The lead story on the homepage of HelloGiggles.com is titled “Crush of The Week: Season 7 of The X-Factor (AKA The One Direction Show.” A deeper dive into the site brings you to content that while witty and 100% entertaining, leans heavily on nail art and unicorns and aww-worthy photo galleries of baby animals. Hello Giggles, it should be noted, is not a site created by teenage girls but by three whip-smart women of the millennial generation. One’s a producer, one’s a TV writer and one’s the star of the FOX hit “New Girl.”
These ladies are smart. And the first time I visited the site, just about a year ago while working on a story founder Zooey Deschanel, I was quite shocked that they didn’t know better.
On a Sunday morning SXSW panel the girlishness of HelloGiggles and other women’s media were challenged by moderator Margaret Wheeler Johnson, the editor of HuffPo Women.
Given the overwhelming trend of "girl" content--from Girls to New Girl to Jane Pratt's XO Jane--there has begun to be a rumble of discontentedness over the way women are representing themselves online, in television and movies, most most significantly in how those representations translate themselves in real life.
Do female journalists and content creators undermine themselves (and other women) by publishing odes to froyo, breakup confessionals or a slew of new girl-titled TV shows? Or does "girly" media surface and acknowledge different women’s experiences as important and worth hearing? After all, some of just might really be into puppies.
Panelists Deborah Schoeneman, a staff writer on the first two seasons of HBO’s “Girls,” Jezebel editor Anna Holmes and Hello Giggles editor-at-large Rebecca Fernandez, come approached the question from very different angles. Schoeneman has been investigating the “girly” phenomenon for several years and wrote the Kindle Single "Woman-Child" on the subject. Fernandez, of course, was defensive of her site’s offering, making the passionate argument that Hello Giggles speaks to “all women on all levels,” and if you don’t like some aspect of its coverage, it’s your prerogative as a reader to simply pass it up.
Holmes, whose editorial perspective I’ve valued for years, was simply not buying it. “I have to say that I do find this girlishness a bit distasteful,” she told the audience. “I suppose it depends on the demographics of the site, and sure Hello Giggles does skew younger. But still, what are those girls being told about themselves? Are they told being cute and loving kittens are the primary things they should be concerned with?” Because that, she says, is problematic.
“Personally I’m very conflicted on the topic,” she continued before raising perhaps the most provocative issue of the trend of both increasingly girly media representations and women in their twenties and beyond aspiring to dress and act much younger than they are. When this behavior and these themes are used as a means to diminish a woman’s power, it’s scary.
But it’s even scarier when women highlight or play up girlish, young or naive aspects of their personality to actively downplay their own power or aggressiveness. It’s no shocker that women are conditioned practically from birth to be cautioned about exhibiting threatening power or assertiveness. Is girlishness about women actively making themselves seem small? Or is it about being safe? It wasn’t mentioned in Sunday’s discussion, which in the end spent more time talking about nail art than overall representations of women and its shortcomings, but I can’t help but tie this trend in girlishness among women to the man-child phenomenon currently plaguing men.
Wheeler and Shoeneberg mention that one huge marker of the woman-girl in media is the major success among middle aged audiences of the films Twilight and The Hunger Games--both adapted from young adult fiction--and the complete flops of “What to Expect When you’re Expecting,” “I Don’t Know How She Does It” and other content specifically targeting that demo. “The truth is, women don’t want to know how she does it,” Wheeler says, “They want to watch girls having love affairs with vampires instead.”We point to many different reasons for this young-ing down of modern women, but most involve women’s self-worth or concern over the way we’re being perceived by men. When we discuss the age-ing down of men, or read books like “Manning Up” and “The End of Men,” though, the blame is placed almost entirely on the economy, a factor that wasn’t mentioned once in the session.
The fact is, as both a Millennial woman and a journalist, easy to see. We are aging in a time of instability, when the future is uncertain, when “growing up” and becoming financially independent, gainfully employed adults is arguably harder and scarier than ever before. If we’re going to give men the crutch of the economy to explain away their video game playing, their hook-up culture and their unwillingness to become their fathers, I believe we should do the same favor for women. Is it possible we’re holding on to the trappings and affectations of youth not because we want to appear cute for all the boys, but instead because we’re simply scared shitless of growing up?
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