Girl Dinner, Hot Girl Walks...how do these trends fit into feminism?
Seemingly random social media trends involving ‘girls’ actually have more to do with feminism than you may think
Pretty much everyone has heard of “girl dinner” and “hot girl walks.” However, what might be more interesting than the fun trends themselves is the potential reasoning behind them.
In this 8 minute podcast (or short transcript), the idea of these ‘girl’ trends are explained.
The author says that it comes from
a tendency, for those of us who are women, to refer to ourselves as ‘girls’ when we’re engaging in activities that don’t involve the male gaze.
This includes things that you do by yourself and for yourself: such as a hot girl walk (where you practice gratitude, thinking about goals, and confidence), and girl dinner (“the only constraints for what seemed to make… a girl dinner was that they were the kinds of foods that women were eating alone”).
So, hot girl walks and girl dinners are activities that only have to do with the girl herself. Oftentimes, the world ‘girl’ is used to diminish someone and their accomplishments. However,
the idea that you are out having your girl dinner and you are creating it for yourself is very different than a man in a boardroom saying, ‘Girl, sit down. The men are talking here.’
The author thinks that these girl trends stem from a nostalgia for the freedom of girlhood, before the expectations of womanhood:
These things happen outside the influence of the male gaze. And therefore, they happen outside of a man’s expectations of what you should be…
Our lives then [as girls'] were wide open. We thought that we could become anything. And we hadn’t yet realized that inevitable heart wrenching conclusion that all women eventually come to, and our generation is still coming to, which is, we’re not going to be the first generation that’s allowed to have it all.
Trends such as hot girl walks provide escapism from the worries of women (the author points out that hot girl walks began trending in summer 2022, around when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade). Some people may worry that this escapism is ‘wasting time’ that could be used to advance gender equality. However, trends like this can be used both as fun escapism, but also to work towards progress in equal treatment:
when you’re thinking about your goals and how you’re going to achieve them [for example, on a hot girl walk], one of those goals should be how you can make being a woman more bearable for you and the other women around you.