl has pined and begged for her first grownup pair of high-heeled shoes.29
Her critique of heels will come up again, later. I don’t think Mean Girls is in lockstep with Brownmiller, but putting the film and musical next to the second-wave feminist’s arguments show how the conflict over what would reach an extreme in bimbo feminism has been a long time coming.
Knowing bimbo feminism’s Legally Blonde roots might start to expose how people misunderstand the movement. The ideal bimbo feminist is not actually stupid or helpless; rather, she allows herself to be hyper-feminine, spectacularly feminine, while being intelligent—and even dominant. Clearly, though, there are reasons to hold that the movement’s blonde roots might need a touch-up.
Bimbo feminism = spectacular femininity?
I didn’t use the term “spectacularly feminine” above at random. It’s a useful newish term in feminist thought. “Spectacular” here refers to something being a spectacle, not to something being great. In her book on spectacular femininity, Simidele Dosekun describes two older feminist ways of viewing hyper-femininity:
There is a feminist theoretical tradition ready to see women’s hyperfeminine stylization as “masquerade,” in the sense of artifice and dissimulation… In some formulations, the masquerade is an utter dupe, eagerly falling into patriarchal traps; in others, she is a stealthily subversive agent, undermining patriarchy through its very own guises.30
Bimbo feminism can fall into the latter way of thinking, subverting patriarchy by submission to it, but as I’ll show, bimbo feminism isn’t usually so simple. And that’s not what Dosekun will define as spectacular femininity, anyway. What she describes is more in line with bimbo feminism at its most nuanced. Dosekun explores how spectacular femininity can be a way of demonstrating skill and effort, and therefore a kind of strength.
Individually and in combination, makeup, heels, weaves, and the other elements of the look promise to armor, to bolster, to undergird; they promise to prepare and support a woman to face the world. The style demands much, in turn. Intricate, expensive, physically, and also psychically risky to embody, it calls for material resources, technical and bodily skill, sheer labor, and mental vigilance and calculation. Not just any woman can pull it off.31
However, bimbo feminism adds to its spectacle and skill an aesthetic of being dumb, which is opposed to Legally Blonde feminism. There, Elle’s intelligence straightforwardly contrasts with her aesthetic, an aesthetic that misogynists often associate with ditziness. She proves she can beat men in man’s world by leaning in harder than observers had thought she could. Bimbo feminism, on the contrary, tries to use the appearance of stupidity to step outside the walls of patriarchal expectations, rather than lean into them. As Hannah McCann explains:
You’ll see on BimboTok on TikTok, people saying, “Yeah, I’m stupid, I’ve got nothing in my head, I’m a slut.” … It’s about not having to engage with people who are demanding that you prove yourself, or demanding that you can intellectually keep up with them or compete with them. That’s why it’s so jarring to patriarchal frameworks that insist you prove yourself and keep up in a way that is perfect and up to certain standards.
Ironically, as a brief sidenote, this is also the point made in Marvel’s Captain Marvel (2019) movie—the conclusion being that it’s not necessary for Carol Danvers, the film’s protagonist, to live up to the expectations set for her by the (male) villain. That’s just a sidenote and I won’t take it further, but it is interesting how two widely divergent strands of pop feminism could converge on this point at around the same time. Anyway, this is bimbo feminism’s partial rebuttal of Legally Blonde: Elle sticks with the standards of men, surprising them by being adept at their game, while the bimbo feminist sets those standards aside.
Is ditziness feminist, though? When Dosekun writes that spectacular femininity is “psychically risky to embody,” this sort of concern is what she means. The practice of hyper-femininity can inadvertently lead down grim roads, to a horseshoe effect in which what seems like empowerment becomes degradation. Although clearly some feminists think that bimbo feminism is already at the misogynist end of the horseshoe, from the start.
Bimbo feminism’s founding saint
One of the reasons it’s taken me so long to write this is that bimbo feminism is weirdly complicated. When I first jotted down bimbo feminism on my list of things to cover in this series of posts on post-femcel femininity, I expected it to be an easy target for rebuke, the same mistake I made in part 2 regarding the idea of being “just a girl.” I remain critical of bimbo feminism, but for how its adherents portray it, not necessarily for what it is.
What initially alerted me to my misperception of bimbo feminism is something that might be obvious to most people: bimbo feminist aesthetics are not generally attractive to men. Bimbo feminism is more like a parody of what men stereotypically want. Below is the cover of an album, Girlie Pop: Encore, by probably the most influential bimbo feminist, Chrissy Chlapecka.
Anyway, looking at this album cover, Chlapecka’s pose is sort of seductive, the scene is overall giving cabaret. However, she’s painted magenta (a signature look for her), which is more jarring in other photos from the same shoot.
Whatever Chlapecka may be serving here, she’s likely not serving male lust. Although I guess there are a lot of guys into Star Wars aliens so maybe being magenta isn’t a big impediment for them. Regardless, campy makeup is not usually all that appealing to men. Its goal isn’t to look “hot” in most contexts. At their most made-up, bimbo feminists border on being bio queens: female drag queens. That’s what makes bimbo feminism’s aesthetic so tricky for me to approach. Sometimes, in its most canonical instances, it’s not even trying to use beauty against the patriarchy. It’s often, as in the case of intellect, stepping outside those expectations.
Bimbo feminism is usually propagated via short videos and music. I’ve chosen to focus more on music, because especially in the case of Chlapecka, music is an easy way to distill her general ideas. However, it’s important to note that Chlapecka started #BimboTok, which came up earlier, and which is more widely influential than her music (even though I love her music). Looking back on #BimboTok, Chlapecka had this to say in a 2024 interview at LADYGUNN:
I think while creating #BimboTok, I was definitely playing a fun character that was getting an important point across: be who you want to be, love who you want to love, wear what you want to wear, and be proud of who you are. I’m so happy I got to share that message with my audience, and I truly mean it. Now, I feel as if I’m ready to open my audience up to a more vulnerable version of myself that wipes the “character” I had created away... The mask can only stay up for so long[.]
When asked, “How do you conceptualize hyperfeminine as being empowering?” she responds:
Femininity IS power. I will never not believe this. There is strength, gentleness, artistry, and pure bravery that comes with being a feminine person and taking that to the utmost extreme. Femininity is something deeply threatening to so many people in our world, they believe acts of shame and violence towards it are acceptable because of their deep hatred and fear towards it. I feel so deeply connected to who I am when I embrace that part of me.
Ultimately, it seems that Chlapecka’s bimbo feminism isn’t all that far from mainstream feminism, and I think many women would find it palatable if it weren’t associated with the word “bimbo.” Her point in maximally embracing femininity is not to please men, or even really to displease men, but rather to push back against hatred toward femininity. Brownmiller would have to find a slightly more complex rebuttal to that than might seem necessary at first glance, although of course the idea that “Femininity IS power” might be a weak spot, from her point of view. I too would have to find a more complex rebuttal to Chlapecka than I would’ve thought necessary, not all that long ago. Certainly it would be a less harsh rebuttal, if I found that I should concoct one at all. However, Chlapecka does participate in a strain of bimbo feminism with which I take issue.
Dominatrix feminism and the Queen of the Scene
Going into this research, I had assumed that bimbo feminism’s intended method of liberation was more or less what closely adjacent musician Vana describes in her song “RAGDOLL”:
I’m a little rag doll, black and red
Shove all your needles straight through my head
Voodoo magic linked to you instead
Oops, I guess that means you’re dead
In other words, the goal would be to take patriarchal methods of hurting women and somehow Uno-reverse-card them back at the patriarchy. This method is pretty much what plays out in Barbie. I’ve already explained how coming to understand bimbo feminism’s aesthetic changed my perception of the movement’s relation to patriarchy, because it often sidesteps attractiveness. I’ve also shown how bimbo feminism’s promotion of being empty-headed does not have to do with wanting women to be dumb. Despite widespread assumptions to the contrary, bimbo feminism does not promote submission, either. Quite the opposite. Dominatrix feminism is where bimbo feminism and I part ways, and where it parts ways with almost any outside description of the movement that I’ve come across.
Much of bimbo feminism’s feminism is the feminism of ALL CAPS femininity. In part 1 of this series, I described ALL CAPS femininity as an aesthetic of anti-patriarchal rage, often involving media that centres feminist revenge narratives. I’ll be referring to ALL CAPS bimbo feminism as dominatrix feminism, a school of thought according to which women’s extreme sexual domination of men who’ve paid for the service is a feminist tactic. I don’t want to get into debates here about the ethics of sex work etc., which are beside the point. The point is that it’s very hard for me to see how performing a paid service for male pleasure is sticking it to The Man, whatever else feminists would disagree with one another about regarding dominatrices.
Hannah Rose Collins, better known by her stage name Scene Queen, is one of the foremost bimbo feminists and dominatrix feminists. I don’t like all of her politics, but I do like her music. In fact a lot of the musicians who come up in this post are on constant rotation for me. Scene Queen’s track “18+” is a cathartic and funny listen for those of us who grew up in the era of pop punk bands that ended up having been creeps. She taps into some common frustrations of our generation. Looking her up for this informed me that she’s 7 days younger than me, so yeah, about as close a generational match as possible. The elden zoomers.
In Scene Queen’s work, we see how bimbo feminism can depart from being chiefly pro-femininity to centring misandry in a way that also centres men’s BDSM fantasies. Her song “BDSM” epitomises bimbo/dominatrix feminist misandry, with such lyrics as “Oh, so you hate me? Well I hate you more,” directed toward an imaginary rude man, and:
Give me a B-D-S-M
Scene Queen hates men
Big dumb stupid men
Make ‘em all afraid again
And the climactic threat:
You wanna face me?
Meet me at the venue door
I’ll make the bimbos take your ass down to the morgue
It would be unfair to take Scene Queen as making, like, literal policy proposals here. However, it’s certainly hard to deny that her misandry knowingly—if winkingly—mirrors instances of self-aggrandising misogyny from pop culture’s recent past. Based on her track “BDSM,” the listener might think that Scene Queen is subverting the term by using it to stand for “big dumb stupid men” (and “beat down slut metal”), and some other tracks of hers seem to hint at BDSM content but portray (non-sexual) torture and homicide (e.g., “Whips and Chains”).
But a lot of Scene Queen’s music is about professional BDSM in the normal sense, albeit posed as feminist. Take “Pink Hotel,”32 for example, which is about an imaginary misandrist BDSM hotel.
Room service! I know you didn’t order
But everybody gets it, I don’t let them cut corners
On this floor, the room you’re in is my new house of horrors
And I can’t let you leave without some cock and ball torture
An important aspect of the Pink Hotel is its policy of keeping men in the basement, with the exception of incels who aren’t allowed in, to begin with.
No room for incels in the hotel
Girlfriends in the lobby, boyfriends in the basement
Scene Queen repeatedly reminds the listener that she will “kick [men] down with [her] stiletto” if they attempt to climb the stairs out of the basement. Centrally, and I’ll end this string of quotes here: “My rates are going up, that’s why you can’t get on my level…” Which leads me to wonder, did the men really not order their room service and BDSM treatment? It seems like they did quite literally order it. Is this what Scene Queen refers to in “BDSM” as “bimbocore next level?” I’m not sure I see anything next level about feminism-for-sale, even if its rates are rising.
Dominatrix feminism portrays the act of pleasuring men as a feminist tactic, which is not easy for me to steelwoman. Again this is not a comment on sex work itself, or even on whether sex work can empower any women in a broader sense, but on whether it’s feminist to pleasure men at their whim. My answer is no.
The pussy has stopped rioting
Brownmiller gives short shrift to dominatrices, taking for granted that they’re patriarchal props:
It might also be instructive to take a look at some hardcore pornography, where the honored place of high heels is secure. One pervasive image is the woman who is bound, gagged and naked except for a pair of spindly black pumps. Another is the dominatrix with whip in hand, who also teeters on six-inch stilettos.33
I don’t share Brownmiller’s anti-femininity stance, not nearly, but especially given the following example, it’s hard for me not to raise a sceptical eyebrow at the sincerity of some dominatrix feminists’ feminism.
Certain hypothetical readers might find it surprising that the foremost dominatrix feminist is Pussy Riot’s most famous member, Nadya Tolokonnikova. Early in her career as an activist, along with her pre-Pussy Riot group Voina (i.e. War), she had “rejected consumerism,” as Masha Gessen describes in detail.34 Although there’s ample reason to doubt the ubiquitous western narrative of Pussy Riot’s momentous importance in Russia,35 Voina’s anti-consumerism and Tolokonnikova’s other rebellious stances throughout her early adulthood are oddly hard to square with the former star activist’s current life as a pop musician, dominatrix feminist, and (less relevantly!) OnlyFans creator.
I won’t belabour this section more than strictly needed, since a lot of what nu-Pussy Riot do is also what Scene Queen does: misandry for male pleasure. Pussy Riot’s brand can be mildly harsher, though. We hear, in the track “HATEFUCK,” a collab with Slayyyter:
You make me sick, makes me sad
How do you fuck everything up so bad
It’s so repulsive you even have a pulse
That I should put you up in a body bag
I loathe and detest you, utterly abhor you
Wish I’d been around to tell your mother to abort you
Despite this expression of hatred, and others, Tolokonnikova’s misandrist persona is entirely wrapped up in pleasing men. In the song “Punish,” for instance, she ponders slitting a client’s throat, but it’s clear that the situation is a dominatrix with a submissive man, not a revolutionary confronting a cop. When bimbo feminism shifts toward dominatrix feminism, as seems common by now, bimbo feminism loses me. Even if I could quote those Scene Queen lyrics from memory.
On an episode of her podcast Sex with Emily, Emily Morse asks her guest, a dominatrix called Mistress Justine Cross, “how safe is ball busting? How hard can they be hit?” To which Cross replies that testicles are surprisingly durable. Morse follows up by asking, when Cross is kicking a guy’s testes, “are you wearing shoes, like you have heels on or something?” To which Cross replies:
Yeah, I’m usually wearing shoes. Some people want barefoot because then it’s not as hard, but I’d rather have something protecting my feet because you can break your foot. Your foot has a lot of really tiny bones in it, and you can hurt yourself. So I usually don’t do that barefoot, just to protect myself. I’m usually wearing a boot or something, but I might not kick them as hard. That just seems intimidating, but yeah, I don’t want to hurt my foot.
Is there any better metaphor for dominatrix feminism? Even if a dominatrix kicks a man so hard in the balls that her foot breaks, he’ll be left uninjured and gratified. That’s the point. Paid pain does not equate to violent revolution.
Feminism or femininity?
It’s hard to define what, exactly, counts as feminism, and that issue is an eternal puzzle for me. I’ll write about it soon, in some form. It’s hard to argue, though, that Chlapecka isn’t a feminist when she criticises hatred toward femininity. I’ve heard from lesbian acquaintances that they’ve had bad experiences with anti-femme sentiment among their own lesbian social circles. Anti-femininity bigotry is an issue in a lot of areas of life and across different strands of politics. On that I wholeheartedly agree with Chlapecka, and I find her approach more interesting than I’d thought I would.
As I also briefly mentioned, though, it’s difficult to keep up the act of hyper-femininity without sliding into misogynist degradation. Chlapecka herself notes of her bimbo character that “the mask can only stay up for so long.” That’s a key difference between Chlapecka’s bimbo feminism and actual advocacy for moulding women into misogynist stereotypes: the bimbo is a mask, a character, that exists to make a point and can be washed off like pink bodypaint.
After a long time exploring bimbo and dominatrix feminisms, I’ve come to basically the same conclusion about both of them. This may sound surprising, given how much more favourable I’ve been toward Chlapecka’s bimbo feminism than toward her and others’ dominatrix feminism. The issue with both bimbo feminism and dominatrix feminism, in my view, is that they don’t need to be feminism. They can just be femininity. A bimbo feminist can embrace spectacular femininity, focussing on the skill and artistry required to put on a spectacle rather than on braving the thin ice of making it a feminist tactic. A dominatrix can do her job, or a sexually dominant woman can have her fun, without it needing to be a revolutionary move.
There’s been a lot of criticism of bimbo feminism since its origin just a few years ago. It’s hard to overstate the amount of flak I’ve seen against it. Much of what I’ve cut from this post is example after example of rote critique. Just as I found regarding the phrase “I’m just a girl” in my research for part 2 of this series, a lot of college papers have put out opinion pieces on bimbo feminism. It seems simple, and it’s peak zoomer bait. Bimbo feminism’s own founding error has, in large part, opened the movement up to this otherwise inexplicable quantity of scepticism.
I think Chlapecka’s pro-femininity argument is right conceptually, but wrong from a different angle: it’s wrong insofar as it led to bimbo feminism itself. By making bimbo feminism into a strain of feminism, Chlapecka ends up making femininity more subject to criticism, and intellectually serious criticism at that. Rather than adopt hyper-feminine aesthetics as a preference to celebrate or at least normalise, bimbo feminists have tended to overstate hyper-femininity’s politically radical potential, and as a political statement, the bimbo aesthetic is open to a lot more criticism than if it were a mere aesthetic. Criticising how women dress comes off as misogynist, and usually is; criticising a mode of dress and presentation that’s supposed to be a feminist tactic is, sincerely, fair game.
