When adulthood starts to feel like a scam, the culture does not offer rest, redistribution, or repair. It offers retreat. A return to softness and connecting with the ‘girl’ that didn’t have to deal with the world. She was a child. Conveniently for the powers at play, this version of ourselves is easier to manage and less likely to demand anything.

This is late-stage girlhood, and it is not a sanctuary. It is a trap.

What makes it so effective is that it does not look like abandonment at first. Late-stage girlhood works by reframing exhaustion as immaturity. If you are overwhelmed, you are told you are not ready. If you are angry, you are told you are bitter. If you want more, you are told you are asking too much. 

The problem is never the system. The problem is always your timing, your tone, your (lack of) softness. Maybe if we all just connected with our feminine energy, right?

Maybe if we go on a hot girl walk, prepare some girl dinner, and make purchasing decisions coded in girl math, we can stay inside the girlhood bubble a little longer. Maybe we can just wait while the world sorts itself out.

It really is that damn phone

In the same feed that shows adult women performing girlhood through strategic incompetence, I am bombarded with reminders that my youth is expiring. The algorithm targets me like a chaotic oracle. I pause on a video titled “Preventative Botox at 25.” Another warns me about “tech neck.” A third insists my thirties are already showing “early signs of aging.” 

Then my phone buzzes with something less “aesthetic”: my retirement contributions need increasing, my insurance will not cover my medication, and ICE activity has been reported in my state.

I do not feel like a girl. 

This is the defining contradiction of the late-stage girlhood era. 

Women are being infantilized culturally while becoming materially central

We are encouraged to stay soft and unserious, even as we power the entire engine of modern life.

·       Women influence the majority of household spending decisions. NielsenIQ points to women having 70-80% influence on consumer spending and controlling an estimated $31.8 trillion of worldwide spending (as of 2024). (NIQ)

·       Circana reported women accounted for 59% of U.S. retail discretionary general merchandise spending over the past year in its 2025 analysis. (Circana)

·       Inside the household, the trend is visible too: Pew reports that in 2022, 16% of opposite-sex marriages had wives who were the sole or primary breadwinners, triple the share from 50 years earlier. (Pew Research Center)

Yet, despite carrying the economy, the culture hands us an impossible job description and pretends it is aspirational:

·       work like a capitalist, but look like a dependent

·       process your life like a therapist, but never disrupt the systems causing the harm

·       spend like an influencer, because if you are not buying, are you even enjoying yourself?

The promises of progress feel unattainable, so the idea of going back to a time where possibilities seemed endless is really tempting.

Just keep upgrading your girlhood membership, girlypop!

Girlhood has been repackaged from a developmental stage into a lifestyle product. A renewable subscription that you can simply upgrade through consumption. The promise is subtle but firm: if you play nice, the system will not hurt you as badly. 

This is how abandonment gets aestheticized.

The problem, of course, is that systems do not improve when a key cohort of people wants to opt out of adulthood.

The theft of girlhood

Before we talk about girlhood as a universal refuge, we have to ask: universal for whom?

The online default is thin, young, able-bodied, cis, and white. But for many women of color, girlhood was never a place we were allowed to stay. We were adultified early, drafted into translation services, caretaking, competence, and survival before our bodies even finished growing. There is a version of Brown and Black girlhood that is less sleepover and more responsibility.

Now the same culture tells us to cling to an idealized girlhood we were denied, as if nostalgia could override the grief of knowing we never got to be that soft in the first place. I do not experience this as an invitation. It feels like a second theft.

The appeal of the trap

Late-stage girlhood is seductive because it offers relief without confrontation. Choosing softness in a brutal world can feel like resistance. And frankly, looking at the scoreboard, who can blame us for wanting to hide?

We are being asked to "lean in" at the exact moment our safety and rights are being stripped for parts.

·       Violence is a pattern. Globally, almost 1 in 3 women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. (UN Women)

·       Rights are volatile. With 41 states enforcing abortion bans, our bodily autonomy is a patchwork of zip codes. Just yesterday, the Wyoming Supreme Court had to strike down a ban to save pill access. Let that be a reminder that our rights are being fought over in courtrooms we aren't invited to. (Guttmacher Institute)

·       The digital world is hostile. Just this week, we have watched technology like Grok be weaponized against us, with AI generating non-consensual images of women and girls, stripping us of dignity for sport. The joke is…harassment? 

Building small, intimate worlds with other women feels like survival. There is something real and deeply human in that instinct. We don’t need to give that up.

But here is the hidden cost of self-soothing: staying in girlhood delays the moment women begin to act like a political class instead of a lifestyle segment.

Capitalism fears women who are demanding. 

The more time women spend perfecting themselves, the less time they spend challenging the terms of their exhaustion. The more energy poured into self-optimization, the less remains for collective fight. Girlhood collapses power inward, where it can be safely monetized, aestheticized, and endlessly deferred.

I am not interested in assigning blame or hosting the misery Olympics. I am interested in understanding consequence. Because if girlhood becomes permanent, womanhood never arrives. 

And without womanhood, there is no leverage.

Let the woman arrive

Girlhood was never meant to be permanent; it was meant to prepare us to enter the world and change it.

And we need to be honest about the upside: Womanhood is not just a duty; it is a release. There is a specific, grounding joy in competence that girlhood cannot replicate. It is the relief of no longer needing to be ‘palatable’ to be safe. It is the satisfaction of having a spine instead of a vibe. When we drop the performance of strategic incompetence, we gain the thrill of actual agency.

Internalizing that we can handle the crisis, sign the check, and hold the line. Girlhood is the comfort of being a passenger princess; womanhood is the exhilaration of driving the fucking car. 

What has distorted that arc is the idea that womanhood is simply another aesthetic to perform, another vibe to curate. It is not. Womanhood is a position. One we have to assume and define for ourselves and for the generations coming after us. That position comes with obligation, confrontation, and the willingness to be disliked. 

So let’s be clear about what is actually being lost. Neither joy nor femininity. 

What we lose by leaving girlhood is the illusion that staying small will keep us safe. It never has. 

Girlhood promises protection on the condition that we remain manageable. Womanhood offers no such guarantees. It offers risk, responsibility, and the possibility of collective power.

That is why it matters that we are beginning to see older women return to the center of the frame. Not as punchlines or cautionary tales, but as complicated protagonists with authority who refuse to disappear into the background. This visibility helps womanhood stop looking like a failure state and starts looking like a continuation. It becomes something you move toward and look forward to.

The culture will keep inviting us back into softness whenever the world becomes too heavy. It will call that self-care. It will call that healing. It will call that choice.

I know you might be tired of fighting, but this is not the time to let it go. At some point, every woman has to decide whether she wants to be protected or whether she wants to matter. 

Leaving girlhood is choosing to matter.