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- 👯♀️Have we reached Peak Girl?
👯♀️Have we reached Peak Girl?
Introducing notyrgirls
notyrgirls
March 14, 2024
For a while now, being a girlie has felt like a precondition for participation in large swathes of the Internet. It hasn’t mattered which kind of girl you were, exactly; only that you were one. Microidentities and behaviour markers associated with girlhood have proliferated, as has the discursive back-and-forth produced by the hot takes industry. Meanwhile, some have started to push back against the seemingly endless waves of girls girls girls.
Along the way, girlhood has stopped referring to a specific age range or developmental stage to become an all-encompassing/totality – an endlessly malleable meme, seemingly applicable to every person in every scenario: the 10 year-old terrorizing employees at Sephora, the (adult) woman in retrograde, garlic girl, girl math, girl online…
Girls have long had to serve as a blank canvas on which others can project their wants, needs, and fears. Objects of scrutiny, they (we) are subject to the weight of the pressures and expectations of everyone around us. This is, as we see it, less a break with what has come before than an intensification of an ongoing phenomenon.
We are at a juncture in which the surge of scrutiny of girlhood is already turning venomous. As two 30-something women/femmes, we’ve been through more than one of these cycles and lived to tell the tale. Our tweenage years – the early 2000s – gave us Britney, Xtina, low-cut jeans, gel pens, skinny worship, inflatable furniture, chatroom culture, pop feminism, Teen Vogue. We listened to pop punk and watched the OC, read The Royal Diaries, shopped at La Senza Girl, learned to count calories and suck in our stomachs. We were brimming with the possibilities of a thousand potential lives, but when we were teen girls, we desperately wanted not to be, because it felt like there was no correct way to be, except to be simultaneously desired, dismissed, denigrated. To always be Other-than.
We have since witnessed the y2k aesthetic (re)turn with equal parts nostalgia, fear, and excitement. In some ways, life online now has opened up infinite portals to different ways of being – with a unique ability to find a community and an audience that is responsive to how you want to self-present. In others, it feels like we’ve backslid into a reality in which to be a girl is never to be enough, or doing it ‘right’. (Plus ça change…) And amid all this, are real girls and their lives being buried under this heightened discursive attention?
The idea for this newsletter emerged from the urgency we have felt to map out the condition of (post-)girlhood today, and not only because of its ubiquity online. We are currently witnessing conservative policy makers attempt to legislate trans youth out of existence and curtail rights to bodily autonomy across the board; genocide in Palestine; the sexualization of young female influencers, and the continued adultification and hyper-sexualization of young Black girls. Amid all this, the questions of who gets to be a girl (and just be, as a girl, and as a child) become ever more salient.
Who are notyrgirls?
If you have read this far, you are probably wondering: Who am I getting into this chatroom with, anyway?
Born and raised in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), Cassandra Marsillo and jac d.b. met just after making it through the trenches of teenagedom. They have since become erstwhile roommates, friends for life, and devoted fans of full-frontal snogging (iykyk).
Cassandra, then & now
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Nickname: Cassy | Cassandra (www.artistorian.com; @theartistorian) is now an educator, artist, and public historian, telling and listening to stories about immigration, identity, collective memory, food, and folklore, particularly in relation to the Italian-Canadian experience and traditions from her family's region, Molise. She also has a personal interest in reading, writing, talking, thinking, and consuming media about girlhood, pop culture, and all the ways they clash and combine. Art is a space in which she has explored themes of memory, nostalgia, identity, and autobiography. As a public historian, she is inspired and informed as much by these explorations as the theories and methodologies of historical work. |
jac, then & now
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Nickname: Jackie | jac d.b. is now a writer, editor, fledgling burlesque performer, and full-time daydreamer. She lives a life in pursuit of desire. She also loves olives. In an academic context, jac has written about the ethics of tourism and travel, historical gender relations, and the emergence of liberal female subjectivity. In addition to these interests, she is currently focused on the history of queer erotic dance, neurodivergence, the allure of the domestic, and the politics of disenchantment. |
This newsletter is an outgrowth of an ongoing conversation between the two of us. Expect monthly (for now) newsletter issues on subjects such as:
Past and present YA (re)interpretations of historical girlhood
Fangirling and crushes
The diary as pop cultural artifact
The teen girl as ultimate intellectual
The modes of teen girl communication: dissing and gushing
The production of insecurity through teenage media, then and now
While the topics we will cover are grounded in our own experiences as survivors of y2k tween girlhood, we will also broaden our scope to explain the afterlives and transmutations of that historical moment today. We promise: this will not be two millennials romanticizing a period that was, in many ways, traumatizing and dark. While rosy retrospection is easier because, sure, we miss certain things about the late 90s and early 2000s, we will approach these topics not with endorsement nor with defensiveness or derision but with critical curiosity.
We hope you will stick around.
Cass & Jac
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