The Girlboss Is Dead. But the "Girlbaby" Is Just As Bad

The next book on every literary It girl's shelf? Kitten by Stacey Yu. The debut novel from the London-based Chinese-American author publishes August 4 and centers on a young woman named Katie's post-graduation unraveling. But it's not just unemployment malaise and mommy issues contributing to her downward spiral; it's a growing obsession with none other than her older, wealthier boyfriend's cat. Katie forms a peculiar connection with the feline, Silver, while visiting her beau's vacation home and can't help but feel envious of how easy her life seems.

As Katie grows increasingly disoriented, the beguiling, biting novel explores the political, economic, and social implications of who gets to be "helpless." In writing, Yu—who's cultivated a following on #BookTok as @literaryfling—spent a lot of time reflecting on many contemporary young women's embrace of identifying as "just a girl." To coincide with the highly anticipated book's release, the rising author shared an essay with Marie Claire to unpack thoughts on the rise of what she calls the "girlbaby," and how it might just be the nihilistic, equally flawed little sister of the "girlboss."

I was an outspoken feminist in high school, so of course I was gifted a copy of #Girlboss. The author Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal, had just invented one of the most popular neologisms in recent feminist and internet history. (Yes, the hashtag was part of the title. It was 2014.) While the title would become a cultural buzzword, the book itself would become irrelevant.

At the time, I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it. I found Amoruso’s shamelessness off-putting compared to my own teenage uncertainty. Still, I kept the book prominent on my shelf, hoping some part of it would rub off on me. I can be forgiven for that, since I had just turned 16. I didn’t know how to be a girlboss, but by God I would try. There were years to go before the term would gain a stink, alongside the shallow corporate feminism and neoliberal logic it represented. First, it would crumble under the attention of anyone with a whiff of class consciousness. Then it would die the ultimate death, becoming a meme.

Girlbosses, of a sort, are still everywhere. Successful, ambitious women have always existed, long before culture coined a word for them. We tend to invent terms to describe the things women do (hot girl walks) and eat (girl dinner) and read (chick lit) and buy (girl math), always through the lens of the girl. These labels infuse normal behaviors with outsized gendered importance while also rendering them completely banal. Women deploy them with an ironic grin, in on our own relentless self-construction. Meanwhile, outside of disparaging women, men don’t really use these terms at all.

Yet there is a sticking power to “girlboss” that the other terms don’t have. Sailing on the culture-shifting tide of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the concept of the girlboss offered a new, fashionable way of being, answering to the anxieties of working under the patriarchy. “Girlboss” had narrative power, offering a compelling arc women could aspire to, considering the systemic inequalities of the time. Per the logic of 2010s mainstream feminism, barriers faced by women, though undeniable, could be overcome with a bit of grit and the right attitude.

Obviously, this was a lie, and most women don’t buy it anymore. A decade or so later, the same structural issues of labor production and gender inequality have barely budged, and the Overton window has shifted so far that Roe v. Wade is now off the table. Millennial optimism has been overtaken by skepticism and mistrust. Girlbosses aren’t just misguided; they’re cringeworthy. So, what do we believe in? What is the aspirational identity for young women today? Not the girlboss, now proven to be a sham. Now is the time of the girlbaby.

The girlbaby knows that life is hard and mean and senseless, and it isn’t her problem. The girlbaby won’t be tricked into fighting a losing battle. The girlbaby could not care less about a raise. Ever the nihilist, the girlbaby suspects the feminists were wrong all along. Then again, so were the left, and obviously the far-right, too—everyone was wrong about everything. The girlbaby is sometimes confused for the traditional male-devotee type, but she hangs out with all crowds because no one can resist a bit of escape. The girlbaby is as pure and trusting as she is damaged and disdainful, and all these qualities make her immune to judgment. The girlbaby refuses to engage. The girlbaby finds safety in retreat. Where the girlboss was more “boss” than “girl,” the girlbaby is just as much “girl” as “baby,” and she thrills in the closeness of the two words, the way they can so often be interchanged. The girlbaby is “just a girl:” helpless, blameless, and oblivious. More than she wants to be loved, the girlbaby wants to be absolved. She wants to live in this frightening, unpredictable world and owe it nothing.

