the group chat w/notyrgirls

Hi notyrgirlies,

Welcome back to the group chat! This is Cass taking over the reigns. We have so many great ideas percolating for our upcoming issues, but you know the drill: the group chat is our little teaser, full of news, links, and sneak peeks to tide you over as we research and write.

Lately, it’s been particularly hard to get out of the doom scrolling vortex. My social media feeds are a dystopian mix of content, jumping from memes about how girls love trinkets, “iron-rich recipes for when you’re on your period”, to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, crystal candy ASMR, ongoing fascism, and cute cats. It’s non-stop, until I’m numb. All that lingers is a looming sense of dread and the hint of a migraine waiting to burst forth... Not to mention a deep feeling of powerlessness to do anything meaningful in this sick, sad world.

But that’s probably the point, isn’t it? Numbness and helplessness are a great combo when you want folks to shut up and listen. They are also part of an interesting turn from the messaging millennials consumed/were fed in our childhood and teenage years.

Jac is tackling this exact messaging in our next full issue of notyrgirls. Despondent about the state of the world, searching desperately for glimmers of hope, she has been looking into her crystal ball to catch a glimpse of the future. At the same time, she’s being pulled back towards her youth, as she reflects on the different, more optimistic outlook that was presented to her as a y2k girl:

What does the future look like to a girl’s eyes? At the cusp of teenagehood, in the throes of pre-adolescent hyperinsecurity, I nonetheless felt poised to take over the world – or at least, to shoulder the weight of solving the world’s problems.

Humanity was in big trouble, adults told us. In the early 2000s, we were all aware of the havoc climate change was beginning to wreak, and warned of how much worse it would get if we didn’t collectively perform an about-face. I was semi-aware of the ridiculousness of American post 9-11 jingoism and spurious invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, my anti-war stance informed not least by Green Day’s 2004 album American Idiot. Meanwhile, my friends and I faced a barrage of messages pushing us towards disordered eating and self-image, only partially countered by my nascent feminism and attempts on part of teachers to encourage more positive mindsets about our own bodies.

At the same time, our parents and teachers told us, it was too late for them to take action. We – the kids just trying to survive high school – were the ones who were supposed to figure this shit out. So in 2001, when my secondaire 1 (grade 7) French class teacher asked us to write down what we wanted to be when we grew up, I wrote “Prime Minister of Canada.” I was a 21st-century girl, dammit! I could do it all!

We weren’t promised utopia, exactly, but there was a level of hopefulness about the future, and our young generation’s ability to shape it, that seems alien now.

Where did that optimism go? Was it ever really grounded in reality, or couched in empty promises? What stories were we told about the future – and where did they fail?

CASS SPILLS THE BEANS

• Namah’s piece, “Get Out of My Room!”, from the latest issue of In the Mood magazine was a great read and really felt in line with our own past notyrgirls issue, “Dear Diary… Writing ourselves through fact & fiction”. I loved this line: “The most intimate relationship a girl will ever have does not take place in her bedroom; rather, it is the one she shares with it.”

• A nod to the importance of accessible community spaces in the Summer 2025 issue of Maisonneuve: “In the Swim of Things” by Eve Cable covers the history and significance of public pools in Montreal.

•  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this season of the Rehash podcast on beauty, “looking at the many ways that the internet has exacerbated beauty standards, and maybe accelerated what we officially proclaim (you heard it here first) to be the death of mainstream feminism. Oh no!” Looking back, I especially liked their episodes on “Mar-A-Lago Face”, “Baby Botox”, and “Glossier” (I will eat up anything that covers Super-intern-Emily’s lore; my fellow The Hills victims will understand).

