February 7, 2024 • 58 mins
Friend of the show Joey joins us to explain girl trends on social media, what they say about where we are societally, why they are popular and why we need to critically question them.
Links:
Trad Wives:
The Feminization of Self-Care:
Pick-me’s:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pick-mes/id1656465616?i=1000604970651
Coquette Capitalism:
https://www.tiktok.com/@c.a.i.t.l.y.n/video/7313264568569187630
Girl Hobbies:
https://www.tiktok.com/@raylot/video/7323330833283058975?q=girl%20hobbies&t=1707252860398
The suffocating trend cycle:
https://www.tiktok.com/@heidsbecker/video/7323388156588428587?_r=1&_t=8jc0RH6cu67&social_sharing=1
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to Stephan Never Told You a production of iHeartRadio,
and today we are so happy to once again be
joined by our contrude Deer, the wonderful, the lovely Joey.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Welcome, Joey.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey, Hello, thanks having me it has it has, but
super excited i'd be talking about TikTok once again.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Happy to be back on.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Well, I'm I'm very excited to learn about it. This
is something I kind of know tangentially about because I've
heard jokes about it, and I have what I call
TikTok friends and they let me know about it. But
I'm going to learn a lot today, So I'm counting
on you, and I know you did a lot of
(01:00):
research for this, and you have quite you were talking
about maybe a whole other other episodes that might come in.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Well, we're gonna this was originally came to you guys.
With this, I was sort of like, Hey, let's do
something about the whole like girl, dinner girl, insert word trends.
And then this very very soon spiraled into a much
bigger episode because I think there is something really weird
(01:31):
happening on TikTok. And just kind of online in general
regarding femininity and womanhood and girlhood and feminism and all
of these kind of big concepts.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
So I am calling this.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Episode when my kind of working title I put in
here was TikTok's Crisis of Femininity.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Because I think, and I specifically, you.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Know, white heterosexual cisgender femininity, but kind of what is
presenting itself is this sort of general just crisis of
femininity using of course, like pulling that from the term
like crisis of masculinity, which is something that I think
gets used a lot to talk about kind of historical
moments and also contemporary stuff that often is just referring
(02:22):
to conversations about masculinity and male identity and times when
this sort of gender role system is being shaken up
and is changing, and particularly how that's tied to like
capitalism and the changing kind of workforce. And I think,
what's happening now again, this is why I'm using this
(02:44):
term crisis of femininity that I just assumed people had
used before, and I hadn't actually found anyone using this,
but I'm sure it's out there. Who's to say, but
we're seeing this sort of weird repackage of feminism and
women's empowerment into a lot of very binary ideas of
(03:08):
womanhood that are often rooted in these very like traditional
gender roles and stereotypes. The kind of most obvious case
and most like extreme case of this is like the
trad wife movement and the stay at home girlfriend and
you guys just did a really great episode with Bridget
about trad wife.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
So that I'm gonna be referencing.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
But I think something that's also happening is this binary
is really making its way into a lot of like
much more mainstream expressions of like women's empowerment that often
like claim to be more progressive and seeing themselves as
more progressive. And then I think all of this is
kind of happening as a response to a move away
(03:50):
from this kind of like quote unquote girl Boss feminism
of the twenty tens. And what's happening is we're kind
of seeing that, yeah, the girl Boss era kind of
is over. It kind of didn't work in a lot
of different ways, And in response, I think it's being
replaced by this sort of feminism that or perceived feminism
(04:12):
that emphasizes consumerism and passivity. And I think it's important
to talk about and have these conversations and have these
conversations about how we're talking about girlhood and womanhood and femininity,
because I think what's happening is sort of it's it's
just as kind of dangerousness, just as like unproductive as
like the whole girl Boss movement was. And I think
(04:32):
we're going to end up where we were kind of
in like twenty seventeen twenty eighteen very soon if we
don't sort of address what's happening here. So I love
that to say, I'm gonna be talking about a lot
of different trends here that I'm seeing happening upfront. Just disclaimer,
as I often say when I'm on this show, just
(04:53):
because I'm criticizing all of these trends does not mean
that you're like wrong or in the wrong for like
enjoying these things. A lot of these things are sort
of like fun on their own, have elements that I
can see are empowering to people, but at the same
time that just makes it all the more important to
look at them critically. So Yeah, to start a couple
(05:14):
of weeks ago, I was on Instagram, and this is
right around when I had pitched this episode to you guys,
and I got this ad that came up that was
for like a self care company. I don't remember which
one it was exactly. I really wish i'd saved this ad,
but I did not. But yeah, I was like a
self care company that sells like candles and face masks
and bath bombs and all that. And in the ad
(05:37):
they used the term quote girl therapy to refer to
the products that they were selling, which again were like
mostly just candles. And this like set off something and
me because you know, if you've been on the internet lately,
you probably have seen there have been a lot of
(05:59):
these trends. Like the first real big one was like
girl dinner, but there's it's gone on into girl hobbies,
girl math, girl but now apparently girl therapy, which again,
this was the company.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Trying to sell candles. That's not therapy.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
You guys just did just free posted a really great
episode about the self care industry that I will put
in the notes because I think that kind of did
a good job selling up a lot of those issues there.
But yeah, this kind of set me on a spiral
of looking at all of these girl whatever trends, which Yeah,
(06:36):
So first off, let's talk about girl dinner, which back
in May, TikTok user Olivia Mahyer made this TikTok about
quote girl dinner. The original video is actually a joke
about this idea of like quote medieval peasant food just
being bread and cheese. And basically the video was her
being like, that sounds great, that's my ideal meal, and
(06:57):
then she.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Says, this is my dinner.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
I call it a dinner or medieval peasant and then
it just shows a bunch of like bread and cheese.
Later on TikTok, user at Karma Pilled made a video
going this is my meal, I call it girl dinner,
and then it's her singing girl dinner and a bunch
of different fonts and then that's the sound that.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Really blew up.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
But it was like derivative of this original video. Interestingly,
with that video, I didn't realize in it she's holding
what looks like a kind of like popsicle stick or
something like.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
It was like an ice cream bar.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
But yeah, that really took off over the summer and
it led to now two hundred and thirty two point
eight thousand videos under the girl dinner tag on TikTok.
So the girl dinner trend that in and of itself
is complicated and like honest, like originally that was gonna
be the whole episode. I kind of asked around different
(07:55):
people like what they thought about this, and I definitely
there was some sort of positive interpretations of it. One
that I definitely kept hearing was like, oh, it's this
kind of rejection of the idea that womanhood is all
about homemaking and it's about you know, making these like
perfect elaborate meals all the time. Like it's this trend
that is sort of like this is like girl dinner
(08:16):
is just kind of like whatever you've got. And you know, Also,
something that was interesting was early on, I think a
lot of people were showing, you know, meals that weren't traditionally.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Things you would associate with like girlhood.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
You know, a lot of like especially again off of
the sort of Girl Boss era, like a lot of
it was very much rooted in like diet culture and stuff,
and these sort of videos were showing more anti diet
culture type meals, like more kind of a lot of
like junk food and stuff like that. That being said,
the problem is once you make a trend and you
(08:52):
put it out into the world, you kind of lose
control of it over it, And what we started to
see was a lot of people using that.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Sound and using the kind of girl dinner thing to show.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Essentially one are just like signs of eating disorders or
you know, promotion of kind of these unhealthy habits.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
So that was the first.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
Sort of thing that happened with that, and then the
other was this sort of girl dinner trend turned into
all of these different things like girl math, girl hobbies,
girl rotting.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Basically like taking the.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
Word girl and then attaching it to another miscellaneous thing,
and by putting the word girl in front of it,
it was kind of giving it this.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Like lighter, unseerious tone.
Speaker 5 (09:37):
Wait, I need to understand what girl rotting is, because
I've heard everything else.
Speaker 6 (09:41):
This girl riting.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
So just to talk about I'm gonna get there, Okay.
Speaker 6 (09:53):
Okay, I need to answer to all these things.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I'm like, what, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
But to kind of point to this sort of overall trend,
there was an article in Forbes that said, quote girl
trends predate TikTok itself. In twenty eight nineteen, Rapper Mecan
the Stallion popularized the body positive slogan quote hot Girl Summer,
which became an internet meme largely through Twitter and Instagram.
Quote being a hot girl is about being unapologetically you,
(10:19):
having fun, being confident, living your truth, being the life
of the party, et cetera. The rapper posted in July,
and the phrase inspired the title of her song Hot
Girl Summer, which released that August. Its legacy can be
seen in some of the TikTok girl trends. And then yeah,
so this article points to like hot girl, block girl, dinner,
(10:40):
all of these different things. Another kind of article talking
about this was from Business Insider, in which they said,
quote gen Z is reclaiming the word girl after years
of reckoning over people using the term to infantilize women.
The fact that women are using the term girl represents
a cultural reclamation, conscious or not, after years of reckoning
over the term and sexist used. Being called a girl,
(11:02):
especially in hierarchical settings like a workplace, can be unintentionally
patronizing at best and demeaning at worst.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And so yeah, like, I totally agree.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
I think like there obviously is like a very heavy
misogynous connotation being called a girl with like things that
are associated with girlhood. And I think it is interesting
that this kind of has been the response to the
fact that like this idea of like the girl boss
and girl boss feminism sort of failed and sort of
didn't really work out.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
This is where I think it.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Is important to look at what these actual trends are
doing and promoting.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
And Samantha, this is what I'm going to get to
your question of what is girl body.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Because yeah, it's for one thing obviously, Like if we're
rooting this back in like hot Girl Summer, Hot Girl Want,
that's one thing. Girl dinner that was sort of the
like nexus point of like something that I think started
very innocently and started as kind of like a fun
thing that took a very dark turn. Go back to
that Business Insider article later on. There's a quote that
(12:09):
says the past few years of girl based trends, as
Kate Lindsay noted in Internet Culture newsletter embedded earlier this week,
have shifted. While women were once girl bossing are now
talking about rotting in their bedrooms. As Lindsay writes, these
types of trends are a counterpoint to the idealized girl
aesthetics of the twenty twenties, and in the process they
(12:30):
plucked and pulled apart the concept of girlhood through internet memes.
Despite some of these trends being pretty mundane, that's actually important.
Reducing a girl to a series of increasingly feral behaviors
removes some of the terms baggage. So yeah, like what
this quote is saying is that like it's sort of
rejecting this idea of like girlhood being a not taking
(12:50):
it seriously and be kind of rejecting the idea of
like the girl boss and the very manicured, very like
put together idea of girlhood. But also I think it
raises this quote kind of phraises a lot of red
flags about this whole kind of girl trend where yes,
it is kind of a response to the fact that
girl boss feminism.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Kind of failed.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
It ended up sort of promoting this very like unattainable,
exhausting idea that was very much rooted in capitalism. So
it's promoting the opposite. Girl rotting is the idea that like, yeah,
you're gonna come home from work and you're just gonna
like lay in bed and watch TV and you're gonna
girl rot You're not gonna and it's kind of repackaging
it as a way of like, oh, this is just
(13:34):
part of girlhood. You're girl rotting, which I don't know.
To me, I'm like, maybe that's there's a bigger problem
there we need to talk about.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
Are we talking about depression?
Speaker 5 (13:45):
Right? This conditional thing that happened, like is that we're
calling a girl rotting to make it cute and hopefully like.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Let me figure that.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
And I'm like, that's a symptom of depression or like,
maybe that is like a bigger again, if we're talking
about all these things being a response to the pact
that like girl boss feminism, you know, just sort of
ended up perpetuating a lot of these really toxic, hyper
capitalist ideas. If girl broading is the opposite of that,
you haven't solved the problem. You're still being exhausted by
(14:16):
the system. Yeah, so that one was weird. I'm going
to pivot to girl math real quick too, because girl
math was the other one that I think really started
to be like, all right, guys, what are we doing?
