2025 in Girlworld

2025 marked the second year of notyrgirls. When we published our first issue in March 2024, being a Girl Online was a whole thing. “She’s just a baby” content, the coquette aesthetic, and y2k throwbacks felt inescapable. In many ways, this year felt like all the worst bits of 2024, plus some new horrors to contend with.

This is a highly subjective, partial accounting of the news that stuck in our brains, the drama we texted about, and what we think was missed (or, more charitably put, what is easier to see with hindsight). Plus, a look forward to what we hope to see in the new year. Welcome to Girlworld (you’re already living in it).

No longer a coquette girl, not yet a trad wife
Kim Kardashian’s holiday hair bow notwithstanding, we saw less and less of the girlish coquette aesthetic in 2025. Out went the pastel pinks, the frills and flounces, the “i’m a widdle girl” affect – wait, what am I saying? The ghost of the coquette girl haunts us still. She endures in the form of the everything-from-scratch, angel-of-the-house trad wife and her slightly less mediatized counterpart, the stay-at-home girlfriend.

As ever, shifts in fashion and social media trends are indicators of social and political conditions. This year, attacks on health rights and worsening economic conditions reinforced the turn to the home:

On the health policy front, the restrictions on bodily autonomy continued apace. By Dec. 2025, more than 20 American states had either instituted full abortion bans  or “restrict[ed] the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade.” In Quebec, the provincial government’s attempts to ratify a constitution may lead to restrictions around abortion, despite warnings from the province’s medical college, advocacy groups, and the Bar.

Misleading information around reproductive and sexual health also continued to proliferate. The re-election of Trump and subsequent appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as US Secretary of Health and Human Services only fueled the misinformation fire. Consequently, we noted a definite shift rightwards in acceptable forms of discourse on AFAB biology, ovulation, and hormones, but also around access to gender-affirming care. The online pushback on using birth control didn’t come out of nowhere.

For This Magazine, Jac explored the complex and often misleading online ecosystem of information-sharing around reproductive and sexual health to ask whether (and how) this system helps us improve health outcomes and advocate for themselves.

Worsening income inequality, food insecurity, and price inflation fed into conservative tradwifery, but also into DIY culture more broadly. In Canada, food bank usage has doubled since 2019, even as food prices are predicted to skyrocket next year. Online, we saw more and more “how to make from scratch” content, from food to clothes and more. What else can we expect when buying butter can be more expensive than making your own?

Read more:

• Alicia Kennedy:“On Trad Wives”

• Gaby Del Valle: “MAGA family values”

It’s still a White Man’s Man’s Man’s World

In 2022, Glamour ran a piece about how millennial women had been "caught in the crossfires of a uniquely heinous, fatphobic time in cultural history" as youths in the 2000s; three years later, we think it’s now safe to say there was nothing unique about it. It is now indisputable that scary-skinny has returned as a pernicious body idea. 

To wit: The wildfire spread of weight-loss injectables, the return of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the strange and worrisome dynamic between Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. Throw in the skyrocketing number of cosmetic surgeries, and it seems like there’s just no winning for people who just want to live, beauty standards be damned.

As always when it comes to discussions around weight and beauty, it’s the people affected by the discourse who end up losing out. If you start using Ozempic or Wegovy after being told your whole life that being fat is a bad thing, you must contend with social derision and potentially serious side effects. If you resist, you run the risk of being denied life-saving health care, professional advancement, and even basic human decency.

In the flurry of discourse around Ari + Cynthia, some commentators have defended their criticism of the Wicked: For Good stars’ appearances because of the influence the pair wields on younger girls. Then again, the intense scrutiny on female celebrities’ bodies is why we are here in the first place… In this reality, can we ever achieve body neutrality, where we are just allowed to exist, just the way we are and without feeling the immense pressure to change what we look like?

As always, the more time we spend concerned about our weight, the less mental capacity we have to defeat patriarchy and white supremacy – lest we forget, the skinny ideal is anchored in racist understandings of Black femininity.

Consider this summer’s “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans” campaign for American Eagle, which was widely panned for its thinly veiled eugenicist messaging juxtaposed with Sweeney’s (blond, white, conventionally super-hot) image. In our August group chat issue, Cass wrote:

Of course, it was actually possible to release a jeans ad in 2025 without being weirdly racist:  The K-pop-style, LA-based girl group Katseye partnered with Gap for an ad in which the denim-clad members perform to Kelis's "Milkshake.” The choreo itself became a huge TikTok meme; for the notyrgirls team, the ad was a sign that the y2k revival is not quite done with us yet… 

@gap

Better in Denim.  This is denim as you define it. Your individuality. Your self-expression. Your style. Powerful on your own. Even better ... See more

For more:

•  Rehash’s podcast on SkinnyTok

•  Aubrey Gordon’s Your Fat Friend

The year in writing about y2k girlhood

The divorce memoir was supplanted by y2k-culture analysis in my reading habits this year. Colette Shade’s critical-cultural memoir, Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) and Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves both dropped in 2025.

After reading these both in quick succession and feeling somewhat let down, I realized that I often dive into works of nonfiction that are explicitly interested in representation and doing cultural or literary analysis and end up feeling disappointed by the lack of understanding of historical-material conditions. (Is that my fault? No, it is the other writers who must be wrong.)

On the notyrgirls front, Cass cracked open up her childhood diary and spilled the tea on everything from which member of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team she had a crush on in the year 2001 to the history of the diary as written from and how girls construct their selves in the pages of these intimate narratives. (Cass really carried the newsletter this year!)

For more:

• Namah: “Get Out of My Room! The teenage bedroom is a site of self-construction and myth-making”

• Haya: “Girlhood Exists in Palestine. You Just Have to Dig Under the Rubble to Find it.”

Then vs. now: Which witch & Freakier Friday

Witches dominated the screen yet again this year, thanks to the release of Wicked: For Good. In the virtual pages of notygirls, Cass weighed the witchy representations of our 90s and 2000s childhood media versus those of today: 

That said, while the girls liked Freakier Friday well enough, their coup de coeur of the year was K-Pop Demon Hunters. I’ve heard this song more times/seen more kid dance choreos to this than I can count (and if you have kids in your life, chances are, so have you): 

Even more news and links we loved:

• Shanspeare is one Cass’ favourite video essayists. These videos were highlights of the year.

• Anora swept awards season.

• Khadija Mbowe left YouTube (sob), but not before dropping so many great video essays, like this one.

Hopes and dreams for 2026 Girlworld

This year was rough across the board, but that doesn’t mean 2026 has to be that way too. Here’s what we’re hoping for, working towards, and creating together in the new year:

Jac: 

• Fighting a “culture war” is a losing battle when people can’t afford to feed or house themselves. I hope we see less focus on aesthetics and representation, and more attention paid to basic labour, housing rights, and science.

• Body neutrality, where we are just allowed to exist, just the way we are and without feeling the immense pressure to change what we look like.

• A Free Palestine.

• One of the great pleasures of late 2025 for me has been just… learning to do things. I can now sew, make quilts, use a table saw, embroider, make bread. If you’re going to be online, do so selectively. Retrieve the info you need and then get the hell out of here!

• Related: For people to realize that the “inevitability” of AI is just empty marketing. You don’t have to use it for squat! 

Cass:

All of the above, plus:

• More zines, printed media that is accessible, underground, and engaging

• Going analog: bringing back my CD collection

• If there’s one thing we can take from the trad wife: learn a sustainable skill

• I know it’s all nostalgia bait, but I went to the Jobros concert last week and I NEED MORE. I need to scream into the void with thousands of other people while my favourite y2k artists perform 20-year old songs!!!