This is a comeback story, but it could've just as easily been a cautionary tale. When I sit down with Carano, she's less than three weeks out from one of the most anticipated fights in women's combat sports history, leaner than she's been in years, sharper in every sense, and positively glowing. 

The End Or The Beginning?

In early 2021, at the peak of the cancel culture era, Disney fired Carano from her acclaimed role as Cara Dune on The Mandalorian after she criticized tyrannical COVID lockdown restrictions on social media. The outrage machine descended immediately and Lucasfilm released a statement calling her posts "abhorrent" and confirming she would not be returning to the franchise. For a woman who had spent her life building something extraordinary, first as a trailblazing MMA fighter who helped open the door for an entire generation of female athletes and then as an actress carving out a rare niche in Hollywood action, it was meant to be a finishing blow. It almost was.

She told me what followed were some of the darkest years of her life. She sold her home in Hermosa Beach, got an RV, and drove. The work dried up. The people she thought would call mostly didn't. The stress piled onto her body in ways she could eventually see in her bloodwork: pre-diabetic levels, cortisol through the roof, a body quietly staging a revolt. "2024 was not looking so good," she tells me. "The depression, and kind of just completely lost. Like, what am I supposed to do? I'm trying my hardest, but nothing's working. I'm in the desert. The questions I was asking were questions other people were wanting to ask. We got to the point where we couldn't ask, and that was a really scary time."

The surprising turning point came through a naturopath in Montana who did something simple: she took Carano's blood work and actually showed her what was happening inside her body. The results were a map of the last few years. "It was pre-diabetic. The cortisol and it was all these horrific things," she says. "She showed me what was going on in my body." After years of her body bearing the full weight of the stress and the loss and the uncertainty, someone finally looking underneath the surface was exactly what it took to start healing.

Another surprise followed. In October 2024, Elon Musk's legal team came calling. In February 2025, she filed suit against Disney. By August 2025, the case had settled, and what happened next is the part that still seems to delight and baffle her in equal measure. Disney released a statement unlike anything she said the company had ever put out before, one that acknowledged her work, her professionalism, and the respect of her directors and co-stars. "Nobody covers this," she says, bemused. "I told this to The Hollywood Reporter journalist and they were like, yeah, nobody's covering this. But if you put the two statements Disney made next to each other, what they said when they fired me and what they said at the settlement, the contrast is just mind-blowing."

Batting A Hundred

When Carano talks about the years that cost her so much, there's no bitterness. She has done the interior work of processing it, and the result is a woman who can speak about one of the most painful chapters of her life without being consumed by it.

She is also, it has to be said, someone who feels vindicated. "Back then it was called conspiracy theories," she says with a laugh. "And I'm like, with my conspiracies, I'm batting a hundred right now." What she was asking, she insists, was never as radical as the reaction made it seem. "The questions I was asking were questions other people were wanting to ask. We got to the point where we couldn't even ask, you know, or counter the narrative, or even make a joke. Comedians suffered for it. People just stated facts that people didn't like." She shakes her head. "That was a wild time. It was not that long ago."

The cultural reckoning with that era, she thinks, is still playing out in ways people don't want to acknowledge. "I think a lot of people now are taking on big causes because they have shame about how they acted during that time," she says. "They don't want to talk about who they became during those years. So they're like, no, no, we're really good people, look at us sticking up for this and this." She lets that sit for a moment. "People want to act like it didn't happen. But it did. And I feel pretty clean-hearted, because I feel good about what I did."

She also points out a pattern she found herself unable to ignore. "Sex discrimination in Hollywood is sadly a real thing, because I've seen a lot of women lose their jobs. Even women I didn't agree with."

"The internet always wants you to be involved in its problem whether it has anything to do with you or not."

As for the people she worked with most closely on The Mandalorian, the ones the internet seemed determined to cast as her adversaries, she is clear. "I never had a problem with Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau. I thought they were always wonderful. There's a lot of stuff I can't even share. But those are two good human beings that I respect, and they respect me." She gives a small shrug at the outrage this tends to generate online. "The internet always wants you to be involved in its problem whether it has anything to do with you or not."