I do not mean to be disparaging. At least, not completely. Just like the fantasy of the girlboss answered the material anxieties of women in the 2010s, the fantasy of the girlbaby does the same for many young women today, either old enough to be disappointed by unfulfilled promises of upward mobility or just beginning to come of age into an economic and sociopolitical maelstrom. Better to be numb and accepting in such circumstances. Whether it’s the rise of the stay-at-home-girlfriend, quiet quitting, or waves of nostalgia-spurred internet trends, the girlbaby, and her promises of comfort and familiarity, is running quite the successful campaign.

Certainly, part of this conversation is about the sexualized ways women are incentivized to infantilize themselves for the male gaze. And sometimes, women utilize the aesthetics and language of the girl to reclaim them, refusing to cede them to the worst impulses of the patriarchy, such as in the case of the babydoll dress. But when I say girlbaby, I’m not referring to a sexualized façade of helplessness—though it can express itself as such—but rather a way of seeing and making sense of our position within the world.

The girlbaby’s less harmful yet quietly revealing influences can be seen online. Linguistic trends spread mimetically, integrating themselves into our daily vernacular and eventually our habits and self-perception. “Little treat” culture repackages consumerism through the language of the child, validating our need to reward ourselves for completing simple tasks of adulthood. “I’m just a girl” has become the catch-all, self-mollifying response du jour. Even when delivered with an ironic ditziness, the phrase pleasures in its proclamation of helplessness. Ironically, “just a girl” is a reference to No Doubt’s 1995 feminist anthem of the same name, which brazenly mocked the idiocy of a male-dominated society.

Of course, Peter Pan syndrome wasn’t invented by our generation. But I’m interested in the way it’s expressed differently. I’m old enough to remember the now desperately earnest slogan of the 2010s: “Adulting is hard.” Tech companies like Google and Facebook designed their offices, signage, and organizational language explicitly to resemble a college campus and Disneyland, respectively. These iterations of self-infantilization as a way to respond to the pressures of adulthood feel remarkably simple, direct, and boundaried. People seemed to think of themselves as adults first, but with inner children who needed tending to. Now, I can’t help but feel a tendency among young adults to insist on our child selves; we’re surprised to find ourselves fully grown, capable adults in a world we are responsible in part for building. I certainly felt that way in my early to mid-20s, perhaps a consequence of moving back home in my final year of college and graduating into a global pandemic. (Or maybe I just have a nostalgic disposition.)

The girlbaby isn’t just an outfit for social media or a cute deflection to use against the challenges of the outside world. On some level, we internalize this image of ourselves, too. Our lives are no doubt shaped by the circumstances of our times, but most of our woes, dramas, and pain are personal. I have felt the appeal of girlbabying most while facing the unique, daily pressures that come with growing older, building my career, negotiating shifting relationships, and navigating housing. This is another reason I don’t condemn the girlbaby completely. The figure represents the fantasy familiar to all of us of stepping out of real life for a while. My escapist tendencies flare up the most when I’m coming up against personal difficulties, not societal ones. Sometimes, I want nothing more than a break from being myself.

Words such as “girlboss” and culturally omnipresent roles like “it girl” and “cool girl”, as well as trends like “girl dinner” or “hot girl walks,” owe their appeal to our age-old desire, as women, to first make sense of ourselves through the eyes of society, and then to present ourselves as such to society. Self-categorization is a human instinct, to be sure—but it is also a particularly feminine one, a way to legitimize ourselves in a social context where we are constantly scrutinized. Ironically, these labels can then trap us, reinforcing our desire for validation and relying on infantilizing stereotypes.

Still, these categories also give us something to challenge. Corporate preening and meme-ification aside, “girlboss” has left us with something important. By putting a name to the aspirational model of 2010s feminism, we have an archetype we can criticize, allowing us to agree on the evidence of the hollowness of its promise. We have learned not just to distrust the girlboss, but also to build a necessary cynicism over any similar label that offers identity formation as a structural cure. We should learn from the girlboss moment and apply the same lessons to our more modern and cynical role model. She may make us feel safe and innocent, but she also tricks us into throwing up our hands, accepting the worst, and relinquishing what little control we do have in shaping our lives. The girlbaby has her moments, but we can’t trust her, either.

Kitten by Stacey Yu is out now.