why 'girl dinner' is not revolutionary
on the girlbossification of a ploughman's
‘I call women’s culture “juxtapolitical” because, like most mass-mediated nondominant communities, that of feminine realist-sentimentality thrives in proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over in political alliance, even more occasionally doing some politics, but most often not, acting as a critical chorus that sees the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement enough.’
- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint
In case you’ve missed it (and if you’re over 28, you might well have), the concept of ‘Girl Dinner’ has ripped through Tiktok like a tidal wave. In May, a woman posted a photo of her evening meal—bread, cheese, grapes, cornichons—in a self-mocking tone. The resulting ‘Girl Dinner’ trend was for styled charcuterie boards, but then something changed; the plates became more scattered, the meals less ‘gastropub wine flight snacks’ and more ‘I have returned from war and this is what remained in my fridge’. So far, so benign.
This is not the first time the messy lives of single women have been a topic of public conversation; far from it. These discussions have even been mainstream. A 2001 episode of Sex and the City had the four main characters discussing their ‘secret single behaviours’, the sometimes gross and always indulgent things they did when they were home alone with no partners and no dates; eating saltines and grape jelly while standing up in the kitchen, for instance. Other episodes showed them eating cake out of bins, being completely unable to cook, snacking and smoking at bizarre times of day. None of this was bound up in strained theory. No one was claiming it was the start of the end of the patriarchy.
That was two decades ago, though, and social media has changed how we think. Overwrought content about the supposed power of the Girl Dinner craze began to crop up. In a viral TikTok, one woman claims that ‘What Girl Dinner has achieved in like three weeks is what the feminist movement has been trying to achieve for the last thirty years.’ This is quite a claim for a social media trend of people posting photos of shit meals. Has it equalised and legalised abortion access across whole nations? Has it stopped men raping their wives? Has it achieved wage parity across the genders, or freed women from the home? It takes a phenomenally ahistorical view of the last three decades, and a complete lack of understanding of current feminist fights, to make a statement like this. The woman goes on to explain that the power of ‘Girl Dinner’ is rooted in Foucauldian theory, in the concept of the Panopticon, in which standards are internalised and internally policed because you feel that you may be watched at any point. By not adhering to patriarchy’s standards (about your dinner), she says, you are ‘ridding the patriarchy of its most effective tool’, which ‘renders [it] powerless.’ She claims that Girl Dinner is ‘nothing short of revolutionary.’
The patriarchy, of course, is not made powerless by women choosing not to cook or order themselves a dinner. The patriarchy operates in myriad ways; in physical, real ways. It deprives women of their rights. It causes violence against women (and others). It suppresses and oppresses people across the globe in a tangible, measurable manner. The underlying belief of the Girl Dinner theorising seems to be that the patriarchy wants single women to be sitting down to a full meal every night when they are in their houses alone. I ask: why would the patriarchy give a shit? A single woman alone in her house is one of the few versions of female existence that I think the patriarchy doesn’t even consider. Patriarchy says that you should feed your husband and children, that you should exist in a permanent state of sacrifice to other people; it doesn’t care if you don’t eat. It would prefer if you didn’t. ‘It’s, like, very unruly,’ says the woman, describing the apparent power of Girl Dinner. ‘It’s very disorganised.’
It would of course be ridiculous to say that a craze for putting together weird looking plates of food is a psy op (it is the kind of thing I would say, but I am distinctly not saying it). But anyone who has read about propaganda or information warfare knows to ramp their dials up to full paranoia when they see the fetishisation of ‘disorganisation’ occurring in real time. Despite what the original poster says, disorganisation is the opposite of revolution. Organisation is dangerous; when people can come together towards a shared goal, this is when the status quo is upturned, when nations are freed, when systems are thrown out and new ones brought in. It’s when oppressed people take back their power. It’s when things change.
In a 1996 US Army publication entitled Psychological Operations: Principles and Case Studies, the main types of disorganisation strategies used by the military are laid out clearly and unabashedly. It specifically cites disorganisation as a goal, as a process to undermine any potential of a coherent movement, saying, ‘Divisive issues exploited could contribute to the separation of a group from the greater society or to the disorganisation of a people.’ Case studies include US and Vietcong psy ops in Vietnam, the Iraqi Propaganda Network, and psy ops in Panama during ‘Operation Just Cause’, otherwise known as the 1989 US invasion of Panama, when the CIA lost control of informant and drug runner Manuel Noriega and killed over 3000 Panamanians to get him back. When you can get amongst a politically educated, organised people, and rile them, and discourage them, and distract them—that’s when the power of movements are undermined, their spirits broken, their goals unachieved.
