Social media is an excellent tool for many people; it has provided countless employment opportunities, raised awareness of global and community issues, and helped spread movements and ideologies such as feminism. However, it has also watered-down significant causes and movements like feminism.
Social media forces users to condense essential topics into 2–3-minute videos, hoping their content will be engaging enough to fit into the algorithm. Within this brief 2-3 minute window, users merely scroll through the comment section and walk away, feeling like experts on the topic. This can lead to significant movements often being reduced to whoever has the loudest voice in the room on social media.
In 2023, the phrase “girl’s girl” gained popularity as a way to praise women for being good-natured in their friendships and interactions. I first encountered the phrase in the heat of a smear campaign against another woman. At first, I was confused because what on earth is a “girl’s girl,” only to find out it was a term used to describe women who celebrate being a woman, whether it’s being the girl in the bathroom who lets you borrow lip gloss to retouch, or a girl who primarily befriends other women. The phrase which started out as a fun way to uplift each other somehow transformed into a male-centred term created by women to tear other women down in the name of feminism.
Throughout 2024, I slowly began noticing a shift in the meaning of “girl’s, girl” from being an uplifting phrase to a more derogatory one. Two girls involved in drama over a man? Cue 100 comments and weeks of discourse surrounding whether they are a “girl’s, girl” or not. Being a “girl’s girl” is a surface-level ideology used to prop women who fit into the expectation of how they are supposed to act. Being on the side that’s participating in this labeling has promoted alarming levels of groupthink. Branding another woman as not being a “girl’s girl” is essentially using a catchy phrase to cover up the desire to blatantly shame and criticize her.
Lately, when I see the term “girl’s girl” being used, it’s often in response to social media users dogpiling on a female celebrity or influencer for issues that often focus on how they inappropriately interacted with a man. It’s a phrase created by women for women that centers around men, and that’s the crux of the issue with the term and the people who use it.
In this day and age of social media, using catchy tactics to promote what you believe feminism entails isn’t necessarily wrong. However, it raises a more significant issue: The increasing tendency to meme and joke about serious causes, movements, and beliefs. Feminism slowly being reduced to putting women in perfect boxes because of social media is a repercussion of this. Picking and choosing which of the feminist ideologies you want to believe in as a way to uplift women while centering men in is counterproductive to the feminist movement and will only continue to undo all the work of women who came before us.
The oversimplification of feminism that is influenced by internet trends surrounding feminism, womanhood, and girlhood all have effects that are quickly being brought to light. Decentering men from female friendships and ending the practice of passing judgment on women based on their interactions with men is necessary to create a safer space for young girls on the internet.
Feminism should be a movement that transcends social media trends that uphold patriarchal values that affirm traditional gender roles.