girl revolution

Good afternoon gorgeous,

Here's what I want tonight:

Cheese curds eaten from the bag with the fridge still open.

A whole cinnamon roll, but picked at out of the box for an entire evening.

A bowl of concord grapes.

Salami from the package.

My perfect girl dinner.

I’ve been on girl-dinner-tok for a while now— people of all ages showing off the weird, cobbled-together meals they eat when no one is looking.

Something that used to be done in private, secretly eating like mischievous raccoons, is being done in public.

If you’re a scarred millennial like me you might have a little girl-label trauma. We assume whatever comes after "girl" is about to reinforce the gender binary while also being generally shitty. We survived the era of girl boss— the infantilizing, pastel washing of capitalism, so of course our fight or flight kicks in when we hear “girl”.

But this time it’s… different.

Girl is being used as an adjective and not as a noun.

And it isn’t standing in for feminine, or cute, or pretty, or weak, or grossly sexual.

Girl is describing the dinner.

It’s standing in for messy, imperfect, chaotic, disjointed, unorganized.

For our whole lives we were taught to hide any part of ourselves deemed imperfect. We pretended to be aesthetic clean girls living in-control Instagrammable lives, while Diet Coke cans collected dust on our nightstands.

We pretended to like Iron Maiden and football (just me?) while pretending not to like Taylor Swift, UGGs, and PSLs.

We abandoned ourselves and each other because we wanted to be loved and protected by a system that was never set up to consider us at all.

They gave us tiny boxes so we squeezed and starved our blistered souls until we fit.

And now, girl dinner is tearing those boxes open and letting us breathe. It's saying, the bits of you that used to bring you shame are okay. Not just okay, they're fun. Share it! Look, we all do it. You don't have to perform the patriarchal version of femininity anymore. The gender binary was always bullshit.

Girl can mean whatever we want it to mean.

Complex, messy, chaotic, imperfect, and real.

We get to make the meaning.

Isn't that fucking freeing?

And it's enabling something bigger.

Let me explain:

Women as an oppressed group never developed a shared sense of culture because our misogyny is internalized. Liz Plank explained really well ​how this is rooted in the Foucauldian theory​ of the Panopticon.

We've been trained to reject and find inferior anything female-coded, while still policing ourselves and each other to adhere to patriarchal standards of femininity and the gender binary. Why can't I just get in this box? What's wrong with me? I need to be smaller so I can get into this fucking box.

It's hard to fight something that's in your mind, so it's hard to build solidarity with each other. And without solidarity or a collective identity, we're really easy to isolate and control.

But what happens when an oppressed group develops a shared sense of identity and culture?

We stop trying to join the group in power and start to see ourselves as part of a collective that has its own power.

We can stop cosplaying patriarchal femininity, and by doing it together, we can make it safer for ourselves and each other to refuse it.

We make space for people of all genders to thrive in their individuality.

We torch the fucking boxes.

GIRL. DINNER.