What’s wrong, babe? You’ve hardly touched your girl dinner?  

With rot-girl winter throwing itself at you with the full force of a thousand-girl army, the feminine urge to ‘just decay’ is stronger than ever. To be a ‘girl’ has transformed: the hot girl has grown tired, iterated and regenerated a million times, the likes of cool girl, sad girl, it girl, and tomato girl taking her place. 

What does it mean to be a ‘girl’? Oxford says a ‘female child or adolescent’, but in 2024, the girl is much more than that. In 2019, Megan Thee Stallion coined Hot Girl Summer as being ‘basically about women – and men – just being unapologetically them’ – the role of the hot girl transcending gender boundaries. The hot girl danced around the teenage and adult-teenage vocabularies for a while, birthing hot girl walks for mindfulness and relaxation ( a four-mile walk – coined by TikTok creator Mia Lind – where you can only think about things you’re grateful for, your goals and how you want to achieve them and how hot you are’ she writes).  

Delia Cai, writer for Vanity Fair, writes that ‘we’ve reached peak girl’. We cool girled our bedside tables, it girled our wardrobes, and girl dinnered and girl mathed through early adulthood. Nicole Holliday, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College, argues that ‘girl’ is a vocative – calling upon a sense of community in girlhood. But is there something unsettling about the new wave of girls? The word has taken a new class; ‘girl’ modifies anything and everything. First, girl dinner. If you’re not in the know, girl dinner – as coined through modern media like TikTok, is, in essence, a meal of snacks. Some argue it’s a divorce of the longstanding marriage of the female to service and servitude: the weird concept of ‘wifey material’ being a girl who can cook, the traditionalist confinement to the domestic sphere. Others observe that as the tides of the trend cycle wash heroin chic back onto the shore, cooked meals are out, and glorified snack plates are in.  

Of course, in this lens, the use of ‘girl’ to modify ‘dinner’ has to be noted that it feels diminutive. Is this another move towards the childlike body – tiny and hairless – that we’ve historically been urged to take on? Much like ‘girl-math’, the bimbofication of finances. Using cash? The purchase was free. Girl math! Has this renewal of ‘girlhood’ pejorated? What started as a reclamation of divine femininity and community has an unsettling aura of smallness and less-than-ness. So much lies beneath that tiny word.  

But I’m still determining. Despite such connotations, the girl’s age is excellent. There are many layers of irony, individuality and invigorating youthfulness within it. Girl is an ingroup – not just to the girls of the world, but the women and adults everywhere. There’s something whimsical and effervescent contained in girlhood. Across its many iterations, it symbolises youth and the female existence. The mighty girl has come to encapsulate our reclamation of womanhood.  

Plate up that food for thought in your next girl dinner