Writes Shannon Keating, in "Confessions of a Recovering Baby Woman On the enduring fantasy of being 'just a girl” — and how I finally decided to get a grip and grow up" (The Cut).
June 17, 2026
"Lately, it seems that many women — perhaps especially white millennial ones — are indulging in the same fantasy."
"According to endless social-media posts and group-chat messages, Adult life sucks lately. I’m opting out. It’s as if a generation raised on the dream of the girl boss has become disillusioned by the promise that hard work will get us anywhere (and to be fair, there’s no guarantee that it will). Struggle is for chumps! 'I’m just a girl,' and I don’t want to learn about balancing my checkbook or filing expense reports or how to parallel park.
The 2020s have been a weird time for womanhood. (Then again, when hasn’t it?) Greta Gerwig’s record-smashing Barbie, more phenomenon than movie, and Taylor Swift’s mind-bogglingly profitable Eras Tour had women spending collective billions to proudly and unapologetically relive their sparkly, pink-tulled girlhoods. Fashion has trended toward the young and feminine, too: : ribbons and bows, beads and sparkles, mary janes and ballet flats. By the end of 2023, Isabel Cristo wrote in this magazine, 'The market [had] conspired to sell us one thing, rendered every which way, and that thing was: girl.' Ours is a time in which 'the only way to have fun [it seems, is] by turning away from adult womanhood wholesale and toward a breezy, bright alternative. Instead of politics, can I interest you in some blissful, childlike ignorance?'"
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55 comments:
So Epstein was ahead of his time.
Balancing a check book in not hard. Recommended to all. Male or Female. Balancing a checkbook is non-binary!
Slackerdom comes and goes. This latest wave is arriving right on time.
I'm tired of whining and lectures...
Stop letting the leftist cult-culture sculpt you.
It's irresponsible, it's devoid of meaning, it's soulless, filled with lies, fake fear and real hate. It is anti-individual. Break free and walk away.
You can be both a woman and a girl, in moderation. Neither is a deficit for a mature, discerning female.
When the demand for lazy girl jobs finally exceeds the supply.
My lefty college educated (indoctrinated) nephew is married and lives outside of Bristol in Wales.
His new "they-them" wife is educated in something useless and does nothing - while my sweet (albeit lefty) nephew dotes on her. (gives me and my sister in law -- concern and heartburn.)
"The 2020s have been a weird time for womanhood."
KBJ has entered the chat.
It's the new wave of live-in-the-basement slackers, from the journals that want to see it happen. Not what I'm seeing in real life, thank goodness.
Across all generations, many people won't grow up unless forced to grow up. This means stuff like struggling for food or shelter and thereby taking on any job, or with women, dealing with a baby after getting pregnant.
Women mature faster than males and are routinely supported in motherhood, so their failures to launch are more obvious than with males. Males tend to struggle until they have assets/jobs, so youthful play/distractions fill the gap.
I take this as a consequence of no-questions-asked social safety nets, snowflake treatment, and the unconditional positive regard model. In other words, adult failures follow from everything that came out of university culture in the last 50 years.
Doesn't this go away when you have a baby?
The older millennials now in their mid-40s are just entering the midlife crisis stage of life. I remember those good times. That's when I got my pilot's license started ocean fishing off a kayak. Built a Navajo style sweat lodge, Got heavily into mountain biking, started competitive Open water swimming and became a highly accomplished plein aire painter. All of those activities led to my most highly creative and productive professional years of industrial hot rodding.
Stay hungry in the Arena and life's never boring.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the trans thing. It's long been said that fashion is dominated by gay men; drag is an over-the-top caricature of femininity; and as The Devil Wears Prada has informed us, everyday behavior and choices are downstream of haute couture.
I know that gay and trans are not the same. But "trans" and drag are, more or less, for the sufferers of autogynephilia, it seems to me.
Nah. But it was a fun if-then for me, for a minute.
My toddler grandchildren are all girls, and I’ve been astounded by the pink-princess gender-stereotyping-on-steroids well beyond what I remember from the nineties when their mothers were little girls. I’m beginning to suspect gender may not entirely be a social construct.
Any mention of Brat Summer?
@Howard, I think you're close but this sounds more like the bulk of Millennials, the youngest of whom just passed into full adulthood (20+), having to decide if they are going to grow up or not. Maybe the answer is yes?
"Get a grip?"
Sounds like an entire movement is losing its grip on an entire generation. Panic is setting in. The shrillness is remarkable.
