The Battle Over What It Means to Be “Just a Girl” Online

“I would love to be a stay-at-home mom. I would love to be a homemaker and a wife. I would love to be able to live on a homestead and go milk my cow and take my eggs out of the chicken coop,” begins a rant from a young white woman in a Free Press video that went viral on TikTok and X one week before Trump won reelection.

“That’s, like, my dream. But I can’t fucking do that, because the way the economy is set up, is I’m forced to work,” she continues. “Being a single working woman absolutely sucks.”

This particular anti-feminist perspective aligns with the popularity of tradwife content, which has exploded on social media with the popularity of TikTok creators like Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm. It’s also a conservative point of view that likely helped President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign: 89 percent of Trump voters believe that “cherished traditions are under threat,” according to a University of Cambridge poll.

Even if women are more openly embodying these “traditional” values, many (like Ballerina Farm or Nara Smith) are doing so for social media followings of millions. They are quietly managing empires and businesses of their own while telegraphing homesteading realness, shielding their own version of a “girlboss” reality.

Meanwhile, mainstream pop culture has largely followed a different trajectory. One that also eschews a 2010s’ vision of “girlbossing,” but in favor of something sexier.

Take FKA Twigs’ recent music video for “Eusexua,” in which the artist and a bunch of corporate baddies are grinding in rows of drab chairs, at first in matching suits before stripping to their underwear. Or Billie Eilish, who spins around on a loop in an office’s swivel chair in her video for “Birds of a Feather.” Shy Smith’s “Soaked” shows the artist in an outfit that is to corporate attire what Britney Spears’ “… Baby One More Time” look was to a school uniform.

“I find a little bit of a fierceness in these performances,” says Andrea L. Press, chair of the Media Studies Department and the Feminist Scholarship Division at the University of Virginia.

Most of this content is pretty hot, or at least trying to be hot. The corporate aesthetic being sexy started bubbling up in fashion and social media trends in 2022, just around the same time Kim Kardashian told Variety that “nobody wants to work these days.” Her flippant observation was swiftly panned and even led to her backtracking in a rare apology. But Kardashian also seemed to be laying a sort of stylistic groundwork that exploded across global culture in 2024.

Sandy Liang and Dior are among the many designers whose recent runway shows featured corporate pieces like two-piece suit sets. The “office siren” trend is still a key aesthetic framework on TikTok, where fashion content on how to dress like a baddie at the office continues to go viral. Byrdie reported on the trend in January, headlining with the phrase “Business Casual for Hot Girls.” Fast-fashion and online retailers like Reformation and Fashion Nova have promoted questionable office wear in email marketing campaigns.

The trend is “another instantiation of a claim to women’s agency to dress how they like—even if this is found inappropriate to many around them,” says Eve Ng, associate professor and graduate director of media arts and studies at Ohio University. It’s also a sharp contrast to the soft, farmhouse aesthetics that are promoted to be better suited for rearing children, baking bread, or tending to a homestead while your husband does the office work.

Younger folks are subverting traditional expectations through an embrace of their own identities in what we used to think of as traditional corporate environments. It’s happening at the same time employers all over the world are still scrambling to get asses back in cubicles post-COVID, with hybrid- and remote-work policies fostering more lax dress codes than ever before.

Within Gen Z, “there is this disconnect, or disidentification with corporate culture,” says Brittnay Proctor-Habil, assistant professor of race and media in the New School’s School of Media Studies. “The use of these aesthetics is very satirical in ways.”

Meanwhile, because Gen Z also entered the workforce in a post-#MeToo era, Press says, “the embrace of sexuality” is a form of “fighting back” against objectification.

The corporate baddie trend is also another reminder of our culture’s obsession with such aesthetic classifications that have popularized cosplaying, turning style trends into costumes. Not too long ago, there was the mob wife and the coastal grandma, both of which went viral and quickly flamed out on TikTok. Then there was the Girl: a coquettish display of girlhood, accompanied by aneurysm-inducing “girl math” and “girl dinner” trends, prompting adult women to self-infantilize their everyday habits. A popular refrain of “I’m literally just a girl” made its way onto T-shirts.

Now, as Vogue’s Hannah Jackson wrote earlier this year, “The Girl has grown into a member of the workforce. Or, at least, a highly stylistic, idealized version of one.”

The natural evolution from Girl to either corporate siren or tradwife was just as evident in the TikTok trends themselves: The whole cycle has been soundtracked by No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” (used 464 million times on TikTok) and “Oh how I love being a woman” (451 million videos).

The use of Gwen Stefani’s punk-rock anthem and a line from a television adaptation of “Anne of Green Gables” perfectly encapsulates these two diverging displays of womanhood.

And so, even while mainstream culture has shifted toward a way of reclaiming agency as women, there are still those taking the opposite approach—wishing to return to a time where women had fewer rights and were not encouraged or permitted to have careers at all.

“Such women see themselves as asserting their agency in turning to a 1950s-esque embrace of traditional femininity,” when it comes to looks and activities, Ng says, “because this is now (still) counter to expectations for empowered women.”