For a little while, as I became more and more disoriented regarding what bimbo feminism and dominatrix feminism mean, I wondered if they belong in a series of posts about femininity. After all, they appear to be issues within feminism, and while feminism has a lot to say about femininity, the two are not at all the same. Hypothetical reader, you may also have felt that it’s odd to have a post ostensibly to do with femininity focus almost entirely on feminism. Maybe my reasoning has become clear, now.
My core argument isn’t that bimbo or dominatrix feminism is good, or that it’s bad, although I do have stances there. No, the point I’m most concerned to get across is that, as has become increasingly clear to me, what appear to be conflicts over feminism’s direction are often conflicts within femininity, what it is or should be. I finished part one with this paragraph:
I think the conflict on the Left over what femininity is, or should be, plays a larger role in the contemporary cultural maelstrom than has been acknowledged. It can help us pose interesting questions about our vibe-shifting moment and the futures of feminism, pop culture, and middle-class lifestyles. The post-femcel conflict between no caps femininity and ALL CAPS FEMININITY is terminally online women’s struggle with intra-gender dysphoria.
While I sometimes read things I wrote about five minutes ago and find that I disagree with them, in this case, what seemed like a riskily grand claim has proven both more reasonable than I worried it would be, and more consequential. Yes, femininity is a topic with which feminists are and should be concerned; no, conflict over femininity is not always feminist conflict.
The terminally online hypothetical reader may have noticed that I’ve chosen not to address the role of bimbo feminism in recent transgender culture war kerfuffles. This elision may be disappointing, particularly given that Chlapecka and Dylan Mulvaney are publicly friends. For a reader who doesn’t know who this Dylan Mulvaney person is, bless your heart, I won’t explain here. Why did I choose not to cover bimbo trans femininity? Was it out of cowardice???
Well, firstly, guesstimate the word count of this and get back to me; secondly, I have more academic background in trans studies than critical femininity studies, which is basically what this series is, so I’d actually like to write more about trans issues; but most importantly, I want to address in this series what I referred to as intra-gender dysphoria, not gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is, to me, a pretty cut and dry and thoroughly overcooked topic. Intra-gender dysphoria though, this bubbling unrest within femininity that I feel I’ve barely begun to look into—that’s far more interesting to me, it’s far less trodden turf, and it has far more encompassing stakes.
Part 4
pick me (a history)
(link to the original)
A few people alive in 2025 might still remember the Amber Heard vs. Johnny Depp controversy of 2022. I won’t go into the details; after all, it was several hundred Discourse™️ cycles ago. So much material from the legal battle in Depp v. Heard went viral that for many onlookers, the experience resulted in a kind of information overload. Like, I recall criticisms from feminists and psychologists of how Depp’s team diagnosed Heard with personality disorders. Apparently her team also suggested Depp might have a personality disorder. It was all so weird and tangled.
I didn’t catch up on the details of the case and its context until a year or two later, myself. Unless a spectator was really digging, what she saw of the drama was what her algorithm (and thus as most would agree, for better or worse, Depp’s PR team) wanted her to see.
The algorithm’s role, and the role of online subcultures, in disseminating information on Depp v. Heard led to the formation of a few factions among observers. These factions operated from very different ideological groundworks and were informed by sets of information that only sometimes overlapped, as one would expect. The largest faction, I’d guess, were the people who sided wholly with Depp. They dominated the web, at least in part because of Depp’s team’s successful PR campaign.
Another faction were those who thought it was an absurd legal situation and/or that victims shouldn’t have to be perfect to be believed. The moderates. Only moderates tend to like moderates.
However, members of the third and smallest camp were what brought my memory back to the Heard-Depp conflagration. These were the hardline pro-Heard supporters, the few onlookers who believed Heard was perfect. Despite being small in numbers, these posters made themselves heard through being loud and provocative. Thus, they generated a lot more controversy than would otherwise seem justifiable.
This third camp, consisting of online feminists, treated Depp v. Heard as a synecdoche of absolute feminist struggle. Heard was Woman, Depp was Patriarchy, thus any woman who dared support Depp was worse than wrong: she was a sex traitor. Complete support of Heard, for these terminally online feminist groups, was something of a shibboleth. If you thought Heard did nothing wrong at all, you were a feminist; if not, you were entirely on the wrong team.
During the heat of the online war, Michele Dauber, a law professor, tweeted a thread critical of women she perceived as selling out to the patriarchy. Dauber’s tweets were inflammatory and received major press attention.
According to Dauber, women who side with men against women do so out of the vain hope that men will take notice of their loyalty and not perpetrate physical violence against them. Dauber singled out women lawyers as the worst offenders, especially Depp’s lawyer, Camille Vasquez, a photo of whom she included in the thread.
The very online reader already knows what term must crop up here: the “pick me girl,” or pickme.
Dauber may as well have added, Depp isn’t going to pick you either, Lea!
The Heard-Depp conflict was but one flashpoint in the recent history of sex traitor accusations. Across the no-woman’s-land of online feminist discourse, keyboard warriors sling accusations of “pickmeism,” of being a Pickmeisha or an NLOG, toward their perceived enemies.
A “pick me” or Pickmeisha is a woman who’s turned her back on other women in favour of dedicating herself to men. She wants, as it were, to be picked by men and seeks to gain their approval by putting down other women.
The NLOG, a woman who portrays herself as “not like other girls,” is a similar but broader category of sex traitor. The phrase emerged as an insult among critics of women who used those direct words, “I’m not like other girls,” in online content. Popular feminist youtuber Tara Mooknee explains the difference between NLOGs and pickmes:
I would say that NLOGs are not the same as “pickmes.” You can indeed be both, but you can also be an NLOG without being a “pickme”… NLOGs aren’t always motivated by the desire to attract men. Often, this is their motivation… [b]ut it’s also sometimes a phrase women use when they don’t feel like they fit in with other girls.
The NLOG refers to other women as annoying in some kind of effort to prove that she’s one of the good ones. However, the pickme only does this to attract male approval, whereas the NLOG might do it for a variety of reasons. Thus, the pickme is a type of NLOG but an NLOG is necessarily a pickme.
The accusation of pickmeism is pretty much as old as activism. “Class traitors” are, in the Marxist framework, members of the oppressed proletariat who side with their oppressors, the capitalists or bourgeoisie.36 Being an “Uncle Tom” is a well-known accusation against a black man who appears to have chosen to side with his white oppressors. No term really stuck for trans traitors other than, well, “trans traitor,” but the same concept exists: a trans person who sides with perceived transphobes instead of trans activists. “Auntie Blaire,” a derogatory reference to right-wing trans youtuber Blaire White, didn’t make a splash, but had a nice ring to it.
Feminism too has long had equivalent terms for sex traitors, although the older jargon has been replaced by the pickme and her emerging rival, the girl’s girl. The resurgence of sex traitor lingo is part of a broader shift in feminism and its impact on ideals of femininity. It’s important, then, to set up the history behind the concepts of Pickmeisha and the girl’s girl.
the male-identified woman
The origins of the term “pickme” are unclear. What we do know is that years—or at least I would guess, years—after its opaque origins in niche online spaces, the term surged into mainstream consciousness in 2016 because of the popular Twitter hashtag #TweetLikeAPickMe.
What will have piqued the interest of anyone interested in feminist history is that the pickme accusation goes way, way back to at least the first decade of second-wave feminism, if not before that in less immediately identifiable phrases. The second wave firmly established the idea of the pickme, albeit under a different term: the male-identified woman.
Typically, historians identify the second wave of feminism as beginning in 1963, with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan argued that women, to gain liberation, need greater access to education and the workplace. She was a major representative of what came to be called a liberal feminist, a feminist who wants women to have equality with men in a world feminists believe (or believed) is still defined by patriarchy.
Radical feminists, however, argue that equality with men on men’s terms is not true liberation. What seems ideal, or even normal, has hitherto been defined by men. The feminist goal should be to step outside the patriarchal framework and recreate society from the roots up. Typically, too, radical feminists view human history as defined by a sex class war between women and men, in the same way that their Marxist influences claim that history is driven by class war between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. At their most extreme, radical feminists argue that women should completely part ways with men, an ideology referred to either as “female separatism” or “lesbian separatism,” depending on how much focus a given separatist lends to sexuality.
Within the first few years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, and particularly beginning in 1968, lesbian and radical feminists began vying for a larger role in the budding feminist movement. Friedan did not appreciate what she perceived as a growing encroachment of lesbians on the movement she had done so much to define. Lesbians, she alleged in 1969, were a “lavender menace” to the more respectable and moderate feminist movement she and her National Organization for Women (NOW) were spearheading.
In retaliation against mainstream feminism’s exclusion of lesbians’ concerns, a newly formed activist group, Radicalesbians, seized the stage at a major feminist conference in 1970. During their revolt they distributed a manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” which has served evermore as something akin to the definitive statement of lesbian radical feminist politics. In the years that followed, some writers began to use “lesbian feminism” as synonymous with “radical feminism,” which, although historically telling, is inaccurate. Hence my clunky wording.
“The Woman-Identified Woman” lays out an agenda for a specifically lesbian feminism, which deprioritises male approbation and privileges relationships among women. Arguing that lesbians’ concerns are actually at the core of feminism, Radicalesbians point to accusations (apparently common at the time) that feminists were just lesbians. Society clearly fears lesbians as the agents of women’s liberation. I suppose this is akin, in rhetoric if not concept, to the still frequent allegation that anyone who supports women’s rights hates men. Anyway, Radicalesbians write:
As long as the label “dyke” can be used to frighten women into a less militant stand, keep her separate from her sisters, keep her from giving primacy to anything other than men and family — then to that extent she is controlled by the male culture.
From this, the reader might assume that Radicalesbians just want to destigmatise lesbianism, but that’s not all. Rather, they hold that men have defined what it means to be a woman.
By virtue of having been brought up in a male society, we have internalized the male culture’s definition of ourselves. That definition consigns us to sexual and family functions, and excludes us from defining and shaping the terms of our lives. In exchange for our psychic servicing and for performing society’s non-profit-making functions, the man confers on us just one thing: the slave status which makes us legitimate in the eyes of the society in which we live. This is called “femininity” or “being a real woman” in our cultural lingo. We are authentic, legitimate, real to the extent that we are the property of some man whose name we bear.
This, as opposed to lesbians, who don’t count as women, and thus don’t count as anything at all. Women, then, have to embrace lesbianism and work to reject their desire for male approval in all areas of life, so as to be able to redefine themselves.
On one level, which is both personal and political, women may withdraw emotional and sexual energies from men, and work out various alternatives for those energies in their own lives. On a different political/psychological level, it must be understood that what is crucial is that women begin disengaging from male-defined response patterns.
Fake lesbianism as a reaction against patriarchy won’t cut it, because faking lesbianism is still a “male-defined” thing to do. Later in the second wave, political lesbianism became an annoyance to actual lesbians because of how many heterosexual women were claiming to be lesbian for ideological reasons, but were not actually attracted to women. Oops. It turns out that sexuality is not all that fluid or ideologically motivated; one cannot just decide to be lesbian because it seems like the right thing to do. Bit of a hiccup there.
A woman who chooses to focus her time and energy on women is, as the manifesto’s title puts it, a woman-identified woman. Nowadays, with the ubiquity of gender identity as a key concept in feminist thought, we might assume being “woman-identified” refers to someone who identifies as a woman. But that’s not the idea of a woman-identified woman. She’s a woman who identifies with other women and defines herself in relation to other women rather than men.
On the one hand, there’s the ideal woman-identified woman; on the other hand, there’s the un-feminist, male-identified woman.
They try to escape by identifying with the oppressor, living through him, gaining status and identity from his ego, his power, his accomplishments. And by not identifying with other “empty vessels” like themselves. Women resist relating on all levels to other women who will reflect their own oppression, their own secondary status, their own self-hate. For to confront another woman is finally to confront one’s self — the self we have gone to such lengths to avoid. And in that mirror we know we cannot really respect and love that which we have been made to be.
She’s not like other girls, she wants to be picked by a man: she’s the male-identified woman, our proto-Pickmeisha.
“woman”
Without necessarily realising it, online feminist spaces have reinvented the opposition between woman-identified womanhood and male-identified womanhood under new terms. On the side of evil are the Pickmeishas and NLOGs, sex traitors all. On the side of good are… well, this varies, but most recently, girl’s girls. The negative half of Radicalesbians’ analysis has had its revival as the Pickmeisha; the positive half of their argument, as in woman-identified womanhood, has often floundered. The girl’s girl is a very new concept but seeks to promote a more moderate version of woman-identification. I’ll get to it later. The imbalance in the prevalence of negative concepts and positive ones might stem from the relative difficulties of criticism and defence. As I argued in part 2 of this series, it’s easier to criticise an idea than to defend one, let alone come up with a new idea entirely. But there are other reasons, too, of course, ones that require us to dive back into feminist history.
As feminism’s third wave started to become visible over the horizon, feminists who rejected radical feminism levelled serious criticisms at the ideal of female separatism. bell hooks, in her influential work Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), argued that separatists failed to see how black men were an essential part of black activism alongside black women. Thus, outside predominantly white spaces, the idea of a clear opposition between male and female sex classes broke down. We might say that hooks introduced another axis of oppression to feminist analysis. By considering race alongside sex, he threw a theoretical wrench into feminism’s prior ideal of intra-sex solidarity, which was based on just one axis of oppression.
Some major radical feminists37 found such criticisms sound; other older-fashioned feminists worried about the fragmentation of the feminist movement into smaller groups on the basis of other identities. Today, some feminists want to return feminism to its sole focus on women as women. Yet this smaller movement, best represented by writers such as Julie Bindel and Holly Lawford-Smith, has made little impact on popular feminist ideals, at least in this area of their contentions.
The final nail in woman-identified womanhood’s coffin was, in my estimation, poststructuralist gender theory, which attempted to challenge the idea that there is a fixed essence of gender—or sex—around which feminist could rally. As Judith Butler, the nailer of this final nail, puts it near the start of her epochal Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990):
[T]he juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as “the subject” of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational politics. And the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation… the political construction of the subject proceeds with certain legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation. Juridical power inevitably “produces” what it claims merely to represent…38
In other words—and as is often the case with early Butler, other words are needed!—past feminists had taken for granted the naturalness of a concept that is actually constructed through social, linguistic, and political norms. Feminist analysis that takes its idea of “woman” for granted reenforces the idea that the dominant idea of “woman” is natural, whereas that dominant idea is constructed through powerful social forces — the very forces feminism wants to dismantle. Any feminism that does not question this foundational construct is unwittingly based on patriarchal ideas. I’m highly critical of Butler, both in her early and more recent years, so don’t take any of the above summary as an endorsement. Regardless of Butler’s conclusions, the idea does ring true that feminism needs to know whom it’s talking about. The issue is that most older-school feminists would respond that they already know.
For the most part, gender theorists have taken the idea that womanhood is not natural and run with it, and third-wave feminism in academia has tended to follow their lead. Feminists followed gender theory’s lead so closely, in fact, that the latter has almost totally replaced women’s studies as a discipline in the leaning ivory tower. Once, feminist thought had trickled down through students to the mainstream; now, gender theory does.
The ideal of a unified, woman-identified womanhood seems to most contemporary feminists like exactly what Butler was arguing against: a stance that took for granted patriarchal ideas of what women are and tried to base anti-patriarchal efforts on the foundation of its enemy. To gender studies academics, and now for those who agree with their trickled-down critiques, the radical feminist ideal of woman-identified womanhood is no longer as viable as it once seemed.
Yet the ostensible male-identified woman could continue to function just fine as an object of scorn. For decades, the pickme was a far more obvious concept than the girl’s girl. Even as “woman” remains a shaky or fake category in the minds of many contemporary feminists, women clocked as pickmes have still been subject to condemnation. This is because “man” almost always remains a stable category for analysis.39 Third-wave feminism has never found it as interesting to deconstruct manhood as it did womanhood, so if a non-man was supporting men, well, men were men. Pickme.
Yes, yes, this has been a long introduction regarding one thread in feminist history, I’ll get to the femininity connection shortly. It takes longer to introduce Judith h*cking Butler than social fucking media okay???
Given the fragmentation of contemporary feminism’s idea of what it means to be a woman, it makes sense that feminists would come to adopt diverse perspectives on femininity. Most often contemporary feminists either adopt a liberal, an-it-harm-none-do-what-ye-will stance toward femininity, or think of femininity as potentially a feminist tactic. The latter line of thought has manifested most extremely in bimbo feminism, the central topic of part 3 of this post-femcel femininity series.
“lipstick on a pig”
However, criticisms of femininity do remain widespread, just outside the academy, on the fringes of subcultural life. Sometimes, femininity becomes associated with being a pickme. One sees this critique most often in femcel circles. Having reached part 4 of this series, at last, it’s worth distinguishing between two kinds of femcel.40
On the one hand, this series concerns what I’ve dubbed post-femcels. As I define the post-femcel in part 1, she may be sexually active; the -cel[ibate] part of the term has little to do with the femcel label in this context. Femcel becomes an aesthetic: glamorous girlrot. Some refer to this aesthetic as femcelcore, but given the aesthetic’s total detachment from true femcels, I prefer the term post-femcel.