It's not surprising that they missed the whole point of the Barbie movie, which was that she grew up and became a "real" woman. But if someone is old enough to think "balancing my checkbook" is still a thing, maybe they weren't the right audience for it in the first place. (Meanwhile, women in their early 20s are setting up AI agents to track their work expenses.)
In the pre-industrial age, women hit puberty, were married off, and became mothers. See old-time Sweet 16 and Latin American quinceaneras (15). There was no self-conscious deliberation, just biology and the obvious state of physical maturity.
Delaying for 5, 10, or 15 years means spending up to half of one's life debating about one's body and goals and second thoughts.
Have you ever heard a man say “get a grip”?
Girl Power means never having to struggle.
It's like, "I'm a girl. Give me the power."
I never balanced my checkbook. Once in a while, check that I actually wrote the checks listed on the statement. Why do math someone else is going to do for you anyway?
Also, I never paid a penny of interest on a credit card, despite using one for 90% of my spending my whole life. Simple things add up.
Ours is a time in which 'the only way to have fun [it seems, is] by turning away from adult womanhood wholesale and toward a breezy, bright alternative.
They are stuck in perpetual maidenhood, never progressing to motherhood and matriarchy.
I don't think 90 year-old maidens, dressed in pink ballet flats, discussing the latest handbags and going to brunch, is going to be pretty.
No wonder they reliably vote for more daddy government.
“I don't think 90 year-old maidens, dressed in pink ballet flats, discussing the latest handbags and going to brunch, is going to be pretty.”
Yea but you see them at every communist democrat demonstration.
"Leaning in" like Sheryl Sandberg is sooo 2013!
Instead of politics, can I interest you in some blissful, childlike ignorance?
Um, that's been your politics for the last 40 years, honey.
All your politics is stupid, emotion and feelings based childhood. All that's changed here is people admitting it
Next stage: "I need a man!"
@Kevin: I don't think 90 year-old maidens, dressed in pink ballet flats, discussing the latest handbags and going to brunch, is going to be pretty.
It's turning into a reinvention of the old Shaker religion. They didn't believe in making babies and died out. There's a massive difference between (1) pre-pubescent, (2) adult, and (3) menopausal female interests and temperaments. While mothers with children continue to focus on families, the never-married and non-breeding women are likely to age out as de facto nuns or Shakers.
Religion, and life, always finds a way.
"I need a man!"
Depending on which way the wind blows, turns out fish really want to ride that bicycle.
They likely peg him, peachy, nttawwt
Do people still balance checkbooks? Do people still write checks? I think I do once a year at the County Clerk's office when I renew my plates and pay my vehicle tax.
I never have understood the notion that parallel parking is difficult. Maybe I'm mistaken in assuming people have the same level of spacial awareness I have when I know they don't by how they randomly back in front of where I'm standing or walking at the grocery.
I like ballet flats. They're so much more comfortable (and more sensible) than heels.
I've never been a big fan of pink. Except on Wednesdays.
The easier life gets for humanity, the more difficult life gets for humans. Way too much leisure time leads to way too much fantasy, which is the core element of the woke. Just look at the Bourgeois Left’s Political agenda. Windmills and the sun Will energize the world! In reality, they slaughter the birds and ravage the Earth. It’s Freud meets Adler, The fantasy driven foot soldiers lead by the power-hungry Aristo’s.
“Instead of politics, can I interest you in some blissful, childlike ignorance?'"
It would be so much better for you (and for everyone else).
Arrested development? It happens for both sexes.
From Instapundit:
FIVE THINGS WE LEARNED WATCHING THE WORLD CUP ON AMERICAN SOIL:
5) Hot Swedish girls love America
Europeans are falling in love with the United States, and why wouldn’t they? Air conditioning. Free refills. Ice. Waffle House. Pure joy. Most Europeans have never experienced these everyday aspects of American life.
So Millennial and Gen-Z guys who are ready to give up on marriage because of their experiences dating the whiny, overeducated but underbrained female college grads of this country who want to see themselves as little girls trapped in an adult woman’s body, these fellows now have a solution. Befriend a gorgeous Swedish fan of her country’s team (or Norwegian or Croatian or Czech or any of the other dozen European* teams in the World Cup), console her when (.if) her team loses, and at the right time offer marriage. Easy!
_______
* Or Asian or African. “I am black and beautiful” it says in the Bible.