It's a posture, she admits, that not everyone understands. But it's consistent with how she's carried the whole chapter. "I do have pain in my heart for people I lost during that time, people I still think deserve justice and I pray for that. But as far as how people were toward me, I'm not good at holding grudges."

The Harder Thing

Her legal victory is a satisfying ending to one chapter, but Carano has never been someone who sits still for very long. She's already working towards another win. But before we get into her much-anticipated fight with Ronda Rousey on May 16th (which will be streamed live on Netflix, the platform’s first-ever MMA event), we have to talk about the physical transformation Carano has undergone, first, because it's incredible and, second, because it's inseparable from everything else.

"I was hiding from the world for a long time."

Since September 2024, she has lost a significant amount of weight that she won't share just yet, saving it for what will clearly be a dramatic reveal. "People are going to be like, I didn't know she was that heavy," she says with a laugh. "It's going to be a little embarrassing. But life is embarrassing; might as well just lean in." For years she had been showing up to fan expos in strategic layers, furry ponchos and boots and a hat, wearing it all so the cameras couldn't quite catch her. "I was hiding from the world for a long time."

She has her own thoughts on the body positivity conversation. "I do believe there should be all sorts of different sizes that are beautiful," she says. "But here's the thing: what is ultimately beautiful is what is healthy." Then, after a beat: "Food is one of the most abused drugs. People use it to hide from the world. And I think a lot of the people who use food, like I did, they're actually taking it out on themselves because they don't want to take it out on others. They're usually very sensitive people."

She's also honest about the seduction of shortcuts. "I thought about just going and getting that procedure that suctions the fat and forms your body," she admits with a laugh. "But I knew it wasn't going to teach me what I needed to be taught. If you don't learn how to take care of yourself, you're just going to end up back in a bad place." So instead, she did the harder thing, in the form of a full professional fight camp.

"Every morning I wake up at three in the morning, and I'm thinking about this fight," she says. "You have to get up every morning. You have to train, you have to do the things that are hard. You have to diet. You have zero life." She even turned down acting work to be here. Everything else is by the wayside. "But I would have never gotten where I'm at now without this."

The result is a woman in film shape, in fight shape, and by her own account in better shape mentally and physically than she has been in years. "This fight is pure passion," she says. "It made me dig really deep, deeper than I would have ever." A stepping stone, she calls it, back to the thing she really isn't finished with yet. "The ultimate goal is to get back to storytelling, which I think has a longer lifespan. It's also so powerful and it's something that I feel like I've got unfinished business and I haven't even tapped into my potential there."

Before Hollywood Knew Her Name

Most people know Carano from The Mandalorian, or from the lawsuit, or from the wave of renewed attention that comes with a comeback this dramatic. Fewer know the origin story, and they should, because it's a good one.

She grew up as the athletic middle child in a family where her sisters were the prom queens. "I was more like, really good at sports and activities," she says with a self-deprecating smile. "I didn't bloom." At nineteen she was in Las Vegas, partying hard, aimless, grieving friends lost to overdoses and violence. "One of my friends got taken out and shot in the head in the desert. Another got stabbed thirty-one times by somebody else I knew. We were in a really tough environment."

One person who helped pull her out of that environment was a young man named Kevin. He decided to honor a friend who had died of heart failure by signing up for Muay Thai, and three months later Gina walked into the same gym. Six months after that, they were both fighting in small, scrappy venues. She was a natural from the start. "It's hard to explain, but as soon as I started really excelling, people just started putting a camera on me," she says. "I was just doing something that was keeping me away from drugs and alcohol. But my career took off into acting, and he kept going into fighting." She and Kevin went their separate ways for a time, each chasing something different.

At the time Carano entered the sport, there was essentially no women's MMA scene to speak of. No female roster in the UFC, no big paydays, no roadmap to success. "It was literally just me doing something I was passionate about that kept me on the straight and narrow," she says. "It garnered a lot of inspiration and attention. And then I caught the eye of Ronda Rousey, and she became who she became." Rousey has credited Carano for opening the door for female fighters to be seen as entertainers and not just athletes, just in time for Rousey to walk through it.

