Why phrases like ‘girl dinner’ and ‘Disney adult’ are setting the generation back
While sitting on public transportation, waiting at airport gates, scrolling through social media, or spending time doing any of the countless things that give me the pleasure of eavesdropping on strangers, I encounter a chilling trend. There’s this talk of “girl math” to justify ordering another cocktail. It’s there when adults stare open-mouthed at AI videos being fed to them in an endless scroll, like kids with unlimited screen time being placed in front of Miss Rachel videos. It’s there when the theaters fill up with adults looking to participate in a loud and destructive ritual. minecraft film.
It’s a kind of regression, less ironic and self-effacing than it once was. It metastasizes to the point where acting childish becomes a personal identity rather than a performance. Even a brand and a belief system.
Self-infantilization has become the household style of contemporary culture. Not just by what we watch, but also by how we talk, what we buy, what we excuse. Everything is softened, rolled, made delicious. Nothing too sharp, nothing too demanding. Since our treats are pre-chewed, they are easier to swallow and digest.
You can see this in the way adults are preparing to welcome the new Harry Potter TV series: not as storytelling to be appreciated, but as a warm, soothing bath to be re-entered. On how “Disney adults” treat a conglomerate as a lifestyle and how critical views of that lifestyle are met with “let people enjoy everything!”
Supermarket shelves are full of brands that look like they belong in nurseries: fluffy fonts, soft pastel palettes, names that should be said rather than spoken. Even the language we use to describe our lives has become smaller. Appetizers are “girl food” and exercise is “hot girl walk”. This online vernacular has seeped into us, too, and I fear for the girls who will one day wake up and have to navigate life insurance or perimenopause.
And in all this pseudo-jocularity lurks a strange, puritanical twist. Every few months, a viral post makes the rounds bemoaning “unnecessary” sex scenes in film and television, as if we were drowning in erotic excess. It’s a funny complaint, considering we’re experiencing perhaps the least horny period in mainstream media in decades.
Six months after its premiere Heated Competition, The only thing people want to talk about is the cheerful asses of the main actors, not the romance of tortured adults. It’s so rare that mutual pleasure is depicted not just subtly but completely. The unspoken, underlying goal of the media is to make even stories about adults acceptable to this infantilized generation.
Infantilization feeds on a kind of strategic innocence. If you don’t own the full spectrum of adult experience, including sexuality, agency, and appetite, it’s easier to position yourself as bland, harmless, “just a girl.” The more we liken ourselves to something cute and non-threatening, the less we have to struggle with complexity. The less is required of us.
While I know it might not be popular to mention Taylor Swift here, based on the impassioned responses I received the last time I wrote about her in this column, there’s a lot to be said about how the billionaire artist and cultural powerhouse still manages to be seen as a delicate thing on the edge of girlhood.
Her fans support her idea of vulnerability and defend it with the intensity you would reserve for an underdog, not someone who has commanded one of the most successful careers in modern music. Questioning his methods or expecting any artist to be complex and thoughtful is, in my opinion, an act of pretentiousness, not the work of a tyrant.
None of this means you should give up on pleasure or give up on nostalgia. Be careful what you wish for. Enjoy silly little treats from department stores. But there is a difference between enjoying something and needing it to remain uncomplicated, unchallenged, untouched by adult thought. There is something so satisfying about being pushed and prodded and still standing tall, not collapsing at the first obstacle like a jellyfish with no muscle tone. After all, bone density is important for growth.