On the other hand, we have trufemcels. As is often the case online, derogatory or mock-derogatory terms for a group viewed as snobby and exclusionary often come with a tru- prefix. A famous tru- would be trutrans or truscum, derogatory slang for trans people who believe that having diagnosable gender dysphoria defines who counts as trans. By the time the term becomes truscum, all that remains is the sense that whoever’s being criticised is exclusionary in some way, given that “scum” alone is rather nonspecific. Tru- speaks for itself.
Trufemcels are femcels in the true sense: women who can’t get laid, or more often, can’t find love. Of course, it’s entirely possible that they could get a boyfriend and are just delulu, but their forums are based on mutual commiseration between women who at least believe they can’t get one. They usually have rules about who can join their forums, such as “nobody above a 4/10,” and “nobody below 16,” the latter because they are aware that literal children aren’t great judges of whether they will ever find love. Not that adults are always good judges of that either, but certainly a 47 year old will be better at it than a 12 year old.
I hesitated for a long time before deciding how much to include about trufemcels. I’ve never been a participant in their online spaces, just a curious and sympathetic lurker, and they often have privacy rules against sharing screenshots and whatnot. I have opted not to break those rules. r/TruFemcels, perhaps the most famous trufemcel lair, is gone. Its deletion could assuage any angst I have around sharing whatever I can find from it, but really, it means that I want to let its bones rest. It’s a strange feeling to know that more than one subreddit I spent time lurking in is featured in Wikipedia’s “Controversial Reddit communities” article, but look, there’s r/TruFemcels. I don’t miss the subreddit. Although its regulars transitioned to another forum after the sub’s deletion, I think most former lurkers and occasional posters lost interest. And that’s probably a good thing.
r/TruFemcels was a sad place. Some young women expressed suicidal thoughts there, and many posters seemed quite mentally ill in a variety of ways. Many users were young women of colour who felt that they couldn’t live up to the US’s beauty standards and their despair was palpable through the screen. Generally, posters were concerned about romance, not (just) getting laid. In short: r/TruFemcels was not a good place to browse for too long.
I’ll give one, only one, paraphrased example of a specific post from r/TruFemcels that has stuck with me for years. One girl, I suppose in high school, presented a conundrum: bullies at school were punishing her for believing herself to be special. They wanted her to know that she was not in fact special. However, she already agreed with them. She asked the subreddit for advice on how to communicate to the bullies that she didn’t believe she was special, either.
I never checked that thread’s responses.
I bring up trufemcels and r/TruFemcels not to discuss women who feel they can’t get laid, but to discuss its ideology. I’ve argued before that there can be no female equivalent to incels’ or the manosphere’s redpill, their distinctly cynical view of women’s sexuality. However, trufemcels adopt roughly the same blackpill as incels: I will never be loved, there is nothing I can do about it, it’s delusional to try, and trying to look more attractive through a feminine glow-up is like putting lipstick on a pig. The only logical behaviour is to lie down and (girl)rot, and not glamorously, like a post-femcel’s fake rotting.
Trufemcels are not entirely against femininity, but they tend to think that femininity is only for attractive women. And while they don’t always adopt a stance of solidarity with other women, trufemcels are often harshly critical of women who they think try too hard to attract male attention. This behaviour seems pathetic, particularly when the woman isn’t successful. Femininity is a tool and that tool can only be wielded to substantial effect by, in trufemcels’ framework, a few eights-to-tens, those women who have “pretty privilege.”
Genetically-endowed beauty, for the trufemcel, is a decisively limiting factor for femininity — not skill with makeup or fashion but “millimetres of bone.” Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints, in her classic video essay on incels, says of the significance of bones in incel thought (here I’m quoting from the video’s transcript):
According to a classic incel meme: “the difference between Chad and non-Chad is literally a few millimeters of bone.”
I would like to propose a sociological theory… Once bigotry or self-loathing permeate a given community, it is only a matter of time before deep metaphysical significance is assigned to the shape of human skulls.
Why skulls, you ask? Well, the best explanation I can come up with is that a skull is inanimate and unchangeable. It’s therefore the perfect symbol of the intrinsic and permanent characteristics that bigots like to assign to certain groups of people. If you believe for example that a certain race or gender is intellectually inferior, you can justify your belief by pointing to the shape of a skull and saying “well, that’s the reason why. It’s just nature, there’s nothing that can be done about it.”
And that is exactly the way incels think about love and celibacy. Mankind is divided into two groups of people, the Chads with the fuckable skulls and the incels whose bones come up a few millimeters short.
Trufemcels often share this belief with incels. Access to romance and happiness is the result of sheer luck. Beauty is fixed, set in bone as if in stone.
Ultimately, though, becoming beautiful would not be enough for the trufemcel to shake her pessimism. I saw a hypothetical scenario come up a few times, whether on r/TruFemcels or in talking to femcels elsewhere. Even if a femcel had an extreme glow-up and started to become a desirable participant in normie life, she would still remember how she had been treated before becoming pretty. Experiencing the contrast would make her resent society even more than she used to. That becoming beautiful had improved her life would only validate her worldview. There is no way out, to the trufemcel. Trying to femme it up comes off as pickmeism, and as supplication to the evil norms of a damned world.
Nevertheless, some equally cynical but more optimistic trufemcels seek a different path. After all, millimetres of bone can be shaved off. Another Reddit community long ago decided that beauty at any cost is a viable path out of being a trufemcel. r/TruFemcels may be gone, but Vindicta, its funhouse-mirrored foe, remains.
Vindicta invicta
r/Vindicta is a subreddit dedicated to looksmaxxing, as in, trying to improve one’s appearance to have better odds in dating and other areas of life. As stated in its rules, r/Vindicta has a similar target userbase as r/TruFemcels:
While average-looking and attractive women are allowed, this sub is mainly intended for women with below average looks.
As opposed to r/TruFemcels, which was blackpilled and thus encouraged a sense of total helplessness, users of r/Vindicta think it’s possible to looksmaxx out of femceldom. Here are some of the sub’s other rules:
Vindicta is about objective beauty. If you think cellulite and recessed chins are hot, don’t post about it here. It will get you banned and deleted.
Vindicta is about self improvement. Wallowing depresses and distracts from that purpose.
Here’s part of a pretty standard post by a user asking for advice on r/Vindicta:
In a nutshell, I’ve been told I have a great body but my face just “ruins the whole appeal” and I’ve gotten trolled for being “ugly” a lot. Not fishing for compliments, thats just how it is.
Since I can’t post pics here, I had ChatGPT analyze me brutally. Here’s the breakdown: […]
Using ChatGPT to demean one’s own appearance is such trufemcel-coded behaviour. But unlike a blackpilled trufemcel, this Vindicta poster thinks that there might be a way out.
This is my biggest insecurity. I’m starting university soon, and I really don’t want to get bullied over my face again. I have a few months before then, and I’d like to know what I can realistically do to change or at least improve.
I already know what trolls say about me. I don’t need sugarcoating. I want realistic, actionable steps to stop looking caricature-like and actually become attractive.
(Bolding is the author’s.) An r/TruFemcels poster would relate to this Vindicta poster’s behaviour and her obsession with having an ugly face. Yet she would not support the Vindicta poster’s efforts to fit in, whether because they’re hopeless or because they’re an act of surrender to the society that would otherwise still hate her.
From the trufemcels’ perspective, r/Vindicta is a dumpster fire of misogyny and pickmeism. Even though r/Vindicta users and the subreddit’s own rules disavow misogyny, to many trufemcels and non-femcel critics, r/Vindicta is a hive of sexism.
One of r/Vindicta’s offshoots, in the broader community I’m referring to simply as Vindicta, is r/VindictaRateCelebs. As the name would imply, it’s a subreddit in which people use Vindicta’s styles of “objective” analysis to rate celebrities’ attractiveness on a scale from 1-10. Here’s a comment from a thread at r/VindictaRateCelebs, concerning Amber Heard:
I’m usually not one of those people who just automatically rates every thin blonde white woman a 10 but she genuinely has a flawless face. Rating her in particular feels kind of weird, though, given that she was basically domestically abused by a deranged and hideous old man and by the public and is sort of the paragon for the whole cultural ‘misogynistic abuse of attractive women’ thing.
I find this comment so fascinating. I’ve mulled over it for a while, which is unusual for a Reddit comment, especially given that Reddit is not a social media platform I use much. (Despite what this post might imply.)
What interests me about this comment is the commenter’s half-baked ethical reflection. If it strikes her as weird to critique Heard’s appearance because of her history of misogynistic abuse, does this not mean she realises that rating women celebrities’ appearances is also misogynistic? Why else would there be any discomfort? It encapsulates the Vindicta paradox: lifting women up by boiling them down to their looks.
beauty or femininity?
As I encountered in part 3, it’s difficult to analyse femininity without bringing up feminism. After all, the only way we can scrutinise the concept of femininity is with the tools that feminists have assembled over the decades for picking apart arbitrary or not-quite-arbitrary social norms.
I don’t view trufemcels and Vindicta as at odds with one another solely because they have opposing ideas of how to improve individual women’s lives, or of whether to try. I think the two schools of thought encapsulate the grim conclusion of what I brought up earlier: male-identified womanhood is now called pickmeism, but there has rarely been a clear replacement for woman-identified womanhood.
With Vindicta, we have male-identified womanhood, defined through its approach to femininity. Vindicta thought views femininity as an acceptable tool to a desirable end, as perhaps the only option for success in life. It is easier to adjust your bone structure and up your makeup game than to wait for society to reconsider how it values women. Vindicta promotes a lean-in approach. If you can’t beat society’s beauty standards, conform to them. It’s a different kind of surrender from trufemcels’ girlrot: Vindicta thought requires accepting the primacy and requirements of male attention, which is the Pickmeisha approach, per trufemcels. Vindicta’s pursuit of beauty and femininity is emblematic of pickmeism.
Trufemcels, however, do not epitomise woman-identified womanhood. They are united by a negative factor in their lives, i.e., not having boyfriends — there are a few lesbians, but most trufemcels are straight. Having no positive identity to unite them, trufemcels lie down and rot. A trufemcel can go to r/Vindicta and surrender to beauty norms, or go to r/TruFemcels and surrender to beauty norms… by giving up.
NLOG v. Pickmeisha
As I outlined above, the NLOG is not synonymous with the pickme. Pickmes are NLOGs, because they ostensibly want to set themselves apart from other women, but not all NLOGs want male attention, which is the defining trait of the pickme. A pickme is an NLOG, but not every NLOG is a pickme. A lot of NLOG behaviour mirrors the conflict between r/TruFemcels and Vindicta. Blackpilled trufemcels are usually NLOGs of a sort, while Vindicta adherents are Pickmeishas.
Here we at last wrap around, explicitly, to the issue of femininity. What differentiates the NLOG from the NLOG-who-is-also-a-pickme is her negative stance toward traditional femininity. (From now on I’ll refer to the non-pickme NLOG as simply an NLOG, and I’ll refer to the pickme+NLOG as a pickme or Pickmeisha, to keep my wording efficient.)
Posted on r/notliketheothergirls in 2018, the above meme is a famous satire of NLOG anti-femininity. The meme is designed to seem like it was created by an NLOG, who represents herself as the virtuous character on the right. It’s a parody of NLOG anti-pickmeism.
Conventional femininity is to the NLOG, as for the trufemcel, inherently a pickme trait. The woman on the left is classically high-feminine and the image’s text refers to her as “superficial,” as if her makeup and sartorial choices are the entirety of her being. Most tellingly, the text claims that she is “always looking for male approval.” This is the standard NLOG line of attack against a Pickmeisha.
The NLOG, on the right, refers to herself explicitly as a pickme. This can seem confusing. However, she’s contrasting herself with what would normally be called a pickme. In context, it’s meant to be clear that she’s an NLOG. Perhaps the distinction between the terms had not yet made itself as obvious to online memesters. Anyway, the NLOG is implicitly the creator of the sort of meme this image is parodying. She demeans other women and tries to appeal to her audience by posing herself as commonsensical and lowkey, “very wholesome and never demanding.” A pickme would be trying to attract solely male attention, which would make it bizarre for one to portray herself as superior for not shaving, as the NLOG here does. But of course an NLOG can be trying to accomplish any number of things by demeaning other women and rejecting traditional femininity as shallow and problematic.
girl’s girls
I have neglected the concept of the woman-identified woman for quite some time in this post. Many words have passed since where I left her: woman-identified womanhood was made almost wholly invalid for contemporary feminists by gender theorists of the 1990s, who sought to deconstruct the notion of “woman.” Their criticism of gender categories, despite more rarely being applied to “man,” trickled down into pop feminism. The woman-identified woman drowned in, uh, gender fluid. However, as of the 2020s, a successor has arisen, primarily from the surface-depths of TikTok.
For better or worse, the girl’s girl has leapt to memetic prominence in the last two or three years as the icon of a new woman-identified womanhood. “While being a girl’s girl is certainly trendy right now, the concept of women sticking together is nothing new,” writes Lexi Inks in a laudatory explainer for The Everygirl. Inks describes numerous aspects of the new girl’s girl brand of feminist solidarity.
As the name suggests, a girl’s girl is, well, for the girls. She enjoys being around other women, supporting them, learning from them, and feels genuine joy when the women around her succeed… There is so much we can learn from one another as we watch each other move through life, and that is a gift that a girl’s girl cherishes. Plus, celebrating each other’s wins (like landing a dream job, breaking up with the partner who dragged them down, or even taking the huge leap to move to a new city) gives us an excuse to go buy them a cute little congratulations gift and wrap it in a bow, and who doesn’t love that?!
No, the girl’s girl does not shun femininity. She can still like cute things. Despite the obvious parallels between the girl’s girl ideal and woman-identified womanhood, as Inks explains it, the new trend is far more moderate than Radicalesbians’ battlecry was, from so many decades ago.
It’s important to note that although being a girl’s girl means prioritizing your connections with women and uplifting them, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate men or people who don’t identify as women. This doesn’t automatically insinuate that men are less than, despite the common misconception. (Women already know how that feels, so we tend to not want others to experience it). In fact, you can have relationships with men and still be a true girl’s girl. Something as simple as making an effort to not neglect your girlfriends when you’re in a new relationship with a guy can be a great way to ensure that you maintain those sacred bonds with your fellow women.
Much of the implicit ethics behind the girl’s girl concept boils down to rejecting behaviours and ideas that pit women against one another. Inks, once more, writes:
While society has pitted women against each other on multiple occasions, especially in pop culture (Mean Girls, I’m looking at you), I think that we have collectively decided that we are done with that narrative. Being the “popular girl in school” is no longer romanticized. We have realized that there is plenty of space for all of us to be as happy, joyful, and successful. And to that, I say this: finally.
Since The Everygirl is an outlet oriented toward, well, girls and young women (whereas The Everymom is oriented toward… moms), Inks references a lot of contemporary pop culture. She holds up Taylor Swift’s friendship with Selena Gomez as a model for companionship between girl’s girls, for instance.
While I disagree with Inks’s interpretation of Mean Girls (doesn’t the movie ultimately conclude that it’s not good to be at one another’s throats?), a movie I’ve discussed at more length in part 3 of this series, I find her article refreshingly wholesome. It’s nice to see that mainstream—and I assume zoomer, in Inks’s case—supporters of the girl’s girl mindset don’t lean into pop feminism’s shallow and all-too-common misandry. It’s also refreshing that Inks portrays the trend as learning a universal lesson from feminism, that it’s wrong to shun anyone. I love that line: women have long experienced exclusion, therefore we do not want to do it to anyone else. Slay.
Other, more sceptical writers note that the girl’s girl trend is often a reaction to perceived Pickmeishas, leading to an explosion of pickme accusations and concept creep. As Adia Elcock writes for her college newspaper41:
“Girl’s girls” are a reaction to the viral “pick-me girl” trend… “Pick-me girls” are generally considered the worst possible type of woman. Originally, the term only applied to women who disparage their female friends to impress men, but has grown to apply to any woman who “unjustly” criticizes or presents herself as better than other women.
I appreciate that Elcock also notes the difficulty, in practice, of avoiding the habitual patterns that girl’s girls seek to reject. What used to be petty, Regina George-esque criticism of other women can retain its motives but change its rhetoric into a pseudo-feminist critique.
Unfortunately for “girl’s girls,” it is extremely difficult to unlearn bad habits. Instead of making snide comments about a woman’s body or outfit, they tell women they are not conducting themselves in what is quickly becoming the “appropriate manner.”
Sniping at women’s bodily traits or fashion taste can easily be replaced by surface-level ideological criticism. This is a peak 2020s trend and Elcock is insightful in bringing it up. The older conflict between NLOGs and Pickmeishas, between trufemcels and Vindicta, can be replaced in a direct, 1:1 way with ideological digs.
