There is no other cultural figure more retrospectively cheugy than The Girlboss. A model of femininity, the girlboss dominated the 2010s, championed by millennials (sorry). The generation that had grown up being told they could be whatever they wanted as long as they worked really, really hard for it were coming of age; entering the workplace still filled with optimism that this might actually be true. In the decade or so since, of course, this has been proven to be nothing more than a fallacy, a fourth wave choice feminism that believed in freeing the nipple and hyperindividualism and adopting Glossier cloud paint as a personality trait and not much else. As we’ve collectively become more cognisant of a different kind of feminism — one that looks to address structural issues of racism, sexism and ableism as the only way to affect positive change — rather than individual personal success, what we came to know as the “girlboss” was executed and buried amongst other embarrassing relics of what we used to believe in, like skinny jeans and BuzzFeed personality quizzes.
The death of the girlboss has been apparent for a little while now. She has long been mourned. The rise of the girlboss gaslight gatekeep meme cemented that. But until now we didn’t know what or who would replace her. The mantle for these cultural conversations, these decisions on who we should elevate as our new icons has now passed to Gen Z, a less capitalistic generation who see through the myth of hustle culture. These zoomers, embarrassed by their millennial pink predecessors, have at last delivered us to a new stereotype of womanhood. Introducing: The Girlfailure.
A relatively new invention, the girlfailure embraces her Ls. She’s a little intense. She has never in her life successfully ‘read a room’. She doesn’t have any savings, but she does have significant credit card debt. She watches a lot of TikToks about Sylvia Plath’s fig-tree analogy, lying face down on a crumb covered bed, but has never read The Bell Jar. She’s well versed in the art of a situationship. She’s well versed in the art of rejection more generally, and can make it kind of funny, now, even. She identified too much with that one line from Anti Hero: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.” She might have been going somewhere once, but lately she’s not sure if she’s gonna get there. She feels largely unmoved by this reality. If 2022 was the year of spiritual and cultural rot, then the girlfailure was the torchbearer, a figure emerging from months spent rotting at home to give the world not 100% exactly, but at least like, 50%. On a good day.
The internet (and by extension the world) is still getting to know the girlfailure. Although she was first seen in depressing memes on Reddit months ago, fittingly she’s only just become important or notable enough to warrant her own KnowYourMeme page, which defines girlfailures as a slang term referring to “an absolute loser of a female character”, referencing a viral tweet posted towards the end of January. That tweet, it should be noted, was calling for more girlfailures. And therein lies her appeal. Unlike the archetypes that came before her, the ones we’ve been told to idolise, encouraged to spend money on emulating, the absolute loser figure of the girlfailure is already there. Where once we wanted to define ourselves and reflect ourselves through aspirational fictional characters and influencers, we’re all simply tired of comparison and jealousy and disguising our Ls as Ws.
Over the past week or so, Twitter has been awash with homages to our favourite girlfailures: Dee from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (failed actress who is frequently driven to the brink by her fellow loser friends), Pearl (violently lonely, will literally kill for attention), Shiv Roy (as one recent meme put it, a girlboss who can’t stop losing). On TikTok, constant fuck-up Hannah Horvath and her friends are thriving, sparking a mass Girls rewatch. Serena Van Der Woodsen always has to go somewhere, and it’s never somewhere good, and yet she remains adored. Even characters that had once been considered aspirational are ripe for reclamation as girlfailures instead; Carrie Bradshaw might have had a Manhattan apartment and hundreds of pairs of Manolos on a Vogue columnist salary, but she also fucked up every single romantic relationship she had, was a truly awful friend, and she loved smoking in her bedroom. But she’s a laugh! She dresses nice! On YouTube too, creators have begun ranking their favourite girlfailures across TV and film, with affection rather than judgement.
Girlfailures, it should be noted, don’t even have to be fictional. We love a real life fuck-up as much as their made-up counterparts. On TikTok the girlfailure is in her infancy, but still boasts 3.2 million views dedicated to women self-identifying as such. When Liz Truss flopped out of number 10 after about five days, her failure and undignified exit was heralded with Taylor Swift fancams. Girlfailures exist on a sliding scale too, from lazy and incompetent (Liz), to beloved albeit downright deranged: Elizabeth Holmes might have dropped out of one of the world’s best universities and lied through her teeth about Theranos revolutionising the world of medicine, but she did get a HBO show dedicated to her horrible dancing and roll-necks, which made her more appealing to everyone. Anna Delvey fucked up so much she got sent to Rikers, and was unapologetic about it, and yet she’s adored as a scammer icon.
Why has the girlfailure emerged now, though? Surely the beginning of the year should have been a time when failure is furthest from our mind, when we’re concerned only with resolutions and wholesomeness and self-improvement? Well maybe, usually, but put simply: we’re tired. And the girlfailure has emerged as a much-needed foil to the uber-successful, increasingly unattainable figure of the girlboss precisely because of that fatigue. The past few years of pandemic and then surreal return to normality have been dominated by self improvement, the pressure, as Jia Tolentino wrote, for women to be “always optimising” ourselves, the tyranny of chasing ideal womanhood, the inevitable crushing self-loathing when we realise the chase is an impossible task. We’ve been bombarded with messages telling us to go on hot-girl walks, to be a clean girl, to embrace a 5-9 before a 9-5. But eventually we’re realising that this messaging, tied up in privilege and aligned with capitalism, is simply unsustainable. And many are, rightfully, knackered.
Increasingly we’re looking for new ways to tune out, to disengage, to drop out, to satirise and disregard these impossible standards. Online, women were suddenly deciding, in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink way, that we’d rather be bimbos than SHE.E.Os. Or we found solace in ‘femcel’ ideology, diving into the ugly parts of ourselves, rather than pretending to always be squeaky clean and impressive. The girlfailure in many ways is just the next stop on that trajectory, a way to express the spiritual malaise of modern womanhood. Sure, her increasing popularity could be taken as a negative; proof that we’re all lonely and depressed and unfulfilled losers. But I’m not so sure. I think our increased openness to representing girls who are just… terrible, can only be a good thing. When our media and online platforms reflect more than just who we want to be, but instead who we actually are a lot of the time, it makes us feel less alone. As the girlfailure Twitter call out said: we’re tired of women, both real and fictional, having to be cool and powerful. We need more women who are just some fucking guy.
We need more women who suck.