Girl Internet

Michelle Santiago Cortés, Dirt's contributing writer, helms our dispatch, a running recap of the latest digital culture news.

The internet has been seized by girls, girlianas, and their gaggles of girlie-pops. Now, apparently, a plate of snack foods put together by a grown woman who only has herself to feed is called a Girl Dinner, according to the New York Times. Olivia Maher is credited with starting the trend on TikTok and she told the Gray Lady (not girl) that the idea came to her while she was on a “hot girl walk with another female friend.” Girl dinner earned its descriptor for being what Maher describes as a “giddy experience.” But the New York Times misguidedly focuses on how Girl Dinner frees women from the “tyranny of cooking.” It crowns it with a pink pussy hat and nudges it, dangerously, into girlboss territory when, in fact, “girl dinner” is part of the growing lexicon of an increasingly girly digital culture.

Mainstream internet culture funnels its supply of girl-slang and and irreverent girlhoods from the usual sources, Black and queer power users. Their “girls that get it” and “girls that girl” refrains are like catnip to grown white women eager to languish in their own girlhoods. Add to this the girlblogger class of meme page admins and internet custodians who have nurtured an ecosystem of hyperfeminine internet-cum-retail trends like e-girl, Coconut Girl, and That Girl, and recall the social internet’s recent history of female domination and you get: Girl Internet.

This weekend, pop culture will cross paths with this powerful current of digital culture when Greta Gerwig’s (Girl Director) Barbie starring…everybody, premiers on July 21st. This conjunction promises to push the Girl Internet further into the mainstream. July 21st also marks the latest album release of uber nostalgic K-pop band NewJeans. Another win for girls.

Personally, I struggle to conjure much excitement for Barbie (2023). I was raised on Sanrio products and PowerPuffGirls. Mine wasn’t just a Barbie house, it was a Bratz, Betty Spaghetti, American Girl, and Polly Pocket house. The pop culture of my literal Y2K girlhood was much more glittery than Barbie’s pink ambition could ever be. Barbie was about becoming a woman, but Girl Power promised eternal youth. I know Barbie meant the world to at least four generations of girls who came before me, the last of which had to contend with the messes and embarrassments of the girlboss. Barbie (2023) promises to show them a way back to their girlhoods, a way of participating in the Girl Internet and finding more sources of “giddy experiences.”

Me, I’ve never stopped being a girl. I was a teenager in Rookie Mag’s internet. The internet of the Tumblr Sad Girl, Virgin Suicides, and Marina and the Diamonds. Which means I’ve since grown into a respectably unstable Ethel Cain listener and Elena Ferrante reader with a deep love of all girl things, including the Girl Internet. When it comes to being a Girl Online, Joanna Walsh writes that “'girl' is an attempt to make time go backwards or sideways.” Noting that IRL a woman is prompted to make herself smaller but, “online, a girl can hammer herself thin as gold leaf until she occupies the whole dimensions of cyberspace.”

As far as girl groups go, NewJeans shimmers. The group is signed to Ador, an independent label under BTS’s same mega-conglomerate, HYBE. The group is the brainchild of Ador CEO and HYBE’s Chief Branding Officer, Min Hee-Jin. Hee-Jin made a name for herself as a creative director at SM Entertainment (a HYBE competitor) with her work for iconic groups like f(x), EXO, and Shinee. If these names mean nothing to you, all you have to know is that visual storytelling and album concepts matter in K-pop, largely due to Min Hee-Jin. Ahead of NewJeans’s debut, the industry was already abuzz with anticipation for “Min Hee-Jin’s girl group.”

I like to imagine that Hee Jin pictured the kind of idol group her younger self would’ve wanted to be a part of and indulged her contemporary tastes in bringing it to life. The result introduced the world to Minji, Danielle, Hanni, Haerin, and Hyein. The five girls wore natural long dark hair and barely-there-makeup in their debut music video, “Attention.” We watch them giggling into their phones, getting ready in the mirror, and dancing in the streets. Fans often compare their choreography to something a group of friends would dance during school recess–fun and effortless. NewJeans is the dazzling girl-next-door-group.

NewJeans finds its marketability in a committed Y2K look and feel. It’s nostalgic and playful, and can easily incorporate trendy wares from brands like Mowalola and Hyein Seo. Ahead of the July 21st release the group has already dropped two songs this year to celebrate PowerPuffGirls' 25th anniversary. “New Jeans” and “Super Shy” are a pair of UK garage, breakbeat, and Jersey Club-inspired tracks, both co-written by Erika de Casier.

But NewJeans yearns for more than just a trendy and marketable girlhood. Last year, Ador produced two videos for 2022’s “Ditto”. Side B sees the five members as schoolgirls in dowdy uniforms running through the halls, huddling at the lunch table, and consoling a friend, a sixth girl, through what looks like heartbreak. The sixth girl films the members dancing in the cafeteria and whispering in the library and we learn that the video is a rescued VHS tape.

Side A follows the same story, only sometimes the sixth girl is seen filming an empty cafeteria, her classmates staring back at her blankly, as if she had imagined the girls the whole time. As if she was a superfan, fantasizing about going to school with NewJeans. As if she had imagined the kind of friends she needed to get through heartbreak or maybe just school. NewJeans shines in the afterglow of memory, moving through girlhood both “backwards and sideways.” But like any good pop act, it’s self-aware. Maybe Barbie can offer fans a self-aware, round-trip ticket to girlhood but that’s a lot of time traveling for one day.

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• Britney Spears is dropping new music tomorrow (Vulture)

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• @CursedSetups, a Twitter account posting cursed (and based) computer setups

• Is the novel a bourgeois form? (Tank Magazine) “Modern book making is a porous and collaborative endeavor.”

• Chloe Sevigny and Chopova Lowena made fairy tale zine together called Conversations with Angels AW23

• November Magazine returns with Volume 5: On Writing “we are perhaps all writers of a sort now—or, at the very least, characters subject to the whims of another’s authorial determination.”

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