What set Carano apart during that era wasn't only her ability to win fights, but also that she refused to adopt the aesthetic common to women in combat sports, the toughened-up, masculine presentation she'd watched female athletes default to throughout her life. She made a conscious choice from day one to stay fully herself: feminine, glamorous, and absolutely dangerous. "You can still be a female and love all the things and be feminine," she says. "It's actually adorable. Women are powerful. They don't have to be like men to be powerful." She changed the visual language of the sport by simply being herself.

"Women are powerful. They don't have to be like men to be powerful."

As for acting, she never planned it. People dropped comments here and there, but she didn't have an agent angling for Hollywood. "If that's going to happen, somebody is going to come find me and give me a job. That's how it's going to happen." The person who came was filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, one week after her fight with Cyborg, while she was still licking her wounds. He reached out to her seemingly out of the blue.

"My mom was so cute, she was like, honey, do you want me to drive you? You know how directors can be. And I was like, Mom, come on, I'm fine." She laughs. "I'm a fighter. I can take care of myself."

That fateful meeting was the beginning of one kind of life, and the end of another. Days in the gym, small venues, and the version of herself that had walked in at nineteen with nothing to lose was receding in the rearview mirror. Kevin stayed in the world she was leaving. And for a time, that distance was just something they both lived with until fate had other plans.

A Decade In The Making

Now, on the other side of careers that neither Carano nor Rousey could have fully predicted, they finally meet. Most people expected the signature Rousey they knew: the trash talk, the scowl, the psychological warfare, but instead we've seen a much sweeter version of Rousey, asking for Carano's autograph and singing her praises. "She created her controversy with other people but with me, she's just been excited," Carano explains. "I think she's enjoyed the training process more, sharing the ring with someone she genuinely wanted to fight." She pauses. "And so have I."

"It's got a pleasant energy to it," Carano says, "because it's something that neither one of us needed to do, but want to. That's a totally different animal." No bills to pay, no rankings to chase. Just two legends who want this, on their own terms, for their own reasons.

"It's something that neither one of us needed to do, but want to."

For Carano specifically, the fight is one final, definitive statement. She had, she says, given up on fighting five years ago. She thought she'd closed that door for good. "Fighting just gets in you, and unless you get it all out of your system, it'll stick in there," she says. "It did stick in there until five years ago. And then I thought I hard-closed the door and was enjoying The Mandalorian and I was like, okay, this is awesome." And then life had other plans. "You just never know what's going to happen."

The Man Who Didn't Blink

If time found a way to finally bring us the fight that never was, it also found a way to bring Gina and Kevin back to each other for good. When I ask about him, her whole face changes. "I've known him since I was 19. He's my first love. And I'm just as in love with him now, if not a hundred times more."

He was by her side when the Disney blowup happened in 2021, and Carano says he didn't hesitate. "He didn't blink. He already understood the world," she says. "I was naive when all this stuff was going down. But Kevin was locked in." The paparazzi and stalkers were outside their Hermosa Beach home, so they sold the house, got the RV, and drove. Over the course of their relationship, he proposed four times, but Carano kept redirecting. "Wait, I don't like how you did it. Try again. Surprise me next time." She shakes her head telling the story. "I was all over the place." They had set January 1, 2022 as a kind of deadline, a date to make a decision. When the morning came, he said he already knew his answer. "And I was like, okay. Let's do this."

There was no ceremony, just the courthouse and a bright pink dress, black army boots, and their own invented last name, chosen together. "He wasn't attached to his name for reasons," she says. "And I didn't want him taking mine. So we made up a name." She pauses. "I didn't realize he needed that commitment. And I didn't realize I needed it either. It was the best decision I've ever made."

Kevin is also an artist, a caricaturist with a particular gift for capturing not just the unique character of every face but also what’s under the surface. And she’ll tell you that it was learning to truly see each other fully, including the hard years and the wrong turns, that finally made it work. "The trick was, I think, we had to forgive each other for the years in between," she says. "We're not throwing anything in each other's faces moving onward. We're going to forgive each other for what we've done and start a new life. And it really has been like a clean slate."

Unfinished Business 

You could talk to Carano for hours, and I honestly wanted to, but she has a fight to prepare for, press conferences, and projects in the works that aren't ready for the spotlight just yet, so we start to wind down. She told me after the weigh-in comes the cheeseburger she's been dreaming about since fight camp started, and after that another story begins.