So from a Washington Post article about girl math, they say, quote,
there's no need to have a moral panic about the trend,
says Dan Egan, vice president of Behavioral Finance and Investing
(14:38):
for Betterment Additional Investment advisory firm. Egan says, what's a
place psychology? And it's obvious this has nothing to do
with gender kidding aside, girl math represents the type of
mental accounting many people do, guys included. It's how we
compartmentalize financial decisions. It's also how we just buy overspending
end quote. So, yeah, girl math is basically this idea
(15:00):
of like there's all these videos being like, oh, if
you're paying for something with cash, it's girl math. It
doesn't matter if it's like you know, you and your
friends going out to dinner and you're just vendowing each
other back and forth for like the same cycle of meals.
It's not real money because you're like basically just like
pay each other back and forth.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Which like I get it.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
And again that quote is saying like this is something
that everybody does. It's just psychology is just kind of
how we like think about spending. Why are we putting
girl in front of it?
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Though? Like what is the message there?
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Are we just sort of saying like, oh, it's girl
math because girls can't do math. Girls can't like understand
finances and like, so later on in that article, they
talked to another financial expert, Kia McAllister Young, the director
of America Saves, and unlike the first person that they interview,
this person's actually a woman, which I don't know, I
think that's interesting, but she calls the trend quote amusing
(15:55):
and like her only sort of concern is this idea
of like, yeah, it's fun, but like, let's make sure
this isn't how we're doing all of our budgeting, Like
it's important to also budget, but like that's kind of
the point is I'm like, yeah, I know, if we're
admitting that this isn't a good way of budgeting, this
is a this is sort of a fun, silly thing.
Why are we so insistent on attaching it to girlhood,
on attaching it to this gender binary And then so
(16:16):
the sort of the last sort of trend that I
want to talk about in these girl whatever trends is
and this is the one that I think kind of
was a marker to me that this kind of trend
is ending and it's sort of starting to reach its downfall.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Is this idea of quote like girl hobbies.
Speaker 6 (16:34):
So there was a.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
TikTok that went viral, and I'm not going to say
the person's user name for this because I have nothing
good to say about this TikTok, but basically it was good.
It was presenting this idea of like girl hobbies and
it was basically saying, oh, if you think you don't
have any.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Hobbies, no, you just have girl hobbies.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
And they listed girl hobbies as grabbing a little treat,
coffee or pastry, doing our skincare, makeup, hair routines, reorganizing
instead of sleeping, hot girl walk, social media, investigative work,
shopping in store or online, and so like.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
This video went viral.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
And immediately like met a bunch of like a bunch
of people did stitches of it, kind of being like whoa, Like, what's.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Going on guys?
Speaker 4 (17:23):
TikTok user Taylor Dade, who uses the at ray lot,
posted a response that blew up that I think kind
of sum rises it very well. She says, what is
going on? What are we saying those are not hobbies?
What is going on with this infantalization brain rot trend
that has grown women saying no, I don't need hobbies
(17:43):
or a personality because I'm a teenage girl and I
have to get coffee and a little treat and go shopping.
And then she later goes on to say, which I
think is another good point. I know everybody who says, hmm,
maybe it's kind of heart andful to identify ourselves with
extremely sexist stereotypes gets called a pick me.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Well, guess what.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
I love Charlotte Tilbury, Contour wand and Hot Pink Stanley
just as much as you guys do. However, I have
my own thoughts and opinions and feelings and ambitions and
goals and dreams and interests and hobbies and personality outside
of consumers bolsh. So yeah, this is wh I think
this particular video, the girl hobbies video, and all of
the backlash signals to me that.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
We're kind of like beyond the peak of this.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
I think people are starting to realize, like it's going
a little too far. But also, yeah, let's talk about this,
because what are the things that she's calling girl hobbies? Shopping,
doing makeup, skincare all of the like we literally just
took the like women be shopping and put it in
a different pont and like repackage it in a way
that so It's kind of like, if the original argument
(18:45):
is that we're reclaiming this idea of girlhood and we're
taking you know, reclaiming the idea of femininity in girlhood.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Is that actually what's happening or are.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
We just reinforcing these kind of stereotypes and it what like,
what is the benefit of also then really really emphasizing
this gender binary, this idea that all of this is
just this is just part of girlhood. All of these
sort of very consumerist, very passive ideas are a part
of girlhood.
Speaker 5 (19:16):
I just want you to know that all these hobbies
you listed off was all on our girl talky So oh.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Sorry, yeah, I know nineteen eighty right, it was literally
lis every single one of those things.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Why exactly.
Speaker 4 (19:30):
That's what I'm saying, though, It's like, what happened guys,
like this is the kind of nineteen eighties Like oh yeah,
literally it's women be shopping in a different font.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
What's happening?
Speaker 5 (19:40):
And also to note all of this makes these are
million dollar industries that we're talking.
Speaker 4 (19:44):
About exactly, which the other part of this is I
think it's interesting that this is like, and I've said,
I think this is a response to the fact that
a lot of people felt that like girl.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Boss feminism didn't work.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
So instead of like becoming becoming the CEO, becoming the
you know women, that's really like winning in the in
the capitalist financial spirit. Now it's just become about consuming
and about consuming the things. And I think this kind
of is where it led me to look at this
not just as like its own kind of trend of
(20:20):
girl dinner, a girl math or hobbies, et cetera, but like,
let's also look at the other sort of conversations that
are happening around girlhood and around women womanhood and femininity
and feminism on TikTok. So this is where we're going
to go into the second kind of silo here in
(20:40):
my big conspiracy board of all of these different trends
that are happening, which is the cycle of fast fashion
micro trends that are happening on TikTok. And this idea
of like the quote like esthetic, if you're somebody like
me who has been very chronically online, you'll know that
(21:00):
this word like aesthetic and the idea of having an
aesthetic is not like a new thing. And so like
when I'm talking about aesthetics, it's not really in an
online sense. It's not really like the traditional definition of
the word. Usually it is referring to like a personal
sense of style that's really tied to fashion and appearance
(21:22):
and kind of like you are just like general household decor,
room decor kind of stuff. I always really associate it
with like kind of twenty fourteen era Tumbler. It was
like a big thing to have, like you're very curated aesthetic.
So yeah, again, it's not like necessarily a new thing,
but I think in a post kind of twenty twenty
(21:43):
world where like TikTok has become this like major hub
for like culture, the whole idea of having an aesthetic
is really like tookn off, and it's moved away from
sort of being a personal sense of style to just
being a way to describe this sort of series of
trends that are happening, and these trends that have also
(22:03):
been happening at like an ever kind of quickening pace
and have become more and more connected to the fast
fashion industry. So yeah, if you've been on TikTok, you know,
the most recent kind of iteration of this has been
the mob wife trend, which was its own sort of chaos.
That was really funny. I am Italian American. I thought
(22:23):
all of the drama around that was really funny. But yeah,
so we have the mob bofe trend. Some previous kind
of esthetic trends that have happened have been the clean girl,
old money, coastal grandma, rock star girlfriend, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera, and the personal bane of my existence. I
could do a whole episode about this, but the cocatte trend, I.
Speaker 6 (22:47):
Know none of these right now, everybody was.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
Freaking out, this is what I think, like, this is
it's this And then it's the same thing with girl hobbies,
where there's one thing that kind of sets it off
and as everybody being like, what's going on?
Speaker 1 (23:04):
What are we doing?
Speaker 4 (23:05):
So yeah, a lot of the time, not all the time,
but usually these kind of aesthetics are tied to like
kind of a callback to an earlier subculture, but instead
of really being rooted in that subculture, being rooted in
like the cultural aspect of it, it's much more focused
on like consumable goods like fashion and you know, yeah,
(23:27):
just like household decor kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
But yeah, really, really emphasizing fashion.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
And we've also seen in a like post kind of lockdown,
post twenty twenty world, the like takeoff of the fast
fashion industry and which you know had been a thing
for a while, but it really really kind of reached
some new heights in like in the sort of post
twenty twenty world, we've seen these brands like Shean really
(23:57):
take off. And this has been like perfect sort of
like it's been this perfect storm of for these trends
to happen, and for these trends to happen it like
a faster and faster pace. So what has happened is
having an aesthetic has kind of moved away from being
a personal sense of style and it has instead become
(24:19):
keeping up with the latest trend, keeping up with the
latest sort of hyper specific micro trend, the clean girl,
the rock star girlfriend, the mob wife, the whatever.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah, and Coquette, which is yeah, I have a lot
of things to say about Coquette.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
And so this is where I think there's two concerning
things here. One is that yes, this is very tied
to fast fashion, and it is very tied to these
corporations that are relying on sweatshop labor that are relying
on all these sort of very terrible practices, both on
a humanitarian level and on an environmental level. And also
(25:02):
we need to look at what is actually being kind
of like promoted at least trends, because well, again, yes,
it is fun to have like a fun little aesthetic
that you know, it doesn't necessarily have to have any
meaning to it. There are some sort of connecting threads
through all of this that I think are a little
bit concerning.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
So like mob wife, rock star girlfriend.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
These were two that really stuck out to me because
I was like, why it's so weird that they're emphasizing
the like girlfriend, you're not the thing, but you're the
girlfriend of the rock star, you're the mob wife. Coquette, Like,
let's be real, it is the coquette trend is rooted
in a like kind of cult around youth and in
a lot of these very like pedophilic ideas about beauty.
(25:49):
In women's beauty, it is like rooted in like the
kind of Lolita trends. And again that's to say, like
you can enjoy this sort of stuff in this sort
of fashion and not have it not be that serious.
But this becoming as popular as it is and being
something that is very much rooted in a lot of
like very misogynistic ideas about beauty. That gets a little
(26:16):
bit concerning. And then sort of we're seeing some other
micro trends that I think are interesting. I don't understand
what these are still, but there was like the tomato
girl and the pickle girl and whatever, and something that
I was seeing happen over and over againness all of
these are they're very much rooted in like girl, clean girl,
mob wife girlfriend, all of these things. They're very much
(26:37):
rooted in this like gender binary, and a lot of
times they are like expressions of hyperfemininity.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
You know.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Coquette is like really leaning into hyperfemininity. Even the mob
wife trend like leans very much into hyperfemininity.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
So I think it's just it's interesting too.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
And one of those articles that I was talking about
originally that we're talking about girl math and girl hobbies
and all this, we're talking about how it's a rejection
of these kind of constant trends, but at the same time,
these sort of trends are also rooting themselves in this
idea of girlhood and femininity and this is what it
is to be a woman.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
This is what it is to be a girl.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
So this is where I'm going to jump in and
like just acknowledge the fact that so like I personally.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Don't identify as a woman.
Speaker 4 (27:35):
I identify as like non binary and gender queer and uh,
trans masculine. But that being said, I think like that
is kind of the thing that makes this really stand
out to me, because all of these trends are so
so rooted in the gender binary and in emphasizing the
gender binary, and I think, especially at a time where
(27:56):
there have been so many violent fs to reinforce that
gender binary, I think we need to be really critical
about how we are actually talking about those ideas and
talking about something as you know, supposedly silly is just
like your whatever personal sense of style, a fashion trend,
(28:18):
but how are we talking about that in terms of
like the gender binary, And so to really look at that,
let's talk real quick about like the extreme version of
this gender binary, which is the trad wife. And you
guys just did a really awesome episode with bridget about
tradwife and trodwife culture that I would definitely recommend checking out.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
I'm not going to go.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
Super into this idea because I think, like I'm definitely
preaching a little bit to the choir here about like
why the whole idea of the trodwife and the trodwife
image is harmful. I think we need to look at
why we're seeing this trend now and what it's claiming
to be in a response to, versus like what it
actually kind of is a response to, because honestly, I
think this whole like tradwife ideal and image is rotten
(29:03):
in a lot of the same anxieties that these other
trends are also rooted in, because the tradwife phenomena is
kind of posing it. What it does is it poses
itself as in opposition in response to girl boss feminism, right,
It is this idea that women we have somehow been
(29:24):
duped by feminism into going into the workforce, and really
what is empowering is to go back into the homes
and you know, get married and hoop out a bunch
of kids and provide for those kids and whatever like
all of that. And I think if you look at again,
the whole idea of like girl rotting, girl math, girl hobbies,
(29:47):
all of that is also a response to the fact
that a lot of women did not feel fulfilled by
girl boss feminism. So TikTok user Caitlin, it's c ai
il Yn with like a period in between each letter.
