Editorial: The danger of “girl dinner” isn’t what you think it is

In recent months, “girl dinner,” “hot girl walks” and “girl math” are just a few of the most popular trends on TikTok. 

#GirlDinner is the latest to come to fruition, amassing equal amounts of adoration and criticism — not to mention over 300 million views. 

This seemingly harmless trend over hastily thrown-together snack suppers was started by a user who called a medieval, peasant-inspired meal their “girl dinner.” 

Now, the term has been flooded with response videos of other peoples’ girl dinners. Many examples include leftover rummaging, single-serving charcuterie pickings and instant meals. 

These videos voice a sentiment of camaraderie or satire to the idea that women sometimes make meals out of potentially random or cheap ingredients. 

The New York Times writes that “Girl dinner represents a conscious choice to opt out of the tyranny of cooking and doing the dishes,” but we think it is more nuanced than that.

There is, of course, some backlash and concern over the term being co-opted by routine undereaters veiling problematic behavior with disordered eating. Despite this, our concern is less with the actual content of the tag than with the semantics it imposes. 

We understand this trend is seen as a fun way to relate to one another and that our divulsion might be viewed as an overreaction or an example of performative feminism. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t actually part of a larger movement that infantilizes and divides women. 

Susan Gelman, a leading contributor to essentialist ideas in psychology, refers to gender essentialism as the belief that gender is a discrete and dichotomous social category inherent to biological differences.

Basically, gender (socially constructed manifestations) is the natural result of sex assigned at birth as opposed to cultural norms. 

The danger in this ideation is that it treats gender as inborn and perpetuates stereotypical preferences. It diminishes the experiences of women who fall outside of the binary, namely: transgender, queer or non-feminine women. 

When we criticize the proliferation of “girly” things, we aren’t putting down women or feminity, we’re questioning the systems that deem things to be girlish in the first place. 

The prefix “girl” denotes a young woman or female child. But are girly things even limited to women or females?

Does using the word “girl” liken the acts of grown women to immaturity? Compoundly, does habitually classifying things as “girl” serve to dampen the subject, this case being the quality of a meal? 

Research from the National Center for Biotechnology Information  examined gender essentialism in transgender and cisgender children and found that by four years old, cisgender children believe that even if a girl looks like a boy, she will share more in common with other girls than boys. By six years old, they believe the essentialist explanation that girls would rather play dress up over sports because they were born that way. 

So back to girl dinner —- this isn’t to say that it’s impossible to build a nutritious, satisfying meal out of cheese, breads and fruits. But is it really intrinsic to the way they function? Surely, women aren’t just born with the desire to keep their food simple. 

If “girl” trends are attempting to subvert the patriarchy, why are they simultaneously upholding the idea that women are not just different, but are actually weaker than men? 

Ultimately, these prefixal “girl” trends support gender essentialist theories that harm or alienate women, especially those outside of the gender binary, by infantilizing womanhood. 

Scrolling through TikTok is a passive experience. Many of us enjoy “girl explainers,” “girl bosses” and “girl dinners.” And while there’s nothing particularly wrong with creating content that is produced for and comforts women, these things too often get catapulted and transformed by juggernaut social media machines. 

To put it as simply as we can, let’s not forget the power of words.