Dila Cakir

Sometimes I feel like so much of the media we consume falls into one of two categories: sociopolitical issues we talk about in class, or the media we choose through apps, movies and books. I often find myself swinging between these two extremes, rarely thinking about the in-between.

A recent long walk sparked a new thought that falls somewhere between the serious and the silly: girl crush. Without romance, this type of crush quickly switches to a different type of intimacy. It’s an attraction with nowhere in particular to go. A type of companionship grounded in admiration. And despite the name, a girl crush has very little to do with being a girl at all. It could be anyone, really.

So much of how we organize people is based on terminology. We put people into categories like “NARPs” (non-athletic regular people) or use descriptions like “girls’ girl.” Who knows if we learn these terms online or from friends who like to generalize, but I hear them frequently. Regardless, my long walk somehow morphed into an attempt to understand the term “girls’ girl.” The more I thought about it, the more I cringed. So naturally, I looked it up. What I found wasn’t all that surprising: A whole lot of online banter about whether the term is in favor of women or not. There are plenty of theories of where it originated, but the short answer seems to be feminist propaganda on social media.

“Girls’ girl” derived from a response to the “pick-me girl.” The pick-me girl was often categorized as putting other women down in hopes of gaining male attraction. The whole “I’m not like other girls” phrase has always felt rooted in the idea that women are interacting through a strange kind of rivalry that assumes women must tear each other down to be desirable. Not only that, but its heterosexual way of looking at female relationships does not necessarily reflect how everyone experiences attraction, friendship or womanhood. So when “girls’ girl” came around, I had hope. But instead of building solidarity in the ways we’ve always needed more of, it did quite the opposite.

Maybe my voice on this topic is one of many, but there is power in numbers. If we’re going to keep using labels, let’s at least make it clear which ones we’re voting out. Sometimes solidarity means making enough noise that the things we’ve learned to accept become impossible to ignore (a not-so-subtle nudge to go vote)!

Ultimately, the girls’ girl seems to rest on a very material understanding of love. It wiggles its way into relationships that need saving through gifts, product recommendations and carefully chosen gestures meant to fix things. The women who are called girls’ girls seem to find comfort in offering you the brand of their sweater, as if it is proof of their care for you. Maybe that’s because there’s a certain routine to transactional friendship: you give and will therefore receive.

You don’t actually have to know her, sit down and think about what she might need. There’s no showing up when things get uncomfortable, or listening when she needs to talk.

The performance of supporting women has started to matter more than the support itself. When being there for another woman gets reduced to sharing product recommendations and complimenting a stranger’s outfit, the meaning of solidarity starts to shrink until there’s barely anything left.

And before I go any further, I want to make clear that I’m not wishing we could go back to the days when women tore each other apart, or when “I’m not like other girls” was practically a personality of its own. I just think we’ve overcorrected into something that’s just as demeaning. We’ve found a way to make supporting women into its own kind of performance, one that’s harder to question because it’s perceived as feminism. And maybe what bothers me most is that we’ve started confusing the appearance of caring with actually caring.

Lily Mott is a member of the Class of 2028.