‘Girl Dinner’: The Implications of Ironic Online Anti-Feminism
This article contains discussions about body image, including dieting and misogyny. Please proceed with caution.
Since its creation in 2016, TikTok, formally known as the lip-syncing social media app Musical.ly, has had a constant grip on the world with its rapid and influential trends, made easy by TikTok’s audio feature in which users can take sound bites from songs, shows, and even other users to create their videos. This feature enables trending audios to develop and often be linked to some kind of common content across all videos using that sound, resulting in an easily identifiable trend that burns out almost as quickly as it starts, as social media trends so often do. One of the most recent examples is a wave of videos in which users describe something trivial they dislike or a popular celebrity’s relatively unknown wrongs while “Hater’s Anthem” by Infinity Song plays, specifically the lyrics “I love the way it feels to be a hater, something so sweet…” While the premise is relatively simple, and the adoption of the term “hater” in recent months has become a light-hearted joke, not every popularized trend and label is entirely innocuous.
Throughout 2023, women and girls online have been openly reclaiming and redefining their womanhood and traditional femininity (for example, the “Oh, how I love being a woman” trending audio on TikTok). Especially since the release of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie”, women have shown increased solidarity with each other and embraced their identities as girls, a wholesome and welcome contrast after being raised on the “I’m not like other girls” mentality in which women were discouraged from indulging in traditionally feminine things, such as makeup or the color pink, due to both external misogyny and misogyny which becomes internalized at a young age.
As a part of this new wave of love stemming from women for themselves and other girls, it’s become something of a meme to attribute certain things to being a girl, semi-ironically but with an air of genuineness that calls back to the “justgirlythings” accounts of the early 2010s.
This appropriately sets the stage in which “girl dinner” was created: TikTok user Livy Mayer describes an experience in which a girl commented on how Mayer’s dinner was like what a medieval woman would eat (with the dinner itself consisting of simple items such as cheeses and pickles). On July 5, TikTok user @karmapilled, also known as Karma Carr, posted a video to her account with self-made audio in which she sings an acapella song that simply repeats the phrase “girl dinner” while recording her meager meal of a mostly eaten ice cream bar. And thus, the trend begins, at least the version of it that is tied to this particular audio.
The term “girl dinner,” although its meaning varies slightly depending on who you ask, typically refers to a small, scarce meal, with some examples listed by the “girl dinner” TikTok filter which randomly selects foods that would belong in a “girl dinner” such as shredded cheese and cucumber slices, to name a couple.
Although at first glance it comes across as another silly typical TikTok phrase, others have started to question the implications of associating femininity with a less-than-fruitful diet.
Why is it that we associate eating very little with girlhood in this way, even as just a joke? This notion likely has roots in the beauty standards for women that have spanned across decades, which insist that being petite and dainty (i.e., thin) is a staple feature that every woman should strive to achieve by, for example, eating very little. For years, women have been discouraged from “gluttony” or openly eating much, especially if the food is unhealthy, which is particularly harsh on plus-sized women, or any woman who does not fit the ideal for thinness, all in the name of maintaining the image that women should be modest, polite, and composed, never desiring or consuming more than what men are comfortable with.
This is far from where “girl dinner” stops, though---the template of putting “girl” in front of an activity or concept to suggest something about its nature, while existing before Mayer’s or Carr’s videos, has begun cropping up everywhere, with phrases ranging from “girl math” to “girl career” to “girl sports,” particularly on girl-targeted niche meme accounts on Instagram and Pinterest which are known for indulging in softer forms of femininity intermixed with pointing out the struggles of that girlhood.
At face value, the terms are entirely innocent; but when one strips these memes down to their core, the attribution of “girl” to a concept in this manner has basically become another way of suggesting something is inferior or easy as opposed to the therefore “masculine” versions of those things. It doesn’t take more than a history lesson to understand why this pattern can be harmful to women: for years, women have worked to distance themselves from the ideas that they are the inherently weaker sex in their fight for gender equality, but the existence of jokes like these, at the risk of simply being funny and relatable, perpetuate and embrace harmful stereotypes that past (and present) girls have tried so effortlessly to debunk. Most girls are familiar with the concept of “girl push-ups,” in which females are allowed to drop to their knees to make push-ups easier, or the phrase “You throw like a girl,” both of which serve to insinuate that women are not as athletically capable as men are.
