“I’m just a girl,” croons ‘90s ska band No Doubt in the titular song. “That’s all that you’ll let me be.” The sarcastic song goes on to list all the things that a delicate young girl could never do, limited by the confines of her “inept” gender. An anthem of third-wave feminism, the song has experienced a recent revival on TikTok, often playing over a clip of a young woman doing traditionally feminine things or making a silly, endearing mistake.
This is where I have to ask, are we listening to the same song?
We have turned a track meant to scoff at society’s misogyny into the soundtrack for its revival. Social media is littered with clips of girls and young women laughing away mistakes and problematic behavior, with a bat of the lashes and a caption reading “I’m just a girl.”
“If someone, specifically a girl, makes a mistake or messes up, it’s kind of played off with, ‘I’m just a girl,’ it’s fine, it’s normal,” said Summit junior Linna Bickel. “[The trend is] making fun of things [that] people do… It’s putting all women into one category, and definitely minimizing us.”
This anachronistic joke has found itself firmly at home in the modern vernacular. There seems to be a cognitive dissonance for girls raised during an era of “girl power” who were told that they can be anything, do anything, that their gender places no bounds on their potential. We listened when they said we were limitless, but now we’re building our own cultural hindrances.
“I actually have two stickers on the back of my car. One says, ‘Caution, woman driver,’ and the other says, ‘I’m just a girl. ’ Personally, I have a history of not being the best driver. I hit curbs. I run stop signs, you know, stuff like that. And so, I am playing into the stereotype of being, quote, just a girl,” said Bickel. “I believe that, too, even as someone with the stickers, we need to support women.”
Can we leave in our minds both contemporary ideas about empowerment and antiquated jokes? We can’t make satirical jokes for long before they become genuine.
“I mean, I think in general, I’ve seen recently a lot of regressions,” said Summit senior Marcus Knight. “There’s the role of women in society where so much progress has been made. But for people to just willingly sort of give up that progress, just because it’s a funny trend or whatever. I think I see a lot of people doing that, and I think it’s kind of disappointing.”
Our mothers and grandmothers have fought tooth and nail to build a better future for us. It can’t be worth it to chisel away at their progress, just for a laugh.
