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In music, it was Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, both of whom propped up the global economy on a mountain of friendship bracelets and silver paillettes. Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour drew more than 2.7 million fans to stadiums around the world, while Swift’s Eras Tour was the first in history to gross more than $1 billion.
In books, it was pop star Britney Spears, whose memoir “The Woman in Me” sold more than 1 million copies in the United States in its first week. Chu herself won the Pulitzer Prize for her work, much of it focused on explorations of womanhood.
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Our language was girl-coded: girl dinner, girl math, all of the girlies doing their lazy-girl jobs. Fashion was Sandy Liang bows and Miu Miu ballet flats; ribbons and miniskirts and ballerina pink. Even men were babygirls.
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But it was “Barbie,” the year’s standout cultural product and example par excellence of the girly phenomenon, that encapsulated the open questions still lurking.
Director Greta Gerwig’s ode to Mattel’s creation — a lovingly rendered depiction of girlish utopia nearly destroyed by a poorly informed patriarchy — was the highest-grossing film of the year, earning $1.4 billion globally. It begins with a radical re-envisioning of a world begun by women — an Eve with no Adam, looming powerfully over the landscape.
But the movie wasn’t a full-throated celebration of girls finally running the world. In many ways, it was a send-up: a meta-critique of a glossy girlboss feminism that never could survive in the real world. In the form of a pathetic but dangerous Ken, the movie nodded to the simmering crisis of masculinity forming both independently of and in direct response to female empowerment.
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Between pink-convertible joyrides and choreographed dance interludes, the movie gestured at a deep dissatisfaction with gender relations. It didn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, offer a solution. But in this sense, it reflected our unsettled discourse around sex and gender, one that this year’s celebration of high-powered girlies might obscure.
Our aesthetic tropes are jokes, “Barbie” warned us. The promises offered by gender roles are illusory. And there are consequences to ignoring the other sex.
In 2023, many women rejoiced in caring much less about male desires. They prioritized themselves over the roles of wife, mother, domestic caretaker. Eras Tour concerts and “Renaissance” screenings were safe spaces to feel one’s feelings, to dance with friends, to escape from a reality that is less generous to women than it should be. And adopting the aesthetics of “girl culture” helped to define that independent role: girls don’t have to get married, don’t have children, aren’t yet tasked with perpetuating society. They don’t pair up with men, and aren’t responsible for supporting them; they leave men out altogether.
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But where, then, do those men end up? What should they be doing in the meantime? How will our society come to terms with this changing dynamic?
Discussing her film with the Atlantic’s Shirley Li, Gerwig outlined what a positive relationship between the sexes — or at least a détente — might look like: more integrationist than adversarial.
“You don’t want to tell people how to watch things, but at the end of the movie, the production design incorporates some of Ken’s fascinations into Barbie Land. Like, the perfection is not as beautiful as the thing that started blending everything together.”
Gerwig continued: “I remember when we went to shoot the finale, when we all walked on set, we were like, This is the most beautiful it’s ever been.”
I loved 2023’s bows and bracelets, the unabashed celebration of all things female. The year of the girl was long overdue. But even as we celebrate women being on top, it would be a shame — and a danger — to forget that someone else might end up on bottom.
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“Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation,” the critic Andrea Long Chu has written.
Not so in 2023. If anything, it was a year of females — of girls in particular — refusing to negate. They took up space, proving that their stories were just as important as anyone else’s: worthy of the big screen, the arena stage and the front page.
In music, it was Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, both of whom propped up the global economy on a mountain of friendship bracelets and silver paillettes. Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour drew more than 2.7 million fans to stadiums around the world, while Swift’s Eras Tour was the first in history to gross more than $1 billion.
In books, it was pop star Britney Spears, whose memoir “The Woman in Me” sold more than 1 million copies in the United States in its first week. Chu herself won the Pulitzer Prize for her work, much of it focused on explorations of womanhood.
Our language was girl-coded: girl dinner, girl math, all of the girlies doing their lazy-girl jobs. Fashion was Sandy Liang bows and Miu Miu ballet flats; ribbons and miniskirts and ballerina pink. Even men were babygirls.
But it was “Barbie,” the year’s standout cultural product and example par excellence of the girly phenomenon, that encapsulated the open questions still lurking.
Director Greta Gerwig’s ode to Mattel’s creation — a lovingly rendered depiction of girlish utopia nearly destroyed by a poorly informed patriarchy — was the highest-grossing film of the year, earning $1.4 billion globally. It begins with a radical re-envisioning of a world begun by women — an Eve with no Adam, looming powerfully over the landscape.
But the movie wasn’t a full-throated celebration of girls finally running the world. In many ways, it was a send-up: a meta-critique of a glossy girlboss feminism that never could survive in the real world. In the form of a pathetic but dangerous Ken, the movie nodded to the simmering crisis of masculinity forming both independently of and in direct response to female empowerment.
Between pink-convertible joyrides and choreographed dance interludes, the movie gestured at a deep dissatisfaction with gender relations. It didn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, offer a solution. But in this sense, it reflected our unsettled discourse around sex and gender, one that this year’s celebration of high-powered girlies might obscure.
Our aesthetic tropes are jokes, “Barbie” warned us. The promises offered by gender roles are illusory. And there are consequences to ignoring the other sex.
In 2023, many women rejoiced in caring much less about male desires. They prioritized themselves over the roles of wife, mother, domestic caretaker. Eras Tour concerts and “Renaissance” screenings were safe spaces to feel one’s feelings, to dance with friends, to escape from a reality that is less generous to women than it should be. And adopting the aesthetics of “girl culture” helped to define that independent role: girls don’t have to get married, don’t have children, aren’t yet tasked with perpetuating society. They don’t pair up with men, and aren’t responsible for supporting them; they leave men out altogether.
But where, then, do those men end up? What should they be doing in the meantime? How will our society come to terms with this changing dynamic?
Discussing her film with the Atlantic’s Shirley Li, Gerwig outlined what a positive relationship between the sexes — or at least a détente — might look like: more integrationist than adversarial.
“You don’t want to tell people how to watch things, but at the end of the movie, the production design incorporates some of Ken’s fascinations into Barbie Land. Like, the perfection is not as beautiful as the thing that started blending everything together.”
Gerwig continued: “I remember when we went to shoot the finale, when we all walked on set, we were like, This is the most beautiful it’s ever been.”
I loved 2023’s bows and bracelets, the unabashed celebration of all things female. The year of the girl was long overdue. But even as we celebrate women being on top, it would be a shame — and a danger — to forget that someone else might end up on bottom.
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