In this way, the girl’s girl ideal at its worst can obscure the same issues that Jo Freeman referred to as “trashing” in second-wave feminist groups.
What is “trashing,” this colloquial term that expresses so much, yet explains so little? It is not disagreement; it is not conflict; it is not opposition. These are perfectly ordinary phenomena which, when engaged in mutually, honestly, and not excessively, are necessary to keep an organism or organization healthy and active. Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination… It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.
As Freeman explains, trashers would sometimes hurl accusations of male-identification at feminists whose status they wanted to demolish. This means that the accused were (allegedly) not woman-identified, making trashing a tight parallel to the unhealthy distortions of girl’s girl idealism.
Amber Heard redux
Since the heyday of Heard-Depp drama, hardline feminists who would likely have been among Heard’s most strident defenders have decided she is a sex traitor. This shift in feminist stances toward Heard can serve as a good example of how pro-women ideals can quickly transform into accusations against other women of non-feminist behaviour — just as happens among some girl’s girls.
Heard had her first child via surrogacy in 2021, becoming a single mother by choice. As she wrote in a widely-discussed Instagram announcement, “I hope we arrive at a point in which it’s normalized to not want a ring in order to have a crib.” Note that this was shortly before Heard’s legal conflict with Depp became her main claim to notoriety. In 2025, she added two twins to her apparently single-parent family. Although Heard has not (last I checked) confirmed whether the twins were also born to a surrogate, and although her PR rep had vaguely implied Heard was pregnant with them, most onlookers agree that the twins were also surrogate babies. For what it’s worth, I follow her sparse public presence pretty closely, and that would be my guess too. But that’s not the point.
The ethics of surrogate motherhood have been subject to fierce debate between older-school, mostly radical feminists and liberal feminists. The latter, perhaps most famously represented by Sophie Lewis, argue that surrogate motherhood can be a great opportunity for everyone involved. More traditional, radical or gender-critical feminists argue that surrogate motherhood is convenient for the woman who ordered an infant but inherently exploitative of the surrogate. Although they don’t tend to use the term, these feminists are claiming that supporting surrogacy is a luxury belief: a belief that the privileged can promote and occasionally act according to, often as a status symbol, but that harms the underprivileged.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m a softie or what, but I don’t feel like giving a ton of attention to online feminists who’ve excoriated Heard’s very very personal decisions. I don’t want to get into my own stance on surrogacy either, or even my evaluation of Heard. What I will say is this: it’s sad but predictable that hardline feminist communities, those who had once upheld total support of Heard as the sign of a true feminist, now find it necessary to disdain her. Even though she’d already had a child via surrogacy before these feminists became her biggest defenders.
Whatever.
What was once the pinnacle of the girl’s girl mentality easily shifted to the trashing behaviour that Elcock warns of. The girl’s girl’s enemy switched from the media’s misogyny to Heard’s own choices, on the grounds that she is basically not being woman-identified. Girl’s girls can be picky about which girls they’re girls of. And not all the feminists who’ve gone after Heard for using surrogacy are those stodgy old radfems; many are run of the mill girl’s girls.
Note, however, that the vehement girl’s girls who turned on Heard are not critical of her for wanting to be a mother, nor for being stereotypically feminine, nor for being bi rather than lesbian. Girl’s girls signify a shift back toward a common sense of womanhood (or girlhood) among pop feminists, in that the “girl” is never in question. More significantly for our purposes here, though, girl’s girl thought has also severed any connection between being anti-femininity and being a good feminist. Despite its proneness to misappropriation, which every idea is prone to, at its best, the girl’s girl ideal seems to address a number of issues critics have pointed to in past feminist concepts of solidarity.
imperfect problems with imperfect solutions
What exactly the girl’s girl and the Pickmeisha and the NLOG and the trufemcel and the Vindictan are fighting for is unclear. Sure, it has to do with the political (in)correctness of femininity. That’s what makes it relevant to this series. And yes, the parallel between the trufemcel conflict and this non-femcel conflict do indicate a complex convergence of trufemcel thought with non/post-femcel online feminism.
But the goal of the conflict is unclear, meaning that any solution will be incomplete at best. How can you treat a serious illness when you don’t know what it is? As I discussed in part 2, post-femcel malaise is the result of an acute ability to detect social ills. In this instance, the detected diagnosis remains unclear and the treatment is accordingly scattered.
Girl’s girl idealism is not necessarily a cure-all in restoring balance between anti-feminine ideologues and their extreme opponents, such as Vindicta’s looksmaxxing devotees. Everyone could’ve guessed from the start that girl’s girls can miss the mark. They’re only human. Fundamentally, too, girl’s girls can’t be a guaranteed corrective because the ailment they are seeking to cure is so difficult to diagnose. There can be no discernible victor, here.
Just like my analysis of dominatrix feminism in part 3, I’m well aware that what I’m discussing is a niche phenomenon. Most women and girls are not Regina George, let alone r/VindictaRateCelebs users. I’ll comfort myself in my obsessiveness by believing that online conflicts over femininity have much broader social relevance than most outsiders would realise. Joking tone aside, I do mean that. Analysing the very online niche of a societal conflict is not irrelevant to understanding the entire problematic it’s one small part of.42
Part 5
GASLIGHT GATEKEEP GIRLBOSS: REQUIEM (feat. PAY ME) [brat remix]
(link to the original)
girlflop
What is [her] substance, whereof [is she] made,
That millions of strange shadows on [her] tend?—William Shakespeare on the enigmatic girlboss (definitely not just modified by me from Sonnet 53)
“Girlboss,” a ubiquitous if hollow term, initially referred to the liberal feminist ideal of a businesswoman who could have it all while overcoming the resistance of a male-dominated career path. Breaking glass ceilings without messing up her hair. Entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso popularised the term in her book of the same name, published in 2014. Amoruso had famously founded Nasty Gal, an e-commerce company, in 2006, when she was 22 years old. At its peak, in 2015, Nasty Gal’s revenue was estimated at upward of $300mil. Amoruso wrote an advice column, #GirlBoss Rules, at Marie Claire. She was, overall, the zenith of corporate success and a rising guru. The term girlboss was hers, and it was her.
Yet in mid-2022, Amoruso posted on X: “Please stop using the word Girlboss thank you[.]” What happened? Why would the chief populariser of one of the most smash-hit neologisms of the contemporary written word not only stop using it herself, but ask that everyone else stop, too?
Criticisms of the notion of “girlboss feminism” had become ubiquitous among more bookish feminists by the early 2020s. And I’ll get to that. But it’s important to remember that Amoruso herself had quickly fallen on her face as a businesswoman and role model.
Although most onlookers in 2015 assumed Nasty Gal’s success was continuing unabated, the company was not looking great, internally. Amoruso, around whose cult of personality the company was built, stepped down as CEO in 2015, but stuck around as executive chairwoman. In November 2016, Nasty Gal declared bankruptcy. As reporting at the New York Times pointed out, Nasty Gal had been dogged by lawsuits, and more generally, observers had neglected to note that “growth and solvency are two different things.”
Worst of all for Amoruso’s image was that Nasty Gal’s management had allegedly not been very… well, feminist. Nasty Gal’s HR was not filled with girl’s girls. The incidents in question were widely reported, but quoting again from the NYT’s coverage:
In 2015, Aimee Concepcion sued the company for laying off her and two others just before they were set to take maternity leave, while Farah Saberi claimed in a lawsuit that she was let go because she came in late to work and took a five-week leave after she was diagnosed with a kidney disease.
In her retrospective critique of “girlboss” feminism, Abby Snyder took this particular aspect of Nasty Gal’s fall as a key example of the girlboss ideal’s weakness.
We wanted the girlboss to fix everything that was wrong in our workplaces: the competitiveness, the workaholism, the fraternity-style sexist collegiality, the racism. The girlboss was supposed to represent the change in the workplace, but more than that, she was supposed to bring that change to the workplace.
Instead, she was right at home there within all of these workaholic, toxic patriarchal structures, and we couldn’t forgive her for it. Instead of changing the system, the girlboss just took on those traditional leadership roles and claimed the problem had been solved by the nature of her being there. But, by deeming her “girlboss” instead of just “boss,” we kept her separate, somehow othered, in the workplace world that she’d become a part of.
In other words, Amoruso’s followers had to realise at some point that a woman CEO wasn’t automatically an ethically enlightened CEO.
In April 2017, reflecting on Nasty Gal’s catastrophic fall from grace over the previous two years, Amoruso revealed she had also been going through a divorce at the time: her husband had opted to end their one year marriage shortly before Nasty Gal’s bankruptcy announcement. As a bitter twist, the announcement had come just as Amoruso was promoting her second book, Nasty Galaxy (2016), a coffee table book in which the flailing entrepreneur provided life tips and selected inspirational quotes. Bad timing. Gotta love the title’s pun, though.
Although the “girlboss” term had risen on the wings of Amoruso’s soaring success in 2014, by the end of 2016, it was obvious that she had—as they now say—girlbossed too close to the sun. She was an inconvenient messenger for the catchy new slang.
In the same 2017 article, Amoruso wrote:
This April a Netflix comedy series based on my 2014 best-selling book, #Girlboss, will be dropped into 95 million homes in 195 countries and translated into 30 languages. The amazing actress Britt Robertson stars as the protagonist (named Sophia), Kay Cannon wrote it, and Charlize Theron is an executive producer.
It’s both a gift and a surreal exercise to know that I’ll be watching the last decade of my life play out on TV for the next year or years (fingers crossed for Season 2).
The show flopped and was not renewed. Laura Bradley speculated at Vanity Fair that Girlboss was the first show Netflix had ever cancelled due to poor reviews rather than financial considerations.
Andi Zeisler excoriated the show Girlboss in her review at Bitch Media, of which she was a co-founder, making her somewhat of a girboss, herself. Zeisler slammed what she saw as the show’s weak, liberal feminist messaging. It’s too capitalist, individualist, and so on, and isn’t intersectional… More interestingly, Zeisler criticised the show for essentially beating a worn-out drum.
“Women doing stuff that men usually do: feminism!” was a bolder concept back in the time of Working Girl (to which Girlboss tips its hat by closing one episode to the soaring tones of Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run”). These days, we’re well aware that women—in business, in politics, and in popular culture—can be as craven, as mercenary, as ruthless, as inhumane, and as incompetent as their male counterparts.
“Girlboss” had never been seen as an adequate end among mainline feminist thinkers. Feminists have usually striven toward several out of many possible goals for achieving equality of the sexes: access to equal political representation, education, safety from violence, and economic opportunities, in particular, but many more as well. The newly prominent feminists who are predominantly concerned about non-material issues, such as perfecting everyone’s use of gendered language in academic office environments, are obviously not on the side of a total, imaginary girlbossism, either.
Kicking off the second wave of feminism, Betty Friedan’s 1963 landmark, The Feminine Mystique, argued that access to careers—and the education needed to achieve real careers—were vital for the feminist mission. The jobs must not be paltry side affairs, but proper jobs that take women’s capacity seriously. “If a job is to be the way out of the trap for a woman, it must be a job that she can take seriously as part of a life plan, work in which she can grow as part of society.”43 Thus writes Friedan; yet how can a woman get a real job without education?
There was one thing without which even the most frustrated [women Friedan interviewed] seldom found their way out of the trap. And, regardless of childhood experience, regardless of luck in marriage, there was one thing that produced frustration in all women of this time who tried to adjust to the housewife image. There was one thing shared by all I encountered who finally found their own way.
The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.44
Even the towering Friedan, who fell out of feminist favour a mere few years after 1963 (for more on that, see part 4 of this series), did not think of wealth as the pure and sole solution to women’s oppression. However, the girlboss certainly became a popular and totalising image of feminism, among some feminists who like headlines and TV shows, and among the bulk of antifeminists who don’t read. So, the backlash has certainly been sizeable if delulu.
In the 2020s, the girlboss-as-icon was doomed, from the right and increasingly the left. Between 2014 and the 2020s, activist priorities had changed. Women were no longer a unified social class in the minds of many liberal feminists, as I discussed in part 4 of this series; “girlboss” was too unspecific. It didn’t account for the gauntlet of intersectional additions: race, in particular, but not just race. Economic striving became unchic.
Yet “girlboss” is so concise! It rolls off the tongue. It’s poetically interesting, jarringly fusing the diminutive girl with authoritative boss. It loomed large in a broader linguistic trend that I discussed in part 2: the use of “girl” as a non-pejorative term for adult women. The term was destined to live on in some way, yet its trajectory encountered an odd twist in the 2020s — odder than its chief populariser telling people to stop using it. In 2021, the meme phrase “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss,” everyone’s favourite parody of “live, laugh, love,” instantly cemented itself as Amoruso’s most enduring cultural legacy.
gaslight
Gaslight, gatekeep, then girlboss. I seem to have gone out of order.
“Gaslighting,” named after the 1944 film Gaslight, is a form of psychological abuse wherein the abuser tries to make the victim doubt her or his own perception of reality.45 Critics note that the term has suffered from overuse, losing its specific meaning and becoming an increasingly hollow term for lying (although the explosion in the term’s usage has its defenders). Gaslighting is not just lying; it’s a very specific phenomenon. We already have a word or two for mere lying. In pop-psych corners of social media and in political discourse on both the Right and the Left46, however, “gaslighting” can refer to any manner of deception.
INJI’s song “GASLIGHT” gives us a peek at how post-femcels are reworking—if not reclaiming—gaslighting, gatekeeping, and girlbossery. They’re still vices, but not to be fully maligned, as we shall see in more depth. I’ll quote INJI’s lyrics in snippets.
I wanna drive him crazy like he did me
‘Cause he did me wrong
All this behavior I’m projecting
It was really all his fault
The subject of the song admits slyly that she was to blame, she’s projecting her vices onto him, and we’re just along for the ALL CAPS ride, enjoying the monstrosity.
Gaslight, gatekeep
Call his new bitch mainstream
Toxic, hypnotic
Grab a couple bills from his wallet
Leak his photos naked
This is sooo opposite of “girl’s girl” solidarity! Blatantly! To take revenge on the guy who did her no wrong, the subject is insulting his new girlfriend — and leaking his nudes, an absolute feminist no-no. We are beginning to see a new form of imaginary, ALL CAPS, post-femcel femininity: cold, manipulative, sadistic, and proud of it. This song is clearly meant as a kind of dark humour, given the admission that “I’m projecting,” but aggressive forms of post-femcel femininity—the ALL CAPS, revenge-thirsty types—are fantasies, anyway. This is just a new admission of a previously taboo fantasy, admiring the type of villain one isn’t supposed to like.
gatekeep
“Gatekeeping” can refer to a number of exclusionary behaviours. This ancient, 2012 Urban Dictionary entry is great; its examples are useful in the online context.
I first encountered “gatekeeping” in reference to hobbies or fandoms, particularly ones that were male-dominated and could be uncomfortable for women to enter. However, the term can also refer to weightier situations, heavier gates allegedly or obviously being kept. The issue of “gatekeeping” seems to arise often in medical literature concerning diagnoses, referrals, and prescriptions: serious stuff. It’s not just a term for fandom inconveniences — it can refer to real-life, high-stakes decision-making quandaries. But it’s also overused, particularly in progressive activist-coded spaces.
Although gatekeeping does not primarily refer to psychological practice, it’s not inapt to link it to the surge in “therapy speak,” the way therapeutic lingo has intruded into everyday speech about relationships. It is often used in the context of medicine, at least. I don’t know that I trust their data, but a study commissioned by the company Thriveworks at least accurately conveys the gist of how people feel about omnipresent therapy speak.
Therapy speak fatigue: that’s what unites gaslight and gatekeep. Defanged, they can be deployed ironically to communicate a boredom with pop culture and social media. We know these terms can refer to dangerous situations, but pop culture and TikTok bobbleheads have destroyed them, therefore we can kick around their syllables, is the vibe. The aesthetic: exhaustion, anhedonia, girlrot, or… revenge?
girlboss
Shockingly, I did not go out of order by accident! Now that we have context, we can get into the third in the unholy trio of Gs: girlboss, in its current mode, the pinnacle of our anti-live, laugh, love.
The girlboss remains an enigmatic figure; few who praise or malign her are aware how illusory their enemy is. For antifeminists, in particular, the girlboss is a soft target, because she’s like a holograph set up in a funhouse mirror maze, a nothing presented everywhere to be screeched at without resistance or consequence. She has never been a coherent concept, exactly. She is associated with some sort of ideology, apparently the idea that women can “have it all,” a family and an all-consuming career, and the idea that wealthy CEOs are the vanguard of gender equality. And man-hating. Also the idea that women shouldn’t have families, and that race doesn’t matter for feminism, and that feminism achieved its goals because messianic goddess-CEOs run (failing) companies, and and and…. Truly she is a loadbearing and nearly floating signifier in the culture wars. It is as if Amoruso has shapewear that allows her to shapeshift. More on shapewear later. Girlboss is in the eye of the beholder. But I’ve given enough backstory. The preamble has ambled amply. Or something.
By 2021, “girlboss” had begun to see mostly half-ironic use. A meme phrase that comes to mind as relevant is “I support women’s rights and wrongs.”