She already knows what it looks like. "I want to act again, then direct. I feel like I've been a part of the biggest and the smallest productions and I see where people go wrong and where they go right," she says. "The hardest part is finding a story you're going to be able to live with for years. Like this fight, I'm creating a painting. At some point the fight is going to come and I'm going to have to leave the canvas, and it's going to have to sit there. I'm going to have to write it myself. More than likely."

Our conversation eventually finds its way to the iconic Rocky movie, and of course she's a fan. She says she plans to watch it before her fight. The symmetry is almost too good. The fighter who became an actress who wants to become a director, drawing inspiration from the man who wrote and directed the defining film about getting back up after you’ve been knocked down. 

When I ask her what has kept her grounded through all of it—the fight, the lawsuit, the comeback—the answer comes easily. "I check in with God all the time," she says. "I don't necessarily pray for victory. I just pray that His will be done through this process. I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be, which gives me freedom and confidence going into this very hard thing. He has got my back no matter what."

"This is the best I've ever felt."

There is a particular kind of freedom in that kind of faith, the freedom to walk into hard things without needing to control how they turn out. She has fought for that freedom in every sense of the word. And when I ask her simply how she feels, standing on this side of all of it, she doesn't miss a beat.

"I feel like I'm blooming now. I love this age. I have a husband. I have goals. This is the best I've ever felt."

The “First Partner” of California and wife of Governor Gavin Newsom said she requires her sons to play with dolls (“even if they tear the head off of them”) and replaces male protagonists in their favorite stories with “she” and “her.” Ironically, there is no mention of forcing her girls to run outside and get physical, hit each other, or play with toy guns. The message she sends is clear: Girls, you are the superior sex. Boys, be more like girls. 

Her comments on gender and parenting expose an ideology that pathologizes masculinity, dismisses motherhood’s natural responsibilities, and treats biology as an obstacle to be engineered away. The problem is not that the governor’s wife made provocative statements, it’s that she said exactly what modern feminists believe. These young men (now ages 15 and 10) are being told every day that their very essence is less valuable than their sisters. Failing to recognize the healthy biological impulses of her own children, she drives their admiration to those who will acknowledge their worth. 

Women like Newsom insist on passing down this insidious strain of feminism to their own children. One that obliterates the natural bonds of affection that keep the threads of society intact. For the Newsoms, the sexes are interchangeable. Neither woman nor man is endowed with unique gifts and attributes that contribute to the healthy development of a child, or a civil society. Like most progressives who subscribe to androgynous egalitarianism, distinctions and biological truths don’t matter to them.

The message she sends is clear: Girls, you are the superior sex. Boys, be more like girls. 

California’s governor seems to reinforce his wife’s questionable parenting tactics. In fact, he says that the “50/50” approach to caregiving is “the issue of our time” and “the answer to so many of our problems that exist in the world.” Both parents begrudge the fact that women, on average, spend 39 days more per year caring for children. The horror! Indeed, Gavin calls the statistic “ominous.” 

Traditional roles for fathers and mothers are not societal constructs. They are the natural order of life that begets thriving and well-adjusted children and in turn, a flourishing civilization. Fathers typically offer the provisions and protections necessary for survival and stability like an income, a home, and structure. They are the ones to pass on healthy risk taking to their children, sons and daughters. They are more likely to say “shake it off” and instill resilience. Mothers offer sustenance (literally for the first year or more of a child through breastfeeding) and nurturance. They are the soft place to land, the one that tends to soothe hurt feelings and bruised egos. Upsetting these natural functions can lead to dysregulated and dysfunctional family dynamics. 

According to Mrs. Newsom, disparities in the job market are the result of the proverbial “war on women,” not a natural byproduct of the inherent sociological differences between the sexes. She has proposed legislation that will hold “tech companies accountable and be a force for good in our kids and family’s lives,” so that they “don’t go down this rabbit hole of very, very dangerous and limiting narratives around ultimately what it means to be a girl and what it means to be a boy.” Biology and human nature must be corrected, according to Mrs. Newsom. Even in her own family. 

