Oh good, a backlash against girl culture
Plus Saltburn as vibes, Jeremy Allen White's abs, sexism at the Golden Globes, and whyyyy are we still televising weddings?
Last week, ABC aired The Golden Bachelor wedding, complete with a “Golden Carpet.” What is up with wedding-as-award-show and why are we still televising weddings? The short answer is just a heavy sigh and an adolescent girl’s eye roll.
But also: the couple has “won”! “Love has won!” To drive this metaphor home (we know the franchise loves metaphors!), the televised wedding extravaganza opens with both Gerry and Theresa, doe-eyed, discussing the joys of never having to be Alone again, with the women of Gerry’s family teaching Theresa how to make their mother’s “cinnamon balls,” and with many many Amazon wedding registry plugs. All is right with the world!
Meanwhile, after the actual red carpet at The Golden Globes, we got tepid jokes about Oppenheimer being too long (I can think of a number of other critiques!) and about the genitals (or lack thereof!) in both Saltburn and Barbie. Many have jumped in to point out the sexism in Jo Koy’s monologue and the twin diminishment of Greta Gerwig and Taylor Swift. Basically, though, the jokes just weren’t that funny.
And yet, we seem to be entering somewhat of a backlash to the year of the girl—a year that was about a reinvestment not in the hetero-coupledom of the TGB and its ilk, but rather, at least on the surface, ad hoc dinners Alone and a retro-feeling girl power. In a piece for The Cut, Isabel Cristo argues that recent girl culture has been about turning away from adult womanhood, but also capitalism feeding off that desire—and that its resurgence signals that feminism is “adrift.” Maybe. But I mean, last year and the rough years that led up to it also brought a general malaise around marriage and motherhood, along with a hefty dose of mistrust in the plausibility of the American nuclear family as a social, political, and cultural institution— including increasing interest in maternal dread, divorce, polyamory and couples fighting.
It seems to me that girl culture isn’t just about rejecting adulthood or even womanhood, but about a broader movement toward redefining what that all might mean and look like, and the distinction feels important. After all, girls don’t want to make mom/wife dinner— they just want to slap some yummy shit that their meat-and-potatoes husband wouldn’t like on a plate. That is not a revolution in and of itself, obviously, but it does say something about the degree women are willing to go in shaping their lives around the kind of womanhood they’ve also been sold.
Sure, neoliberal feminism seems a bit lost, as former girl bosses try to decide whether they’re more invested in electoral politics or popular versions of socialist feminism—or as
writes in this really comprehensive piece, in NGOs—or whether they actually want to burn everything down (or whether TGB is a feminist victory). As Jolie also writes, however, “Hand-wringing essays about the state of feminism first need to clarify which tendency of feminist thought, movement, or identity they mean.”