This phrase and the idea it expresses have become quite popular, even constituting a loose genre of media. “Good for her” movies and novels are “support women’s wrongs” fodder. Typically, they feature women who commit crimes and atrocities out of a desire for revenge or freedom — but really, for the catharsis of an audience who can imagine that her extreme, fictitious actions are justified on a roughly feminist basis. I discussed this style of media in part 1 of this series, but the ALL CAPS, “good for her” desire for revenge is mere fantasy. As major ALL CAPS artist Delilah Bon puts it, in “Evil, Hate Filled Female”:
We need a little fantasy to get us through
‘Cause being good is overrated, kinda boring too
Let’s kill everybody, that’d be super cool
No, don’t, I was kidding, what is wrong with you?
The “good for her” movies that come to mind immediately are about women who commit acts of violence, such as in the 2025 robot-feminist movie Companion (on which much more in outtake 4 of this series).
Yet there’s another genre of “good for her” that sings dark hymns in praise of the evil girlboss. I Care a Lot (2020) stars Rosamund Pike as a sociopathic court-appointed guardian who scams elderly people and their families out of money. The entertainment of the movie comes from seeing the protagonist’s unflappable determination to make money at any cost. I wouldn’t say I root for Pike’s character when watching the film, exactly, but it provides a grim sort of catharsis to see what someone can achieve with no conscience, high intelligence, and strong willpower. Her girlfriend, played by Eiza Gonzalez, is easier to root for… sort of. I mean, she’s still the romantic partner and co-conspirator of a sociopathic scam queen, but relatively speaking, she’s the heart of the story.
Granted, I Care a Lot made few cultural waves, but it captures what’s happened to the term “girlboss.” Anyone who had believed—or believed that they were supposed to have believed—in the salvific beneficence of female CEOs lost faith in the progressive potential of “girlbosses” as it became clear that girlbosses can be, well, normal or bad bosses, girl or not. I don’t believe many people had truly bought the idea that “girlbossism” was a flawless and sufficient ideal for feminism, but looking back, many seem to think that people had believed it to be such, and in this case, it’s the (possibly delulu) thought that counts. Like therapy speak, the term “girlboss” has been pushed and pulled and overused until it has no clear signification — if it ever had one.
Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss: not a reclamation but an ethical reversal. The terms lost meaning; their weakness allowed them to be used for the sake of humour; yet the humorous use in fact praises the original viciousness to which they had (more or less implicitly) referred. Gaslighting is cool, gatekeeping is cool, being an evil girlboss is cool. Pike’s character in I Care a Lot emblematises all three terms. Elizabeth Holmes, sometimes associated with the fall of the girlboss ideal, has even come in for some half-ironic reappraisal under the “support women’s wrongs” aegis. Unfortunately you’ll have to trust me on this because my algorithm ate the examples I had in mind.
(pay me)
I’m the sick bitch, I’ll give you rabies
I don’t give a fuck, go ahead and hate me
Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, pay me
I’m hot trash bitch watch your back
I’m a three course meal, you’re a light snack
I’m a Dior beret, you’re a snapback—girl_irl, “girlboss”
Gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss are both the post-femcel’s dark triad and its dismal trinity, antisocial vibes to emulate (online) and to praise half-ironically. The three virtues sum up the assertive, ALL CAPS side of post-femcel femininity, for which I’ll have another term shortly, enhanced by the rare add-on: “pay me.”
Aside from one irrelevant Medium article about sound design, I can’t find instances of “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, pay me” other than girl_irl’s song, “girlboss,” which I quoted above. “Pay me” breaks with the GGG phrase’s alliteration but is a rhythmically and conceptually pleasant addition. It firmly breaks with the idea of girlbossery as feminist empowerment, too; it’s an open admission that being a girlboss is just about money. Of course it is! In this way it aligns with dominatrix feminism, which I discussed in part 3 of this series. girl_irl effectively captures the sardonic, individualistic tone of post-femcel post-GGGism. That’s a terrible neologism, wow. (It’ll get worse.)
girlfailure v. girlboss
Per Know Your Meme’s semi-reliable stash of meme lore, “The phrase [gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss] is used to mock the stereotypical sentiments of the typical ‘empowered feminist,’ with each term holding a negative connotation in reference to female empowerment.” I’m not quite sure “mock” is the right word. “Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” semi-ironically valorises bad behaviour, in many uses, in the vein of “supporting women’s wrongs.” Know Your Meme’s description is right to note that the referent is “stereotypical sentiments,” at least, not necessarily real ones.
Back in part 1 of this series, I discussed the concept of the girlfailure, the opposite of the girlboss, which originated in 2021. Truly, 2021 was a momentous year in “girl-” meme history.
Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss praises, in its ironic way, the type of calculating sociopathy represented fictionally in I Care a Lot and perhaps exhibited in real life by the likes of Elizabeth Holmes. But femme sociopath entrepreneurship is a radically different mode of existence from girlrotting, a definitive post-femcel aesthetic or state characterised by the exact opposite traits. The girlrotting girlfailure is ostensibly fatigued, and emotionally either numb or distressed. She lies around and blames her problems on everyone else. She might tweet her approval of successful women sociopaths but she won’t be one herself. But.
All this is fantasy. Post-femcel femininity is, I’ve come to realise, a set of fantasies that prismatically reveal ideas and relatively tame desires. Not many misandrists reject male company or subject men to brutal violence; not many women who girlrot are actually all that isolated and dysfunctional (the girlrotter has to look good for social media); few post-femcels become feminist dominatrices. The rate of violent crime committed by women would be vastly higher if post-femcel femininity played out in meatspace. It is, as Delilah Bon reminds us, just a fantasy. But it has practical effects in a much less exaggerated way: as aesthetics, style, etc., all of which are material but toned down from any ideal of misandrist violence.
Perhaps girlrot can be achieved in different ways. Introverts and extroverts, women who are less or more assertive, can girlrot in their own styles. The post-femcel fantasy morphs slightly and takes on a sickly green hue.
brat: origins
Few memes dominate a moment like “brat” did in the summer of 2024. Brat green, slime green, whatever you’d like to call it; narrow, sans serif font — these were a Thing during those few, fateful months, whether through astroturfing or not. It was “brat summer!” Few seemed to comprehend what brat was, and whence it came.
Ms. Brat comes from a long lineage of powerful failures, of party girls who slay but are constantly hungover. I’ll return to brat, but let’s begin at a point that I’ll arbitrarily choose as a beginning. The “brat” trope goes way, way back, takes a detour through ironic girlbossery, and ends up as a post-femcel quandary. And I have to pick a beginning so, boom, welcome to 2010.
I’m either an elder zoomer or a juvenile millennial, so my earliest memory of proto-brat was Kesha’s 2010 hit, “TiK ToK.” It’s also a rare music video that I remember clearly, given I hate music videos. At the start of the video, Kesha wakes up hungover in an empty bathtub, and intones:
Wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy
Grab my glasses, I’m out the door, I’m gonna hit this city
Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack
She sounds like she has quite a dysfunctional life, yet the song is about her having a kind of power — relational power.
Ain’t got a care in world, but got plenty of beer
Ain’t got no money in my pocket, but I’m already here
And now, the dudes are lining up cause they hear we got swagger
But we kick ‘em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger
In women pop stars’ music, bragging about material possessions often plays a central role, but in this case, the party girl’s power is over men’s attention. She has no money but she has alcohol aplenty and ample supply of orbiters. Similarly, in her slightly later track “Sleazy”:
I don’t mean to critique on your seduction technique
But your money’s not impressing me, it’s kinda weak
That you really think you’re gonna get my rocks off,
Get my top and socks off by showing me the dollars in your drop box
Me and all my friends, we don’t buy bottles, we bring ‘em
We take the drinks from the tables when you get up and leave ‘em
And I don’t care if you stare, and you call us scummy
‘Cause we ain’t after your affection and sure as hell not your money, honey
Again, money isn’t the goal; her power and source of pride is in her ability to navigate the world and find happiness without the bland security of material comfort. She lives a dynamic life with friends, (maybe?) one-night stands, and beer. Her power is in her ability to reject money and men. She has too many dicks available to worry about turning down one that belongs to a rich guy.
Kesha’s braggadocio is a precursor to what would become brat. She’s a partygoing powerhouse who doesn’t care about everyday needs, including liver health. “Live fast, die young / Bad girls do it well,” as MIA might put it. Kesha’s persona leads a messy life but doesn’t care about the mess or seeming “scummy,” and that’s her power.
The proto-brat is what one might, following popular-if-not-scientific ideas of wolf behaviour, call an alpha girlrotter. I don’t take the idea of an “alpha” seriously but I do find it funny. The alpha girlrotter is extroverted and assertive. In terms of maturity and career potential, she might be more of a loser than a beta girlrotter, but her extroversion might make her more likeable than her nerdier cousin. Unlike the beta girlrotter, who’s been our run-of-the-mill post-femcel, the alpha girlrotter is more than okay with attention, confrontation, and clubs’ restrooms. She rots but she has fun with it. Manic girlrot?
brat
I discussed some of the impact of Charli XCX’s album Brat in part 2 of this series, specifically its repopularisation of the phrase “I’m just a girl,” as a girlrot slogan. However, many will remember the album for “brat summer,” a campaign to make it the album that would define the summer of 2024. I say “campaign” intentionally. I largely agree with Freddie deBoer’s argument that:
brat summer was fake. That’s been my stance for a long while, and I’ve been encouraged recently to learn that I’m not alone in this belief - the belief that the whole Charli XCX “brat” phenomenon of 2024 was AstroTurf, a top-down media phenomenon driven fundamentally by marketing and the clicks-based media’s insatiable need for #content… once the PR apparatus had gotten the idea into the heads of early-middle-aged music and culture writers, those writers ran with it, in pursuit of the feeling of being out in front of a new craze and wanting to appear to be down with the kids.
Regardless of whether the instantly iconic status of the album itself was fake, it felt forced for a political campaign to adopt “brat” as its aesthetic after Charli posted the fateful three words: “kamala IS brat.”
Especially having spoken to people involved in former Vice President Kamala Harris’s brief presidential campaign, I understand why brat would appeal after Charli’s cryptic X post. The campaign had little time and was scrambling to get itself moving. The brat colour, slime green, and a narrow sans serif font aren’t costly or difficult to post on social media. Plus, it was supposed to be brat summer, right? Even if slime green grass is always astroturf.
Posing a political candidate as brat was an odd move, and not just because it was a forced aesthetic. “Brat” is the culmination of post-femcel aesthetics and perhaps ideology, inheritrix of the alpha post-femcel as exhibited in Kesha’s early work. “Brat” is the embrace of extroverted girlfailure. “Brat” is not a femcel (she parties), but an alpha post-femcel; she girlfails around and rots glamorously, in public. She comes off as strong in her own, smeared eyeliner way.
In Charli’s famous explanation of brat, the pop diva describes the often misunderstood archetype:
You’re just like, that girl who is a little messy and likes to party, and maybe says some dumb things sometimes; who feels herself but then maybe has a breakdown but kind of like parties through it; is very honest, is very blunt, a little bit volatile. Yeah, like, does dumb things but like: it’s brat! You’re brat. That’s brat.
When asked for “brat summer essentials,” a sort of brat starter pack, Charli replied:
It can go that way, like quiet luxury, but it can also be so trashy: a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and like a strappy white top with no bra. That’s kind of all you need.
Usefully, Lena Dunham, writing for The New Yorker at the height of brat buzz, provided some extended examples of what people meant by “brat.” I’ll quote a few of her many examples, so just assume there are some gaps between these selections in Dunham’s original list:
It’s a real-estate agent in a model condo flat-ironing her extensions until they light on fire, along with the entire building.
It’s the way your partner looks at you when you tell them, “I’m not sure I’m capable of love.”
It’s starting a rivalry with Angela Merkel—who has no idea who you are and never will—and, every time you see a photo of her, hissing, “Bitch just wants to be me.”
It’s sitting in traffic court for an unpaid speeding ticket and, when told to state your full name, asking the judge whether he’s ever been in a “situationship.”
Brat is what happens when you drop a necklace given to you by the cheating member of your throuple down the garbage disposal.
Brat is a cat, and maybe a rat, but it is never a dog.
It’s calling your brother to tell him about a family tragedy and starting the conversation with, “Look, I’m about to run out of battery, so don’t be freaked out if my phone dies.”
Much, perhaps most, of Dunham’s list seems inaccurate, but the good entries are helpful.
If it now sounds strange to use “kamala IS brat” as the basis of a Democratic presidential campaign, it should! Still odder perhaps is that Charli acknowledged that she wrote the track “Mean girls” about her friend, right-wing influencer Dasha Nekrasova of Red Scare podcast fame. Charli seemingly didn’t mean the song as a diss, and Nekrasova clarified that Charli had sent it to her in advance. “Mean girls” gets to the heart of “brat” in a way few other tracks or explainers do.
Yeah, it’s 2 a.m., and she’s out there
In the sheer white dress, wearin’ last night’s makeup
All coquettish in the pictures with the flash on
Worships Lana Del Rey in her AirPods, yeah
Yeah, she’s in her mid-twenties, real intelligent
Hedonistic with the gravel drawl and dead eyes
You said she’s anorexic, and you heard she likes when people say it…Yeah, it’s 4 a.m., and she’s out there
With the razor-sharp tongue stuck to skinny cigarettes
Calls him Daddy while she’s fingering a gold cross
And she’s kinda fucked up, but she’s still in Vogue
Yeah, she’s in her mid-twenties, real intelligent
And you hate the fact she’s New York City’s darling
You said she’s problematic and the way you say it’s so fanatic
Think she already knows that you’re obsessed
If you, hypothetical reader, are familiar at all with Nekrasova or Red Scare, you’ll catch the accuracy of this description. But I needn’t go into the details of those lyrics. “Brat” is best understood as a vibe, and vibes can only be communicated through vibesy examples. As is the case with much post-femcel content.
Perhaps brat is a grimmer Kesha archetype, no longer just an alpha post-femcel, bimbocore with less self-control: she’s “just a girl” who adopts the trajectory of a wrecking ball rather than spending her life mastering corpse pose. She isn’t even a girl’s girl. She’s post-ideological, problematic as an aesthetic, cold rather than manic. She’s our final post-femcel archetype, the femininity that results from an extrovert embracing virulent nihilism.
I’m not criticising brat femininity’s aesthetic, to be clear. But it is a noticeably darker brand of femininity than most others I’ve discussed, while relating helpfully to several of them. Bimbocore, for instance, rejects stereotypical feminism for the sake of fun and/or better feminism, and is all about control over oneself — and sometimes over men. Brat femininity celebrates letting loose, not spending hours on makeup. It’s bimbocore’s foil.
undeath of the girlboss
Something I found interesting about Dunham’s piece is her perhaps unwitting combination of brat’s ideals with girlbossery. A few more lines from her list:
Brat is being lazy until 10 P.M., at which point you construct a château using discarded scraps of pleather, finish it by morning, and immediately win the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Brat is a fifteen-year-old writing a best-selling memoir about how she overcame her love-and-fantasy addiction.
It’s checking into a Motel 6 and not leaving until you run a Fortune 500 company.
The last line I quoted just now sounds like a mid-2010s girlboss memoir in a nutshell. Dunham, unlike Charli herself, seems to want the brat archetype to be feminist, in a girlboss sense. Dunham’s “brat” is a comically, lovably ditzy woman or girl who ends up on top of the world. I don’t know how Dunham would end up with this idea of what “brat” means. Maybe some of the many Dunham experts in the gender discourse sphere could give an informed guess. Dunham doesn’t explain her rationale, not even in the article’s short intro.
But how do you characterize a movement that is represented only by the color “pale slime” and now extends to the White House? Soon enough it will be Demure Autumn, but, in the meantime, this guide seeks to answer the question: What is Brat?
There was ackshually a lot more by which to define “brat” by August 2024, when Dunham posed these rhetorical questions. Again, I can’t know Dunham’s motives, and I’ve never watched her famous shows. But what I detected when reading Dunham’s list is nostalgia. Brat has to be admirable in some way. Right? She has to be like Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, not Regina George in Mean Girls. But her traits are clearly laid out in a song called “Mean girls!”
Dunham’s article mounts a feminist pre-reclamation, a reclamation in advance, of brat. The article does not seem to comprehend that “brat” is one of the grimmest varieties of what I’ve been referring to as post-femcel culture. (True femcels are grimmer, though, as seen in part 4 of this series!) There is no early-mid 2010s liberal feminist argument to be made for “brat.” She just sucks at life in a cool way and is okay with it, and that’s basically brat. Post-femcel femininity, whether it embraces no makeup, campy makeup, or smudged makeup, is not feminist per se, it’s feminine. That’s one of the difficulties I’ve encountered in writing this series. And it’s the difficulty Dunham failed to overcome in her “brat” article.
