With my TikTok addiction getting steadily worse, not a day goes by where I haven’t been exposed to a slideshow of hyper-stylised images of girlhood with the words’ “I’m just a girl” plastered over the screen in pink, glittery, unforgiving lettering.
When the phrase surfaced upon TikTok around 2020, it initially circulated as feminist satire. “I’m just a girl”, taken from No Doubt’s 1995 song of the same name, and featuring lyrics such as “Oh, I’m just a girl, all pretty and petite / So don’t let me have any rights” was used to parody the trivialisation of women’s experiences; Gwen Stefani’s performance utilising irony to expose the stereotypical labels girls have historically and consistently been held under within a patriarchal society.
However, five years on, the original trend of parody has aligned itself with other potentially harmful digital micro-trends such as ‘girl dinner, girl math, delulu girls, and silly yapper girls’; phenomena through which an online subset of women have constructed a communal, self-referential form of digital femininity (Wight). These trends, while originally appearing ironic and self-aware, have increasingly flattened into a stylised performance of helplessness, disguised by hyper-femininity. As Her Campus Bristol identifies, there is ‘a creeping, incessant narrative exposing young people to a gender binary that paints women as girlypop,bad-at-maths and nurturing girlfriends who never eat’(Her Campus Bristol).
Through repetition, these digital performances risk producing a generation of women socialised to associate femininity with incompetence. Saying “I’m just a girl,” ‘oversimplifies identity’ and “flattens the complexities and nuances of one’s personhood’ (Tazibona) By reducing oneself to “just a girl,” women tacitly invite society to reimpose the familiar gendered stereotypes of girlhood; weakness, naïvetity, and dependence, under the illusion of irony. It is a linguistic form of self-erasure, disguised underneath pink sparkly ‘tee hee’ performances of mistake.
Although it may seem as though I’m failing to appreciate a lighthearted, humorous trend, this growing tendency of self-infantilisation has moved away from our screen and into real life situations. I have witnessed in real time, strong minded women I know who align themselves fully with feminism, use the ironic invocation of “I’m just a girl” to evade moving chairs, assembling furniture or changing a flat tire- stereotypically ‘masculine’ tasks. Seemingly solidifying to the opposite gender the inequality that we have been trying to contend with for years.
Through these trends, what emerges is a form of weaponised incompetence, disguised by an attempted irony that’s not so ironic. Beneath the parody lies a reinforcement of the hierarchies that feminism aims to dismantle, a performance of ‘weakness’ disguised as satire. As Nonkosi Tazibona puts so perfectly: In 2025, ‘girl humour is beginning to feel more like internalised misogyny. In some ways, we’ve taken a tool of empowerment and purely weaponised it against ourselves.’ (Tazibona)
-Lottie Horn
Volunteer Writer
Girl Museum
References:
Wight, Izzy. “I’m Just a Girl”: Why are we dumbing ourselves down for the bit?” Fashion Journal, 11 Mar. 2025, https://fashionjournal.com.au/life/just-a-girl/
Gudgeon, Vhaire Kim. “i’m Just a Girl”: Should we be worried about this Tik Tok trend?” Her Campus Bristol, 27 Oct. 2023, https://www.hercampus.com/school/bristol/im-just-a-girl-should-we-be-worried-about-this-tik-tok-trend/
Tazibona, Nonkosi. “I’m Just a Girl: Oh No No No Sweetheart.” The Weird Brown Girl, 3 Jan. 2025, https://theweirdbrowngirl.com/im-just-a-girl-oh-no-no-no-sweetheart/