Girl’s Girls: Young Women and the Allure of Perpetual Adolescence

Cat G

2024 is shaping up to be the year of the girl. Whether you blame Charli XCX or Taylor Swift, musings on “girlhood” are inescapable on social media. Find yourself on Instagram, and you’ll likely stumble across pictures of baby deer and Bratz dolls serving as backdrops for text that reads “I'm just a 23 year old teenage girl”. Spend a couple of minutes on TikTok and you might encounter a “girlcore edit”, tear-jerking clips from Euphoria and Ladybird spliced together while Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” drones solemnly in the background. And of course there’s the seemingly endless barrage of “girl trends” that have emerged from the primordial ooze in the past nine months. Justifying an impulse purchase? You’re doing girl math! Dedicating hours of your day to an elaborate makeup and skincare routine? Those are your girl hobbies! Eating tiny portions of random snacks instead of a meal? That’s not disordered eating, silly, that’s just girl dinner! The finer details of these trends are endlessly interchangeable, catering to a wide array of subcultures, demographics, tastes and temperaments. If you find video edits of Margot Robbie’s Barbie tearing up to “You're On Your Own Kid” a little gauche, you can simply watch a montage of the Lisbon sisters sulking to “Pretty While I Cry”, or a compilation of clips featuring Effy Stonem chain-smoking to “Brand New City”. You can be a “clean girl”, a “hot girl”, a “literary it-girl” – what matters is that you’re a girl, a social role distinct from its adult counterpart, woman. So why is self-infantilization back en vogue? And why do self-proclaimed feminists seem to be leading the vanguard? 

I feel a handful of caveats are in order here, chief among them an acknowledgement of the fact that while this cultural phenomenon seems to skew heavily “female,” it is by no means exclusive to women. As the traditional markers of (middle class) adulthood like salaried employment, homeownership and the ability to start a family become increasingly inaccessible, it makes sense that many 20-somethings have retreated into adolescence, and at times, childhood; take for example the immense popularity of children’s cartoons among young adults of all genders. It’s also worth noting that teens, tweens and actual children constitute a significant portion of social media users, and I have nothing but the utmost reverence for seventh grade girls fumbling to make sense of their subjugation via Lana Del Rey memes and fan-edits of Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen. What I am specifically interested in exploring here are the swathes of women, aged 20 to 25, who seem hellbent on clinging to an adolescence they've long outgrown. 

It’s no secret that many women have “a thing” about aging. Whether you’re 22 and blowing 800 bucks on “preventive Botox” or 11 and applying retinol serum, women and girls fear “getting old” before we really have much of a sense of what it even entails. To quote Susan Sontag’s brilliant essay, “The Double Standard of Aging,” women “are old the second they are no longer very young.” This is not the same ennui about aging felt by all as we hurtle towards decay, or some frivolous exercise in female vanity– this is women’s grounded appraisal of our material conditions, a measured response to the reality that our value depreciates over time in a way men’s does not. A woman’s worth is more or less synonymous with her “sexual viability”; when a woman is no longer fuckable, she’s rendered disposable. But if this is just about smooth skin and perky tits, why insist on all the childish window dressing? What other factors account for “girlhood’s” cultural resurgence, and why is embracing an arrested approximation of femininity now understood by many as an act of resistance?

I sincerely believe that teenage girls occupy a uniquely precarious position in society. Simultaneously revered and reviled, teen girls are at once middle-aged men’s favorite punchline and Pornhub category. For many women, adolescence is a time in which we are repeatedly denied autonomy, often forcefully, by boys and men; it makes total sense to me that some women attempt to retroactively “reclaim” their teen years by embracing the aesthetics that defined them. I wonder, however, at what point a reclamation of adolescence is a refutation of agency. In “The Double Standard of Aging”, Sontag writes “The ideal state proposed for women is docility, which means not being fully grown up.” Rather than relegating ourselves to “girlhood”, maybe we can finally, for lack of a better turn of phrase, grow up.