Girl Math, Girl Dinner: An Essay on Girls and Girlhood on the Internet
Author: Joana Perrone
Girl Math, Girl Dinner: An Essay on Girls and Girlhood on the Internet
Joana Perrone
Throughout the past few years, the internet (and social media in particular) exploded with ‘girl’ terms and imagery — girl dinner, girl math, clean girl, lovergirl. Alongside these trends, the term spread to other cultural products, including pop music, with certain artists gaining traction on social media for producing works that relate to being a ‘girl’. Packaged neatly within this ever-growing and ever-shifting media landscape are broader ideas about ‘girlhood’. Sifting through the videos and photos tagged with many varieties of ‘girl’ discourse, it is impossible not to wonder what they say about changing gender perspectives in the digital age.
This is not a completely new line of questioning. The phenomenon of ‘girl’ discourse has been seen in many think pieces and media articles (Dahia, 2025; Jibril, 2024; Sinha, 2023). It seems like the internet interprets ‘girl’ discourse much like it does everything else: by defining the trends as either positive or negative in the quest for women’s liberation. Under this lens, it can either be another expression of patriarchy and restricting women’s capacities and capabilities, or a funny trend bordering on absurdity and allowing women to subvert already existing ideas about them and their place in society. In this piece, I do not propose to pass judgment on ‘girl’ discourses. I am much more interested in their existence itself and the ways ‘girl’ as a term has been explored by popular culture to encapsulate specific experiences in women’s lives. The question here is not only what ‘girl’ currently is in the social media and popular culture landscape, but what it can be; its possibilities as explorations of feminine identity in the 2020s. Particularly, I am interested in how popular girl discourses can shape perceptions and experiences of girlhood. That is, if I am reading, watching, listening and consuming ‘girl’ discourse, what is this telling me about what being a girl means?
If the reader is not chronically online or if they assiduously avoid social media, it might be important to explain the phenomenon of ‘girl’ trends. Since 2023, many have come to the fore, with some of the most popular being #girldinner, with more than 1.6 billion impressions on TikTok (Forbes, 2023) and #girlmath (over 232 million views (ibid.)).
Girl dinner can be summarised in one very simple idea: girls making dinner out of different (and often random) nibbles or ‘comfort’ foods. These are often (though not always) small portions, and incongruent with the ideal of a ‘full meal’. For example, one video shows a girl making a bowl of simple pasta, drizzling oil and some shredded cheese on top — done, girl dinner. Another shows her plate in which anchovies, olives, tomatoes and red onions sit together — girl dinner. Girl math follows a similar trend in which women and girls share the way they approach finances in a mostly facetious manner. For example, one states she bought a 300-dollar bag, but if she uses it every day of the year, the bag actually costs less than $1 per wear. Another TikTok user states that if she returns clothes she has bought, she makes a ‘profit’.
Alongside these, the idea of an ‘aesthetic’ that includes your outfits, home, lifestyle and attitude has grown on TikTok and is also embedded in girl discourse. The #cleangirl had over 650 million views on TikTok by 2022 (The Established, 2025), and other categories also exist, such as rat girl, lovergirl, soft girl, that girl, and many other types of girls, all glittering with their own possibility of encapsulating one’s identity. If one inhabits the internet, the idea of a ‘girl’ or of ‘girls’ is extremely present. And it is also specific about what being a girl is: you eat little, you manage finances badly, you orient yourself towards aesthetics (and by extension, consumerism). It is no wonder that these trends faced backlash among media commentators — there is no ‘boy dinner’ or ‘boy maths’. Presumably, because boys (and men) just have dinner and do math.
In her piece for Cosmopolitan, Hannah Millington states:
Whether these are supposed to be tongue-in-cheek harmless trending terms or not, ultimately they are feeding into a trend in which we refer to ourselves as incapable infants. Sorry but all the adult women I know have tools in the cupboard, eat substantial home-cooked meals, and can be trusted with their money. So… why are we trying so hard to patronise and belittle ourselves when we’ve spent centuries fighting against the stereotypes of women being useless, impractical children? (2023)
This direct question highlights much of what has been the cultural backlash to ‘girl’ trends — namely, that they are furthering negative (and oftentimes patriarchal) ideas about women. But it goes beyond. When Millington highlights that the adult women she knows have a life that does not corroborate the girl-archetypes or the girl-activities, she is interrogating whether or not these ‘girl things’ are actually part of living life as a woman. By juxtaposing girl-discourse with the adult women in her life, Millington is touching upon a very crucial point, namely, why are women broadly producing and consuming trends in which they infantilise themselves? Why are they transforming into girls?
