ReFrame 2025
Severn Court (October-August)
Theatre Trent 2023/24
Arthur News School of Fish
Graphic by Louanne Morin

You Are Not "Just A Girl." Stop Saying That

Written by
Louanne Morin
and
and
January 23, 2025
You Are Not "Just A Girl." Stop Saying That
Graphic by Louanne Morin

These days, I find quite a lot of things  stupid and upsetting. Circumstances in my personal life have had me confronting the brunt of a new style of buzzword-heavy antifeminism head-on.

Every time I open Instagram, it seems like another distant acquaintance of mine has become “just a girl” and now believes that her personality is best represented by an Instagram Reels video of a baby kitten, or a butchered edit of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid with “my big strong boyfriend” plastered over it.

No amount of Luddite swearing-offs of social media applications could save me from the endless flow of “coquette” “romanticizing” of women’s unique knowledge to the tune of “you don’t get it!/you just don’t get it”, from Lana Del Rey’s St. Tropez

What are these specifically female knowledges? 

On social media, they mostly refer to female experiences of heterosexual dating. For every time Josh sends pictures of a massive fucking fish he caught to another girl, Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift’s seemingly endless released (and unreleased) discographies have a song that goes perfectly with your ominous story post about it.

This article would not go very far if I tried to understand what goes through the minds of heterosexual women, so I will stop here. What puzzles me about “women’s knowledge” is the way it has enshrined itself as a legitimate academic concern, and a feminist one at that.

From the circumstantial assemblage of some cursory readings of a chapter or two of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality and enlightened conversations around a bong and a $7 bag of chips, many a first-year Cultural Studies student has come to the realization that “objectivity isn’t real” and “hard sciences are basically fascist, man.”

For many adult academics who seemingly never left said bong rotation, rational, scientific, or otherwise positivist epistemes are fundamentally and irreversibly male ways of knowing.

As a second year undergraduate student who thinks bongs are gross, I am obviously a much better person than any of these academics. I do not take issue with the assertion that a field often dominated by rich white men would come to reflect their specific modes of thinking; my contention is with the “women’s knowledge” that is placed in opposition to this form of thinking.

In my experience of the social sciences, “women’s knowledge” appears as something more intuitive, emotional, embodied, and ultimately, subjective than men’s knowledge.

Where men are said to believe in the triumph of mind over matter, the calculation of every minuscule choice towards the best utilitarian outcome, we ought to learn from women’s capacity to simply feel—to follow their instinct and to ground their decisions in mutual care.

“Care” is the key word here; in fact a whole field of study was formed in the 1980s around care-centered ethics. Care ethics were initially presented as feminist, but their proponents today are an odd mix of family abolitionist Communists and anti-abortion advocates.

Care ethics are in many ways the precursors of this mysterious “women’s knowledge.” Central to this thinking is the assumption that what women are most capable of—our most central contribution to an egalitarian world—is care, feeling, or intuition.

This quote, by science fiction writer and feminist thinker Ursula K. Le Guin has stayed with me through my frustrations. Certainly, there is value in irrational, caring, emotional, or embodied thinking. I wonder, however, why that should be the purview of women? Why must care be what women bring to the table?

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”—Ursula K. Le Guin

This conceptualization of blind, merely emotional “women’s knowledge” is one of the legacies of care ethics. What their wide spread allowed is for the valuation of traits belonging to a deeply sexist imagination of women to be treated as feminist. The traits of a docile housewife are now a prized possession of women, a fresh new perspective at odds with our sterile, male world.

Antifeminism is at work everywhere. My assigned readings often make me want to crawl into bed and scream into my copy of The Straight Mind. What now?

In a Tweet which I cannot seem to find anywhere on the internet, I recall a woman posting an exchange between herself and her father. To her “I’m just a girl”, her father retorted something along the lines of “I don’t know what that means but it sounds demeaning towards you as a person.” What a cool guy.

In absence of 1970s political lesbianism, I think we ought to follow this Twitter user’s father (a sentence which applies to myriad of different life circumstances, it’s become a sort of guiding principle for me).

When certain girls and women in my life call themselves “just a girl,” I’ve taken to pointing it out, and being honest about how obnoxious I find it. When class readings and lectures employ the legacies of care ethics, I get really annoying about it. 

No more “letting people enjoy things”, on social media or in the academy. I’m going to start throwing copies of The Second Sex at people, and so should you.

ReFrame 2025
Severn Court (October-August)
Theatre Trent 2023/24
Arthur News School of Fish
Written By
Sponsored
ReFrame 2025
Severn Court (October-August)
Theatre Trent 2023/24
Arthur News School of Fish

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