Writer Amanda Shapiro takes a look at what everyone is calling the year of girlhood – the girl dinners and girl walks; sold-out Beyoncé concerts and everything hot-pink Barbie – in order to find what it says about the state of boyhood.
The summer of 2023 belonged to self-identifying femme women, mostly thanks to one permanently high-heeled doll and two permanent fixtures of pop music. It’s hard to overstate the impact of even one; together Barbie, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé blanketed the world in a haze that even had Google donning pink. (The pink was so overwhelming that we even published an op-ed about it: Hedi Slimane’s CELINE Is the Only Brand Standing Up to Barbie Pink, when only one celebrity didn’t sport head-to-toe pink at the movie’s pink carpet premiere).
Headlines touted women’s spending power, the sense of community at stadiums and in theaters, and the mental health benefits of seeing strong women in the spotlight. But behind all the feminist rah-rah was a deeper truth: the summer we turned pretty wasn’t really about women; it was about girls. Eating #girl dinner, taking hot girl walks, doing girl math, even girl rotting on your couch all weekend was part of this summer’s online celebration of girlhood.
Specifically, it was about nostalgia for a certain type of (cis-)girlhood, one that Delia Cai describes in Vanity Fair as “exuberant and hyper feminine, playful and innocent.” Also, she adds, “almost always white.”
That obsession with girlhood, which sparked an unprecedented level of pandemonium and an $8.5 billion buying spree, raised an interesting question: If Barbie made women yearn for that bubblegum flavor of girlhood, what were men yearning for now?
For every stereotype about girls, there’s also a reductive corollary for boys: Little League, Boy Scouts, BB guns, video games. But if you ask men if they’re nostalgic for these things, as I did, you might get some blank stares. For example, one guy told me he played video games every weekend – he only wished he had more time. Another told me that the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was really good. Men, it seems, spend more time reminiscing about the Roman Empire than their own pasts.
I found this perplexing, until I talked to the parents of boys. I asked what their kids were into, and, as it turns out, they’re into video games and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles too. Also, LEGO and lightsabers. A lot of them saw The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, all of which are brands that have existed since today’s men were boys. Those films, along with Fast X, Oppenheimer, and Barbie, rounded out the highest grossing films of 2023 as of this writing. For those keeping score at home, the ones that aren’t Barbie are based on video games, comic book characters, nuclear warfare, and fast cars – not the Tracy Chapman kind.
Men and boys are also well-served by the small screen. The most-watched programs last season were NFL Sunday Night Football, the neo-Western Yellowstone, and NFL Monday Night Football. A million and a half people watch Major League Baseball on a given night – 10 times the number who would go to a Taylor Swift and Beyoncé concert combined. Speaking of concerts, Swift and Beyoncé weren’t the only two artists to fill stadiums this year. Bruce Springsteen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dead and Company, Phish, Blink-182, and Metallica also mounted major national tours with sold-out dates.
Nostalgia is a fundamental human emotion, a combination of the Greek words “nostos” (homecoming) and “algos” (pain). “How I wish for the months that have passed / and the days when God watched over me,” says biblical Job. Odysseus wants nothing more than to return home. Coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, nostalgia was long considered a disease whose symptoms included manic longing and melancholia. But to yearn for something that intensely, you have to be without it. And that, I think, explains women’s girlhood nostalgia vs. men’s blank stares. When the entertainment machine satiates you with an endless loop of familiar content – from the $30-billion-grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe to outdated history documentaries, what is there to miss? If our screens are to be believed, boyhood is manhood and manhood is boyhood; the VFX get better but the stories remain the same.
Not so for girls. Women are mostly expected to age out of their childhood comforts. Xbox and Marvel stay, while dolls and dress-up clothes go in the attic. Girls who don’t oblige face social consequences, often from other girls. What’s more, after being told that their hobbies are childish and silly, they’re supposed to support and even adopt the interests of boys. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect portrayal of this than the Matchbox Twenty scene in Barbie, in which Ken plays – and sings – "Push" to Barbie. If you saw the film in the theater, you probably felt the collective cringe – every woman has her version of being trapped by a guy and his guitar.
By the time they’ve fully entered adulthood, women have buried their girl selves so deeply it can be painful to dig them up. But the nostalgia, the yearning for who they once were, remains. That’s why this year of girlhood felt so powerful for so many. For the first time in recent memory, women’s nostalgia was recognized. Masquerading behind high heels and glitter, something repressed was set free. All those hot girl walks and girl boss videos making the rounds on TikTok were acts of reclamation. Same with loving a complicated doll, one owned by nine out of 10 American girls. And bopping along to “puzzlingly uncool” Taylor Swift, who grew up alongside Millennial women and goes by “mother” to Gen Z. It felt okay to love something you’d once loved fiercely before you were forced to let it go.
“[Summer 2023] felt like a coming-home to many, who have remembered the joy in being the unfiltered little girl again,” says artist Sam Rueter in a TikTok with over 560.7K views. “Releasing the idea that feminine things are silly and uncool and boring… as if women could ever be anything other than our dramatic emotions and self-obsessive behaviors to the outside world anyway.” She asks what I think is a central and unanswerable question for many women: “How can we translate our lost girlhood back into adulthood?” Where are our cinematic universes, their immersive games, their opportunities to escape? Who are our mothers now?
It’s a question of how to deal with the hunger of a nostalgia that hasn’t been sated. And it sits at the center of Barbie as well as in Swift’s work. Swift has been writing longingly about the past since her debut album – an already wistful teen. The most recent, Midnights, is the most textbook example yet. According to Swift, the album is a representation of “13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.” And what is the “Eras” tour if not a nostalgic look back at all the nostalgia of her last 17 years?
Sometimes the objects of Swift’s nostalgia are real: an old lover, a childhood home. But just as often her nostalgia is for an alternate version of events. The woman she might’ve been, if. On “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”– a bonus track on Midnights about a relationship she had at 19, Swift delivers the line, “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.” When she performed the song on tour, she sang it like an order, and the crowd did too.
But not all longing is this personal. Collective nostalgia – a shared emotion within any group or culture – is equally powerful and even more pernicious. Especially the brand of nostalgia that glorifies masculine toughness, feminine vulnerability, and whiteness all around. Studies have shown this is the nostalgia that underpins conservative politics writ large. And arguably, no one is more susceptible to it than American men. Boys may not need to learn to hunt game to feed their families or run invaders off their land, but the signifiers of that way of life remain: Nerf guns, Grand Theft Auto, Quentin Tarantino, every John Wayne movie ever made. Women may be forced to give up girlhood, but what kind of boyhood is possible when you’re constantly told to “Be a man”?
If the year of the girl proved anything, it’s that childhood on the whole is due for reinvention. Because while Barbie helped some women reclaim their girlhood, for others it was a painful reminder of something they could never and would never attain. Meanwhile, male culture – which at first glance seemed like boy culture trapped in amber – looks more like training for a version of manhood that’s gone extinct.
Reinventing childhood will take more than bringing our sons to Beyoncé concerts or our daughters to see Spider-Man. It requires letting go of the collective nostalgia that’s allowed these binaries to become so entrenched in where we’ve come from. We will always miss the kids we once were. But that longing shouldn’t need to dress up in pink – or blue.
