By Jasmin Asifiwe

Boys, whether infants or in their fifties, will always be boys and are never expected to become men.
Girls on the other hand, are said to mature faster yet are still held to higher accountability.
A boy hits another boy on the playground: “boys will be boys”.
A boy sexualises his female classmate: “boys will be boys”.
A man assaults a girl: “boys will be boys”.
Boys are not born this way. They are socialised into being dominatingly violent and immature by way of being masculine. Where any challenging behaviour negatively affects others, the world will rationalise it and induct growing youth into toxic masculinity.
To combat this trend, women have come together to characterise our own actions. Women on TikTok have started a movement wherein our silly tendencies are jokingly explained away by the phrase ‘I’m just a girl’. It exemplifies a return to the inner immaturity of girlhood: driving over a curb, bed rotting, not texting back. Girl math, girl dinner, girls girls girls. The great fun of this collective effervescence is the complete 180 from the razor-sharp girlbosses of the 2010s. A candy-coated relatability has replaced the She-E-O era, lives of leisure and laziness being equated to femininity. It’s all in great fun, just joshing around – girls will be girls!
Nevertheless, the patriarchy rears its ugly head and there has been contempt for this trend by men online. Those not sticking to the female paradigm are consequently evil. It begs the philosophical question as to why women and not men are equally held responsible for their personhood. Being a girl should be an acceptable excuse to be immature.
There’s always been an idea that women mature faster than men but while this may be true physically, the way we have been socialised should also come into play. The two are inextricably linked.
This girl-core trend does come with its own issues. When women in their twenties and thirties infantilise themselves, explaining away any difficulty rather than addressing issues head-on, we become predisposed to diminishing our power in a male-centred world. Maybe embracing a little more austerity could be beneficial so that we as women are not disempowered.
The phenomenon has somehow also come to exclude people who don’t neatly fit into the girl ideal.
TikToker Dylan Mulvaney became an immediate sensation after sharing her experiences as a transgender woman, but her song Days of Girlhood released in March has garnered hatred online. Despite light-heartedly colouring her own experience as a woman, as many pop songs do, criticism included that she was wrongfully speaking for all women, specifically “real” women. She received intense hate in the same vein that those of the ‘I’m just a girl’ trend got from men.
Overall, this can be symptomatic of a deeper cultural paradox. A tongue in cheek joke that has turned into diminishing our own power and agency. To be a childish grown woman can foolishly amount to losing our selfhood and make some believe their word is the end-all-be-all to the standards of womanliness. Men who can be taught what’s right in childhood become pseudo-victims of sexist socialisation. Their actions are not individual – they are slaves to the apparent inherent male characteristics of rowdiness, hostility, and carelessness. Though the girl TikTok trend doesn’t offer the same blanket excuse, it mirrors this convention by weirdly inserting naivety into femininity. But for both men and women, self-awareness is key. We can’t, and shouldn’t, be chained to our genders.
Jasmin Asifiwe is in her third year of a double degree in Journalism and Law.