I'll link the original video in the notes. But she
(30:07):
made a really great video I think breaking this down
and connecting a lot of these things that I'm talking
about and talking about it in the context of the
child wife movement. So in a video called Coquette Capitalism,
which I will link in the notes, she starts by
quoting a tweet from fashion and culture writer Ryan Finn
that states bows and ribbons are symbolic of twenty twenty
(30:28):
three being the year of the girl plus useless thing,
when it should have been the year of the girl feminism. Instead,
we've had the Barbie film rebranding girl boss culture through
uplifting successful billionaire capitalist women girl math being used to
advertise at the same time the reproductive rights are being stripped,
the gender wage gap is awful, and we lack a
globally interconnected feminist movement and the bows and ribbons that
(30:53):
sort of trend is related to the coquette trend, just
her context, and.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
This is why I'm critical of that argument.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
Like girl Dinner and girl Math and girl whatever, it's
somehow like reclaiming this idea of girlhood and femininity which
had previously not been taken seriously by the patriarchy, because
we need to look at what is actually being claimed
as part of girlhood. Caitlin then goes on to talk
about how, in addition to the popularity of like the
coquette trend and this return to more like girlish esthetics,
(31:23):
very traditional feminine aesthetics, which was all these aesthetic trends
I was talking about. Quote, twenty twenty three was also
the year of girl math, and girl math was juxtaposed
against the male Roman Empire, where in pretty overt ways,
we're saying through pop culture and memes that girls can't
do math, or girls have their own special kind of
math called girl math. Meanwhile boys or men are constantly
(31:45):
thinking about history.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
They're thinking about the Roman Empire.
Speaker 4 (31:48):
She then says, quote this happening in the same year
as the rise of the state home girlfriend, the soft life,
and the Sprinkle Sprinkle, which all of that I'm kind
of putting under the like trodwife umbrella, because I think
the state at home girlfriend is sort of the like
more secular, slightly less crysto fascist.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Version of the trod wife. But yeah quote.
Speaker 4 (32:09):
The implicit argument behind all of these being that contemporary
feminism has failed to provide women with material well being.
The real way to undermine the patriarchy, or to make
the patriarchy work for you, is to get a rich
man to pund your lifestyle and never have to work again.
So we're seeing in real time the infantilization of women
through pop culture and memes. The image of the girl
boss or girl power of five to ten years ago
(32:30):
in the early to mid two thousand times is dead,
particularly as many of these women owned millennial core companies
like Nasty Gal and Glossier experience their corporate downfall and
honestly like, yeah, I agree, I think that she's onto
something there. So she then goes on to say we've
ended up with bimbo feminism and girl math not because
women believe that they themselves are stupid, but because they're
(32:50):
tired and because the promise of girl boss feminism that
we've seen for the last several decades didn't deliver. The
reason that girl boss feminism wasn't successful in challenging the
patriarchy was because it was not anti capitalist and Instead,
it viewed capitalism as an avenue through which women could
find liberation. For the vast majority of women who belong
to the working class and have to continue to go
(33:11):
to work in order to pay their bills and survive
in capitalist society, girl boss feminism did not think for
them except maybe replace their boss or their CEO with
a woman in a hand suit. The material conditions of
the vast majority of women didn't change as a result
of girl boss feminism, and after several years of significant
material challenges, including the pandemic and shrinkulation, it's no wonder
why people might want to retreat back into I'm baby
(33:33):
and I just want to be taken care of. Unfortunately,
this is just a band aid or a short term
coping mechanism two larger structural problems of capitalism and patriarchy
end quote so.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
To summon up.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
I think it's not a coincidence that we're saying the
tradwife stayed home, girlfriend, girl, insert word trend, and like
highly binary fashion trends all happening on TikTok right now.
I think this is all kind of a respect to
this crisis of femininity and the fact that like the
(34:06):
world is a very very scary place right now. Like
one of the things that she said in that is
that I get it. It is like there's a lot
of really weird mess of stuff happening. We are entering
an election year. There are so many, so many scary
possibilities and realities that are happening, particularly for women and
(34:27):
for non men, and so it makes sense to want
to seek that comfort, to want to go back into
this idea of like self and fantilizing I'm.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Just a girl. I'm not gonna you know, I'm.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
The whole I'm just a twenty four year old teenage
girl thing. I think, especially for a lot of us
that are at like, you know, I'm in my mid
twenties right now. The pandemic happened at a time when
I would have been reaching a lot of those like milestones,
and I that's of experience is.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Sort of disrupted for me.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
I think a lot of people are feeling sort of lost,
and I think all of these things are responses to
that feeling of being lost. And it's understandable, but again,
it is not a solution. It is a band aid.
I think the importance of talking about this right now
is that if we lean too hard on all these ideas.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
If we lean too hard of this idea of girlhood.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
Being silly and light and this very like consumerist idea
of girlhood, it's just going to end up. We're just
going to end up the same place that we were
in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, where people were starting
to realize that, like the girl Boss, feminism also didn't work.
(35:46):
So yeah, I think again, there's two main concerns here.
One is this sort of leaning into consumerism as a
form of.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Liberation or self actualization.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
The second is this really really strong emphasis on the
gender binary and on everything being very very gendered, whether
that's something like you know, food which is what we
need to survive, to hobbies and fashion and all of that,
all of that happening at a time when there is
efforts to criminalize any sort of deviance from the gender binary.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
So yeah, all of that is.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
To say, these are all very There's a lot of
weird stuff happening. There's a lot of weird stuff happening
on TikTok. I don't know what the solution is.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I think.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
Again, I understand why this moment is happening. I understand
what these things are responding to. But I also think
it is indicative of the fact that something is like
very wrong right now and people are just kind of
scrambling for solutions. And yeah, that's where we're at.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
There's a there's a lot of obviously, like I'm sitting
here trying to remember any of these trends. I'm like,
I don't I'm on TikTok and i don't know these
three things. And I'm so sad that I'm not caught
up with the world slash the kids, you kids.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
You know what.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
I don't even like I can I call my I
don't know if I can still call myself a kid,
But I'm not a kid of that.
Speaker 6 (37:24):
I'm saying this in this ideal of like I old, it's.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Well, that's part of it is that all of this
stuff is moving very fast, and I think that is
definitely an element of it. All of these these trends
are moving very fast. These ideas are moving fast, These
images of these idealized images of womanhood or of girlhood
are moving very fast. And you know, like you said before,
that is very convenient for a lot of these companies
(37:49):
that are making this clothing or this whatever, or these
candles for girl therapy or whatever.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
You know.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
And again, this is why I keep going back to
capitalism and what happens when we look at capitalism as
a route for as a route for liberation, because we
tried that with the Girl Boss feminism and it didn't work.
And now we're trying a different route, which is through
(38:18):
consumption and through consumerism, and that also is something that
I think is going to I think we're already seeing
it start to kind of fall apart, and I think
it could lead us in a very dangerous direction. And also,
capitalism is always going to be have an interest in
upholding the gender binary, you know, like it is easier
to sell things to people if they are very highly gendered.
(38:40):
It's easier to advertise things that are this is about girlhood,
this is about whatever.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
So there definitely.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
Needs to be some more sort of critical thinking, I think,
around gendering all of these ideas so so explicitly.
Speaker 5 (38:53):
Well, it's also just a reminder that capitalism and marketing
know how to take advantage of something, and so they
are going to make money whichever way possible. But I
think it's also important to remember that things like Girl Boss,
which seemed cute and empowering at the beginning. Really, when
it did benefit women, it was white heterosexual women kind
(39:14):
of some conversations about what happened on Facebook and having
big books readen about motivating women to be leaders. It
was aimed and targeted towards one specific type of woman,
which also is that same conversation of like when women
talk about why can't we go back to the days
where we didn't have to wor feminism failed us, when
in actuality, yes, white feminism failed you, because if we
(39:35):
had actually looked at the black community and the people
of color during the big waves of feminism in the seventies,
we would have a different conversation about choice rather than
about work and not being what they would say, housewife
and all that. And there's that conversation who was left
out and who was not being seen? And that's in
the same conversation too, because when we talk about cute
girly things, it's typically white women that I see or
(39:58):
white girls, and it's a cute idea for a minute.
Then you start thinking about the repercussions of because people
see this as cute and just a fun trend, you
don't see the underlying thing of like, oh, eventually this
will be used against whomever in this ideal of Okay,
we can fix ourselves. We become more like these people
(40:20):
and doing these girl and dinner, which every time you
say that, that ring, that that jingle is in my head.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I can't get rid of it.
Speaker 5 (40:27):
Yeah yeah, yeah, constantly every time, and that forever will
be in my head. But like who who it is
benefiting and what the ideal type or like lifestyle is,
and it's usually trended after again sis, upper middle class
white women. And that's that conversation of like, yeah, this
doesn't seem bad. But then when you really look at
(40:49):
who is being normalized and who is being upheld as
this is the status quo, it's very dangerous.
Speaker 4 (40:55):
As you were saying, Yeah, and like what I said
at the top two been talking about girl Dinner.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
I think it is something that started totally innocently.
Speaker 4 (41:03):
I think it honestly, like I understand the arguments for
why people enjoyed it. But once you put a trend
out there into the world, like you lose control of it.
I think like the last kind of big example of
this was the whole like bimbo trend in bimbo feminism
on TikTok, and like that is something that when it.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Started, like I was like, oh my god, I love this.
This is so fun. I think a lot of the
early kind of creators around that.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Were doing some really fun content, but it was something
that you know, a was co opted by these corporations
that were like, oh, look, another opportunity to sell a
certain type of clothing or whatever.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Two people sell a lifestyle to people.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
And then also if it's an idea that is rooted
in very misogynistic stereotypes, like the idea of like the
bimbo reclaim, something can turn into just reinforcing those stereotypes
real quick. And I think we're seeing that now with
all these girl trends.
Speaker 5 (42:07):
Right And also with that, we should be holding social
media responsible as well, because we see who is trending
and that makes a difference of why these trends are successful.
And again, it's also kind of like the whole fact
that a lot of black creators will talk about the
fact that their stuff is suppressed while qts white girls
(42:27):
and I love I love you my SOLSI please don't
think I'm being mean, but it like statistically as it's
shown that the QT white girls are probably going to
be at the forefront of trending, not just white girls,
but white people in general.
Speaker 6 (42:40):
So just spreading that out.
Speaker 5 (42:42):
But like, that's that conversation is like, are we also
talking about what social media is allowing to be the
top of the trend and why it is the top
of the trend and who is being suppressed in these
conversations as well, because you know, there's a lot to
the algorithm, but also algorithm that is created or manipulated
(43:05):
by these companies, you know, Instagram and Facebook. Husband repeatedly
called out for that, and TikTok is slowly getting repeatedly
called out for that. But it's a it's a conversation
in this as well, because yes, that girl had no
intention I'm sure of like making this. She's like, why
a y'all talking about me? I just wanted to eat
cheese and bread and I feel you. I feel you.
(43:26):
That's all I want to do is eat bread. But like,
in the end, who is being raised on these platforms
or who are being more noted or being seen up
more often? And in that conversation as well, but also
I still need you to explain to me what Coquette
is I'm still lost.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
Oh this is yeah, I probably shouldn't have included.
Speaker 4 (43:50):
A little thing about that, so confused, I might come
on here into a whole episode about all of my
various issues with cocatte. Coqutte is one of those things
where again I think when we talk about is you know,
criticizing a sort of cultural thing, if this is a
you know, type of fashion or style that you are
(44:12):
interested in, if something that you like, totally understand that.