This criticism of what could be framed as ‘harmless’ social media fun follows from Sara Ahmed’s discussions around being a feminist killjoy, namely, interrogating, complaining, and being inconvenient (Ahmed, 2023). As she states, ‘if you expose a problem, you pose a problem; if you pose a problem, you become the problem’ (2023:18), an idea which underpins the figure of the feminist killjoy. The desire for enjoyment is therefore opposed to the idea of engaging with the world around oneself by rupturing with what others might perceive/portray as ‘standard’. It begs those engaging with the terms above to stop and think: what does it mean to call a meal girl dinner and to consider a purchase through the lens of girl maths?
It means to mediate girlhood through two lenses: one of behaviour and one of consumerism. By flattening girl discourse into a very specific set of behaviours under capitalism, it obscures the question of what women and girls seek in girlhood. Girlhood has been called ‘a separate, exceptional, and/or pivotal phase in female identity formation’ (Wald, 1998),1 and the centrality of this experience seems to echo through the use of girl terms on the internet. The desire to form an identity around a girl category can potentially evoke a connection to this particular experience — a recapturing or a belonging. If girl math, girl dinner, and girl aesthetics conflate girlhood with patriarchal and limiting beliefs about women, how would one engage with the idea of girl without infantilising oneself, limiting oneself? Who even is this girl anyway?
Dylan Mulvaney’s ‘Days of Girlhood’ song, released in 2024, faced immediate backlash, despite it following much of the popular social media discourse around girls. The lyrics, which portray Mulvaney’s experience with gender transition,2 reflect much of the girl discourse that is seen on social media: drinks with friends, shopping, dressing up. Upon its release, transphobic discourse reached fever-pitch heights, arguing that Mulvaney was flattening women’s experiences to dangerous stereotypes. The barring of a trans woman from engaging with the standard ‘girl’ discourse showcased how the latter excludes women from participating in it. While ‘girl’ discourse has been criticised, it is doubtful whether cis women would have received the same level of backlash as Mulvaney — a contradiction pointed out by many on TikTok. It is worth noting that, as ‘Days of Girlhood’ received waves of criticism for being sexist and reductive in its understanding of girlhood, the hashtags girldinner, justagirl, girlmath, etc., were still wildly popular.
This shows how this ‘girlhood’ is limited: it is reserved for cis women, and even further, for rich White women. Sanya Dahia, writing about the clean girl aesthetic, highlights: ‘Also, if you thought anyone could be a “Clean Girl”, you’re highly mistaken. It is only the white, skinny, and rich girls who can.’ (2025). In addition to this, authors have pointed out that many of the signifiers of ‘clean girl’ actually originate in Black culture (Murray, 2022; Randall, 2022; Morrison, 2025). Some of the most notable are slicked-back buns and gold hoops, which have been part of Black and Latina aesthetics for decades. Hailey Bieber is a great example of this — her ‘brownie glazed lips’ are a repackaging of an iconic Latina look that has been around at least since the 1990s. As stated by Sir John in his interview with Diet Prada, ‘When it was on my sisters or my mom, and in Black and Latino communities, it was seen as ghetto. Now that it’s on white bodies, it’s seen as “fashionable.”’ This happens in a social media environment in which White influencers outperform their Black and minority ethnic counterparts both in subscriber numbers and profit (The Guardian, 2024).
If clean girl aesthetics steal from Black and Brown women while gatekeeping them from reaping the material benefits from this surge in popularity, it is unsurprising that many other characteristics underpinning girl discourse have been historically reserved for Whiteness: frailty, purity, helplessness.3 Women of colour, and particularly Black women, can engage with girl discourse, but it is clear through the scrolling that the category girl, as it stands on social media, is mediated by cisnormativity, Whiteness and privilege and the beauty standards that come with it. The backlash to Mulvaney’s song (Mulvaney being herself White, blonde, and rich) showcases how the girl category becomes smaller and smaller to exclude bodies and experiences that deviate from White, heterosexual and cisnormative.