So many women. So many fantasies. So men now fantasize about the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
Weird. I really don't think most women think or do this way. It strikes me as a so-called trend that is vastly inflated/vastly overstated. I've always mostly dismissed this sort of trend piece. I'm certainly not going to make any bizarre extrapolations from an article like this.
Yeah, I'm biased. I think stuff like this is stupid. I'm not a knee-jerk, dismissive person, but I do make exceptions for this kind of thing. I think broad-brushing is stupid, too.
Regards,
Lori (reader_iam)
Broad-brushing makes brain cells go mushy. There, I said it.
Regards,
Lori (reader_iam)
Keep in mind this piece of AI assisted trash was put out by "The Cut," which bills itself as a "New York Magazine site covering women's lives and interests, from politics, feminism, work, money, relationships, mental health, style, ..." Ipso facto, it speaks of and to a tiny minority of real women. And homosexual men.
I've had to cancel credit cards twice in the last couple of years because of unauthorized charges. I balance my accounts each month because I don't want other people spending my money.
White liberal women can have their politics and their blissful, childlike ignorance as well. What a country! What a time to be alive!
The modern model for an ambitious liberal woman is RAAT under the Pro-Choice religion in service of State, feminists, and alpha males with a left-wing orientation.
Today I overheard a woman with two children speaking, well, prosletyzing, to two other women, while we all waited in line at the airport. She explained that she was returning to the US from Occupied Palestine to seek support from local Christians for the suffering going on there. Oddly, she meant support for the Gazans, whose suffering will end immediately upon the destruction or disarming of Hamas. I think I'll skip her presentation, it would be considered unduly rude to blurt out, "Hamas delenda est!" after every sentence she utters in her talk.
American feminists’ and other American women’s condemnation of rape, etc., in Britain after the Lowe Report was impressive. Impressive like all the racial healing during Obama’s reign.
I just wonder who is going to look after the cash and park the car? Or what happens if you don't fill out an expense report - how do you get the money back? But maybe this is Notes from the Lives of Trust Fund Babes aka Babies. Every action is in service of some fantasy or other. Nothing is done out of need. Or maybe this is all dreams, dreams of college women, still wrapped in entitlement. The Woman Boss Era is over. Now they'll be The Pink Prancer. Ladies, why not dream of something safe like bungee jumping without checking on whether the bungee cord is jumping with you
My checkbook stays balanced, at the very least, once a month when the statements roll in. My credit cards are the tougher one. I track every charge, and have had to close and cancel out cards about a half dozen times over the past few years, because of fraud. The card company does a pretty admirable job screening out and alerting on the fraud. Other times I have to fight the spurious charges myself. I have one ongoing one now, based on a shady company that somehow got itself into the Houston airport on the premise of airport security facilitation - a short cut to TSA lines. They get you all the way through the line before you finally understand that they are not TSA but a fee-based subscription service.
There's an amazing amount of fraud that just slips by as a one or two time charge of modest amounts, designed to stay under the radar. There's also an astonishing number of unethical businesses that try to trap you into a subscription model. That's criminal heaven, right there. If they can slide in a charge every month with modest escalations over time they've got it made. Pay attention to what you're being charged.
The latest fraud model appears to be a case where criminals gain access to your charges and then spoof them - it shows up as another charge to a company or merchant you might recognize, you might think at first it's an error by an otherwise trusted party - but in fact, what the criminals have done is 'spoof' the merchant's identity, made the charge to your account in their name, but funneled the money to themselves.
Women are not a Diversity bloc. Next!
"There's also an astonishing number of unethical businesses that try to trap you into a subscription model."
I hear ads regularly for apps that will find and cancel unused subscriptions.
Really? You can't just look at your monthly statement and verify the charges you're paying for are ones you actually made and subscriptions are ones you want to continue?
And people complain that it's hard to save money.
n.n said, "Women are not a Diversity bloc. Next!"
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They tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end, it didn't even matter.
Mason G.,
"You can't just look at your monthly statement and verify the charges you're paying for are ones you actually made and subscriptions are ones you want to continue?"
Sure, but this can be surprisingly difficult given the very short space the banks provide for identifying information on the transaction. I don't know how much of the fault lies with the card brands versus with the banks or the credit card gateway companies, but at any rate -- If they were required to show not just some cryptic abbreviation of the ultimate owner or holding company, but also a full plain text rendition of the name by which the company is known to you the consumer, that would go a long way.
So many women seem incapable of understanding the 2020s (and SO many other periods) has been wierd for men too.
Or they just don't give a damn.
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