But at the same time, I think we really need
to examine, like what a lot of it is rooted.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
In Coquette is Basically.
Speaker 4 (44:26):
This is the other problem because the thing that happens
on TikTok with a lot of these trends is they
start off as one thing and then they just become
like much broader and like I think coquette is definitely
Like I saw something the other day that was like
a bunch of very like runge style clothing that somebody
called coquette, and that is not coquette at all.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
But coquette is basically it is it's it's rooted in like.
Speaker 4 (44:49):
Stuff that is I hang on, I'm trying to find
like a good definition of it because I'm looking at
like the pictures. Yeah, it's all very it's like pink
and a lot of bows, and it's rooted in this
idea of like girlhood and childhood.
Speaker 5 (45:05):
So it's just like a pastel version of the Lolita, right.
Speaker 4 (45:10):
It's it's it's okay, it's a it's yeah, that's good
way I put it.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Get it's like pasta Lolita fashion. It is.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
The whole kind of trend is very connected to like
the Lolita trend, which again that's where I get into
I think, I think it is important to examine how
some of this is kind of rooted in these very
like these cults of youth and particularly around like young
girls in girlhood and how that is sexualized. It became
(45:38):
very pop Yeah, at the end of twenty twenty three,
this became like very very popular on TikTok. If you
guys saw there are a lot of like videos of
people putting bows on like everyday objects and being like
my favorite one was somebody who took like a pair
of like weights and like put a bow on them
and was like their cocatte now. Like but again, like
(46:00):
with that, it's fun and it's silly, but also anytime
we're using a trend that is or a idea that
is like rooted in a lot of complex, mildly problematic,
you know, to extremely problematic ideas, and it just opens
(46:24):
the door for a lot of stuff to happen.
Speaker 5 (46:26):
Yeah, I got to I yes, and I see that
it is aligned with that conversation about soft.
Speaker 4 (46:31):
Girl, Yeah, which I think also I read what you
said about like all of these trends also being like
you know, when you look at them up on TikTok,
when you see the stuff that's trending on TikTok, a
lot of the times it's white women. A lot of
the times it is like conventionally attractive cis white women. Yeah,
that's also part of the conversation, and that is also
part of like the idea of you know, if this
(46:51):
is the image of girlhood that we're creating, and this
is the image of womanhood that we're creating, it's very white,
it's very it's very much rooted and traditional ideas about beauty,
and uh, yeah, it is. It's it's definitely it's rooted
in whiteness, it's rooted in heteropatriarchy, it's rooted in TRANSASOCNE. Yeah,
(47:12):
and that again is an issue of like the apps
more than I think it is these individual creators.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
One thing that I did think was interesting that I
did not realize this.
Speaker 4 (47:29):
So the original girl Dinner, the person that did the
video that was like girl dinner or medieval peasant food
or whatever, which I didn't even realize that was how
it started, that was made by a white woman. The
woman that did the one with the little song with
the like girl dinner, that was actually a black woman
that did it, that made the original video. Which but
(47:50):
again I think about this conversation was interesting because I
had not seen that original video until I like went
and looked it up and was like, who is the
first person to.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Like make that sound?
Speaker 4 (48:00):
So I don't know, maybe there's there's definitely something there too, but.
Speaker 5 (48:05):
Yeah, maybe the original I saw was also a white girl.
And then that's who got a credited who got credited
with it?
Speaker 4 (48:11):
For what I've said, That's what I'm saying is that
she got the credit for it, which she did, you know,
make the original video using term girl dinner. But yeah,
like I that I it took me much longer to
find out who made the song.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
Yeah, the jingle. The jingle, the jingle is a jingle.
Speaker 6 (48:28):
In my head because and also now I want meat, and.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
Geez, you can make that happen. I think you can
make that happen.
Speaker 6 (48:38):
I'm gonna have to go to a grocery store.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Well, I do think there's a lot more we could
talk about.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
There's a lot of I've been thinking about this a
lot too, about the nick Well, I'm not on TikTok,
so this was all new to me.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
But I've been thinking a lot about the idea.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Of cause the first episode I ever did it was
bad feminism, and it was about like if you're not
a perfect feminist and you're not a feminist. But now
I feel like we've gone in the other way, which
is like you.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Don't have to do anything to be a feminist.
Speaker 4 (49:10):
You well, it's it's the other extreme.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
It's the other extreme.
Speaker 4 (49:14):
You could be a you could again spend your day
grow rotting in bed, and that's feminism.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
The thing is, like I get it in terms of
let's be honest about what is killing us with this
trying to succeed, But at the same time, like if
you're just like eh, doing this, that's not the same thing.
Speaker 4 (49:39):
Right, There needs to be a middle ground, I think
is the it's the big thing here, like right, like.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
You can you can say like I'm not the perfect feminist,
but that doesn't mean you can be like, oh, well
I'm not the perfect feminist like that. There's a difference
between that. So I would love for you to come
back and I could tell.
Speaker 4 (49:57):
You, yeah, something that I've interesting too, Just to add
one more quick thing in there. So and I brought
up this term and talking about one of the TikTok's earlier,
but the idea of like any sort of criticism of
these trends, you're labeled to pick me. And I think
so the podcast Rehashed did a really good episode about
the idea of a pick me and kind of how
(50:18):
that term has evolved.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
But I think.
Speaker 4 (50:22):
The whole idea of what a pick me is has
also like kind of derailed on TikTok and on social media,
and it has become like any sort of rejection of
hyperfemininity gets you labeled as a pick me, like saying
like it even got so far as to people, you know,
when the whole like Barbie Heimer thing was happening, it
was like, oh if you're like not excited to go
(50:44):
see the Barbie movie or like a pick me, And.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
It's like, I don't know, Like people just have different
tastes in movies.
Speaker 4 (50:49):
Sometimes that doesn't really seem like a reason to be Yeah,
or like women that don't want to wear makeup, I'm
I don't. Again, I don't I find as a woman either,
Like I don't really wear makeup. That's not because I
think there's something inherently wrong with wanting to wear makeup.
That's a personal choice. That does not make me a
pick me because that is not something that like I
(51:11):
want to do. But yeah, there's and I think that
that is interesting in when we're talking about these sort
of returning to these very very extreme binary ideas of
what womanhood is, any sort of rejection of that femininity
gets you labeled to pick me, which I think is
interesting and concerning. Yeah, there's many many things here that
(51:39):
I will probably pig back on to talk about.
Speaker 6 (51:45):
Yeah, Yeah, we might need you to back on just
to explain trends to us.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
To be honest, honestly, that'd be great because.
Speaker 6 (51:52):
That might be I'm like, I'm going to send you
these things, explain these to me.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
I'm so down.
Speaker 4 (51:58):
I don't I barely understand half of these. By if
somebody is seriously like, what is going on with the
whole like pickle girl tomato girl thing, if.
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Somebody wants to explain to me what that means. I
have a theory about tomato girl. Tomato.
Speaker 6 (52:13):
They just not like pickles with tomatoes.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
No, no, no, it's pro pickles and tomatoes. Okay.
Speaker 5 (52:19):
The tomato girl has something to do with the girl
that came on saying that tomatoes make you fat and
then everybody got mad at her.
Speaker 6 (52:26):
Oh that could be about It's probably right, but I
don't know. That's what I remember, like that was a
huge thing.
Speaker 2 (52:32):
I was going to go back into the history where
people used to call hot girls tomatoes. That's where hot
tomato really.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Ye, that makes way more sense.
Speaker 6 (52:45):
I don't know, But yours makes more sense.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Well, I mean mine makes more logical sense. Yeah, I
didn't know that makes sense.
Speaker 6 (52:50):
Yours makes more sense. Mine makes just more timely. Yes,
we you know.
Speaker 2 (52:57):
This is what is the magic of our our team
is that we all come from different We none of
us know the answer, but we all have theories.
Speaker 5 (53:10):
I know, the person who pickles everything and sells on
the basis you can pickle anything.
Speaker 6 (53:17):
That's the only pickle person I know.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
Fine, find the pickle.
Speaker 4 (53:21):
You know.
Speaker 1 (53:23):
We're going off the rails.
Speaker 5 (53:25):
We are.
Speaker 6 (53:27):
Completely literal. So I'm hungry. Apparently Stunk has been growling
the entire time, So.
Speaker 1 (53:37):
Time to have some girl dinner. Just keep chilling. These
questions must be answered, Joey.
Speaker 6 (53:47):
We need you, I think we need you back on First,
we have to have you research those things.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
Do you know?
Speaker 6 (53:54):
Actually did you say you did know? Did we cut
you off?
Speaker 5 (53:56):
That?
Speaker 6 (53:57):
What a pickle girl and a tomato girl?
Speaker 4 (53:59):
Well, it has more to do with and this is
where these are ones. I'm like, I'm not is concerned.
I think these are more just like fun little trends
people are doing.
Speaker 1 (54:08):
But it's like tied to.
Speaker 4 (54:13):
I like, it is still very much tied to like
aesthetics and like how you're dressing, how you're doing your makeup,
all of that. I just don't exactly know what it
is because what is that? What is tomato? How does
that translate into fashion?
Speaker 5 (54:33):
But?
Speaker 6 (54:34):
Oh, I think Annie's moron than I am.
Speaker 1 (54:36):
In nineteen twenties, tomato girl not tomato.
Speaker 4 (54:42):
According to People magazine, it says being a tomato girl
calls for a hyper specific wardrobe too. Must have pieces
include picnic appropriate dresses, flowey linen pants, headscarves, woven handbags,
and more. The trend is also big on patterns, whether
(55:03):
it being chimham I'm sorry, I'm not I don't want
to say that, or pinst yeah, or pinstripe islands or florals,
and of course artsy food graphics.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
So again it is like it's tied to uh fashion
like fashion trends. Yeah, Ingham, okay, Dingham.
Speaker 6 (55:26):
That is an old schools Okay, I think that's nineteen twenties.
And I think you're right, Annie.
Speaker 4 (55:30):
Right, I was gonna say that's yeah. I think it's
it's it's it's like yeah image. They're very like going
for a picnic, going to like this like old fashioned.
But yeah, it is interesting that all of these kind
of micro identities that we've created for ourselves are all
very very rooted in consumerism and buying things to show
(55:52):
our sense of self.
Speaker 1 (55:53):
Yes, identity, you must buy it exactly.
Speaker 6 (56:00):
I'm just gonna pick a random food and be that
girl too.
Speaker 1 (56:02):
Let me fine one, oh start a transamitta, Oh god,
don't do it. The whole episode is about control.
Speaker 4 (56:16):
Actually start like the latest iteration of like the tried
wife whenever.
Speaker 6 (56:22):
Korean again real racist, could be very Korean. I'm like,
well that went bad, that went alright? Four everybody?
Speaker 2 (56:34):
Oh no, oh, well, well on that note, we have
quite a lot more we could discuss later. Thank you
so much Joey for coming on. We always love having you.
Speaker 4 (56:53):
Of course, always love to join y'all, love to get
to explain weird Internet stuff to you guys.
Speaker 6 (57:01):
Yes, yes, giving us in the loop.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
So thank you. Where can the good listeners find you, Joey?
Speaker 4 (57:09):
You can find me on Instagram or the app that
I'm still calling Twitter at pat not prat that is
p a t T n ot p r.
Speaker 5 (57:21):
A t T.
Speaker 4 (57:22):
If you want to hear more of the work that
I do, you can check out After Lives Lelane Planco's Story,
which just finished up its first season. I also am
an occasional guest host on There Are No Girls on
the Internet slash producer there with Bridget. If you want
to hear more, specifically weird internet news and Internet culture stuff,
(57:47):
definitely check out that show.
Speaker 2 (57:50):
Yes, yes, definitely check that out. Thank you again, as always,
Joey for doing all this research and listeners. If you
would like to contact us, you can. Her email is
Stephania Momstuff at iHeartMedia dot com. We are on Twitter
at mom Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok at
stuff When Never Told You. We have a tea public
(58:11):
store and we have a book you can get wherever
you get your books. Thanks as always to our super
producer Christina, executive producer Maya, and our contriuter Joey who's
here yay, thank you, and thanks.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
To you for listening.