Biology and human nature must be corrected, according to Mrs. Newsom. Even in her own family. 

The First “Partner” of California demonstrates the worst of feminine instincts: performative virtue signaling, condescension, and disrespect for the men in her life. Gavin Newsom seems to have given his wife everything she could ever want. Status, ethically questionable funding for her political nonprofit, and most importantly—although she may not perceive them to be as such—four beautiful gifts in the form of her children. Yet she can’t even muster the decency to call herself “First Lady,” acknowledging the fact that she is, indeed, his wife.

There is nothing less attractive than an ungrateful woman. Men created civil society for women and children, yet feminists insist on destroying the very thing that has protected and provided for them for eons. 

At a time when fertility rates have crashed to an all-time low, it is the musings of women like Siebel Newsom that will ensure the destruction of civilization as we know it. She has said she doesn’t know if our country is “ready for First Partner.” Let’s hope we don’t have to find out. 

Jennifer Galardi is a senior policy analyst in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing.

Against this backdrop, enter our Coachella hero and heroine. A couple so demure, so unassuming, calmly poised amid the chaos. The man in a backwards cap and light-wash jeans scarfs down his ramen noodles. The woman, jacket wrapped round her waist, shovels an unidentifiable finger food down her gullet. Precious moments captured in their oh-so-candid TMZ photo. Unified, the couple model their red plastic cups in frame, as if to say, ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’

And just like that, the façade quickly lifts, and we realize this isn’t a spontaneous moment between a fraternity brother and his sorority sweetie. This is a highly choreographed tableau involving formerly popular pop princess, now turned amateur astronaut, Katy Perry and her new (still married yet legally separated) beau, Justin Trudeau. Yes, the former leader of the second-largest country and G7 nation, Canada.

You may be asking, “What’s the big deal?” Let this middle-aged couple cosplay away. But sadly, this is not just about two people dressing up and going out, but rather a pattern of performative politics that has metastasized for decades now.

Take the red solo cups. People were quick to call Trudeau a performative hypocrite for posing with a plastic cup. Under his leadership, Trudeau introduced and instituted a nationwide ban on single-use plastics, forcing Canadians, coast-to-coast, to adhere to these edicts or face up to thousands of dollars in fines.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this couple’s penchant for performative politics. They may not have invented it, but they are damn close to perfecting it.

What is Performative Politics?

There was a time when performative politics was so ubiquitous that it was like the air that we breathed. It was here, there, and everywhere, every time a high-brow politician donned a cowboy hat and kissed a baby or gladhanded at a fair while holding a corndog. Every time a celebrity spouted off at the Oscars about ‘environmental consciousness’ in between their flights operated by a private jetliner. You saw it there.

And believe me, it still exists, but we’re starting to see the cracks. Once upon a time, Americans would’ve just looked the other way if powerhouse Oprah Winfrey tried to sell us her weight loss plan while simultaneously taking a GLP-1 jab. Not today. We’re sick of symbolism over substance, slogans over sincerity. Unfortunately, Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry have not gotten the memo.

Trudeau and the Truckers

Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau built an entire career capitalizing on political branding. A self-described male feminist, Trudeau put a premium on visual effects in the public square, often landing him in hot water. Whether it was failing to declare over $200,000 in government funds for his lavish vacation, calling out racism while failing to disclose his own past of wearing blackface, or declaring that Canada welcomed all immigrants before quickly reversing that law to say, ‘Canada needed to slow the population growth.’

But no action of Trudeau’s epitomized performative politics more than his treatment of Canadian truckers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trudeau touted himself as a paragon of personal liberties, but that all came crashing down. His government implemented vaccine mandates and travel restrictions that ignited fierce opposition and fueled the Freedom Convoy protests, a series of protests and blockades in Canada during the pandemic aimed at opposing vaccine mandates for truck drivers crossing the U.S.-Canada border. Rather than seeking meaningful dialogue to address the concerns of the protesters, Trudeau tarred them as ‘racists and misogynists.’ He seized their money, froze their private and business bank accounts, and invoked emergency powers, a move later rebuked by a federal court. For all his bluster about advancing civil liberties, Trudeau brought the force of the federal government down on his own citizens, quelling dissent through might. But he’s not the only guilty party in this couple…

Katy Perry: Activism as Aesthetic

Katy Perry knows a thing or two about cozying up to power. Today, she’s the girlfriend of former PM Trudeau. But she has always fancied herself a political actor and a ‘champion for women.’ She endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2015, saying she was like a ‘phoenix rising’ and that Clinton ‘embodied unconditional love.’ She publicly backed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. All in the name of bettering the world for women, but there’s just one glaring problem with that. Perry’s performance. She notoriously says one thing, while her actions point to something else entirely.

