Hyper-Femininity Freedom

It's 2004, a warm August evening. You are in your 15m2 beige room with you and your hair rollers, sitting on the single bed and looking at the small black box with a DVD of Mean Girls inserted in it. At that time, Regina George was still a mean girl unemancipated by the derogatory attitudes towards her. Even the ending of the movie tells you who you should aspire to be when all hyper-feminine female characters start suppressing their femininity and thus become pleasant characters. This is just one example of how we were all raised to believe that hyper-femininity is not a good quality for a girl of high quality.

 photo by Sarah Carpenter

The noughties weren’t a great period to be a woman, with the ancestor of social media—the tabloids—chewing and spitting out girls more misogynistically than ever. The well-known celebrities with girly pink style then—Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan—would often be described in a misogynistic context. Their style included statements such as the Juicy Couture pieces, baby T-shirts, low-rise jeans. Tabloids would call them bimbos—a word that gained popularity a century ago and has been used as an insult to describe attractive yet shallow women. Did this ultimately put bimbos and the feminine girly style in the same category?

Paris Hilton at her birthday party in Las Vegas / via Vogue 

The stereotype around having a girly pink style coming hand in hand with being unintelligent started gaining popularity. As if the world is at war with the color pink—ostracized through misogyny.

Yet where did pink come from and why is it the mainstay color representing femininity? Like all colors, pink was gender-neutral before the 20th century. Female politicians’ wardrobes, historic paintings such as The Blue Boy and Pinkie, and, of course, the media’s portrayal is what made pink socially known as the girly color. The spectrum of girlhood can be found in the hues of pink—light pink for youth and innocence, hot pink for a sexy and intimidating look.

Pinkie and The Blue Boy paintings / via holditnow

Throughout the noughties and the tenties, wearing pink and dressing with girly pieces (dresses, skirts, tight baby T-shirts, for example) was preferred for young girls yet was a stereotypical battle for older women. As if they had to prove themselves twice as hard as the rest of the women. However, a recent rise in the popularity of some girly aesthetics, along with the influence of artists, is causing a wave of liberation for hyper-feminine girls.

Looking at artists such as Sabrina Carpenter and her girly chic style with short dresses being a signature look feels like a big costume at first because we are so not used to grown-up women seriously dressing like this. Nevertheless, her statement heeled boots, mini skirts, shiny accessories, and glitter as a cherry on top are having a comeback in the everyday wardrobes of women. Supported by aesthetics such as the coquette core further helps seeing the world through pink-tinted glasses while looking at your velvet ballet flats, hair bows, and tiny skirts. It’s not for the male gaze, it’s because the scathing discourse of pink girls being shallow, as invented by men, is finally breaking apart. Women start owning the narrative around their style more and more.

Sabrina Carpenter / via Teen Vogue 

Not only are women unabashed by their style and confident in expressing themselves through it, but the hyper-feminine girls are no longer being demonized by the media and society. Another narrative around this style is that not only are they shallow, their style can also express a desire for popularity and mean behavior. We are diving deeper into the media and film discourses around hyper-feminine girls with most movies from the early 00s demonizing the girly-fashioned women.

Mean Girls (2004) is one example where the more feminine you are the meaner you are portrayed as. The movie demonized the girly chic style of wearing pink skirts and rarely wearing pants by expressing this as shallowness and a hunger for popularity through mean aims. A big argument for this is how by the end of the movie all girls change their style to jeans, a long top, and no pink statements, except for Janis who maintains her emo style after the end despite being a mean girl herself too. This ultimately links having a pinkish feminine style to being shallow and mean, thus creating a demonizing narrative around those girls.

Mean Girls (2004) - The “mean girls” style vs. the one of the rest of the girls / via Everett

After decades of being socialized into the world by movies that portray the “cool girl” as the masculine one, Dazed stated that 2023 is “the year of the girl.” What did 2023 bring? Hyper-femininity. Pink shades of aesthetics, the Barbie movie re-embracing women’s femininity, trend after trend is unpackaging those secretly suppressed feminine expressions of one’s style. While they are quite often suppressed from inside the house of females, these internalized views have been projected on each one of us for decades so it can be hard to take a step back and stop laughing at the dumb blonde jokes. Yet while it’s natural to have a predilection to other styles instead of the hyper-feminine one, expressing it in a “not like other girls” manner is simply not it…

As more aesthetics and artists are putting pink and hyper-feminine pieces in the spotlight, women are fighting harder to overcome the misogynistic views and be taken seriously by all genders despite their style or its color. And to all women who find joy in expressing themselves through a hyper-feminine style—keep challenging those internalized beliefs and simply have fun dressing yourself without external opinions.