Speaker 2 (58:23):
Stephane Never Told You is production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcast from my Heart Radio, you can check out the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast wherever you listen to your
favorite shows
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to Stephan Never Told You a production of iHeartRadio,
and today we are so happy to once again be
joined by our contrude Deer, the wonderful, the lovely Joey.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Welcome, Joey.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey, Hello, thanks having me it has it has, but
super excited i'd be talking about TikTok once again.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Happy to be back on.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Well, I'm I'm very excited to learn about it. This
is something I kind of know tangentially about because I've
heard jokes about it, and I have what I call
TikTok friends and they let me know about it. But
I'm going to learn a lot today, So I'm counting
on you, and I know you did a lot of
(01:00):
research for this, and you have quite you were talking
about maybe a whole other other episodes that might come in.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Well, we're gonna this was originally came to you guys.
With this, I was sort of like, Hey, let's do
something about the whole like girl, dinner girl, insert word trends.
And then this very very soon spiraled into a much
bigger episode because I think there is something really weird
(01:31):
happening on TikTok. And just kind of online in general
regarding femininity and womanhood and girlhood and feminism and all
of these kind of big concepts.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
So I am calling this.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Episode when my kind of working title I put in
here was TikTok's Crisis of Femininity.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Because I think, and I specifically, you.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Know, white heterosexual cisgender femininity, but kind of what is
presenting itself is this sort of general just crisis of
femininity using of course, like pulling that from the term
like crisis of masculinity, which is something that I think
gets used a lot to talk about kind of historical
moments and also contemporary stuff that often is just referring
(02:22):
to conversations about masculinity and male identity and times when
this sort of gender role system is being shaken up
and is changing, and particularly how that's tied to like
capitalism and the changing kind of workforce. And I think,
what's happening now again, this is why I'm using this
(02:44):
term crisis of femininity that I just assumed people had
used before, and I hadn't actually found anyone using this,
but I'm sure it's out there. Who's to say, but
we're seeing this sort of weird repackage of feminism and
women's empowerment into a lot of very binary ideas of
(03:08):
womanhood that are often rooted in these very like traditional
gender roles and stereotypes. The kind of most obvious case
and most like extreme case of this is like the
trad wife movement and the stay at home girlfriend and
you guys just did a really great episode with Bridget
about trad wife.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
So that I'm gonna be referencing.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
But I think something that's also happening is this binary
is really making its way into a lot of like
much more mainstream expressions of like women's empowerment that often
like claim to be more progressive and seeing themselves as
more progressive. And then I think all of this is
kind of happening as a response to a move away
(03:50):
from this kind of like quote unquote girl Boss feminism
of the twenty tens. And what's happening is we're kind
of seeing that, yeah, the girl Boss era kind of
is over. It kind of didn't work in a lot
of different ways, And in response, I think it's being
replaced by this sort of feminism that or perceived feminism
(04:12):
that emphasizes consumerism and passivity. And I think it's important
to talk about and have these conversations and have these
conversations about how we're talking about girlhood and womanhood and femininity,
because I think what's happening is sort of it's it's
just as kind of dangerousness, just as like unproductive as
like the whole girl Boss movement was. And I think
(04:32):
we're going to end up where we were kind of
in like twenty seventeen twenty eighteen very soon if we
don't sort of address what's happening here. So I love
that to say, I'm gonna be talking about a lot
of different trends here that I'm seeing happening upfront. Just disclaimer,
as I often say when I'm on this show, just
(04:53):
because I'm criticizing all of these trends does not mean
that you're like wrong or in the wrong for like
enjoying these things. A lot of these things are sort
of like fun on their own, have elements that I
can see are empowering to people, but at the same
time that just makes it all the more important to
look at them critically. So Yeah, to start a couple
(05:14):
of weeks ago, I was on Instagram, and this is
right around when I had pitched this episode to you guys,
and I got this ad that came up that was
for like a self care company. I don't remember which
one it was exactly. I really wish i'd saved this ad,
but I did not. But yeah, I was like a
self care company that sells like candles and face masks
and bath bombs and all that. And in the ad
(05:37):
they used the term quote girl therapy to refer to
the products that they were selling, which again were like
mostly just candles. And this like set off something and
me because you know, if you've been on the internet lately,
you probably have seen there have been a lot of
(05:59):
these trends. Like the first real big one was like
girl dinner, but there's it's gone on into girl hobbies,
girl math, girl but now apparently girl therapy, which again,
this was the company.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Trying to sell candles. That's not therapy.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
You guys just did just free posted a really great
episode about the self care industry that I will put
in the notes because I think that kind of did
a good job selling up a lot of those issues there.
But yeah, this kind of set me on a spiral
of looking at all of these girl whatever trends, which Yeah,
(06:36):
So first off, let's talk about girl dinner, which back
in May, TikTok user Olivia Mahyer made this TikTok about
quote girl dinner. The original video is actually a joke
about this idea of like quote medieval peasant food just
being bread and cheese. And basically the video was her
being like, that sounds great, that's my ideal meal, and
(06:57):
then she.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Says, this is my dinner.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
I call it a dinner or medieval peasant and then
it just shows a bunch of like bread and cheese.
Later on TikTok, user at Karma Pilled made a video
going this is my meal, I call it girl dinner,
and then it's her singing girl dinner and a bunch
of different fonts and then that's the sound that.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Really blew up.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
But it was like derivative of this original video. Interestingly,
with that video, I didn't realize in it she's holding
what looks like a kind of like popsicle stick or
something like.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
It was like an ice cream bar.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
But yeah, that really took off over the summer and
it led to now two hundred and thirty two point
eight thousand videos under the girl dinner tag on TikTok.
So the girl dinner trend that in and of itself
is complicated and like honest, like originally that was gonna
be the whole episode. I kind of asked around different
(07:55):
people like what they thought about this, and I definitely
there was some sort of positive interpretations of it. One
that I definitely kept hearing was like, oh, it's this
kind of rejection of the idea that womanhood is all
about homemaking and it's about you know, making these like
perfect elaborate meals all the time. Like it's this trend
that is sort of like this is like girl dinner
(08:16):
is just kind of like whatever you've got. And you know, Also,
something that was interesting was early on, I think a
lot of people were showing, you know, meals that weren't traditionally.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Things you would associate with like girlhood.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
You know, a lot of like especially again off of
the sort of Girl Boss era, like a lot of
it was very much rooted in like diet culture and stuff,
and these sort of videos were showing more anti diet
culture type meals, like more kind of a lot of
like junk food and stuff like that. That being said,
the problem is once you make a trend and you
(08:52):
put it out into the world, you kind of lose
control of it over it, And what we started to
see was a lot of people using that.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Sound and using the kind of girl dinner thing to show.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Essentially one are just like signs of eating disorders or
you know, promotion of kind of these unhealthy habits.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
So that was the first.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
Sort of thing that happened with that, and then the
other was this sort of girl dinner trend turned into
all of these different things like girl math, girl hobbies,
girl rotting.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Basically like taking the.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
Word girl and then attaching it to another miscellaneous thing,
and by putting the word girl in front of it,
it was kind of giving it this.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Like lighter, unseerious tone.
Speaker 5 (09:37):
Wait, I need to understand what girl rotting is, because
I've heard everything else.
Speaker 6 (09:41):
This girl riting.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
So just to talk about I'm gonna get there, Okay.
Speaker 6 (09:53):
Okay, I need to answer to all these things.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I'm like, what, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
But to kind of point to this sort of overall trend,
there was an article in Forbes that said, quote girl
trends predate TikTok itself. In twenty eight nineteen, Rapper Mecan
the Stallion popularized the body positive slogan quote hot Girl Summer,
which became an internet meme largely through Twitter and Instagram.
Quote being a hot girl is about being unapologetically you,
(10:19):
having fun, being confident, living your truth, being the life
of the party, et cetera. The rapper posted in July,
and the phrase inspired the title of her song Hot
Girl Summer, which released that August. Its legacy can be
seen in some of the TikTok girl trends. And then yeah,
so this article points to like hot girl, block girl, dinner,
(10:40):
all of these different things. Another kind of article talking
about this was from Business Insider, in which they said,
quote gen Z is reclaiming the word girl after years
of reckoning over people using the term to infantilize women.
The fact that women are using the term girl represents
a cultural reclamation, conscious or not, after years of reckoning
over the term and sexist used. Being called a girl,
(11:02):
especially in hierarchical settings like a workplace, can be unintentionally
patronizing at best and demeaning at worst.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And so yeah, like, I totally agree.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
I think like there obviously is like a very heavy
misogynous connotation being called a girl with like things that
are associated with girlhood. And I think it is interesting
that this kind of has been the response to the
fact that like this idea of like the girl boss
and girl boss feminism sort of failed and sort of
didn't really work out.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
This is where I think it.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Is important to look at what these actual trends are
doing and promoting.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
And Samantha, this is what I'm going to get to
your question of what is girl body.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Because yeah, it's for one thing obviously, Like if we're
rooting this back in like hot Girl Summer, Hot Girl Want,
that's one thing. Girl dinner that was sort of the
like nexus point of like something that I think started
very innocently and started as kind of like a fun
thing that took a very dark turn. Go back to
that Business Insider article later on. There's a quote that
(12:09):
says the past few years of girl based trends, as
Kate Lindsay noted in Internet Culture newsletter embedded earlier this week,
have shifted. While women were once girl bossing are now
talking about rotting in their bedrooms. As Lindsay writes, these
types of trends are a counterpoint to the idealized girl
aesthetics of the twenty twenties, and in the process they
(12:30):
plucked and pulled apart the concept of girlhood through internet memes.
Despite some of these trends being pretty mundane, that's actually important.
Reducing a girl to a series of increasingly feral behaviors
removes some of the terms baggage. So yeah, like what
this quote is saying is that like it's sort of
rejecting this idea of like girlhood being a not taking
(12:50):
it seriously and be kind of rejecting the idea of
like the girl boss and the very manicured, very like
put together idea of girlhood. But also I think it
raises this quote kind of phraises a lot of red
flags about this whole kind of girl trend where yes,
it is kind of a response to the fact that
girl boss feminism.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Kind of failed.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
It ended up sort of promoting this very like unattainable,
exhausting idea that was very much rooted in capitalism. So
it's promoting the opposite. Girl rotting is the idea that like, yeah,
you're gonna come home from work and you're just gonna
like lay in bed and watch TV and you're gonna
girl rot You're not gonna and it's kind of repackaging
it as a way of like, oh, this is just
(13:34):
part of girlhood. You're girl rotting, which I don't know.
To me, I'm like, maybe that's there's a bigger problem
there we need to talk about.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
Are we talking about depression?
Speaker 5 (13:45):
Right? This conditional thing that happened, like is that we're
calling a girl rotting to make it cute and hopefully like.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Let me figure that.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
And I'm like, that's a symptom of depression or like,
maybe that is like a bigger again, if we're talking
about all these things being a response to the pact
that like girl boss feminism, you know, just sort of
ended up perpetuating a lot of these really toxic, hyper
capitalist ideas. If girl broading is the opposite of that,
you haven't solved the problem. You're still being exhausted by
(14:16):
the system. Yeah, so that one was weird. I'm going
to pivot to girl math real quick too, because girl
math was the other one that I think really started
to be like, all right, guys, what are we doing?
So from a Washington Post article about girl math, they say, quote,
there's no need to have a moral panic about the trend,
says Dan Egan, vice president of Behavioral Finance and Investing
(14:38):
for Betterment Additional Investment advisory firm. Egan says, what's a
place psychology? And it's obvious this has nothing to do
with gender kidding aside, girl math represents the type of
mental accounting many people do, guys included. It's how we
compartmentalize financial decisions. It's also how we just buy overspending
end quote. So, yeah, girl math is basically this idea
(15:00):
of like there's all these videos being like, oh, if
you're paying for something with cash, it's girl math. It
doesn't matter if it's like you know, you and your
friends going out to dinner and you're just vendowing each
other back and forth for like the same cycle of meals.
