Opinion | The Joy of Communal Girlhood; the Anguish of Teen Girls

OK, I’ll admit it. When I first learned of hot girl walks, I tried it: Go on a walk, think about how hot you are, do not talk (or think) about men.

I thought girl dinner was pretty funny, too. Adult woman dinner meant preparing dinner for others. But a girl dinner? It was just delicious — or at least, edible — morsels tossed on a plate to please you and you alone. No prep, no cleanup, just me and my wedge of cheese and a handful of stale almonds, toppling the patriarchy with snacks.

But then, it seemed, there was suddenly a special “girl” version for everything: Weird girls were quirky fashionistas who refused to conform to sartorial blandness. Clean girls were subverting beauty standards — or something like that — with “no makeup” makeup and skin that looked like glazed donuts. Snail girls prioritized “self-care” over ambition, while rat girls — perhaps the most clever of the girlie trends — scurried about town, not a care in the world, shirking society’s expectations that women cater to others by prioritizing only themselves.

I’ve followed these phenomena over the past year with some combination of bewilderment and delight. Decades after my mother’s generation tried to dissuade the use of “girl” to refer to grown women, that four-letter word, with all its connotations, still seemed to make things involving women more playful, less shrill, a little more fun. And who didn’t want to be fun? Surely there was nothing harmful about the idea, however silly, that a simple dinner could be a feminist act, or that light physical exercise could be an exercise in self-confidence. Honestly, if only I could be as confident and unbothered — and simultaneously menacing — as a New York City rat.

And yet I still found myself mistrusting something about all of this: In 2023, it felt like the world was glorifying girlhood, or an exaggerated version of it, more loudly than at any time I could remember (or at least since I was 16 and dressing as a Spice Girl for Halloween). Was it just coincidence that this embrace came at a time when girls themselves seemed so very miserable?

If the year in girl culture were to be charted, you might say it began with Beyoncé, who became the most decorated Grammy artist of all time, climaxed with Barbiemania, which broke studio records and led to a shortage of pink paint, and ended with Taylor Swift, whose Eras Tour became the highest-grossing music tour in history and who was just named Time’s Person of the Year. Girlhood literally boosted the economy.