There is a moment in the 2023 Barbie movie that sits in my chest like a stone. America Ferrera’s character delivers a monologue about the impossible contradictions of being a woman, and even though the internet tried to critique it and think pieces called it “too obvious,” almost every girl I know felt a quiet sting when she heard it.
Maybe obvious is the point. The truth becomes cliché only when it is constant. And for young women today, the script of womanhood feels less like a guide and more like a surveillance system we have been trained to perform for, one I want to challenge here. This is not an argument for caring less but for caring differently, in ways that are not dictated by someone else’s comfort.
Modern femininity lives at the intersection of empowerment and inspection. We are told to love ourselves, but also to keep up. We are encouraged to take up space, but also to stay pretty while doing it. We are expected to perform confidence without appearing to perform. Authenticity has become a requirement, yet privacy is seen as suspicious.
It is not just that women are watched. It is that we learn to watch ourselves.
Where performance meets public life
Hollywood simply shows the extremes first.
Taylor Swift goes to a football game, and suddenly the country is debating whether she is ruining sports or saving ratings. Ariana Grande gets cast in “Wicked” and spends months not only promoting a film, but also fending off analysis of her face, her divorce, and her new relationship. Pamela Anderson attends Paris Fashion Week without makeup, and, instead of silence — the truest form of freedom — her natural skin becomes a topic of dissection.
Billie Eilish once wore oversized clothes and became the face of anti-objectification. She later wore form-fitting looks and was criticized for betraying the very narrative the public had projected onto her. Sabrina Carpenter performs pop with a wink, and half the internet debates whether she is reclaiming femininity or being infantilized by it.
In each case, the public conversation was not actually about the clothes, makeup, or concert outfits. It was about control. When famous women evolve, the culture audits them. When they do not evolve, the culture still audits them. The expectation is not perfection. It is an explanation.
The algorithm did not invent the gaze – it intensified it.
Women have always been asked to calibrate themselves.
In one era, society idolized the chic, mysterious movie star who never slipped. In another, it adored the low-maintenance girl who is “naturally stunning” without seeming to try.
Today, the aesthetic changes every few weeks, yet the rules stay the same: look good, look effortless, stay likable, act confident, and document it well enough to be admired but not so well that it looks intentional.
The difference now is scale and speed. Social media did not invent beauty standards, but it turned them into data points to measure our worth. What once lived on magazine covers now refreshes in our hands every thirty seconds.
The difference now is scale. Social media turned beauty standards into metrics through likes, saves, reposts, and side-by-side comparisons. Perfection once lived in magazines. Now it is in the palm of your hand, constantly refreshed, constantly critiqued.
Florence Pugh cuts her hair, and the internet debates whether she is expressing power, trauma, or a branding strategy.
Kylie Jenner appears with more natural features, and suddenly her face is treated like a cultural indicator rather than something attached to a human being. One woman’s personal choice becomes another woman’s panic about falling behind.
The female body has been cast as both billboard and battlefield, not because women chose that role, but because the culture refuses to stop reading us like text.
The gaze moves inward
Sociologist Erving Goffman described life as a performance long before the For You Page existed.
But today, self-presentation is not just conscious. It is anticipatory. We picture the comments before they come. We pose for photos we might never post. We rehearse authenticity.
Young women champion “natural beauty,” then purchase serums, brightening drops, and lip oils to recreate it. We talk about embracing a messy bun, then redo it several times until it falls in that editorial, off-duty way. Even self-love can become a look, something for the camera roll before it is something for the self.
This is not vanity. It is conditioning. The border between who we are and who we need to appear to be has blurred so fully that sometimes even we cannot tell the difference. Scroll through your Instagram story archive and count how many photos exist only because someone else might see them. That is the quiet modern tension: documenting a life sometimes overtakes living it.
What would womanhood look like without the audience?
Imagine Pamela Anderson attending a fashion show without being called brave. Ariana Grande changing her hair and no one analyzing her emotional state. Taylor Swift cheering at a game, and the conversation staying about football. Billie Eilish choosing a silhouette with no discourse attached.
Imagine the rest of us posting a picture because we like it, not because it rounds out a grid. Taking a break from work without framing it as a lifestyle era.
Not broadcasting authenticity, but actually having it.
We do not need to unsubscribe from femininity. We just need to unlearn the idea that being a woman requires public proof.
The answer isn’t to abandon caring altogether. It is to stop arranging our lives to soothe someone else’s expectations.