It's not real money because you're like basically just like
pay each other back and forth.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Which like I get it.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
And again that quote is saying like this is something
that everybody does. It's just psychology is just kind of
how we like think about spending. Why are we putting
girl in front of it?
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Though? Like what is the message there?
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Are we just sort of saying like, oh, it's girl
math because girls can't do math. Girls can't like understand
finances and like, so later on in that article, they
talked to another financial expert, Kia McAllister Young, the director
of America Saves, and unlike the first person that they interview,
this person's actually a woman, which I don't know, I
think that's interesting, but she calls the trend quote amusing
(15:55):
and like her only sort of concern is this idea
of like, yeah, it's fun, but like, let's make sure
this isn't how we're doing all of our budgeting, Like
it's important to also budget, but like that's kind of
the point is I'm like, yeah, I know, if we're
admitting that this isn't a good way of budgeting, this
is a this is sort of a fun, silly thing.
Why are we so insistent on attaching it to girlhood,
on attaching it to this gender binary And then so
(16:16):
the sort of the last sort of trend that I
want to talk about in these girl whatever trends is
and this is the one that I think kind of
was a marker to me that this kind of trend
is ending and it's sort of starting to reach its downfall.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Is this idea of quote like girl hobbies.
Speaker 6 (16:34):
So there was a.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
TikTok that went viral, and I'm not going to say
the person's user name for this because I have nothing
good to say about this TikTok, but basically it was good.
It was presenting this idea of like girl hobbies and
it was basically saying, oh, if you think you don't
have any.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Hobbies, no, you just have girl hobbies.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
And they listed girl hobbies as grabbing a little treat,
coffee or pastry, doing our skincare, makeup, hair routines, reorganizing
instead of sleeping, hot girl walk, social media, investigative work,
shopping in store or online, and so like.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
This video went viral.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
And immediately like met a bunch of like a bunch
of people did stitches of it, kind of being like whoa, Like, what's.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Going on guys?
Speaker 4 (17:23):
TikTok user Taylor Dade, who uses the at ray lot,
posted a response that blew up that I think kind
of sum rises it very well. She says, what is
going on? What are we saying those are not hobbies?
What is going on with this infantalization brain rot trend
that has grown women saying no, I don't need hobbies
(17:43):
or a personality because I'm a teenage girl and I
have to get coffee and a little treat and go shopping.
And then she later goes on to say, which I
think is another good point. I know everybody who says, hmm,
maybe it's kind of heart andful to identify ourselves with
extremely sexist stereotypes gets called a pick me.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Well, guess what.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
I love Charlotte Tilbury, Contour wand and Hot Pink Stanley
just as much as you guys do. However, I have
my own thoughts and opinions and feelings and ambitions and
goals and dreams and interests and hobbies and personality outside
of consumers bolsh. So yeah, this is wh I think
this particular video, the girl hobbies video, and all of
the backlash signals to me that.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
We're kind of like beyond the peak of this.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
I think people are starting to realize, like it's going
a little too far. But also, yeah, let's talk about this,
because what are the things that she's calling girl hobbies? Shopping,
doing makeup, skincare all of the like we literally just
took the like women be shopping and put it in
a different pont and like repackage it in a way
that so It's kind of like, if the original argument
(18:45):
is that we're reclaiming this idea of girlhood and we're
taking you know, reclaiming the idea of femininity in girlhood.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Is that actually what's happening or are.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
We just reinforcing these kind of stereotypes and it what like,
what is the benefit of also then really really emphasizing
this gender binary, this idea that all of this is
just this is just part of girlhood. All of these
sort of very consumerist, very passive ideas are a part
of girlhood.
Speaker 5 (19:16):
I just want you to know that all these hobbies
you listed off was all on our girl talky So oh.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Sorry, yeah, I know nineteen eighty right, it was literally
lis every single one of those things.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Why exactly.
Speaker 4 (19:30):
That's what I'm saying, though, It's like, what happened guys,
like this is the kind of nineteen eighties Like oh yeah,
literally it's women be shopping in a different font.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
What's happening?
Speaker 5 (19:40):
And also to note all of this makes these are
million dollar industries that we're talking.
Speaker 4 (19:44):
About exactly, which the other part of this is I
think it's interesting that this is like, and I've said,
I think this is a response to the fact that
a lot of people felt that like girl.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Boss feminism didn't work.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
So instead of like becoming becoming the CEO, becoming the
you know women, that's really like winning in the in
the capitalist financial spirit. Now it's just become about consuming
and about consuming the things. And I think this kind
of is where it led me to look at this
not just as like its own kind of trend of
(20:20):
girl dinner, a girl math or hobbies, et cetera, but like,
let's also look at the other sort of conversations that
are happening around girlhood and around women womanhood and femininity
and feminism on TikTok. So this is where we're going
to go into the second kind of silo here in
(20:40):
my big conspiracy board of all of these different trends
that are happening, which is the cycle of fast fashion
micro trends that are happening on TikTok. And this idea
of like the quote like esthetic, if you're somebody like
me who has been very chronically online, you'll know that
(21:00):
this word like aesthetic and the idea of having an
aesthetic is not like a new thing. And so like
when I'm talking about aesthetics, it's not really in an
online sense. It's not really like the traditional definition of
the word. Usually it is referring to like a personal
sense of style that's really tied to fashion and appearance
(21:22):
and kind of like you are just like general household decor,
room decor kind of stuff. I always really associate it
with like kind of twenty fourteen era Tumbler. It was
like a big thing to have, like you're very curated aesthetic.
So yeah, again, it's not like necessarily a new thing,
but I think in a post kind of twenty twenty
(21:43):
world where like TikTok has become this like major hub
for like culture, the whole idea of having an aesthetic
is really like tookn off, and it's moved away from
sort of being a personal sense of style to just
being a way to describe this sort of series of
trends that are happening, and these trends that have also
(22:03):
been happening at like an ever kind of quickening pace
and have become more and more connected to the fast
fashion industry. So yeah, if you've been on TikTok, you know,
the most recent kind of iteration of this has been
the mob wife trend, which was its own sort of chaos.
That was really funny. I am Italian American. I thought
(22:23):
all of the drama around that was really funny. But yeah,
so we have the mob bofe trend. Some previous kind
of esthetic trends that have happened have been the clean girl,
old money, coastal grandma, rock star girlfriend, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera, and the personal bane of my existence. I
could do a whole episode about this, but the cocatte trend, I.
Speaker 6 (22:47):
Know none of these right now, everybody was.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
Freaking out, this is what I think, like, this is
it's this And then it's the same thing with girl hobbies,
where there's one thing that kind of sets it off
and as everybody being like, what's going on?
Speaker 1 (23:04):
What are we doing?
Speaker 4 (23:05):
So yeah, a lot of the time, not all the time,
but usually these kind of aesthetics are tied to like
kind of a callback to an earlier subculture, but instead
of really being rooted in that subculture, being rooted in
like the cultural aspect of it, it's much more focused
on like consumable goods like fashion and you know, yeah,
(23:27):
just like household decor kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
But yeah, really, really emphasizing fashion.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
And we've also seen in a like post kind of lockdown,
post twenty twenty world, the like takeoff of the fast
fashion industry and which you know had been a thing
for a while, but it really really kind of reached
some new heights in like in the sort of post
twenty twenty world, we've seen these brands like Shean really
(23:57):
take off. And this has been like perfect sort of
like it's been this perfect storm of for these trends
to happen, and for these trends to happen it like
a faster and faster pace. So what has happened is
having an aesthetic has kind of moved away from being
a personal sense of style and it has instead become
(24:19):
keeping up with the latest trend, keeping up with the
latest sort of hyper specific micro trend, the clean girl,
the rock star girlfriend, the mob wife, the whatever.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah, and Coquette, which is yeah, I have a lot
of things to say about Coquette.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
And so this is where I think there's two concerning
things here. One is that yes, this is very tied
to fast fashion, and it is very tied to these
corporations that are relying on sweatshop labor that are relying
on all these sort of very terrible practices, both on
a humanitarian level and on an environmental level. And also
(25:02):
we need to look at what is actually being kind
of like promoted at least trends, because well, again, yes,
it is fun to have like a fun little aesthetic
that you know, it doesn't necessarily have to have any
meaning to it. There are some sort of connecting threads
through all of this that I think are a little
bit concerning.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
So like mob wife, rock star girlfriend.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
These were two that really stuck out to me because
I was like, why it's so weird that they're emphasizing
the like girlfriend, you're not the thing, but you're the
girlfriend of the rock star, you're the mob wife. Coquette, Like,
let's be real, it is the coquette trend is rooted
in a like kind of cult around youth and in
a lot of these very like pedophilic ideas about beauty.
(25:49):
In women's beauty, it is like rooted in like the
kind of Lolita trends. And again that's to say, like
you can enjoy this sort of stuff in this sort
of fashion and not have it not be that serious.
But this becoming as popular as it is and being
something that is very much rooted in a lot of
like very misogynistic ideas about beauty. That gets a little
(26:16):
bit concerning. And then sort of we're seeing some other
micro trends that I think are interesting. I don't understand
what these are still, but there was like the tomato
girl and the pickle girl and whatever, and something that
I was seeing happen over and over againness all of
these are they're very much rooted in like girl, clean girl,
mob wife girlfriend, all of these things. They're very much
(26:37):
rooted in this like gender binary, and a lot of
times they are like expressions of hyperfemininity.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
You know.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Coquette is like really leaning into hyperfemininity. Even the mob
wife trend like leans very much into hyperfemininity.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
So I think it's just it's interesting too.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
And one of those articles that I was talking about
originally that we're talking about girl math and girl hobbies
and all this, we're talking about how it's a rejection
of these kind of constant trends, but at the same time,
these sort of trends are also rooting themselves in this
idea of girlhood and femininity and this is what it
is to be a woman.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
This is what it is to be a girl.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
So this is where I'm going to jump in and
like just acknowledge the fact that so like I personally.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Don't identify as a woman.
Speaker 4 (27:35):
I identify as like non binary and gender queer and uh,
trans masculine. But that being said, I think like that
is kind of the thing that makes this really stand
out to me, because all of these trends are so
so rooted in the gender binary and in emphasizing the
gender binary, and I think, especially at a time where
(27:56):
there have been so many violent fs to reinforce that
gender binary, I think we need to be really critical
about how we are actually talking about those ideas and
talking about something as you know, supposedly silly is just
like your whatever personal sense of style, a fashion trend,
(28:18):
but how are we talking about that in terms of
like the gender binary, And so to really look at that,
let's talk real quick about like the extreme version of
this gender binary, which is the trad wife. And you
guys just did a really awesome episode with bridget about
tradwife and trodwife culture that I would definitely recommend checking out.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
I'm not going to go.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
Super into this idea because I think, like I'm definitely
preaching a little bit to the choir here about like
why the whole idea of the trodwife and the trodwife
image is harmful. I think we need to look at
why we're seeing this trend now and what it's claiming
to be in a response to, versus like what it
actually kind of is a response to, because honestly, I
think this whole like tradwife ideal and image is rotten
(29:03):
in a lot of the same anxieties that these other
trends are also rooted in, because the tradwife phenomena is
kind of posing it. What it does is it poses
itself as in opposition in response to girl boss feminism, right,
It is this idea that women we have somehow been
(29:24):
duped by feminism into going into the workforce, and really
what is empowering is to go back into the homes
and you know, get married and hoop out a bunch
of kids and provide for those kids and whatever like
all of that. And I think if you look at again,
the whole idea of like girl rotting, girl math, girl hobbies,
(29:47):
all of that is also a response to the fact
that a lot of women did not feel fulfilled by
girl boss feminism. So TikTok user Caitlin, it's c ai
il Yn with like a period in between each letter.