In her piece for Dazed, Halima Jibril openly states that the issue with Mulvaney’s song is not Mulvaney herself, but the fact that her experience of girlhood is mediated through patriarchal and capitalist ‘girl’ discourse (2024). That is, it is subjected to the same criticisms of reductionism and sexism (with the added weight of transphobia). She juxtaposes her text with Jess Bacon’s piece for Dazed in 2023, which positioned girl trends, girldom and girlhood as potentially radical reclaiming by women of things they were taught to be ashamed of (Bacon, 2023). Bacon’s piece follows from other work, which highlights how girls mediate their relationship with culture by downplaying or rejecting ‘girl’ coded cultural production, products, etc., during their formative years (Cann, 2015). Internalised misogyny, experiences of trauma, sexualisation, and uneven distribution of housework can all impact how girls experience that formative period that Wald refers to. In truth, even after think pieces and discussions, girl discourse remains present and alive — it is certainly attractive. So if the girl is not going anywhere, where can we go with the category?
In their 2024 ‘Girl, so confusing’ remix, British pop star Charli XCX and New Zealand artist Lorde collaborate to discuss their relationship and how that is interpolated by fame and insecurities. In the song, Charli starts by highlighting that she cannot even understand their feelings about each other, as they are immersed in perceptions of herself. The song touches on how both of them see each other as idealised, and perceive themselves as less-than, and how this dynamic bleeds into their relationships. The chorus, which repeats the title, seems to encapsulate this dichotomy: being a girl is confusing, and they cannot explain it as they are ‘just’ girls.
This shows that both artists identify with being girls, despite both being in their late twenties to early thirties. At one point in the song, Lorde explicitly mentions the young girl who lives within icon Charli XCX. Their experience is one of half-fear, half-insecurity that comes from perceiving oneself as just a girl while thinking of the other as the icon. In this song, the idea of girl does not seem to evoke a sense of less-than the same way girl math and girl dinner do. In fact, part of its success seems to be because of the way in which it encapsulates ‘how society’s treatment of women can lead to disconnection and feelings of competition’ (Santini, 2024). Even the line about being ‘just a girl’ (another staple of internet girl discourse, commonly used in contexts in which women do not wish to engage with complex or onerous tasks) is subverted. By being juxtaposed with the question about how one feels being a girl, it showcases the complexity of girlhood itself. It removes the flatness of the girl as consumption or girl as behaviour and imbues it with meaning — girl as experience.
In 2025, another pop star engaged in girl discourse to provide a potentially more liberatory path for the use of the term. In her song, ‘Adult Girl’, Marina explores the track’s title through a poignant experience of belated childhood and adolescence. She tracks her life and the way she relates to her youth by noting that she did not experience feelings in an unburdened state. When she returns to the absence of experiences of innocence or joy, and a lack of ‘girlhood’, Marina emphasises how her adulthood now allows her to embody a wide range of feelings that were previously closed off to her. At one point, she directly refers to a child inside her who will not behave in accordance with expectations for a woman her age.
Marina is then portraying an ability to inhabit and love girlhood in a way she could not before. Girlhood is the opposite of infantilisation — it becomes the medium by which the woman can be free, and express emotions that have so far been forbidden to her. In this space of adult girlhood, the latter becomes the way to enact liberation.
In her famous essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, Iris Young explores how girls’ motility is defined by a lack of space, or by occupying a space that is less than what is actually available (1980). This exploration highlights the early character of this restriction, which happens in childhood, and shapes women’s phenomenological4 experience more broadly. The insights of Young’s essay on phenomenology rely primarily on demonstrating that the way women move in the world is mediated by restrictions which begin much earlier in life. As Young states, they are not only body-subjects, but their world experience is mediated through being objects (such as by the male gaze, or by being under the threat of gender violence). Marina’s song implies that she managed to gain some autonomy over her bodily expression; she can cry, scream, and rage. Her experience of girlhood is decoupled from frailty or inability, being actually one of freedom and exploration. She seems to use a ‘return’ to girlhood as a time in which her motility had not yet been restricted. Similar to Charli XCX and Lorde, her category of girl is a lived-in experience rather than a behaviour or a consumption. Catherine Driscoll stated:
The girl is an assemblage of social and cultural issues and questions rather than a field of physical facts, however much the girls’ empirical materiality is crucial to that assemblage. (2008)
In the songs mentioned above, the girl transcends aesthetic and consumption; it is moveable, not fixed. By recognising oneself as a girl and allowing oneself to be a girl, these women are both transforming themselves and giving a name to their experiences — not only in relation to the world around them, but in relation to themselves. Girlhood becomes a push-pull experience to them, recognising in it both a potential liberation and the ways in which it is enmeshed with insecurities, fear and trauma. In doing this, girlhood seems to evoke Chisholm’s essay ‘Climbing like a Girl’ (2008), written in response to Young. In it, the author explores how girls and women can go beyond the limits ascribed to them through their own lived experience and engagement with their bodies. She states that girls now routinely challenge the restrictions imposed on their motility and the boundaries imposed on them occupying spaces.5 This challenging of norms ascribed to girls’ bodies might reveal why the idea of girls and girlhood seems to have such a wide appeal that it has inscribed itself into popular music and social media trends.