Currently, Katy Perry is facing a public backlash and police investigation after comments from actress Ruby Rose, who alleged that Perry sexually assaulted her at a club in Australia. Perry denies the allegations, but, nonetheless, these are very damning accusations. Critics are quick to point out Perry’s history. Previously, a former TV host claimed Perry had publicly touched her inappropriately and attempted to kiss her at an industry event. Perry, on national TV, shamed an American Idol contestant when she found out she had multiple kids by saying she "laid on the table too much." Critics also point out disappointment with her work with music producer Dr. Luke, amidst his drugging and rape allegations by fellow pop star Kesha. Finally, her bizarre behavior was put on blast as she rode Jeff Bezos’ multi-million-dollar rocket up to space to take selfies. An act that resembled more Zoolander’s ‘Blue Steel’ than Sally Ride.

The Formula is Wearing Thin

For years, politicians and celebrities, just like Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry, hid behind performative politics. They kept doing it because it worked. But overexposure has a way of ruining even the best cons. However, I believe that we may be witnessing the final curtain call on this con. And we could have Trudeau and Perry to thank.

The merging of politics and pop culture culminated in the relationship of two of its most performative proponents, which could be just what’s needed to collapse the entire system. Audiences are more skeptical than ever. With greater access to politicians' and celebrities’ actions through social media, we see through the sham more clearly. And with corporate media no longer serving as the ultimate gatekeepers of all news, we can see with our own eyes whether a public figure’s actions line up with their words.

So now we find ourselves in this pivotal moment.

A Rare Bipartisan Agreement

Trudeau and Perry may single-handedly be able to accomplish something together that few politicians and celebrities have ever been able to manage. They could align all sides of the political aisle in agreement on one key issue. A Pew Research poll asked Americans to list words that describe U.S. politics today, and majorities pointed to words like “Chaos,” “Messy,” “Hypocrisy,” and “Circus.” I believe the question is no longer whether performative politics works, but rather when it will come crumbling down. And with their powers combined, I believe Trudeau and Perry can collectively tire us of show-activism once and for all.

Sure, this couple didn’t invent performative politics, but they have come to embody it. He from the podium, she from the stage. When even the most polished practitioners can no longer make the act feel convincing, we all start to see the cracks of light peek through. The red Solo cups, the carefully curated activism, the choreographed relatability. At a certain point, the performance doesn't persuade; it wears thin. And if performative politics is finally reaching its breaking point, we all owe a great deal of gratitude to Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry for not just being its willing participants, but the key agents of its final demise.

That’s the idea, anyway. It’s supposed to be a feminist badge of honor. If you ask me, it’s just creepy. Cliques based around immutable characteristics can go one of two directions: insufferably woke or bordering on supremacy. Neither camp attracts normal people with actual personalities or interesting things to say.

However, I must grant that the girl’s girl wasn’t created in a vacuum. She was a response to the intrasexually competitive “cool girl” archetype of the early 2000s who took pride in being not like the other girls. Like most movements built in opposition to what came before them, though, the correction overshot the mark. What began as solidarity as an antidote to toxic intrasexual rivalry, turned, over time, into a conformist hivemind—one which demands blind allegiance to the group.

Millennial Internalized Misogyny

Women who came of age in the early 2000s and 2010s grew up in a culture that was allergic to femininity. It wasn’t cool to be girly. “Girly” connoted being silly, vapid, or even mean. Countless women learned to distance themselves from anything that seemed too traditionally feminine. Early waves of feminism unwittingly encouraged this by fighting for women’s rights in a world that prized masculinity.