I'll link the original video in the notes. But she
(30:07):
made a really great video I think breaking this down
and connecting a lot of these things that I'm talking
about and talking about it in the context of the
child wife movement. So in a video called Coquette Capitalism,
which I will link in the notes, she starts by
quoting a tweet from fashion and culture writer Ryan Finn
that states bows and ribbons are symbolic of twenty twenty
(30:28):
three being the year of the girl plus useless thing,
when it should have been the year of the girl feminism. Instead,
we've had the Barbie film rebranding girl boss culture through
uplifting successful billionaire capitalist women girl math being used to
advertise at the same time the reproductive rights are being stripped,
the gender wage gap is awful, and we lack a
globally interconnected feminist movement and the bows and ribbons that
(30:53):
sort of trend is related to the coquette trend, just
her context, and.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
This is why I'm critical of that argument.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
Like girl Dinner and girl Math and girl whatever, it's
somehow like reclaiming this idea of girlhood and femininity which
had previously not been taken seriously by the patriarchy, because
we need to look at what is actually being claimed
as part of girlhood. Caitlin then goes on to talk
about how, in addition to the popularity of like the
coquette trend and this return to more like girlish esthetics,
(31:23):
very traditional feminine aesthetics, which was all these aesthetic trends
I was talking about. Quote, twenty twenty three was also
the year of girl math, and girl math was juxtaposed
against the male Roman Empire, where in pretty overt ways,
we're saying through pop culture and memes that girls can't
do math, or girls have their own special kind of
math called girl math. Meanwhile boys or men are constantly
(31:45):
thinking about history.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
They're thinking about the Roman Empire.
Speaker 4 (31:48):
She then says, quote this happening in the same year
as the rise of the state home girlfriend, the soft life,
and the Sprinkle Sprinkle, which all of that I'm kind
of putting under the like trodwife umbrella, because I think
the state at home girlfriend is sort of the like
more secular, slightly less crysto fascist.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Version of the trod wife. But yeah quote.
Speaker 4 (32:09):
The implicit argument behind all of these being that contemporary
feminism has failed to provide women with material well being.
The real way to undermine the patriarchy, or to make
the patriarchy work for you, is to get a rich
man to pund your lifestyle and never have to work again.
So we're seeing in real time the infantilization of women
through pop culture and memes. The image of the girl
boss or girl power of five to ten years ago
(32:30):
in the early to mid two thousand times is dead,
particularly as many of these women owned millennial core companies
like Nasty Gal and Glossier experience their corporate downfall and
honestly like, yeah, I agree, I think that she's onto
something there. So she then goes on to say we've
ended up with bimbo feminism and girl math not because
women believe that they themselves are stupid, but because they're
(32:50):
tired and because the promise of girl boss feminism that
we've seen for the last several decades didn't deliver. The
reason that girl boss feminism wasn't successful in challenging the
patriarchy was because it was not anti capitalist and Instead,
it viewed capitalism as an avenue through which women could
find liberation. For the vast majority of women who belong
to the working class and have to continue to go
(33:11):
to work in order to pay their bills and survive
in capitalist society, girl boss feminism did not think for
them except maybe replace their boss or their CEO with
a woman in a hand suit. The material conditions of
the vast majority of women didn't change as a result
of girl boss feminism, and after several years of significant
material challenges, including the pandemic and shrinkulation, it's no wonder
why people might want to retreat back into I'm baby
(33:33):
and I just want to be taken care of. Unfortunately,
this is just a band aid or a short term
coping mechanism two larger structural problems of capitalism and patriarchy
end quote so.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
To summon up.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
I think it's not a coincidence that we're saying the
tradwife stayed home, girlfriend, girl, insert word trend, and like
highly binary fashion trends all happening on TikTok right now.
I think this is all kind of a respect to
this crisis of femininity and the fact that like the
(34:06):
world is a very very scary place right now. Like
one of the things that she said in that is
that I get it. It is like there's a lot
of really weird mess of stuff happening. We are entering
an election year. There are so many, so many scary
possibilities and realities that are happening, particularly for women and
(34:27):
for non men, and so it makes sense to want
to seek that comfort, to want to go back into
this idea of like self and fantilizing I'm.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Just a girl. I'm not gonna you know, I'm.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
The whole I'm just a twenty four year old teenage
girl thing. I think, especially for a lot of us
that are at like, you know, I'm in my mid
twenties right now. The pandemic happened at a time when
I would have been reaching a lot of those like milestones,
and I that's of experience is.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Sort of disrupted for me.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
I think a lot of people are feeling sort of lost,
and I think all of these things are responses to
that feeling of being lost. And it's understandable, but again,
it is not a solution. It is a band aid.
I think the importance of talking about this right now
is that if we lean too hard on all these ideas.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
If we lean too hard of this idea of girlhood.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
Being silly and light and this very like consumerist idea
of girlhood, it's just going to end up. We're just
going to end up the same place that we were
in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, where people were starting
to realize that, like the girl Boss, feminism also didn't work.
(35:46):
So yeah, I think again, there's two main concerns here.
One is this sort of leaning into consumerism as a
form of.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Liberation or self actualization.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
The second is this really really strong emphasis on the
gender binary and on everything being very very gendered, whether
that's something like you know, food which is what we
need to survive, to hobbies and fashion and all of that,
all of that happening at a time when there is
efforts to criminalize any sort of deviance from the gender binary.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
So yeah, all of that is.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
To say, these are all very There's a lot of
weird stuff happening. There's a lot of weird stuff happening
on TikTok. I don't know what the solution is.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I think.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
Again, I understand why this moment is happening. I understand
what these things are responding to. But I also think
it is indicative of the fact that something is like
very wrong right now and people are just kind of
scrambling for solutions. And yeah, that's where we're at.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
There's a there's a lot of obviously, like I'm sitting
here trying to remember any of these trends. I'm like,
I don't I'm on TikTok and i don't know these
three things. And I'm so sad that I'm not caught
up with the world slash the kids, you kids.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
You know what.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
I don't even like I can I call my I
don't know if I can still call myself a kid,
But I'm not a kid of that.
Speaker 6 (37:24):
I'm saying this in this ideal of like I old, it's.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Well, that's part of it is that all of this
stuff is moving very fast, and I think that is
definitely an element of it. All of these these trends
are moving very fast. These ideas are moving fast, These
images of these idealized images of womanhood or of girlhood
are moving very fast. And you know, like you said before,
that is very convenient for a lot of these companies
(37:49):
that are making this clothing or this whatever, or these
candles for girl therapy or whatever.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
You know.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
And again, this is why I keep going back to
capitalism and what happens when we look at capitalism as
a route for as a route for liberation, because we
tried that with the Girl Boss feminism and it didn't work.
And now we're trying a different route, which is through
(38:18):
consumption and through consumerism, and that also is something that
I think is going to I think we're already seeing
it start to kind of fall apart, and I think
it could lead us in a very dangerous direction. And also,
capitalism is always going to be have an interest in
upholding the gender binary, you know, like it is easier
to sell things to people if they are very highly gendered.
(38:40):
It's easier to advertise things that are this is about girlhood,
this is about whatever.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
So there definitely.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
Needs to be some more sort of critical thinking, I think,
around gendering all of these ideas so so explicitly.
Speaker 5 (38:53):
Well, it's also just a reminder that capitalism and marketing
know how to take advantage of something, and so they
are going to make money whichever way possible. But I
think it's also important to remember that things like Girl Boss,
which seemed cute and empowering at the beginning. Really, when
it did benefit women, it was white heterosexual women kind
(39:14):
of some conversations about what happened on Facebook and having
big books readen about motivating women to be leaders. It
was aimed and targeted towards one specific type of woman,
which also is that same conversation of like when women
talk about why can't we go back to the days
where we didn't have to wor feminism failed us, when
in actuality, yes, white feminism failed you, because if we
(39:35):
had actually looked at the black community and the people
of color during the big waves of feminism in the seventies,
we would have a different conversation about choice rather than
about work and not being what they would say, housewife
and all that. And there's that conversation who was left
out and who was not being seen? And that's in
the same conversation too, because when we talk about cute
girly things, it's typically white women that I see or
(39:58):
white girls, and it's a cute idea for a minute.
Then you start thinking about the repercussions of because people
see this as cute and just a fun trend, you
don't see the underlying thing of like, oh, eventually this
will be used against whomever in this ideal of Okay,
we can fix ourselves. We become more like these people
(40:20):
and doing these girl and dinner, which every time you
say that, that ring, that that jingle is in my head.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I can't get rid of it.
Speaker 5 (40:27):
Yeah yeah, yeah, constantly every time, and that forever will
be in my head. But like who who it is
benefiting and what the ideal type or like lifestyle is,
and it's usually trended after again sis, upper middle class
white women. And that's that conversation of like, yeah, this
doesn't seem bad. But then when you really look at
(40:49):
who is being normalized and who is being upheld as
this is the status quo, it's very dangerous.
Speaker 4 (40:55):
As you were saying, Yeah, and like what I said
at the top two been talking about girl Dinner.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
I think it is something that started totally innocently.
Speaker 4 (41:03):
I think it honestly, like I understand the arguments for
why people enjoyed it. But once you put a trend
out there into the world, like you lose control of it.
I think like the last kind of big example of
this was the whole like bimbo trend in bimbo feminism
on TikTok, and like that is something that when it.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Started, like I was like, oh my god, I love this.
This is so fun. I think a lot of the
early kind of creators around that.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Were doing some really fun content, but it was something
that you know, a was co opted by these corporations
that were like, oh, look, another opportunity to sell a
certain type of clothing or whatever.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Two people sell a lifestyle to people.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
And then also if it's an idea that is rooted
in very misogynistic stereotypes, like the idea of like the
bimbo reclaim, something can turn into just reinforcing those stereotypes
real quick. And I think we're seeing that now with
all these girl trends.
Speaker 5 (42:07):
Right And also with that, we should be holding social
media responsible as well, because we see who is trending
and that makes a difference of why these trends are successful.
And again, it's also kind of like the whole fact
that a lot of black creators will talk about the
fact that their stuff is suppressed while qts white girls
(42:27):
and I love I love you my SOLSI please don't
think I'm being mean, but it like statistically as it's
shown that the QT white girls are probably going to
be at the forefront of trending, not just white girls,
but white people in general.
Speaker 6 (42:40):
So just spreading that out.
Speaker 5 (42:42):
But like, that's that conversation is like, are we also
talking about what social media is allowing to be the
top of the trend and why it is the top
of the trend and who is being suppressed in these
conversations as well, because you know, there's a lot to
the algorithm, but also algorithm that is created or manipulated
(43:05):
by these companies, you know, Instagram and Facebook. Husband repeatedly
called out for that, and TikTok is slowly getting repeatedly
called out for that. But it's a it's a conversation
in this as well, because yes, that girl had no
intention I'm sure of like making this. She's like, why
a y'all talking about me? I just wanted to eat
cheese and bread and I feel you. I feel you.
(43:26):
That's all I want to do is eat bread. But like,
in the end, who is being raised on these platforms
or who are being more noted or being seen up
more often? And in that conversation as well, but also
I still need you to explain to me what Coquette
is I'm still lost.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
Oh this is yeah, I probably shouldn't have included.
Speaker 4 (43:50):
A little thing about that, so confused, I might come
on here into a whole episode about all of my
various issues with cocatte. Coqutte is one of those things
where again I think when we talk about is you know,
criticizing a sort of cultural thing, if this is a
you know, type of fashion or style that you are
(44:12):
interested in, if something that you like, totally understand that.
But at the same time, I think we really need
to examine, like what a lot of it is rooted.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
In Coquette is Basically.
Speaker 4 (44:26):
This is the other problem because the thing that happens
on TikTok with a lot of these trends is they
start off as one thing and then they just become
like much broader and like I think coquette is definitely
Like I saw something the other day that was like
a bunch of very like runge style clothing that somebody
called coquette, and that is not coquette at all.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
But coquette is basically it is it's it's rooted in like.