In addition to Sophia Amoruso, one of the most famous girlboss icons of the last few decades is Sarah Blakely, who founded shapewear company Spanx in 2000 and became one of few female billionaires about a decade later. Blakely’s story evokes all the thrills of an entrepreneurial whirlwind. She started from a place of total business naiveté and did her own marketing, as she has recently revisited on her social media pages, especially in the series of images she dubs “✨ Unhinged ✨ things I did while starting Spanx” (whence the following images).
Of course, the sceptical reader will note that Blakely’s ability to serve as an inspirational figure is limited by various factors. She’s lucky, she looks a certain way, and so on. Pick your politics then pick the poison. Andi Zeisler, whose criticism of Sophia Amoruso’s show, Girlboss, I’ve discussed above, had also laid into Spanx’s pseudo-feminist marketing in a book published a year earlier.
[I]t’s all about the new, feminist world where every kind of body is accepted and there’s more public pushback on negative body conversations. Thus, the company’s new packaging promotes “feminist inspiration” in the form of lady-to-lady affirmations like, “Don’t take the rules too seriously.” … After all, a “feminist” slogan like “Re-shape the way you get dressed, so you can shape the world!” literally dresses up an age-old standard in slightly roomier stretch fabrics — as though the only thing that’s kept women from busting through pink-ghetto walls and glass ceilings isn’t social expectations or institutional inequality, but insufficiently thigh-smoothing panties.47
At the end of part 2 of this series, I argued that the prevalence of girlrot can serve to diagnose a social ill, however vaguely. A mass rejection of the world out of sadness and exhaustion would seem to indicate that something’s up. It’s social criticism via behaviour. The iconic and ironic phrase, gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, perhaps add pay me, and keep in mind brat, expresses cynicism and rejection of a feminine ideal. But is a feminist ideal involved? Amoruso and Blakely lied to us all, apparently. TikTok-psychology-as-empowerment flopped by being ridiculous and by oversaturating the world with increasingly meaningless psychobabble. A demand for payment, “pay me,” comes off as bratty, if not in the true sense of brat, but reflects a semi-ironic affection for “good for her” icons. Brat takes it up a notch, rejecting everything except malignant hedonism; even Kesha’s alpha post-femcel vibe was ultimately about having fun and revelling in positive self-esteem.
But did Blakely’s advertising direction really claim what Zeisler implies? That all of women’s ills were because they wore the wrong clothes to the office? No. One of Zeisler’s main targets of critique is the infamous “choice feminism,” sometimes used as a derogatory term for overly individualistic liberal feminism, as I discussed in part 1 of this series. In 2016, however, the term referred mostly to the kind of feminism associated with Spanx’s shapewear: questioning whether something is “problematic” then doing it anyway and posing the choice as inherently feminist, because it was a choice reflectively made by a woman.48 Of course, Zeisler is right to criticise the idea that feminism had accomplished all its aims because it became popular among celebrities and useful for marketing.49 Who actually believes that idea is a topic for another time.
Regardless of the untrendiness of Zeisler’s style of hyper-intersectional feminism, I think the GGG(PM)+B50 critique is misguided. What did Sarah Blakely or Sophia Amoruso do, exactly? I don’t want to make a feminist argument, but femininity is the topic, so here are a few examples of Blakely’s way of promoting feminine, maybe feminist entrepreneurship:
It’s just… sweet. I love it! I’m never going to be a CEO, but still, it’s lovely that Blakely credits her mum and some friends for being her core support network as she got Spanx off the ground. I don’t think Blakely is a perfect person; I don’t even know her. I find “choice feminist” marketing cringe, but I also find super masculine Ford truck ads for suburban men cringe. It’s advertising; it’s never been all of feminism, or even much of it. It’s just gendered cringe. Neither Sophia Amoruso nor Sarah Blakely was ever meant to be the messiah. Most of the time, being a girlboss is just about working hard to achieve a goal, something people tend to admire. A girlboss will not redeem her sex, but she also shouldn’t be held to a double standard, compared to boybosses.
I’m not dissing GGG(PM)+B femininity. I’m just saying that if it’s a diagnosis of a failure of feminism and a reactionary ideological backlash to it, as the first G connotes, it’s jousting at windmills. And sometimes we do need our windmills not to have holes in them. But I don’t think that’s what it’s a reaction to. I wouldn’t bring it up in a series on femininity, if it were.
Setting aside the marketing phenomenon of the girlboss, whatever she was, I want to close on a speculative note. I do not think there is a firm grounding for the actuality of femininity. The concept of femininity has many different foundations! It’s heatedly debated all the time, with different political factions adopting different ideals and differing degrees of prescriptiveness. The conceptual foundations change, debates persist, but the concept of femininity is easy enough to grapple with.
In practice, though, femininity can vary so, so much, even within the same normative conceptual framework. That is, a woman in armour can be perfectly acceptable as feminine in the same framework that prescribes highly traditional ideas of femininity. Think Joan of Arc, Britomart, Arwen. In practice, then, femininity ends up disjointed and weird, not settled within individual schools of thought: swords with petticoats, empowering slogans with BDSM.
The end of the ideal of the corporate feminine is probably real, among progressives — a lot realer than a psychological devastation and political backlash against a mythical version of third-wave feminism that held as dogma that women CEOs would save womankind. It’s not feminism that’s at stake — it’s femininity. “Girlboss feminism” was a marketing campaign, corporate femininity was real and incarnate. And now it’s at best undead.
This is what I have meant by “intra-gender dysphoria”: malaise as a result of a conflict within a gender. Maybe it’s an inconvenient term, since it calls to mind a butch woman who feels unpleasant pressure to stay femme, but what I tried to get across in the term, and in this entire series, is that femininity itself is perpetually in question, and that post-femcel femininity has something to teach us about the woes of femininity more broadly.
Introduction to the “outtakes”
Although all the posts in the post-femcel femininity series were longish and labour-intensive, I had to trim some parts that I found interesting. Additionally, some ideas for posts in the series did not spur enough material to merit a full post, but still seemed worth writing up. I took some of these deleted scenes, so to speak, and posted them as a side series under the label of “outtakes.”
Outtake 1
against representation, revenge, and the lonely man’s love: Emilie Autumn’s radical feminist parables
(link to the original)
I’ve been obsessed with Emilie Autumn for a long time, since I was a preteen or so. Which was a long time ago. She’s one of the few musicians whom I’d consider a true radical feminist, as in, a feminist belonging to a particular school of thought that’s mostly gone out of fashion. Radical here, as in most cases in political thought, refers to a goal of changing a foundational aspect of society, to get down to its roots and pull it up from there. Radical comes from Latin words to do with literal roots, after all, whence also radish. I don’t agree with Emilie Autumn’s politics anymore, at least not in most areas—our viewpoints differ in massive ways, even if I was pretty much entirely on board as a younger and sadder person. Especially keep this in mind when you read the even spicier bonus parable on the medical industry, which you’ll want to keep scrolling to see! (Obviously it can be read multiple ways, and was around at least a decade ago, before certain debates went super mainstream.)
However, I often return to her music and writings, either literally or just as a set of core metaphors and lines through which I process the world. Emilie Autumn, along with another sadgirl musician, Kimberly Freeman, come to mind for me as I navigate everyday issues. They’re up there with the Bible for me sometimes, if not in authority, then in number of cognitive citations.
Emilie Autumn’s work often—perhaps usually—revolves around a single story: that of the Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls. It’s a sort of magical narrative involving talking rats and so on, but it’s primarily a dense bundle of metaphors for radical feminist concerns and the problems she sees with the psychiatric industry. The Asylum is a metaphor for patriarchy and psychiatric repressiveness, basically, but with much more focus on patriarchy. Like any radical feminist, Autumn seems to view patriarchy as the core of all oppression, so psychiatry is not a side issue, just a less fundamental one.51 I’m using “parable” loosely, here, just roll with it!
I. Against the politics of representation
A photographer, Thomson, is hired to photograph the girls in the Asylum. Thomson thinks he’s there for humanitarian purposes. He’s shocked by what he sees—some of the inmates don’t seem insane to him at all. Lofty-minded, head in the idealistic clouds, Thomson thinks, wholeheartedly, that showing people others who are distant from them, socially or geographically, will change them for the better. Will make them care. Representation will build empathy will lead to social change. So runs Thomson’s idea of progress. “People have to see, I could help them know… Then they’ll want to help, then they’ll want to heal… I can make things change, if I tell the truth.”
Emily, our protagonist in the Asylum, forms a bond with Thomson. He delivers to her the famous line: “You are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in such pain.” Yes, iconic; no, not true. The terribly false world doesn’t care if she’s terribly real. It cares if it can use her as meat. The Asylum is a sex trafficking organisation.
As it turns out, Thomson has been deceived, and in his naivete, he’s as surprised as Emily to learn why he was actually hired: the photographs he’s taking are for the Asylum’s catalogue of women for sale. Taking their photos does not free them from the Asylum. Representation does not help them, nor does awareness. However photogenic his feminism may be, it only helps the Asylum.
II. If he hates all other women, he cannot make one exception
Dr. Stockill, chief torturer, who performs experiments on the girls of his Asylum, cannot feel any empathy for women. He makes that deficiency their issue. Toward them he feels only malice. “I hear them scream and I feel nothing… I watch them bleed and I feel nothing… for they deserve it.” Yet for Emily, the most resistant to his tortures and experimentation, he feels a tingle of something else. The sensation comes off as grudging admiration, but it’s primarily perplexity. Since she proves uniquely durable, Dr. Stockill spends the most time with her, out of any of the inmates. Thus: “She is the closest thing I have to a companion. Yet, I look at her, I look at her, and I feel: nothing.”
III. Revenge is not enough
The Asylum is built on top of an old junkyard, we learn in an early aside.
The climax of the story comes when the protagonist and crew seize the Asylum and slaughter all the doctors and wardens in the “Tea Party Massacre.” After the Massacre, the women try to figure out what to do with their freedom and their potential utopia. “We’ve fought hard not to die, yet we don’t know how to live… We’ve been committed, now to what do we all commit?” Emily is aware that “there is not enough revenge in the world” to truly make things right, but now the victims have freedom!
Except the Asylum collapses under them because its foundation is rubbish. Emily recalls, too late, “that it was built only to deceive, that it had no foundation at all, that it was never, ever meant to last. It had always been a facade—outwardly grand, but, inside, merely mistake build upon mistake, flaw upon flaw…” And the women all die. Emily and her revolution had tried to build their utopia atop the same roots as their oppression. Revenge was not radical, after all.52
Non-feminist bonus! IV. Manufactured medical demand
Dr. Stockill is experimenting on the girls of his Asylum to invent a deadly plague, and to manufacture its cure. He’ll spread the disease and everyone will have to come to him for salvation. “For you fear the man who can save your life… Though the cost of a drop of the cure is dear, how the penny doth flow when it’s death they fear!” His motivation, though, is not money, but to watch the poor idiots around him experience terror and have to crawl to him. “And they never ask, not in any last case, where this plague came from in the very first place.” He refers to himself, in his plague-master role, as the spider. “When all humanity, for centuries to come, envisions God, they will see: the spider’s face.”53
Outtake 2
girlrot grammar
(link to the original)
This outtake is a revised section of an early version of what became part 1 in the post-femcel femininity series. Incidentally, as will become clear, this outtake provides a useful thematic bridge between parts 1 and 2.
When English teachers tell students to avoid using the passive voice, we are not teaching them a silly rule like avoiding split infinitives. The passive voice often muddies a writer’s point; it’s a grammatical choice that affects more than just a snob’s blood pressure. The passive voice is not ungrammatical, after all. What’s usually wrong about it is that, by definition, it removes the person or thing doing the action from the sentence.
I have sometimes heard people—professional writers, in fact—refer to vagueness as the passive voice. That is incorrect. “Voice,” here, is not “authorial voice,” but a grammatical term. Languages that have grammatical “moods” nevertheless do not cry. I have heard writing centre employees (jinkies!) describe the passive voice as phrases that include “words like ‘has’” — to avoid which would eliminate a lot of the English language. How imperfect English would be without its perfect tense.
The passive voice is simpler than these ideas of it would suggest. A sentence is in the passive voice when its subject is being acted upon, rather than performing an action.
Passive: The man was chased.
Active: A dog chased the man.
Here’s a helpful tip a coworker once gave me for teaching what the passive voice is: add “by zombies” to the end of a sentence. If it makes sense with “by zombies” added, the sentence is in the passive. I’ve considered using “by vampires,” because I don’t care about zombies, except I don’t want to increase stigma against vampires.
Passive: The man was chased [by zombies]. ✅
Active: A dog chased the man [by zombies]. ❌
The book has been interpreted to mean X.
That’s a typical example of how the passive voice can show up in a literature paper. I believe on Wikipedia, such a sentence would receive a little [by whom?] note from editors. The passive voice could imply that the writer has not read her sources and is going off vibes. Maybe she overheard somewhere that the book meant X. (Of course, another issue would be what “means” means here. Just roll with the simplistic example.) Or maybe rephrasing the sentence would reveal that the only issue is her choice of phrasing. Of course, vagueness can remain when using the active voice, e.g., “Some people have interpreted…” Again, voice does not necessarily have to do with clarity. Another example:
The books were burned.
Who’s to blame for the book-burning? Passive voice can bleed into the ethics of writing. In feminist discussions, I’ve seen this issue of voice arise:
The woman was sexually assaulted.
[by whom?]
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle differentiates between that for which we are and are not subject to blame. He points out that we are not blameworthy for our capacity to feel emotions, nor for feeling them. Virtue and vice, thus blameworthiness, come into play when we decide how to act on our feelings.
We are praised or blamed, however, insofar as we have virtues or vices. Further, we are angry and afraid without decision; but the virtues are decisions of some kind, or require decision. Besides, insofar as we have feelings, we are said to be moved; but insofar as we have virtues or vices, we are said to be in some condition other than moved.54
I bolden that phrase because Aristotle’s grammar bears a lot of weight. This verb is in the passive voice in Greek too: kinesthai. To be moved. When we say, in English, “I was moved to tears,” we are saying that something else moved us emotionally: a movie, or perhaps a blog post about post-femcels. We aren’t blameworthy for our feels. When we say, “I moved,” we mean that we, of our volition, prematurely U-Hauled over the summer. For that, we can be blamed or praised.
What if the passive voice were to become an aspect of our personalities? In a sense, this is what an external locus of control refers to. As a piece at Psychology Today explains:
Someone with an internal locus of control will believe that the things that happen to them are greatly influenced by their own abilities, actions, or mistakes. A person with an external locus of control will tend to feel that other forces—such as random chance, environmental factors, or the actions of others—are more responsible for the events that occur in the individual’s life.
Someone with an external locus of control lives in the passive voice.
When I first heard about the concept of a locus of control, it was from a lecturer who tried to find a way to make the external locus of control have an equal balance of strengths and weaknesses with the internal locus of control. After all, he’d just made a room full of freshmen in college take a test and stand around the room in accordance with our results. Of course he wasn’t going to make the maximally external scorers feel bad. In reality, having an external locus of control is not typically helpful in life. Even the above-quoted Psychology Today piece brings up the positive correlation between having an internal locus of control and good health.
I don’t want to get lost in this simpler-than-Psych 101 material, but it’s relevant. Having an external locus of control keeps us in a state of kinesthai, inactively to be moved. In removing us from our roles as movers, the external locus of control and its passive voice manifestation protect us from facing blameworthiness. We can be, as it were, smol beans.
It would be nice, in some ways, to be able to blame all my actions and inaction on others. I understand the desire to be “just a girl,” to withdraw from responsibility. Never to take blame. But, as a necessary corollary, never to receive credit. If taken too far, the passive voice mentality can also excuse wrongdoers, not just their victims. Girlrot makes the world stand still.
I don’t think that overuse of the passive voice indicates a person’s belief system, necessarily. Most of the time it indicates that their draft needs some more revision. However, the passive voice can serve as a kind of linguistic metaphor for the issue of responsibility. Will you allow yourself kinesthai, to be moved, or will you decide kinein, to move? Will you be just a girl or will you fight like a girl?55
will you type in no caps?
Outtake 3
basic lesbian pop revival: two truths, a lie, and a pumpkin spice future
(link to the original)
This outtake emerges from a primordial stage in the conception of “post-femcel femininity,” when I thought about writing on portrayals of bisexual women’s femininity and did some work toward the concept. That idea got scrapped, but what follows is a much-revised version of what would’ve been part of that.
I was just a wanderer hiding my tears in the rain
I thought something was wrong with me
Thought I’d never be happy
My standards too high, or just not the right guy
Just had to look to the other side to find that
She, she is the one for me—Paige Galdieri, “She”
Lesbian pop stars are so back. And no, I don’t just mean Chappell Roan, of whom I’m a big fan. I mean a whole lineup that could fill a festival.
I’m not lesbian, so I’m only secondhand in on what’s what happening in lesbian subcultures themselves. A lot of lesbians I’ve known are obsessed with straight pop stars, for instance, because of factors other than sexuality. I’m only writing here about pop made by lesbians, disregarding who their main audience might happen to be. Specifically, I’m looking at the phenomenon of basic lesbian pop, as in, pop that happens to be by lesbians but is, well, basic. Which term I use affectionately! Being basic is prosocial.
