Today, I use this article to air out my personal grievances with the phrase “I’m just a girl.” I choose to believe that the woman who came up with this phrase was aiming to enact its transformative power over the complex female mind. A strategy for which, as women, we are able to escape a male-dominated society that faults and blames us for our wrongdoings. Perhaps she wanted this phrase to be prescriptive for when we innately blame ourselves for certain actions. Maybe “I’m just a girl” was born with a motive of self-forgiveness, yet, in the modern context of femininity today, it feels like a marker of the stagnancy of a patriarchal womanhood.
Over the years, the way we categorize femininity has drastically changed. All of this, to me at least, has been perpetuated by social media. For a while, we were ‘pick-me’, then we didn’t want to be like other girls, and then we were ‘bruh girls,’ then forced to play into the trend of nonchalance where caring deeply about anything was weird, and then we somehow landed on embracing it all, while infantilizing ourselves with the phrase, ‘I’m just a girl;’ A warped retaliation against the misogyny within which we’ve been forced to define ourselves.
I find the confines of feminism to be a tired topic, but as we continue to morph into a trend-based society, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which female culture has changed and continues to change.
You’re not just a girl, and guess what? You’re not using ‘girl math’ to calculate how much money you ‘made’ from your return at Sephora. Sure, these are funny moments that are specific to the feminine experience, but you must stop falling into the trademarked faults of femininity that blame you for spending money or going shopping. I’m not one to disparage a shopping spree, but the repeated mantra of ‘I’m just a girl’ subjects you to a confinement from which you must free yourself from.
There is an infantilization of self that is spurred from these phrases, and subconsciously, it’s teaching us to define ourselves based on tired stereotypes. The term ‘girl,’ though beautiful, wonderful and layered with ferocious complexity, keeps us firmly planted in a youth with which we no longer identify. Your youth was joyous, your girlhood eternal, but allow yourself to believe you are so much more than just a girl.