Feminists, then, saw it necessary to make the case for women’s equal rights, dignity, and respect contingent on the idea that we were fundamentally no different than men. Not all at once, but with each wave’s addenda, it effectively made it so, within a few generations. It’s true enough that men and women are more alike than they are different. We’re not different species, after all, even if some of us are from Venus and others from Mars. But the insistence on erasing any difference spearheaded a movement that required women to reject their womanliness to prove their competence.

There’s historically been an association between women who comported themselves in a distinctly feminine manner and those who saw a woman’s role as limited to the confines of the home. Likewise, there was an association between the pantsuit-clad broad with the chopped haircut, and the “serious woman,” a woman who had the intellect, disagreeability, and ambition to compete in a man's world. The stereotypes became enmeshed with the archetypes of femininity and masculinity altogether.

The dignity of womanhood, presented through femininity, was degraded.

In the process, the dignity of womanhood, presented through femininity, was degraded. Young girls, still forming their identities and becoming interested in attracting the attention of their male peers, began to distance themselves from womanliness. That included feminine presentation, interests, and psychology. It also included women as people. They boasted how little they cared about all things frilly and pink, or that they engaged in stereotypically masculine interests. How they only got along with guys because “girls are just too much drama.”

In reality, this performance didn’t actually liberate women from anything it sought to, like sexual objectification or rigid gender roles. Cool girls still had to be hot and feminine enough in all the conventional ways of facial and bodily attractiveness. They just got to pretend that wearing pink made you a frivolous woman, whereas being a “sexy nerd”  or “gamer girl” was, for some reason, vastly more empowering.

When Men Created Culture

To be fair, this was hardly women’s original idea. I’d argue it’s more like a mimetic virus that's been passed down from art to its consumers and then to the broader culture. The early 2000s were, among many things, a time when men still dominated most industries and were the cultural gatekeepers of entertainment. That’s not to say that it was unfair. It’s safe to say that DEI policies created to correct for this imbalance have ruined just about everything.

However, I think it’s fair to say that a byproduct of men dominating senior positions in most industries, notably in the arts, was the effect of capturing a distinctly male ethos, by way of the writing, direction, and casting. Our very relationship to these stories was filtered through the dominant cultural lens of the time. It was noticeably wanting of an actual woman’s insight.

We saw tropes like the manic pixie dream girl, a term coined by AV Club critic Nathan Rabin in 2007 to describe "a fantasy figure who exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” He described it “as an archetype that tapped into a particular male fantasy of being saved from depression and ennui by a fantasy woman who sweeps in like a glittery breeze to save you from yourself, then disappears once her work is done.”

The key words here are “male fantasy.” These characters were archetypes cooked up entirely in the imaginations of men, usually daydreaming about an aspirational figure that didn’t actually exist, or who could exist but in ways he was manifestly uninterested in. She exists solely to help the protagonist find happiness without having any personal goals or romantic needs of her own. 

The implausibility of it all, that this beautiful, quirky, magnetically mysterious, charming girl is interested in some painfully unremarkable, not even attractive guy, is what makes it a trope. It’s a half-baked character archetype lacking any real personhood or development. It requires an insulting level of suspension of disbelief. The writing is bad because there’s no theory of mind for the girl of supposed flesh and blood before us. No interiority to speak of.

Women internalized the archetypes they saw on screen, which communicated to them that the ideal woman is low maintenance, non-threatening to men, and different from other women.

If you stabbed her, would she bleed, or would she spontaneously combust into a puff of fairy dust? The answer to that question, I do not know. She probably doesn’t either, because she isn’t real. She is the idealized fantasy of a love interest formed in the early stages of a crush. She is the woman with BPD in the idealization phase. She is the dead wife giggling with reckless abandon in a solemn montage of her greatest highlight reels. She is all sugar without the crash. An unrealistic window into someone who is all fun and no work, with no story of her own.

But you see, at the time, the entertainment industry was populated by mostly male writers, directors, casting agents, and producers who gatekept which actresses made it. They controlled who the stars were, what the movies were about, how they were shot, and how they were written. This inevitably led to tropes that failed to capture the full female experience, but women do this to men, too. It’s a fundamental failure of cross-sex mind-reading.