It aligns with the rise in pop stars who speak or refer to girlhood, interrupted girlhood or reclaimed girlhood. Their popularity and longevity as artists has to do with this reconnecting with younger generations of girls who are seeking to find representations of themselves in the cultural landscape. Taylor Swift was heralded as ‘shaping girlhood’ (Sinha, 2023) with her Eras Tour, with one commentator stating: ‘for a few hours, I reconnected with that fearless younger version of myself.’ (Harry, 2024). Similarly, The Washington Post compiled fans’ reflections on the experience, which highlight the sense of being safe and able to express emotions and movements freely (such as crying, dancing) (Schultz and Pannoni, 2024). In this, the Eras Tour seems to encapsulate the space of girlhood as one of freedom, where one can express a wide range of spatial and emotive movement, and exist fully as a body-subject.
Therefore, artists are mediating their life experience as girls/women through their song production, giving space for a more shifting landscape in the popular discourse of girl. Under this light, Mulvaney’s own experience as a trans woman is seen in ‘Days of Girlhood’ — in which she essentially is enjoying feminine things and a girlhood that was previously forbidden or inaccessible to her. If we consider Mulvaney’s own motility, the idea that she can move through the world as a girl speaks to freedom. Much like in Marina’s song, Mulvaney is highlighting how she can engage with activities that she was once excluded from — be it by her own perception or society’s. In her song, Mulvaney sings: ‘sister taught me how to girl’, positioning her own identity as a girl as a way of moving in the world, rather than a static category.
Those pop culture references to girlhood in the 2020s showcase the breadth of girl discourse and how it is attractive to women long after they have ‘passed’ their girlhood years. Marina, Charli, Lorde, Taylor and Dylan speak from their own places in which girlhood is a process, which includes delight and joy and pain and fear. While coming from a variety of different spaces, they are all contributing to an idea of girlhood that is embedded in lived experience, and not necessarily mediated by consumption and by tying one’s identity to one ‘specific’ girl. These might sometimes be mediated by patriarchy or misogyny, but so is girlhood. In this, they seem to be following Chisholm’s point that women can overcome the gendered limitations ascribed to their bodies. Simultaneously though, the category ‘girl’ exists within a gender system that can limit women’s/girls’ motility by emphasising their position as objects rather than body-subjects — and the clean girl, lovergirl, that girl categories are often constructed around highly objectified archetypes of girl, as discussed previously in this piece. And while these artists and their songs can potentially provide a more intricate understanding of girlhood and allow women and girls to articulate their experience through popular music, there are still strong limitations to their ideas of ‘girlhood’. It is important to note that these singers are all White and privileged, and are all thriving under capitalism. That they speak to many women and girls showcases how the so-called ‘girl’ experience is becoming more mainstream, but it also further conflates the image of girlhood with Whiteness and privilege.
What we can see, though, as we move through social media and popular culture, is that the ideas of girl, girlhood and femininity remain a contested sociopolitical space. The persistence of ‘girl discourse’ seems to underpin a desire in both girls and women to lay claim to their own identities. However, as seen in this piece, it is also a space in which race, class, capitalism, and patriarchy take part, resignifying bodies and cultural expression and excluding certain women from inhabiting ‘girlhood’ (or certain types of ‘girlhood’). If social media mediate the lived body of girls and women, then the way we speak about girls and girlhood matters. Maybe the resurgence of girl discourse and what it produces can give space for women and girls to lay claim to a time in their lives in which many impositions are being made over their bodies and experiences. The only way to find out is through engaging with it, picking up and examining it against the flatness of girlhood as one fixed, consumer-driven figure.
Notes
1. This concept of ‘girlhood’ being a central experience in a woman’s life has been observed in the existence of girl/girlhood studies as a particular subfield of gender studies (Brown, 2008; Driscoll, 2008).