This is basically the idea that these types of memes and phrases enforce. For example, “girl math” refers to simple, easy-to-understand math---because why? Women aren’t intelligent enough to grasp math beyond a middle-school level (which, once again, wasn’t the original meaning of the trend, which was initially harmless)? It’s fun to laugh at, but what lies at the root of this idea and where does it stem from, since women across time have disproved the deficiencies that these memes suggest we have, other than internalized misogyny? It all traces back to, once again, men’s comfort regarding the abilities of women.
And we can’t blame women for wanting to fight back against those stereotypes with well-meaning, fun inside jokes that were meant to connect us—until those jokes start contributing to the very stereotypes they were created to satirize, as their original intentions grow beyond what they were started for.
“…it feels like the takeaway from these well-meaning, largely harmless posts about girlhood and womanhood and work and pleasure […] was to academically scoot right past the opportunity to examine capitalism and the intersecting pressures of race and class and gender and age and education (or the opportunity to celebrate the joys of enjoying a good latte sans guilt) and instead launch themselves right down the horrifically slippery slopes of gender
essentialism,” Tumblr user chainofclovers writes in their post dissecting capitalism’s influence on the “girl dinner” trend.
Ultimately, the emergence of that trend has only served to divide women more, with some happily participating in the expansive world of “girl dinner” jokes, with others taking the steps to try and undo the mentality those jokes contribute to. The idea that women are meant to be complacent in their perceived inferiority ultimately only benefits the men who want women to feel bad about themselves; it’s much easier to manipulate girls into believing in their own weakness when they’re exposing each other to it as well in the form of easily disguised memes and content with surface-level relatability.
To many, this interpretation of the initial “girl dinner” joke that started it all is… to put it plainly, not that deep.
“…the actual trend is literally just saying that sometimes girls don’t want to cook, and so we eat a random assortment of snacks and leftovers […] girl dinner is not 2 almonds or a plain salad or whatever else you’ve decided is misogynistic,” Tumblr user cryiling argues.
And they’d be right---on its own, two young women on TikTok making a harmless funny video is ultimately not doing any harm to other women, nor is it promoting the aforementioned ideas. It’s more about what the trend turned into once picked up by the general Internet population, and what implications it has for how society, especially the female members themselves, views other women; the simplification of pro-girl content has warped it into something that more resembles the very pillars of the patriarchy it was created to combat, and on a platform like the Internet which passes along information like the world’s biggest game of telephone in which the original meanings and contexts can be lost, this can prove to be far more harmful than originally intended.
“It’s upsetting because it almost feels like everything involving food and women ends up contributing to eating disorder and diet culture when the intention is the exact opposite,” senior Maya Douglas said when asked about her feelings regarding the trend.
Popeyes joins TikTok trend by adding a “Girl Dinner” option to its menu (Popeyes)
If anything can be learned from the “girl dinner” phenomenon, it’s to be critical of the implications behind the online world’s beloved memes. Far too often, damaging ideas conquer the web unchecked due to the bite-sized (no pun intended) and funny packaging they come in, and people of all kinds (but especially women and other minorities) suffer because of it. We have to remember that, even though we know we’re joking, not everybody who uses the Internet possesses the same literacy and context, especially young children who inevitably find themselves in online spaces they’re not supposed to be in, and men who will leap at any chance to adopt these ideas as their own with complete seriousness. The messages we perpetuate in the biggest, fastest information-sharing platform in history have an impact on everyone, whether it’s recognizable to the naked eye or not.
In summation, leave “girl dinner” on TikTok---women deserve to eat their fill after being left hungry and dissatisfied for so long.