• I then fell into Botox discourse tok. @clios_world opens this TikTok arguing that “Botox is a systemic way of suppressing women’s personalities.” The typical comments ensue:

I do think that, in cosmetic cases, it really can be that deep. Many of the comments also brought up how too much Botox and filler are ruining cinema. Of course, this comes after decades of not allowing women in the public eye to age or gain weight without intense scrutiny. So… there’s a lot of deep-seated stuff to unpack behind the criticisms of so-and-so’s stiff face taking us out of a film’s universe.

• We gotta talk about “Syd”, as her new bff, American Eagle’s VP of Marketing, Ashley Schapiro calls her. Sydney Sweeney’s genes/jeans campaign has been discussed everywhere, including in the White House. I recommend the Polyester Podcast’s episode “​​Are Sydney Sweeney's Jeans The Harbinger Of Doom?” and reading through this Instagram post by @praxis_archives, which highlights many parallels through past and present white supremacist, eugenicist, and racist thinking/practices. Once again, it is kind of that deep. Because whaaaaat:

• But, then again: “So, yeah—shitty ad. Ultimately, though: irrelevant. A distraction. I don't really care to live in a world where more people worry about a poorly written American Eagle ad than about Israel's systemic and U.S.-funded starvation, destruction, and invasion of Palestine, or about RFK Jr.'s HHS winding down funding for mRNA vaccine development, or about Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth’s seeming endorsement of a group of Christian nationalist pastors' belief that women shouldn't vote and that the country at large should follow the patriarchal values they (mistakenly) consider to be Christian, or about Trump deploying the National Guard in the capital and taking over D.C.’s police force.” From Hmm that’s interesting’s “what if outrage were a finite resource?”

No matter the actual meaning behind the campaign, the intention was to stir up this discourse and benefit from it. AE (and “meme-stock investors”) definitely did. Outrage is clearly still a great resource for the economy, as finite as it may be. Is this how late-stage capitalism survives, through endless outrage cycles and rage baiting? I need to never hear of “meme-stock investors” ever again.

• In better news: please tell me you’ve seen THIS READ by Jinkx Monsoon re: J.K. Rowling. Masterful.

• And in worse Canadian news, politicians are still capitalizing on nationalism as a response to Trump and as a means to “advance the economy”—at all costs, apparently—by destroying the environment and making moves towards increased privatization of social services, especially healthcare (in Ontario and in Québec, for example). Meanwhile, Arms Embargo Now recently released a report exposing Canada’s military exports to Israel, despite public promises to the contrary. This just a couple weeks before a targeted Israeli attack in Gaza City killed six journalists and cameramen: Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Momen Aliwa, and Mohammed al-Khalidi.
  

  While outrage may be a finite resource, we have to treat the red flags for what they are: symptoms, consequences, pieces, pawns of a move towards the right and a society that is less just than it already is. Power and control leech into our lives on micro- and macro-levels, from Botox to bombs.

• On that note, a roundup of some of my favourite posts about researching (learn to do it! It’s fun and fundamental):

• This summer, Jac and I finally finished reading The Hunger of Women by Marosia Castaldi. Following the protagonist Rosa’s reflections on the mundane (cooking, daughter growing up and moving away, falling in love and lust), we are reminded that these everyday experiences have deeper connections to the rhythms and patterns of history, nature, the universe. Castaldi doesn’t use any punctuation in this book. Rather, everything is a continuous thought or reaction: “By lacking something so fundamental as a period, The Hunger of Women asserts itself as not only a novel but also an exercise in how to transmute a book directly into a living human brain.” Highly recommend.

THE 411

Find out what Cass and Jac have been up to outside of notyrgirls.

• Read Jac’s piece, “Vagina dialogues: Has the internet killed feminist health activism?” in This Magazine.

• Cass is starting her PhD this September! You can read more about her project here. She also has a piece, “Eating in Saint-Leo,” in the upcoming issue of kitchen work, which will be out soon.

We’ve reached the end of my brain/link/doom dump, but we’ll see you very soon with our next issue. Until then, sound off in the comments below: let us know what moments of community, resistance, and activism have brought you joy lately.