2. The song is a reference to Mulvaney’s TikTok series with the same title, in which she documented her experiences with femininity and trans joy. These included occasions such as going to Pride, being a bridesmaid, and everyday things such as getting a second piercing and getting laser hair removal.
3. This critique fits within broader criticisms of White feminism which centre White women’s experience as the norm for ‘female’ experience. It is present alongside many works of Black feminist authors, including bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman (1981) and Lola Olufemi’s Feminism, Interrupted (2020).
4. In this, I am following an existential phenomenology argument: phenomenological experience would, in layman’s terms, refer to the ‘first-person’ experience. That is, the way one experiences, perceives and feels the world around them.
5. Indeed, Young herself later criticised her piece, including by highlighting that many things had changed since she wrote it (for example, women wearing trousers regularly). However, she still sustained that many women and girls lived ‘a confined and limited experience of space and movement’ (1990, 15).
Bibliography
Ahmed, S. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Allen Lane, London, 2023.
Bacon, J. ‘2023: The Year of the Girl’. Dazed, 12 December 2023. https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61545/1/2023-was-the-y....
Bhatia, R. ‘If It Takes 10 Steps and ₹30,000, Is It Still “Effortless” Beauty?’ The Established, 26 March 2025. https://www.theestablished.com/self/beauty/if-it-takes-10-steps-and-30000-is-it-still-effortless-beauty.
Boyd, R. ‘“The Darker You Are, the Less You’re Worth”: The Influencer Pay Gap’. Media. The Guardian, 24 June 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/jun/24/darker-skin-lower-pay-influencer-pay-gap.
Chisholm, D. ‘Climbing like a Girl: An Exemplary Adventure in Feminist Phenomenology’ Hypatia, 23:1 (2008), pp. 9-40.
Harry, A. ‘Bracelets, Tears and Joy: Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Is the Epitome of Girlhood’. Popsugar UK, 24 June 2024. https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainment/taylor-swift-eras-tour-review-49372657.
hooks, b. Ain’t I a Woman 2014. Pluto Press, London, 1981.
Jibril, H. ‘In Defense of Dylan Mulvaney’s Pop Song’. Dazed, 18 March 2024. https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/62211/1/dylan-mulvaney-days-of-girlhood-trans-womanhood.
Millington, H. ‘It’s Time to Put an End to “Girl” Trends that Infantilise Women’. Cosmopolitan, 13 September 2023. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a45097227/tiktok-girl-trends-pro....
Morrison, L. ‘“Clean Girl” or “White Girl”? Exploring Racial Double Standards in the Fashion Industry’. The Menton Times. Accessed 28 January 2026. https://www.mentontimes.com/news-4/%E2%80%9Cclean-girl%E2%80%9D-or-%E2%80%9Cwhite-girl%E2%80%9D%3F-exploring-racial-double-standards-in-the-fashion-industry.
Murray, C. ‘“Girl Math,” “Girl Dinner” Trends Explode on Social Media—And Draw Plenty of Critics’. Forbes. Accessed 5 October 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/09/08/girl-math-girl-dinner-trends-explode-on-social-media-and-draw-plenty-of-critics/.
Olufemi, L. Feminism, Interrupted, Disrupting Power. Pluto Press, London, 2020.
Randall, T. ‘The Problem with TikTok’s “Clean Girl” Aesthetic’. n.d. Accessed 28 January 2026. https://i-d.co/article/tiktok-clean-girl-aesthetic/.
Resnick, A. ‘The Clean Girl Aesthetic Is All Over Social Media—But It’s Not Exactly Harmless’. Byrdie. Accessed 28 January 2026. https://www.byrdie.com/clean-girl-aesthetic-critique-6744031.
Schultz, K. and A. Pannoni. ‘Taylor Swift Fans Reflect on Eras Tour: “The Invisible String of Girlhood”’. The Washington Post, n.d. Accessed 1 February 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/interactive/2024/eras-tour-fan-memories/.
Sinha, E. ‘Taylor Swift Is Shaping Girlhood for Legions of Girls and Women and That’s Worth Celebrating’. Elle India, 13 December 2023. https://elle.in/taylor-swift-shaping-girlhood/.
Young, I. M. On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing like a Girl’ and Other Essays. [Electronic Resource] Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford University Press, 2005. https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0195161920.001.0001.
Walker, B. ‘Why “Girl” Trends Need to Stop’. Dazed, 18 August 2023.