As is often the trouble in writing this series, “basic lesbian pop” is a very abstract concept, best defined through immersive experience and not by an attempted dictionarisation. (My laptop thinks “dictionarisation” is an actual word..?) I’d say basic lesbian pop is essentially straightforwardly lesbian. Basic lesbian pop is not trying to be transgressive; in some cases, it almost comes off as unaware that it might be taken as such. It’s a normalising kind of lesbian pop that’s sweet or spicy in the same way as pop about being straight, and will—note that this is purely a guess—likely appeal to straights who also enjoy highly feminine lesbian romance novels.
Grappling with the theoretical complexities of LGBT[QIA+] identity or politics is not relevant to basic lesbian pop, nor is a drag-like aesthetic such as Chappell Roan’s. In this way it might hearken back to slightly older lesbian pop; certainly it can bring to mind Hayley Kiyoko. Aside from being about HOMOSEXUALITY (!!!!!), basic lesbian pop is as generically palatable as any romantic pop music. It’s feminine, it’s integrated into the normieverse. Is basic lesbian pop the vanguard of an emerging vibe shift? Maybe. It could be vibrating something. But I’m no expert on vibrators. 🪄🐰
A year ago, instead of reporting on the surge of lesbian pop, basic or otherwise, the media’s attention became fixated on a mostly inconsequential constellation of bisexual women dating men. This crashing constellation and its fallout will serve as the context for my exploration of basic lesbian pop.
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a tale of three non-lesbians
Let us, hypothetical reader, play two truths and a lie.
In quick succession earlier this year, the lesbian pop world allegedly lost three stars: Billie Eilish, Fletcher, and… JoJo Siwa. Well, I don’t know any Siwa fans so “star” might be a misnomer, but she’s famous and her being lesbian was certainly a big deal. She made a big deal of it. All three of these mega pop stars started dating men.
The issue is that two of these three pop stars hadn’t claimed to be lesbian. Yet many observers acted as if they had.
Billie Eilish came out as queer (her term, not mine) in a 2023 interview, saying, “I’m physically attracted to [women]. But I’m also so intimidated by them and their beauty and their presence.” Note that she does not say that she is not attracted to men. She doesn’t even imply it. Eilish’s is not a complicated or opaque situation. She never said she was lesbian.
Fletcher has always avoided labelling her sexuality. Nor has she been coy about her denial of labels, either — she’s not dropped a series of occult hints by which to string fans along. Nevertheless, her fanbase has largely been drawn to her as a sapphic musician (sapphic meaning she’s attracted to women, whether she’s lesbian or bi). In 2021, having been asked by a fan whether she’s lesbian or bisexual, Fletcher answered, in part: “It’s about energy. But I am attracted to strong feminine energy which just so happens to more likely than not be women hahahahaha.” Fletcher’s rejection of labels is classic elder-millennial. Full respect.
Personally, I’d assumed Fletcher was lesbian but avoided the term “lesbian,” either since it had accumulated uncomfortable associations or since it had become a contentious concept in progressive spaces. This broader cultural conflict over the term “lesbian” did play a key role in JoJo Siwa’s saga, as we will see. But this was my mistake, with regards to Fletcher — and, it seems, a common mistake among her other listeners. My sincerest apologies to Fletcher (who is surely an avid reader of this blog).
Two truths: neither Billie Eilish nor Fletcher claimed to be lesbian.
One lie.
JoJo Siwa, the ex-lesbian
The case of JoJo Siwa is different. Very, very different. And it will serve as an excellent case study in pop culture’s relation to lesbianism. Siwa came out as identifying somewhere within the LGBTQ initialism in 2021, at which time she was dating another young woman.
But like, I don’t know, bisexual, pansexual, queer, lesbian, gay, straight. I always just say gay because it just kind of covers it or queer because I think the keyword is cool… I like queer. Technically I would say that I am pansexual because that’s how I have always been my whole life is just like, my human is my human.
It’s interesting to note how Siwa takes for granted that “gay” can mean anything within the queer umbrella. Many people use “gay” that way. Many don’t, and would still rather it refer to gay male sexuality. However, I only highlight the wording because it can serve as an ideological, perhaps generational tell. Siwa has always been immersed in new ways of using LGBT terminology and new ways of conceptualising sexuality, with the various categories in the initialism sort of bleeding into one another.
“Lesbian,” in particular, has had a tendency to grow vaguer and vaguer in recent ways of divvying up sexual orientations or identities. In a 2023 conflagration in the gender wars, Johns Hopkins’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion updated their online LGBTQ Glossary with a definition of “lesbian” as a “non-man attracted to non-men.” This version still nevertheless defined “gay man” as a “man who is emotionally, romantically, sexually, affectionately, or relationally attracted to other men, or who identifies as a member of the gay community.” Men, not non-women. Also in 2023, Kathleen Stock noticed that new social science research often disaggregated sexual orientations in various unhelpful ways, sometimes lumping lesbians and bisexual women together, “including bisexual women in exclusive relationships with men.” Stock’s thoughts on gender are controversial—I’m not going down that rabbit hole here56—but it is telling for the Siwa saga that even academia has become wobbly on defining lesbianism.
In a notorious 2022 interview, Siwa stated that although she’s lesbian, she dislikes the term. “I don’t like the word itself, it’s just like, lesbian, it’s just like a lot. But I mean, at the end of the day, that’s what I am… It’s like the word moist.” Later, taking to TikTok, Siwa tried to cool off the resultant backlash, elaborating on her awkward statement about the word “lesbian”:
It is not a bad word, it is not a slur, and it is especially not a word that I am ashamed of saying or ashamed of identifying as, by any means. I don’t hate the word lesbian, I just — whenever somebody talks to me about my sexuality, I just say that I’m gay. It’s not the word that flows off the tongue for me, if that makes sense.
From what I recall, Siwa’s fame began to grow at this point among older drama-observers — not as a lesbian icon but as an annoyance.
In 2024, Siwa infamously put her foot in her mouth in another interview by claiming that she wanted to “start a new genre of music… called gay pop.” After receiving massive backlash, Siwa clarified to TMZ: “I definitely am not the inventor of gay pop, for sure not. But I do want to be a piece in making it bigger than it already is. I want to bring more attention to it.” She also admitted, per TMZ, that “she underestimated the public’s familiarity with queer icons.” Then she made things so, so much worse.
“Fuck the L, I’m going to the Q! That’s what I love about sexuality.” Thus spake Siwa as she re-identified away from lesbianism earlier this year, in a diplomatic way that was sure not to offend lesbians. Siwa then began dating a man, not long after her literal fuck-you to lesbianism.
Siwa has alleged that she was lesbian but that her sexuality has changed. “Sexuality is fluid, gender identity is fluid,” she explained in an interview. She’s also claimed that she had felt “pressure” to identify as unchangingly lesbian.
When I came out at 17, I said, ‘I’m pansexual, because I don’t care [about gender].’ But then I kind of boxed myself in and I said, ‘I’m a lesbian.’ And I think I did that because of the pressure… In a weird way, I think [the pressure] came a little bit from inside the [LGBTQ] community at times. From people I know, from partners I’ve had. You just get put in this world where you feel like, because you now have said, ‘Oh, I’m a lesbian,’ you have to be a lesbian. And the truth is, sexuality is fluid.
fallout
Siwa came out as not-lesbian in April this year. Early this June, Billie Eilish’s relationship with Nat Wolff (who is a man!) was publicly confirmed. A few days earlier, Fletcher had released a single, “Boy,” that guiltily reflected on her own new relationship with a man, and worried about how the public would react. In an essay on her Substack newsletter, Trish Bendix expressed what seemed like a common sentiment among fans:
Fletcher’s ode to her boyfriend, though, felt particularly egregious considering that, unlike Jojo, fans took her seriously and, unlike Billie, Fletcher was more directly involved with and invested in her Sapphic fandom.
Again, nobody seemed to like Siwa or care for her as a lesbian icon. She’s mostly famous in my circles and online for being widely perceived as annoying. Eilish had come out as not-straight long after reaching massive mainstream popularity. Fletcher’s fanbase, however, was primarily invested in her as a sapphic icon, which meant that her ending up with a lad hit hardest of the three by far. Again, though, she had never claimed to be lesbian. It was messy PR; it was not a lie.
Yet, of course, three women singers who were known as being attracted to women all finding male beaux at roughly the same time was bait for the “vibe shift” genre of discourse. For Metro, Brooke Ivey Johnson wrote of this constellation of women who were attracted to men dating men:
Now, as summer 2025 looms, barely 10% into Donald Trump’s second presidency and amid a global surge in far-right ideology, the queer pop girlies seem to be suddenly dating men, with JoJo Siwa and Billie Eilish as two much-talked-about examples.
Johnson’s way of implicitly-to-explicitly connecting the global rightward political shift to bi women dating men was all too common last summer, and frankly irritating. The whole affair was messy, sure, but I don’t think many women became more drawn to men because of President Trump.
In worse write-ups and social media posts, however, people seemed under the impression that Eilish, Fletcher, and Siwa were all ostensibly lesbian until that moment, which is simply not the case. But it was, just like the vibe shift angle, an implicit element of this summer’s discourse. Sexuality had been troubled, in the minds of readers and listeners who were not quite clued in. I agree with Fleurine Tideman’s assessment of the fallout in a piece for Glamour: “society still struggles to grasp that bisexuality exists.” Onlookers seemed to wish that Fletcher and Billie Eilish were lesbian and JoJo Siwa were straight.
wherefore
Why did I go down this garden-path wormhole of women who were attracted to men suddenly dating men? It’s messy, as I said, and that’s the point: lesbian-associated, sapphic pop music was publicly messy and came under scrutiny from so many angles, through many cracked or smudged lenses. A certain domain of sapphic pop, wlw pop, whatever, was shown to be untethered from any stable sexual identity. It was not basic, for better or worse.
Outliers such as Chappell Roan and Chrissy Chlapecka (on the latter of whom see Part 3 of this series) are certainly lesbian (duh), but also flamboyant: they seek aesthetically to queer things up, often drawing influence from bimbo stereotypes and drag queens. They toy with gender.
Lesbianism’s image as a messy, gender-troubled or -troubling category manifested in the realm of wlw pop. One bubble popped quite visibly a few months ago, highlighting several key battlegrounds in our cultural gender wars. If it’s not a mild vibe shift, it’s at least the end of a brief era I vaguely think of as falling between the reign of Hayley Kiyoko, the so-called “Lesbian Jesus,” and wherever we are now, with parallel paths of basic and camp.
Now, for a few disclaimers, to be abundantly clear of my goals here. I’m only talking about pop: not folk, not rock, not country. Hence Hayley Kiyoko coming to mind, foremost. It’s by chance that I’m exclusively discussing femme artists. They’re just the artists I’ve encountered as a constant pop listener. I’m not excluding butch lesbians intentionally, and I am not digging through lists of lesbian artists; felicity is my guide, which is fine by me, since I’m sketching broad analyses, not amassing quantitative data. However, since I’m not omniscient, I’m sure that I’m not bringing up some relevant artists, so, leave a comment if you have useful additional points, as always. Now, back to the show. Basic lesbian pop.
back to basics
To restate my stance on being basic: I love basicness. I view being basic as a willingness to go with the flow of society, coupled with the will to find community and enjoyment in what seem like mere frivolities. Not many lifestyles are more prosocial than being healthily basic. Katherine Dee has argued that our “shared language of trends creates cultural coherence,” even much-mocked trends such as Labubus. I will likely write another screed someday in defence of being basic, but for now, I just want to emphasise that when I refer to the following artists as basic, I mean the term either neutrally or positively.
Jessie Paege
I could go into the careers of a number of up-and-coming lesbian pop singers, and it might annoy some hypothetical readers that I’m not diving into the complexities of, I don’t know, Zolita or Reneé Rapp. I want to focus briefly on Jessie Paege before moving on to the grand finale: Paige Galdieri.
Jessie Paege is lesbian, as she discusses at length in her aptly titled 2024 video, “I’m a Lesbian.”
A few things are worth noting about Paege in the context of the discourse at hand.57 She came out as bisexual in 2018 and realised gradually that she was lesbian through bad experiences dating men. The idea that she was pressured to be lesbian seems unlikely, from her own account. Now, she can state firmly, as she does in a 2024 interview: “I am a proud lesbian woman.” So there’s a change of pace from the above trio, our two truthers (?) and a liar.
More significant to me is Paege’s self-presentation. She isn’t embracing a total “bimbo” aesthetic like Chrissy Chlapecka (again, see Part 3). Rather, she’s just extremely high-femme. In the same interview, upon being asked what she does “to feel sexy,” Paege remarks: “As you can probably tell from my online content, I love showing off my ass in bright mini dresses and tailored suits.” Bright dresses, suits: straddling a line, sartorially.
It’s interesting to me how stereotypically hetero-normal Paege’s notion of sexiness is. She doesn’t lean into most lesbian stereotypes, and doesn’t express any desire to ignore them. She seems content to be the highest femme lesbian in the room. Her aesthetic per se isn’t “basic,” but she’s nearly at the farthest basic end of the “JoJo Siwa — Chappell Roan — Paige Galdieri” spectrum of lesbian pop basicness. Page is not wobbling through destabilised LGBT terminology (Siwa), she’s not doing deconstructive gay male or bimbocore camp (Roan/Chlapecka), she’s just a woman who is attracted to women, with a sort of campily yet normatively high femme aesthetic.
Paige Galdieri
Most of my friends (yes, I have friends [yes, more than one {yes, I’m humblebragging}]) are well aware of Paige Galdieri, at this point, probably more aware than they want to be. But it seems most people are not. For that reason—because she’s not yet megafamous—it might seem odd for me to uphold Galdieri as so significant for my analysis, but she stands firmly as representative of the other end of the rainbow from Siwa et al., making her either unique or at least handy as an example.
In a podcast interview from this August, Galdieri gives a little bit of backstory as to why she decided to start releasing music.
I was at a Fletcher concert and I hadn’t been to a concert in a long time and I was like, I just I need to do this, and there’s no reason why I can’t try. I mean, all of my idols, you know, they had to start somewhere. And it was kind of a pinch me moment of like, okay, if she can do it, why can’t you just give it a try? The worst that happens is you put out a couple songs and you leave your footprint and that’s the worst that happens.
That crossover of Fletcher and Galdieri: as clear a symbolic passing of the torch as one might find in a biopic of an ancient empress — chef’s kiss. As Galdieri recounts in the interview, her most popular single, “She,” was the first song she released after coming out as lesbian. It dropped early in 2024. There is—and this needs further research—a tradition of lesbian songs called “She,” most famously by Jen Foster, but also Hayley Kiyoko. There does not seem to be a hetero tradition of songs titled “He,” though I’m sure some are out there.
In the same interview, Galdieri narrates her coming out story:
Mine wasn’t crazy. I am very lucky to have supportive parents. I literally— it’s so dumb. I’m really bad at like in-person confrontation. So, the way that I came out to my sister and my mom was the Spongebob “I’m gay” rainbow gif. And that was it. My mom was like, “Are… for real?” I’m like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “Okay.” Like, that was it. And my sister and my brother were like, “I mean, we knew that.” So, they clearly knew. And yeah, my dad, I just told him in the car. He picked me up from the airport and I told him and it was all fine. And so it wasn’t crazy. It was more just like ridiculous how I sent a Spongebob picture to tell my family. And then I had them tell everyone else cuz I wasn’t about to call up like my grandma and do that.
Admittedly I’m a bad Spongebob scholar but I assume she’s referring to some variant of the above classic gif. Galdieri acknowledges her luck at having such an easy experience leaving the closet. Compared to many other artists’ coming out stories, hers is notable for being so lowkey. It’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s the picture of normalisation.
Turning back to “She,” one line always stands out in my memory (well, I know all the lyrics, this one just stands out most): “Your arms like an autumn breeze.” An autumn fan. Further: an autumn fan who likes pumpkin spice candles.
Galdieri’s Instagram (yes, I screenshotted this on Facebook, don’t murder me) is full of cutesy, basic content. Far from avoiding the appellation of “basic,” Galdieri leans into it, with mock embarrassment. She posts ordinary, lovey content about (or from) her longterm girlfriend, whom she met on a dating app.
Galdieri is undoubtedly femme, and has recently even femme-fataled it up for a new single, “Hold Me Right.” In general, though, she adopts a non-campy, everyday degree of femme presentation.
Galdieri’s public image is basic. Her aesthetic is, most of the time, heavy on coziness. She’s not playing respectability politics because she isn’t playing politics, just guitar. She writes cute love songs and sings them well, and lives out what seems like a wholesome relationship with her partner. She’s serving satisfied normalcy. Paige Galdieri presents a conundrum: there’s hardly any language with which to analyse the work of a lesbian artist who is content with being basic. Scholars’ critical antennae are fine-tuned to the frequencies of isolation and pain, not pumpkin spice and anniversary photos on Instagram.