Speaker 4 (44:49):
Stuff that is I hang on, I'm trying to find
like a good definition of it because I'm looking at
like the pictures. Yeah, it's all very it's like pink
and a lot of bows, and it's rooted in this
idea of like girlhood and childhood.
Speaker 5 (45:05):
So it's just like a pastel version of the Lolita, right.
Speaker 4 (45:10):
It's it's it's okay, it's a it's yeah, that's good
way I put it.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Get it's like pasta Lolita fashion. It is.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
The whole kind of trend is very connected to like
the Lolita trend, which again that's where I get into
I think, I think it is important to examine how
some of this is kind of rooted in these very
like these cults of youth and particularly around like young
girls in girlhood and how that is sexualized. It became
(45:38):
very pop Yeah, at the end of twenty twenty three,
this became like very very popular on TikTok. If you
guys saw there are a lot of like videos of
people putting bows on like everyday objects and being like
my favorite one was somebody who took like a pair
of like weights and like put a bow on them
and was like their cocatte now. Like but again, like
(46:00):
with that, it's fun and it's silly, but also anytime
we're using a trend that is or a idea that
is like rooted in a lot of complex, mildly problematic,
you know, to extremely problematic ideas, and it just opens
(46:24):
the door for a lot of stuff to happen.
Speaker 5 (46:26):
Yeah, I got to I yes, and I see that
it is aligned with that conversation about soft.
Speaker 4 (46:31):
Girl, Yeah, which I think also I read what you
said about like all of these trends also being like
you know, when you look at them up on TikTok,
when you see the stuff that's trending on TikTok, a
lot of the times it's white women. A lot of
the times it is like conventionally attractive cis white women. Yeah,
that's also part of the conversation, and that is also
part of like the idea of you know, if this
(46:51):
is the image of girlhood that we're creating, and this
is the image of womanhood that we're creating, it's very white,
it's very it's very much rooted and traditional ideas about beauty,
and uh, yeah, it is. It's it's definitely it's rooted
in whiteness, it's rooted in heteropatriarchy, it's rooted in TRANSASOCNE. Yeah,
(47:12):
and that again is an issue of like the apps
more than I think it is these individual creators.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
One thing that I did think was interesting that I
did not realize this.
Speaker 4 (47:29):
So the original girl Dinner, the person that did the
video that was like girl dinner or medieval peasant food
or whatever, which I didn't even realize that was how
it started, that was made by a white woman. The
woman that did the one with the little song with
the like girl dinner, that was actually a black woman
that did it, that made the original video. Which but
(47:50):
again I think about this conversation was interesting because I
had not seen that original video until I like went
and looked it up and was like, who is the
first person to.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Like make that sound?
Speaker 4 (48:00):
So I don't know, maybe there's there's definitely something there too, but.
Speaker 5 (48:05):
Yeah, maybe the original I saw was also a white girl.
And then that's who got a credited who got credited
with it?
Speaker 4 (48:11):
For what I've said, That's what I'm saying is that
she got the credit for it, which she did, you know,
make the original video using term girl dinner. But yeah,
like I that I it took me much longer to
find out who made the song.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
Yeah, the jingle. The jingle, the jingle is a jingle.
Speaker 6 (48:28):
In my head because and also now I want meat, and.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
Geez, you can make that happen. I think you can
make that happen.
Speaker 6 (48:38):
I'm gonna have to go to a grocery store.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Well, I do think there's a lot more we could
talk about.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
There's a lot of I've been thinking about this a
lot too, about the nick Well, I'm not on TikTok,
so this was all new to me.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
But I've been thinking a lot about the idea.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Of cause the first episode I ever did it was
bad feminism, and it was about like if you're not
a perfect feminist and you're not a feminist. But now
I feel like we've gone in the other way, which
is like you.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Don't have to do anything to be a feminist.
Speaker 4 (49:10):
You well, it's it's the other extreme.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
It's the other extreme.
Speaker 4 (49:14):
You could be a you could again spend your day
grow rotting in bed, and that's feminism.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
The thing is, like I get it in terms of
let's be honest about what is killing us with this
trying to succeed, But at the same time, like if
you're just like eh, doing this, that's not the same thing.
Speaker 4 (49:39):
Right, There needs to be a middle ground, I think
is the it's the big thing here, like right, like.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
You can you can say like I'm not the perfect feminist,
but that doesn't mean you can be like, oh, well
I'm not the perfect feminist like that. There's a difference
between that. So I would love for you to come
back and I could tell.
Speaker 4 (49:57):
You, yeah, something that I've interesting too, Just to add
one more quick thing in there. So and I brought
up this term and talking about one of the TikTok's earlier,
but the idea of like any sort of criticism of
these trends, you're labeled to pick me. And I think
so the podcast Rehashed did a really good episode about
the idea of a pick me and kind of how
(50:18):
that term has evolved.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
But I think.
Speaker 4 (50:22):
The whole idea of what a pick me is has
also like kind of derailed on TikTok and on social media,
and it has become like any sort of rejection of
hyperfemininity gets you labeled as a pick me, like saying
like it even got so far as to people, you know,
when the whole like Barbie Heimer thing was happening, it
was like, oh if you're like not excited to go
(50:44):
see the Barbie movie or like a pick me, And.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
It's like, I don't know, Like people just have different
tastes in movies.
Speaker 4 (50:49):
Sometimes that doesn't really seem like a reason to be Yeah,
or like women that don't want to wear makeup, I'm
I don't. Again, I don't I find as a woman either,
Like I don't really wear makeup. That's not because I
think there's something inherently wrong with wanting to wear makeup.
That's a personal choice. That does not make me a
pick me because that is not something that like I
(51:11):
want to do. But yeah, there's and I think that
that is interesting in when we're talking about these sort
of returning to these very very extreme binary ideas of
what womanhood is, any sort of rejection of that femininity
gets you labeled to pick me, which I think is
interesting and concerning. Yeah, there's many many things here that
(51:39):
I will probably pig back on to talk about.
Speaker 6 (51:45):
Yeah, Yeah, we might need you to back on just
to explain trends to us.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
To be honest, honestly, that'd be great because.
Speaker 6 (51:52):
That might be I'm like, I'm going to send you
these things, explain these to me.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
I'm so down.
Speaker 4 (51:58):
I don't I barely understand half of these. By if
somebody is seriously like, what is going on with the
whole like pickle girl tomato girl thing, if.
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Somebody wants to explain to me what that means. I
have a theory about tomato girl. Tomato.
Speaker 6 (52:13):
They just not like pickles with tomatoes.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
No, no, no, it's pro pickles and tomatoes. Okay.
Speaker 5 (52:19):
The tomato girl has something to do with the girl
that came on saying that tomatoes make you fat and
then everybody got mad at her.
Speaker 6 (52:26):
Oh that could be about It's probably right, but I
don't know. That's what I remember, like that was a
huge thing.
Speaker 2 (52:32):
I was going to go back into the history where
people used to call hot girls tomatoes. That's where hot
tomato really.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Ye, that makes way more sense.
Speaker 6 (52:45):
I don't know, But yours makes more sense.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Well, I mean mine makes more logical sense. Yeah, I
didn't know that makes sense.
Speaker 6 (52:50):
Yours makes more sense. Mine makes just more timely. Yes,
we you know.
Speaker 2 (52:57):
This is what is the magic of our our team
is that we all come from different We none of
us know the answer, but we all have theories.
Speaker 5 (53:10):
I know, the person who pickles everything and sells on
the basis you can pickle anything.
Speaker 6 (53:17):
That's the only pickle person I know.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
Fine, find the pickle.
Speaker 4 (53:21):
You know.
Speaker 1 (53:23):
We're going off the rails.
Speaker 5 (53:25):
We are.
Speaker 6 (53:27):
Completely literal. So I'm hungry. Apparently Stunk has been growling
the entire time, So.
Speaker 1 (53:37):
Time to have some girl dinner. Just keep chilling. These
questions must be answered, Joey.
Speaker 6 (53:47):
We need you, I think we need you back on First,
we have to have you research those things.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
Do you know?
Speaker 6 (53:54):
Actually did you say you did know? Did we cut
you off?
Speaker 5 (53:56):
That?
Speaker 6 (53:57):
What a pickle girl and a tomato girl?
Speaker 4 (53:59):
Well, it has more to do with and this is
where these are ones. I'm like, I'm not is concerned.
I think these are more just like fun little trends
people are doing.
Speaker 1 (54:08):
But it's like tied to.
Speaker 4 (54:13):
I like, it is still very much tied to like
aesthetics and like how you're dressing, how you're doing your makeup,
all of that. I just don't exactly know what it
is because what is that? What is tomato? How does
that translate into fashion?
Speaker 5 (54:33):
But?
Speaker 6 (54:34):
Oh, I think Annie's moron than I am.
Speaker 1 (54:36):
In nineteen twenties, tomato girl not tomato.
Speaker 4 (54:42):
According to People magazine, it says being a tomato girl
calls for a hyper specific wardrobe too. Must have pieces
include picnic appropriate dresses, flowey linen pants, headscarves, woven handbags,
and more. The trend is also big on patterns, whether
(55:03):
it being chimham I'm sorry, I'm not I don't want
to say that, or pinst yeah, or pinstripe islands or florals,
and of course artsy food graphics.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
So again it is like it's tied to uh fashion
like fashion trends. Yeah, Ingham, okay, Dingham.
Speaker 6 (55:26):
That is an old schools Okay, I think that's nineteen twenties.
And I think you're right, Annie.
Speaker 4 (55:30):
Right, I was gonna say that's yeah. I think it's
it's it's it's like yeah image. They're very like going
for a picnic, going to like this like old fashioned.
But yeah, it is interesting that all of these kind
of micro identities that we've created for ourselves are all
very very rooted in consumerism and buying things to show
(55:52):
our sense of self.
Speaker 1 (55:53):
Yes, identity, you must buy it exactly.
Speaker 6 (56:00):
I'm just gonna pick a random food and be that
girl too.
Speaker 1 (56:02):
Let me fine one, oh start a transamitta, Oh god,
don't do it. The whole episode is about control.
Speaker 4 (56:16):
Actually start like the latest iteration of like the tried
wife whenever.
Speaker 6 (56:22):
Korean again real racist, could be very Korean. I'm like,
well that went bad, that went alright? Four everybody?
Speaker 2 (56:34):
Oh no, oh, well, well on that note, we have
quite a lot more we could discuss later. Thank you
so much Joey for coming on. We always love having you.
Speaker 4 (56:53):
Of course, always love to join y'all, love to get
to explain weird Internet stuff to you guys.
Speaker 6 (57:01):
Yes, yes, giving us in the loop.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
So thank you. Where can the good listeners find you, Joey?
Speaker 4 (57:09):
You can find me on Instagram or the app that
I'm still calling Twitter at pat not prat that is
p a t T n ot p r.
Speaker 5 (57:21):
A t T.
Speaker 4 (57:22):
If you want to hear more of the work that
I do, you can check out After Lives Lelane Planco's Story,
which just finished up its first season. I also am
an occasional guest host on There Are No Girls on
the Internet slash producer there with Bridget. If you want
to hear more, specifically weird internet news and Internet culture stuff,
(57:47):
definitely check out that show.
Speaker 2 (57:50):
Yes, yes, definitely check that out. Thank you again, as always,
Joey for doing all this research and listeners. If you
would like to contact us, you can. Her email is
Stephania Momstuff at iHeartMedia dot com. We are on Twitter
at mom Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok at
stuff When Never Told You. We have a tea public
(58:11):
store and we have a book you can get wherever
you get your books. Thanks as always to our super
producer Christina, executive producer Maya, and our contriuter Joey who's
here yay, thank you, and thanks.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
To you for listening.
Speaker 2 (58:23):
Stephane Never Told You is production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcast from my Heart Radio, you can check out the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast wherever you listen to your
favorite shows
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
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