Girlhood online is a three-headed monster

We’ve been discussing this for months, and for months the topic has been evolving, shifting, expanding, becoming at times reactionary, at times revolutionary, without any clear resolution. Do you know Hercules' Hydra, which grows more heads every time one is cut off? The conversation around what it means to be women today, around girlhood, the right to carefree joy and frivolity for girls, is just like that—a beast that must be managed and controlled, perhaps even understood and eventually tamed. We try to explain and justify opposing arguments: those who believe it is a trap of stereotypes and those who see it as empowering, to gain a deeper understanding.

Do we have the right to be frivolous and joyful in a society that wants us to be lonely and bitter?

It’s true that society pushes us to grow up too fast, to take up space even when it’s difficult, to push ourselves to act, to compete, to succeed. Because it’s hard, because it’s new, because before it wasn’t allowed for women and now, little by little, it is—but we still need to insist. We have to learn to be indifferent, yet take everything deadly seriously, head-on, to compete. The freedom to pursue a career, to exist, to have sex with whomever we choose, to do what we want with our bodies is something we’ve fought for and we are still fighting hard for. And to keep it, we need to be serious and composed, always, in every situation. Assertive, competent, never showing weakness to those who would attack us. We’re not supposed to be childish, joyful, frivolous, because those are girlish things, and we are modern women, warriors. We’re not supposed to be interested in pink, pilates, or anything that might bring us back to that dimension. Head down, charging against a wall. In this perspective, the right to lightness is yet another thing to protect and expand, and it’s undeniable.

Silly girlhood is harmful: the stereotypes

However, this right to frivolity has its limits. It does because we live in a society, interacting with other people, interacting with stereotypes. Because critical thinking is a rare commodity, one that must be trained, or it will be lost—like foreign languages. Online trends evolve, gain momentum, lose sight of their origins, and then go out into the world to sting. We’ve seen this, for example, with girl math, which started as a fun short-form video trend but circled back to the stereotype that women are more suited to the humanities, less scientific, and less capable of doing math. The same sad fate befell girl dinner, which took less than a million TikTok views to pull us back into the world of pro-ana blogs and into the invitation of eating disorders. And what if this categorization ends up making us more foolish?

The solution lies beyond online spaces, in a complex and multifaceted vision

It’s difficult to translate this on social media, difficult to carry with us everywhere a complex vision of reality that embraces all viewpoints, but it’s necessary—especially when we move from online to offline. The simplification of reality, which seems essential on social networks for the success and impact of content, spreads like an oil spill, seeping into our work, our relationships, our friendships. This is why, in conversations with our friends, we find ourselves seriously saying things like "he’s a Labrador, she’s a black cat," or "I’m the older sister, he’s the younger brother," as if these categories, created for brevity and impact on social media, could apply to the thousand nuances of real life, as if we had a character limit, a limit to definitions. It’s not like that, and perhaps we need to reclaim the lost complexity, even in our words. Are men ever asked to choose between being serious or playful?

Protecting girls and contemporary femininity

As adult women, multifaceted women, women who know (and must know) how to be frivolous, assertive, serious, playful, joyful, and determined all at once. It is then our responsibility to reclaim our many dimensions, to choose not to choose, not to let ourselves be limited. Above all, it is our duty to assert a femininity without boundaries or divisions, to teach it to those who come after us, to the young girls who decide who they want to be on social media without knowing that they can be everything. Because women are not dolls or memes; women are people who can decide what femininity means to them, one by one, in an endless plurality of voices that has cost us dearly but means even more.