She is lit from above, the way saints used to be. The phone is propped against something just out of frame, the angle practiced into naturalness, and she is telling you—with the specific warmth of someone who has done this four hundred times and means it every single time—that you are doing amazing, that you are that girl, that the plate of crackers and grapes and whatever cheese made it to the end of the week is not a failure of domesticity but an act of radical self-sufficiency, and the comments arrive like a tide: goddess, queen, so valid, and nobody disagrees, because the platform these women have gathered on was not built for disagreement. It was built for return visits.

Call it what it is. Not feminism but its image—high-resolution, frictionless, better looking than the original, which was always a little difficult to be around.

Disha Asija is a PhD scholar specialising in feminist epistemology, and she reaches for Baudrillard: his argument about hyperreality, the world where copies circulate so widely that the original becomes not just inaccessible but beside the point. What gets amplified by algorithms and pushed through by influencers is, in her words, “obviously a facade”, a picture that is “very rosy, that does not tell you the real struggle of feminism, that does not tell you the ugliness of it”. The softer critique—that capitalism has co-opted feminist aesthetics—isn’t quite right, because co-option implies a struggle that was eventually lost. Asija is describing a system that absorbed the surface of feminist language before it could become threatening, and now circulates that surface as the substance. “Just because women have become visible,” she says, “does not mean women have become empowered”.

Professor Usha Raman researches the social and cultural impact of digital media. She describes the bind content creators navigate: algorithms reward extreme content because outrage drives engagement, while audiences punish genuine controversy. What survives is content that signals edginess without delivering it—what Raman calls “an acceptable middle which could attract a conformist audience with some signalling to edginess that is harmless”. The feminist-adjacent post. The opinion that provokes just enough to be shared but not enough to require defending.

What this kills is what Raman calls the dialectic—the productive friction feminist praxis depends on. “Assent and agreement are crucial to aggregating followers,” she says. Disagreement costs.

Kriti Sachan, a bookstagrammer with 192K followers, knows this from the inside. Certain tones travel further—“confident takes, slightly provocative opinions, things that can be easily clipped or debated”—and the most considered content is rarely the most circulated. She is clear-eyed about the trap: “If you over-edit your thoughts just to be liked, the content becomes very bland very quickly.” But clarity about a trap is not the same as escaping from it.

Taste bends the same way. Sachan notices herself gravitating toward books that are easier to “content-ify”, that photograph well and don’t demand much. Literary fiction can make it, she says, “but usually if it’s packaged in a very digestible way”. The algorithm doesn’t ban difficult books. It just buries them until engaging with difficulty starts to feel like a personal eccentricity.

Tanishqa Mathur is a project analyst—and a consumer of reels rather than a producer of them—and she has been watching comment sections long enough to describe what she sees with the precision of someone who has stopped being surprised. Women posting, " You’re so cute, you’re so great”, regardless of what the content is; men on the same post writing jokes, being critical. She is not nostalgic for the male mode. But the female one produces something with the shape of a community and very little of its substance. “Nobody can be a girl’s girl,” she says, when it means “following female creators you have never heard of and leaving heart emojis under their posts.”

Offline, a girl’s girl means someone who will “show you the mirror”—who knows you completely, tells you the truth the rest of the world doesn’t, and shows up for the things that don’t make good content. The online version has kept the label and dropped everything that made it mean something.

Sachan watched this happen in real time: “girl’s girl” started as “a genuinely nice sentiment, the idea that women should root for each other instead of competing”, and became “a weird moral label people assign to themselves, like a personality trait you declare rather than something you demonstrate.” This is what branding does to ideas—keeps the surface, removes everything underneath, and the surface keeps circulating until it’s hard to remember what it was pointing at.

One girlhood, not many

The word girlhood—which this piece has been using as though neutral—is, in Asija’s view, part of what’s wrong. “When you use the word girlhood, especially on the internet, it has really essentialising tendencies. Not all girlhoods are the same.” The girlhood that gets amplified is classed, typically cishet, capital-intensive—it fits women who are “docile, can be domesticated to a certain sense, not completely independent”. Women who are working-class, queer, whose lives won’t resolve into a coherent aesthetic are “marginalised even further”. The celebration of womanhood turns out to be the celebration of one commercially legible version of it.

“Why girl?” Asija asks. “Why not womanhood?” Girlhood suggests pre-political innocence—it doesn’t carry the weight of labour or structural argument. It is light enough to sell. The Trad-Wife versus Girlboss binary presents itself as a dialectic and is nothing of the kind. Both identities are optimised for consumption, both require capital to perform, and neither has any interest in examining the conditions that produced them. Different shelf placements in the same supermarket.

Raman tracks two simultaneous movements: a politics of choice, organised around identity and personal practice, and a politics of structure, organised around collective critique. In East Asian contexts, she argues, girlhood aesthetics have functioned as genuine resistance—a claiming of identity, a refusal to be ashamed of what patriarchy trivialises. “Is there something to an unapologetic gathering of young women?” she asks, and answers: yes. But commercial capture has left it “less about consciousness-building and more about trendiness”.

The most reliable enforcement comes from the community that the algorithm has shaped. “When every critique gets framed as ‘tearing another woman down,’ it makes honest discussion harder.” The distinction between disagreement and attack collapses online, where everything is public, tone doesn’t survive compression, and the audience’s reaction is always visible.” Sachan says. “It is hard to separate disagreement on a point from disapproval of the creator, and that is perhaps at the core of the monoculture,” Raman reaffirms.

Asija has already thought through what would happen if she published her critique of the word “girlhood”. The word functions as “unification of womanhood, of everything good,” so to question it reads as an attack. This is how social enforcement works—not by punishing every dissenter, but by making dissent feel expensive enough that most people decide against it before anything has to happen. “I can imagine the kind of opinions and comments I would get,” she says. She doesn’t need to post it to carry the weight of it.

Mathur notices what this produces: communities where honesty has been quietly priced out. “Online, everything becomes slightly performative because there’s an audience watching. People defend positions more strongly than they might in a normal conversation.” The space that presents itself as safest turns out to be the one where the least is said.

Whether performative solidarity can become real solidarity is a question Asija refuses to resolve. She is torn between the view that performance is hollow all the way down and the view that sustained performance might eventually make people “critical of things, actually real in it”. Raman would take the second position—performance has always been the first stage of political mobilisation, and the platform has every interest in keeping users there rather than letting them move toward structural politics that doesn’t require a login.

The Swifties are the test case: a fandom written off as consumption that has, for some people, become something more. What platform girlhood mostly lacks is the outward turn—the moment where the energy generated inside gets pointed at something outside. So far it mostly points at itself.

Sachan’s vision of better is deliberately small: a space where women feel comfortable being imperfect, where support doesn’t require agreement, where conversations aren’t always about who is right and who is problematic—“just people thinking things through together.”

“Solidarity is not gift-wrapped,” Asija says. “It’s not something that comes with a pink bow. It’s difficult. It’s a struggle. Sometimes it’s ugly.”

The algorithm, of course, prefers the bow.

Treya Sinha is an ats and lifestyle writer

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