Before you read this article, I would suggest listening to “Just a Girl” by No Doubt and really reading the lyrics. This will all make sense, I promise. Now I feel inclined to discuss.
Gwen Stefani has gone on the record to explain in detail what the song means. It was a 90s power anthem meant to mock stereotypes about women, even using the word “girl”, a term associated with frills and pink. It was a song that fought back against what many thought being a woman was, and overcoming the imbalance between the sexes.
It was a song of liberation, becoming a woman, and no longer being seen as “just a girl.”
Flash forward to 2023–24, the song is trending again in the face of women losing their rights to their bodies and general anatomy. You would think the song would be trending for a good reason… well, instead, when you click the song on TikTok, you will see a different story. Videos like TikTok creator’s @miasweitz of girls crashing their cars, having complicated beauty rituals, and everything else you could think of are all you would see under the same statement: “I’m just a girl.”
There has been a quiet shift for a few years, one that doesn’t announce itself with protest signs and policy papers. It appeared as a joke at first, a certain aesthetic or vibe.
“I’m just a girl.” Girl dinner. Girl math. Feminine energy. Blue store vs. pink store.
Content that feels unserious and playful, at times even self-aware, but beneath the softness is something sturdier and older taking shape.
This is the soft launch of hard conservatism.
On the surface, these conversations come off as harmless, but in this political climate, what is harmless about joking about your loss of autonomy and turning to a state of ultra-submissiveness? The language disarms critique by declaring itself unserious. If it’s a joke, how could it possibly be political?
But politics doesn’t stop for anyone’s jokes and doesn’t always come as a command. Sometimes it slips through the aesthetics and niches, using repetition and trends to normalize what becomes normalized.
At the same time as these trends is the birth of renewed fashion and lifestyles. Gone are the funny buzzwords, and in comes a swift cultural change with a fascination surrounding the “tradwife” aesthetic.
Now, before I start speaking of people such as TikTok content creators like Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith, I am not dogging on stay-at-home moms or homemakers, and I think that it takes a lot to do these things, but I think many people who subscribe to the idea that this is the magnum opus of being a woman should rethink why they feel this way.
Figures like Ballerina Farm, where domestic labor is aestheticized, and the abundance of mouths she has to feed is a dream; they’re stripped of their historical weight and repackaged as fulfillment.
Bread making becomes content, and motherhood becomes a branch. Submission is the lifestyle. She is “just a girl.” The problem is not that women choose domestic lives—never that. Feminism has always defended choice. The problem is how choice feminism collapses any context and pretending choice exists in these vacuums of power, economy, or history.
When everything is framed as a matter of personal preference, structural critiques disappear.
This is where bioessentialism creeps back in dressed in affirmations. The insistence on “feminine energy” as something innate, delicate, cyclical, and natural sounds affirming until it hardens into expectation. When femininity is defined biologically, it becomes exclusionary by design. Trans-exclusionary radical feminism borrows this language, using biology as fate and destiny, turning feminism into something to be gatekept. It seems based on protection, but what it protects is a narrow definition of womanhood that mirrors those very systems feminism once fought for (or maybe never fought for).
Even pop culture participates. Sydney Sweeney’s frequent framing as the embodiment of “natural femininity,” her genes being “superior”—eugenics becomes a weapon against everyone, not just women. Her body becomes symbolic, invoking debates about desire, purity, and what “real” women look like. This is not about her as an individual (well, it could), but about how a new culture was using her image to revive old hierarchies under new lighting.
Everything has a side now—pink vs. blue. It’s almost like being transported back to elementary school. Everything seems to have a side. The work many have done has been cut in half by words like “sassy men” and “performativity”, leaving identities unable to be explored. The binary is comforting in a moment of instability, when the world feels uncertain, and freedom is pushed to extremes. Sometimes, people can only fall back on rigid categories to feel safe.
Historically, this is not new.
Feminists like Betty Friedan named the dissatisfaction that followed, exposing how enforced domesticity functioned as a form of control. In the 1960s and 70s, resistance emerged not only through protests, but also through culture.
Fashion, art, music, and writing became tools to fracture expectations. Punk rejected femininity altogether. Riot Grrrl screamed it back on their terms. Black feminists from the Combahee River Collective onward refused the idea that liberation could ever be one-size-fits-all.
What we are seeing now is another cycle. Conservatism no longer needs to argue. It vibes. It’s aestheticized, letting people opt in slowly, through irony and softness, until the underlying values feel normal again.
But resistance is happening too.
It appears among people who interrogate these trends rather than dismissing them. In creators who historize instead of romanticize. In feminists who refuse both purity politics and bioessentialism, insisting that liberation must be expansive or it is not liberation at all. The pushback is quieter, but sharper. It lives in essays, in podcasts, in classrooms, in group chats where someone finally mentions how messed up it can get.
Every era of conformity has produced its challengers. The more polished the narrative, the more necessary the disruption. The soft launch of hard conservatism is not the end of feminist resistance. It is a condition that demands its next evolution.
As history shows, cool people always show up when things get too neat. Resist, learn, hard launch understanding, empathy, and love. Go be cool.