A fleet of young women on TikTok are not the CIA, and what’s at stake here is not the freedom of a nation or a socialist government. But the conflation of the trivial with the political here does have the effect of distracting a massive amount of young women away from a more radical engagement with the concept of feminism. It is the girlbossification of the concept of disordered eating (the poster of the TikTok wrote a substack about how Hilary Clinton must have had girl dinners on her (failed) campaign trail), of the 90s child’s Saturday afternoon dinner plate, of a child’s portion of a Ploughman’s lunch. Even the term ‘girl’ is said to signify some sort of impassioned spirit, rather than being the patronising, diminutive term we know it is used as.
None of this is meant to decry the TikTok generation. Gen Z, in my experience, are wildly open and curious, and thoughtful to a degree that I certainly was not in my late teens and early 20s. They appear to me to be impressively open and committed to learning about the ills of the world. I want to tell them they can chill out, that they can make mistakes and waste time. But can they, when everything they do is wrapped up in a pressure to be public, to live in every moment recorded and reported? They are living lives that none of the rest of us can relate to, lives that have been defined by the phone in their hand and the camera in that phone. This is the context that defines the ‘Girl Dinner’ movement.
What is actually being pushed back against, here? In my years on this planet I have never felt pressure to cook proper meals when no one else is around. I do it, most of the time, because I love it, and other times I eat packets of crisps dipped in Sainsburys discount hummus and drink half a bottle of wine. The effect is the same, for the outside observer, because the outside observer doesn’t exist—unless I bring them into existence by posting on Instagram. The social media compulsion to present every meal you eat in a curated, lifestyle-magazine fashion is what’s really being “resisted” by the concept of girl dinner, and its power is confined to only that context. The idea of posting as a revolutionary act, against the very medium it feeds, is a version of those bloviated tweets about why someone is leaving Twitter, as if this, as if any of this, is real or important. You can stop tweeting your innermost thoughts, you can stop Instagramming your styled breakfast, videoing your pristine kitchen and your freezer drawer of matcha-tinted ice balls. To stop or keep going has no real world importance; the only currency here is the currency of the medium itself. To disengage would not be revolutionary. It would only be sane.
In her thesis on ‘American Autobiography as a Genre of the (Post)Human’, Edinburgh-based trade union organiser Maria Torres-Quevedo reminds us that putting our lives on social media cannot constitute activism; she writes that ‘explicit engagement with technology, or the explicit understanding of the relationship between technology and what has been traditionally understood as the human, does not in and of itself entail a more politically emancipatory project’. She goes on to say that the term ‘girl boss’ ‘simultaneously infantalises women and positions them as stakeholders rather than victims or resistors of capitalism’. Girl Dinner does the same; at the same time as it condescends to women, it also encourages them towards consuming and being consumed on the platform of capitalist technology, to the benefit of the same rich white men who constitute the faces of modern patriarchy.
All of this, every part of it, is about consumption; is this not a wildly neoliberal capitalist idea of revolution, thinking that it can be freed by what you buy and eat? Flicking through Instagram while writing this article, I saw a brand selling clothes with the caption GIRL DINNER: Scroll these while you eat. Eat fifteen olives, it said, while you buy this denim shirt. Don’t stop consuming, this whole movement seems to say; don’t start thinking communally, knocking on doors and pouring out into the street in rage; all you have to do is consume MORE, but weirder. More ‘unruly’. That’s it; a plate of unrelated snacks! That’ll show em! Consume and be consumed; make content out of this and post it on a platform that feeds on your lives. Feed the machine, and keep on feeding. Consumption is how you will reach revolution!
A few months ago I read No Choice: The Fall of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect the Right to Abortion by Becca Andrews, and cried as I read about the women of Jane, who operated illegal abortion clinics in rented rooms and apartment buildings. When the police raided the buildings in which they worked, the women of Jane chewed and swallowed the medical records they held, so that the women they’d helped would not be criminalised. If there’s a method of women becoming ungovernable, it won’t be reached by eating apparently chaotic dinners. If there’s any such thing as a radical feminist consumption, it is this.
God, this is so fucking good, yes to all of it! If you ever write a book of essays, I will be ALL OVER that.
Fucking hell, Heather!!!! Everything you said, all of it, YES! X