FEMININE IS NOT CONSUMPTION.
It never was.
But somewhere between Sephora and Shein, someone whispered:
“If you want to be soft, you have to buy it.”
And we believed them.
Girlhood has been skinned, shrink-wrapped, and sold back to us in 4–6 business days.
It’s no longer a phase of being—it’s a colour palette. A mood board. A haul.
We’ve been reduced to the aesthetics of the algorithm.
You sleep with plastic, wake up with plastic, peel plastic from your skin and apply microplastics right back in the name of skincare. You sip your iced serotonin through a plastic straw in a plastic cup, then flex your recycled anxiety in a pink Stanley.
Not that one. The other one.
Because the old shade of pink is so last week.
You go to pink Pilates with pink mats and pink leggings and pink vitamins in your pink pill organizer, because divine femininity now comes with a discount code and affiliate links.
You hate matcha. But the gram loves it.
So you order another $9 matcha in a plastic cup for the photo and let it rot in the backseat of your Ubered femininity.
You come home to a deluge of PR boxes. 28 shades of foundation for your one face.
Because inclusivity, babes.
Unbox your Shein package. Your Temu. Your Walmart restock. Your “support small business” bundles that you’ll recommend and discard in the same breath.
Because girlhood is just content now.
And content is currency.
Now we spiral into Labubu land, hoard ugly little collectibles to chase a mystery Labubu.
Not because it’s cute. Not because it’s needed.
Because capitalism understands that if you slap a pink bow on a mass-produced troll, we’ll call it healing our inner child.
And if it’s a mystery, well, then it’s magic, right?
No. It’s marketing. We fall for it because brain in the big 2025? Bitch be fr.
This isn’t girlhood.
It’s hoarding disguised as identity.
It’s dopamine wrapped in dopamine wrapped in delusion.
They’ve taken “softness” and weaponized it.
They’ve taken “divine feminine” and sold it in 12 different pink shades with rose quartz energy and a full-face beat.
They’ve convinced you that to be beautiful is to accumulate.
To be feminine is to perform.
To be desirable is to purchase.
They invented new flaws just to sell you new fixes.
“Facial harmony”?
You didn’t even know your face was a problem until TikTok told you it was asymmetrical.
Now you need contour sticks and LED masks and buccal fat dissolvers and inner corner highlights because-oh no-your cheekbones don’t look like the $12k girl on your FYP.
We live in a world where girlhood is curated consumption.
And god forbid you resist.
Because if you don’t join the pink parade, you’re “not like other girls.”
And that, too, is a crime.
But here’s the thing.
Girlhood was never plastic.
It was never pinkwashed productivity.
It was never Stanley Cups and Pilates and the eternal haul.
Girlhood was chaos and clarity. Dirt under your nails and notebooks full of rage.
It was mismatched socks and stories written in the margins of math textbooks.
It was crying at 2 a.m. and building an empire at 6.
It was anger that couldn’t be marketed and softness that couldn’t be sold.
You don’t need to buy it back.
You need to burn the barcode.