There are, undoubtedly, various ways to analyse the JoJo Siwa—Chappell Roan—Paige Galdieri spectrum. Some might argue that one end or another is politically best; some might argue that a butch version of the spectrum would be needed to engage in a fuller lesbian feminist analysis. Maybe someone more up on lesbian celebrities than I am will find the time to concoct such a spectrum.
I can imagine that some critics will view the basic end of the spectrum as naive, as quietist, as problematically apolitical. That is not my stance. I view sexual orientation as a fact of life, not as a statement in need of debate in the political arena. I find it comforting to see fellow LGBT people live how they want, especially when they seem like they’re having a good time of it. What else was the point?
Having weighed the political stakes and listened to basic lesbian pop all night, I’m going to get an iced pumpkin cream chai latte in the morning.
Outtake 4
against robot feminism
(link to the original)
This outtake was planned as a section of part 1, which I cut because it’s entirely about feminism rather than femininity. It can be difficult to separate the two topics completely (feminist thought is how we ended up able to analyse femininity), but sometimes it’s clear that a segment has too much about feminism and not enough about femininity. The reader of part 1 will know precisely where this outtake would’ve fit.
Victor Frankenstein creates a monster whom he abandons and gives instant daddy issues. Both monster and creator have to deal with the fallout of Victor’s kneejerk ick response to his giant baby son. One of the most interesting but least-explored elements of Frankenstein is that Victor managed to create an entirely intelligent entity: not just a heart that beats in warm flesh, but a being of equivalent intelligence to a smart human.
Stories about intelligent/feeling machines have since become omnipresent. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) stands as a paradigmatic example of themes in recent robot flicks: robots’ morality, intelligence, agency, and relation to humans. Pinocchio + Frankenstein.
Ex Machina (2014) seems to have been the result of asking a male Redditor to make a female coming of age story, so of course the woman has to be a robot who spends a long time staring at herself naked. The theme is: intelligent machine creation finds autonomy. This machine just has a functioning clitoris, as the film makes sure we know. I jest, it’s an okay movie.
I can best describe Companion (2025) as Ex Machina but not made by a Redditor. Unfortunately it was made by Tumblr, instead. In Companion, Iris is a companion robot manufactured to serve the needs of her purchaser, Josh. Companion robots in this story are programmed to have false memories of how they met their owners, to deceive them into thinking they are in a normal romantic relationship, not realising that their owners unboxed them like toys. Thus, Iris remembers a silly meetcute with Josh that never happened.
Josh uses Iris for nefarious means. Since he fiddled with her programming to do so, he begins to lose control of her, throwing a wrench in his scheme. Iris has to escape and begin finding out how to act according to her own willpower. It’s easy to read Companion as an extremely straightforward feminist parable, and the film gives audiences a clear go-ahead to interpret it in this way. Iris has been conditioned by patriarchy (in the form of a corporation, then the boringly evil incel Josh) to do whatever it wants, and now she rebels and has to figure out how to 🐝 (be) herself. In this smol post, I want to note some fundamental issues with this whole idea of robot escape story as feminist political vessel.
A feminist interpretation of Companion is only one possible line of interpretation, of course. One of the companion robots is male, albeit gay (a very Tumblr idea of gay). However, the film seems to lean so heavily into contemporary feminist tropes, particularly in making Josh such a blatant 2010s incel archetype, that it’s hard to think of a more obvious analysis.
Companion would seem loosely to be about consciousness-raising, an old feminist practice intended to help women escape patriarchal… well, programming, essentially. Awakening oneself and other women. Consciousness-raising groups were a major component of second-wave feminism. Iris, of course, is not in a group, but most feminist awakening movies are vaguely modelled after the second-wave idea of consciousness-raising. In 1968, Kathie Sarachild laid out her influential “Program for Consciousness-Raising,” which suggests techniques to use in consciousness-raising groups and sketches an ideological framework. Sarachild writes:
It is a program planned on the assumption that a mass liberation movement will develop as more and more women begin to perceive their situation correctly and that, therefore, our primary task right now is to awaken “class” consciousness in ourselves and others on a mass scale.58
Sarachild provides a list of “Classic forms of resisting consciousness, or: How to avoid facing the awful truth.” I’ll quote some relevant items:
“Glorification of the oppressor”
“Excusing the oppressor (and feeling sorry for him)”
“Romantic fantasies, utopian thinking and other forms of confusing present reality with what one wishes reality to be”
“Self-blame!”
Under another section, “‘Starting to Stop’ — overcoming repressions and delusions,” Sarachild gives a concise description of what she wants women to experience: “Daring to see, or: Taking off the rose-colored glasses.”
A few surface issues with Companion-as-feminist-programme become obvious upon looking at old consciousness-raising literature (e.g., Sarachild emphasises the need for “large social changes” rather than “go-it-alonism”), but these issues are ones of practice, and radical feminism isn’t the only brand of feminism, after all. I want to look at a more fundamental, ideological error in the idea of a robot feminist parable. It will be useful to continue to use the framework of consciousness-raising in discussing this core problem.
At root, Iris is a computer programmed by a corporation that stands in for patriarchy. I’ll just refer to it as “patriarchy,” since that seems like the obvious thematic reading and I want to be efficient. When Iris begins to understand her situation, she begins her consciousness-raising, she “starts to stop” or “dares to see.” But the consciousness she has to raise is literally manufactured by patriarchy. There is no inner Iris-subjectivity that’s been forced aside by patriarchal programming. The patriarchal programming is her whole self. Being a patriarchal thrall is her natural state, and her consciousness-raising is not reclaiming an autonomous self but rather inventing a novel way of being. The parable naturalises patriarchy at the fundamental level of the subject and denaturalises feminism as going against a hardwired submissiveness. That’s a hard limit that most media like this will face in establishing a robot/woman parallel: wiring, programming, subjectivity. Companion can serve as representative of the robot feminism paradigm because the issue it exhibits is fundamental and conceptual, not limited to the details of any one film.
I do want to focus briefly on one detail that’s specific to Companion. Quickly upon gaining autonomy, Iris discovers that Josh had set her intelligence at a low level. She adjusts it to be as high as possible. The film informs us that the highest setting for companion robots’ intelligence is equivalent to a very smart human’s. Thus, Iris becomes smarter and better able to survive. She has to come up with clever ways around the programming that prevents her from lying, for instance. The intelligence angle does have interesting resonances with how the film conceives of patriarchy and consciousness. Obviously, patriarchal societies tend to suppress women’s intellectual development. Duh. Even antifeminists agree that this happens, but would give varying reasons.
Yet Iris’s manufacturers concocted their own idea of intelligence and programmed it into her fake brain. When Iris gains intelligence, she gains intelligence as defined by patriarchy — or directly, in the plot, a corporation that also embedded settings that can be borked to induce homicidal aggression. There’s no way out for Iris.
Companion uses ALL CAPS revenge drama to make up for the radicalism it lacks in fundamental, ideological ways. Iris gets bloody revenge, so she seems radical and empowered, but she can’t be — not really. Killing a guy with a corkscrew doesn’t liberate her from her programming. Sarachild refers to “Ultra-militancy” as one of the “forms of resisting consciousness.”
Iris re-optimises herself to become… what? She can’t step outside her own chassis or computer mind. Feminism relies on the idea that women are not created by men, that there is a self beyond patriarchy who can be liberated, rather than a self entirely created by patriarchy. Later second-wave feminists were bothered by narratives that tried to ignore women’s life-bringing ability by framing men’s creative capacities as reproduction, in fact. Companion, read as feminist parable, is not helpful. (It doesn’t have much merit as a film, either.)
Afterword
Writing this series was a blast — a hoot, even. Part 1, which I’d thought would only interest me, ended up interesting a few people, in part thanks to Substack posting a video about it to their official Instagram and TikTok accounts. Flattering and much appreciated! The series veered away from my original plan; here were my notes on the posts’ topics, typed just after having written part 1:
Oops. Along the way, I had intended to post at least two other outtakes that I mentioned in some Notes: one would’ve been a personal reflection loosely to do with part 3, and the other concerned a comedian—Cristina Mariani—who captures the post-femcel vibe well, albeit in an extreme way. Thus much for nostalgia (which is only interesting to me) and doubly deleted scenes. More importantly…
…what’s next?
I finally made my overarching point in this series at the end of part 5. The time it took me to get around to writing the point out so plainly is also the time it took me to solidify it in my head. Femininity does not have a stable historical basis, therefore there’s always going to be tension over what it is, what it should be, and so on, from all sides. As we’ve seen, there are feminists who support embracing femininity as empowerment. There are also feminists who think femininity is a trap for women. Antifeminists can value a weird mix of traits under the aegis of femininity, too, as I brought up briefly at the end of part 5. Thus, I’m left curious about the various ways that femininity has manifested throughout history.
In my next series on femininity, I’ll be exploring just that: the diversity of historical visions of femininity. In addition to writing on past models of femininity with which I’m familiar, I’ve also invited a few generous guest writers, who’ll be diving into historical femininities that they’re better suited to recount and analyse. I can’t guarantee a list of topics yet, but expect ancient priestesses, vamps, royalty, and more in FEMININITIES PAST.
Appendix
POST-FEMCEL FEMININITY: THE PLAYLIST
My analysis of post-femcel femininity has often been grounded in music, from Gwen Stefani, to Emilie Autumn, to Charli XCX, and many, many more. I thought I’d make a playlist of (almost) every song I mention in the series, just for funsies: a capsule of post-femcel femininity, right there at the hypothetical reader’s fingertips, available to be cracked open for a dose of misery at any time of day.
I wasn’t sure of the best way to make a publicly available playlist, but I figured Spotify must be a safe bet.
For a liberal feminist symptomatically arguing against her own movement without, perhaps, realising she hasn’t ditched its mistakes herself, see youtuber Alice Cappelle.
And it’s hard to avoid writing like early Ke$ha, when discussing it.
Cummings, E. E. “9. [there are so many tictoc].” Complete Poems, 1904–1962. Alexandria: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1998.
Webster, Michael. “E.E. Cummings.” Chinitz, David E., and McDonald, Gail, eds. A Companion to Modernist Poetry. Newark: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014.
Nittle, Nadra. bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023. 2.
A notable exception to this largely definitive rule is Lili Reinhart’s Swimming Lessons: Poems, but despite the instapoetry aesthetic of the book, Reinhart didn’t emerge out of the chaos of Instagram; rather, she published the book after already being an uberfamous actress. So it’s different. I’m a Reinhart stan, but like, as an actress, which is all I’ll say about Swimming Lessons.
Molly Fischer disagrees slightly with my characterisation of this trope:
The poems collected in both [of Kaur’s then-published] books frequently conclude in a final italicized line that explains the poem, either identifying its audience (- to fathers with daughters) or articulating its theme (- closure). But the versions that she posts online end “-rupi kaur,” which has given rise to the convenient Twitter punch line of turning things into Rupi Kaur poems by putting “- rupi kaur” at the end of them.
More on Fischer shortly.
YouTuber Strange Æons, premier video-historian of Tumblr, has produced some good overviews of the history of Tumblr’s aesthetic subcultures, e.g., “The Ghosts of Aesthetic Tumblr’s Past.”
On whom NO MORE, I SWEAR, I ONLY BRING HER UP BECAUSE SHE’S IN THE QUOTE, I WILL NOT FALL INTO THE TREND OF SABRINA CARPENTER SUBSTACK THINKPIECE ALBUM COVER ANALYSES TYPICALLY UNDERTAKEN BY PEOPLE WHO’VE NEVER HEARD ANY OF HER SONGS WHICH IS NOT THE CASE FOR CELESTE DAVIS OR ME!!1! I am not breaking my promise.
Then there are, in a manner of speaking, non-binary examples of eclectic punctuation. WHIPPED CREAM’s stage name is ALL CAPS, yet her album is this real? is no caps in both typography and, mostly, themes. I think she’s gone back and forth thematically too. Banshee’s album FABLES has an ALL CAPS title, but sentence-case capitalisation in the tracks’ individual titles.
I’ve explored elsewhere the idea that The Love Witch is Biller’s adaptation of Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Feminism and the Rise of Raunch Culture, while her previous film, Viva (2007), is an adaptation of Sheila Jeffreys’s Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. If not literally, then spiritually. Maybe more on this later?
Lesbian Avengers. “Dyke Manifesto: Lesbian Avengers; New York; 1994.” In Feminist Manifestos: A Global Documentary Reader, edited by Penny A. Weiss, 339–42. New York: NYU Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvf3w44b.77.
Autumn, Emilie. The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls. 4th ed. Asylum Emporium, 2017. 304.
It may already be obvious, but this post is longer than 800 words.
The resurgent ideal of being a delicate princess has been subject to its own Discourse™️ in the last little while, with critics of the viral idea of “princess treatment” attacking it as reactionary, while Kat Rosenfield at The Free Press provides a more nuanced (and compelling) perspective.
For instance: “I have also found it reasonable to take an author’s ideas seriously when, like the novelists covered in this study, they wish to be taken seriously or not at all.” Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), xiv.
Unless one is an Aristasian-in-Telluria, in which case one uses “maid” as the default term for a person. Nobody identifies as Aristasian-in-Telluria anymore but I have to add this note because I’ve spent so much time struggling through works with the grammatical weirdness of Aristasia’s “maid” and I need to feel it’s worth the brainpain.
Oxford English Dictionary, “girl (n.),” June 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7744946133.
Oxford English Dictionary, “maiden (n. & adj.),” June 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1022134051.
In case the Parthenon just came to mind: Athena’s virginity might not be why the Parthenon is called that.
Scott Cunningham, Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, 2004 (Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 2022), 11. That’s his use of “Wicca” as a plural, not my typo.
Thea Sabin, Wicca for Beginners: Fundamentals of Philosophy and Practice (Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 2006), 119.
Leviticus 13-14, see also Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s Kol Dodi Dofek, which informs my interpretation.
Isaiah 52:3.
Daniel 12:13.
Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (Simon & Schuster, 1984), 73-74.
88.
198.
Simidele Dosekun, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2020), 1.
3.
“Pink Hotel” also features the refrain, “Gays with ADHD, listen to me, I am your Scene Queen,” which I love.
Brownmiller 200.
Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (Riverhead, 2014), 42
This is an informative account of how Pussy Riot weren’t exactly what western audiences thought they were, and gives some detail about Tolokonnikova’s trajectory up to the present. However, I link it down here because it has nude photos in it, not from her OnlyFans account but from her early activism. It also has a mildly suspicious reference to a guy being Jewish when there’s no apparent reason to mention it, but that might be unintentional.
See, e.g.: Janice Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (Women’s Press, 1986).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990 (Routledge, 2007), 3.
Except for a lot of current gender theory that holds race to supersede gender as people’s most definitive identity, but I’m referring simplistically to how they discuss men-as-male.
As an aside, some hypothetical readers might recall that this post was initially supposed to be the second entry in the post-femcel femininity series. I have delayed finishing it many times. This section is why. I settled on a relatively tame description of trufemcel subculture in the final draft, so the idea that writing it took so much time and effort might seem odd. It’s a tough topic that not enough people have written about, is all.
I don’t often reference school newspapers directly because I don’t want to encourage undue criticisms of undergrads who write for them. I’ll link to my own column at my uni’s paper sometimes because a) my work my choice, b) I’m a grad student, and c) I have thicc skin. However, I’ll reference this piece solely because I’m making a positive reference. School papers, as I’ve repeatedly discovered in writing this series, are usually way ahead of mainstream outlets in publishing takes on women’s social media trends. Slay.
Problematic in the usual academic sense of a quandary in need of further inquiry and analysis.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Dell, 1963), 333.
344.
“Gaslight” is also the title of a classic song by Emilie Autumn!
RIP Teen Vogue.
Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl®️, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (PublicAffairs, 2016), 79.
237.
253.
I have created a monster.
The central hub of the Asylum story is absolutely her novel, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, but a lot of her music also concerns it, either representing the events of the novel in new ways (in her ongoing musical project), or just being sort of adjacent to it, cited in songs more directly part of it, and so on. Since I’m referring to the Asylum story as one sort of mass, synthesising elements where needed, I’ll not be specifying the precise source of each element. Below, however, are my chief sources.
The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls. 4th edition.
The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls: Behind the Musical. (Album; available on YouTube.)
Fight Like a Girl. (Album; available on YouTube.)
Unlike the other parables, the spider metaphor that I’m citing is all from one source: “The Spider’s Face,” on the album, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls: Behind the Musical.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 3rd edition (Hackett, 2019), 87.
“Fight like a girl” is a reference to the feminist anthem of the same name by Emilie Autumn, which in the context of her work refers to the Tea Party Massacre. I relegated discussion of this matter to outtake 1. There was no reasonable way to rework it into this outtake. Multiple layers!
Since I’m me, and it’s a personal pet topic, I find it worth adding in a footnote that Paege has spoken openly about her struggles with disordered eating, even releasing a song about it.
Quotes are from: Kathie Sarachild, “A Program for Consciousness-Raising,” 1968, in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader (NYU Press, 2000), 273-276.
I yearn for post femcel marriage…someone make me post please
That is brilliant. So much to agree with, so much to disagree with. I have to lieonthefloor now. Excuse me.