The word “girlhood” is everywhere. But hearing it feels a bit like being flashed by a nudist. Nobody complains about Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood; and “childhood” is completely normal. As a young woman, I feel comfortable admitting I was recently a girl; but saying I had a “girlhood” sounds bizarre.
The feeling started to creep in around 2023, when the word came up as a fashion-industry descriptor – baby pink was legion and you couldn’t move for fear of bumping into a hair bow. The online magazine Who What Wear collaged together some outfits by Miu Miu and Sandy Liang and used the headline “How celebrating girlhood quickly became the internet’s favourite trend”; Dazed called the same thing “Girlhood-core”. That year, the director Sofia Coppola released a book of behind-the-scenes photos, bound in the same pastel pink, to her female fanbase. “Bows, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, and the entirety of Lana Del Rey’s discography are all things that were once shamed for enjoying, but have become core components of what makes up girlhood…”
The look isn’t new. But it found its creepy moniker as adults flocked to TikTok over the pandemic, bearing years of residual internet detritus from the time when Tumblr held most of the alternative market share. For around 15 years this exact amalgamation of whites and pinks, Nouvelle vague hairstyles, Lana Del Rey videos and Sofia Coppola films has held currency wherever young women exist online. The nostalgic aesthetic is refined but has no single creator; its resounding motifs have been pinned, reblogged and retweeted until they became a universal online language. Welcome to the girlosphere, the least understood corner of the political internet.
We are already familiar with journalistic fretting about the “manosphere”, which shovels anti-feminist and white nationalist ideology from underground message boards on to increasingly visible parts of mainstream social media. The influencer Andrew Tate allegedly radicalises young men into misogyny, they say (though recent Ofcom research has found his reach might be overstated); the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson forms the more acceptable face of this loose digital grouping. More than any individual, the manosphere’s standard bearer might be the green cartoon frog, Pepe, who presides over the digital basement of the alt-right.
In May this year, Stephen Graham’s smash Netflix show Adolescence took over the national conversation. The four-part series follows the Miller family after their 13-year-old son kills a female classmate. It’s all about male rage and online misogyny. “Adolescence is such powerful TV,” the Guardian wrote, “that it could save lives.” Now, secondary school pupils in England are to be taught about incel culture, and misogyny inherent to the so-called manosphere, according to statutory government guidance recently published by the Labour government.
Less thought – almost none – is given to the opposite corner of the internet. We know all too well about the damage social media has wrought to a specific class of online adolescent women. Their rates of depression, anxiety and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social media platforms proliferated and expanded. Being in the “girlosphere” puts you at personal risk. The current “manosphere” panic revolves around a group of all-powerful influencers, who basically act like radio pundits; it seems frivolous by comparison to worry about how the internet looks. But young women do things online that men don’t; they make moodboards, curate feeds and live vicariously through “aesthetic” images. In this case, the visuals themselves might be key.
The girlosphere is broad enough to subsume any ideology without obvious cognitive dissonance. The beliefs that reach it become glamorous by association; it is aesthetically coherent but politically all over the place. It has no Andrew Tate; its only universal “influencers” are enigmatic fictional characters, models and pop stars. Nine or ten years ago you could plausibly be a teenage Dworkinite and have all the same glittery pink images on your blog as a pro-porn liberal. “Cottagecore”, the vague grouping of unthreatening rural aesthetics that emerged in the dying days of Tumblr, accommodated both “tradwives” and second-wave feminists. Today, pro-eating disorder images on X and Pinterest are made more palatable when they use suitably “coquette” images of Slavic fashion models. Dangerous habits get embedded in the girlosphere at light speed; young women searching for escapism are at higher risk of getting sucked in.
The fictional basis of the girlosphere has stayed the same for more than a decade. It is deliberately voyeuristic and distant. Goodreads tells me that the Virgin Suicides gets tagged as “girlhood” more than any other novel on the platform; the book and its film adaptation have had a cult online fanbase of young women for over ten years. But both are narrated by a cast of male characters; we barely see the central, insular group of sisters outside of dreams, rumours, windows and diaries. And the “coquette” craze on TikTok was borrowed wholesale from a decade-old Tumblr subculture, whose prime influence was the haunted paedophilia-Americana of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. If you’re a young girl in this sphere then you’re probably edgily imagining yourself as the abductee – but the whole point of the novel is that it obscures the abductor’s criminal motivations through a veil of aesthetic-first literary devices.
The manosphere, by contrast, is fundamentally anti-aesthetic. It puts its real-world grievances and ambitions before its visual concerns. Men do not participate in the collaborative collaging that made “girlhood” into a nebulous vibe and Lana Del Rey into an all-purpose political tool. Nobody’s living vicariously through the MS Paint cartoons of Pepe the Frog; Andrew Tate’s livestreaming backgrounds have made no impression on the current generation of interior designers. You can write its acolytes off as political undesirables after a single glance.
The girlosphere is a different kind of entity. There was nothing inherently malevolent about it in the beginning, but its escapist foundations have made it into a potentially sinister tool. Young women come to seek aesthetic pleasure and end up ricocheting over the political spectrum. The mainstream fashion devotees of the “girlhood” aesthetic pose it as a symbol of reclaimed sisterhood, but this is the most sinister proposition of all, like something out of the Stepford Wives. It has only resounded for so long among young women online because its creepy voyeurism puts it at arm’s length from the real female experience. You don’t have to think with empathy when you mix modern-day policy and the vibes of a fictional middle America; you don’t have to consider the practicalities of your own body when you spend all day collaging together old photos of Slavic supermodels. And once you enter the girlosphere, you can never leave. Future generations will have to endure this too: a ballet flat stomping on a human face, forever.
[See more: On freedom vs motherhood]
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