Women as constructed through men’s creative direction tended to have some unfortunate tendencies that erased women’s nuances and often reduced them to sexual objects, cliches, and fantasies that served male egos. That sort of art and messaging permeating the culture made women downright contemptuous of the “male gaze,” a term coined by film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1973 to describe media created from a perspective that assumes the viewer is male, framing women on screen as objects of male desire.

Women internalized the archetypes they saw on screen, which communicated to them that the ideal woman is low maintenance, non-threatening to men, and different from other women. In turn, women learned to perform the social ritual of establishing that they are “not like the other girls” by engaging in performative distancing from womankind and conventional femininity for social points. This made her the alluring, mysterious woman who stood out to men. For a time.

This was before women, whose collective identity politics were in their infancy outside of niche academic feminist circles, began clocking the phenomenon as a neurosis arising from a desperate desire to be “picked” by men. The “pick-me” in early 2000s culture was rewarded, but today, she is punished. The hypervigilance surrounding this accusation leads to many false accusations, ushering in yet another reversal of the original problem. Where before women entertained a faux persona as a performance to appeal to men, modern culture, which seems to grow more homosocial by the year, sees women contorting themselves to appeal to other women.

Birth of the Girl’s Girl: Reclamation of Femininity & Sisterhood

What do we do when we realize we’ve failed to recognize the wholeness of a person and instead chalk them up to an insufficient caricature or ogled them voyeuristically while denying them agency? Do we take pause and recognize the nuances in individual interests and temperament? God no, we swing hard the other way, baby! Overcompensation is the name of the game.

If a “pick-me girl” is a male-centered woman who feels alienated from womankind because she sees other women as direct competition, the girl’s girl is her cultural correction. Pick-mes put other women down for male attention and frame themselves in opposition to women as a collective. It’s all well and good for women to come to recognize this as unhealthy, immature behavior and to be put off by it. I understand why women are suspicious of those who seem to represent this type of intrasexual competition and started openly calling it out. 

That’s how we got the pick-me antagonist: the girl’s girl. She isn’t scared of her own reflection. She doesn’t see women as her natural enemies but as her fellow sisters. She doesn’t see femininity as inferior because it’s frilly or soft. She doesn’t see male attention as the highest good, allowing her to become a more self-actualized person who’s less quick to peacock in front of men at the expense of other women.

If a “pick-me girl” is a male-centered woman who feels alienated from womankind because she sees other women as direct competition, the girl’s girl is her cultural correction.

They are, as Shaeden Berry writes in Refinery29, “happily admitting that they are, contrary to what we've been told to avoid, just like other girls.” This has become a common refrain among self-described girl’s girls on TikTok: “I love being just like other girls.” Where the pick-me is flattered by a man’s compliment that she’s “not like the others,” the girl’s girl is insulted, likely registering it as a red flag.

Why should a woman’s alienation from other women make her more valuable? Why would sharing traits and interests with other women make her less attractive? These are the questions that run through the girl’s girl’s mind, and they’re not unreasonable. You can appreciate someone’s individuality without telling her she’s special only because she isn’t like most other women—the implication being that most women are shallow, silly, or interchangeable. However, the girl’s girl isn’t all sainthood, feminism, and girl power. There’s an essence of surveillance, cult-like loyalty tests, purity spiraling, and tribalism to it all. 

Social and political commentator Tara Mooknee points out how using a negative definition to explain what a girl’s girl is poses some problems, “not only a lack of clarity, but the use of negative framing—here's what she wouldn't do—focuses on those who aren't girls girls and their alleged discretions.” The discourse starts to revolve around who fails to be a girl’s girl rather than what it means to be one. “Your mind is then looking for the red flags more than the definitive traits themselves. So, you're more likely to be focused on policing those who fail to be girl’s girls than embracing and emulating those who are.”

Womanhood as Surveillance

That brings us to the girl’s girl content ecosystem: a specific type of content created for a specific audience, usually on TikTok, that often feels infantilizing and gynocentric. I can understand the incentive to view yourself as part of the collective of womankind, to embrace other women in a spirit of camaraderie, but it’s been taken to some uncomfy, dare I say entitled, extremes. 

Self-proclaimed girl’s girls generate an ever-expanding list of social faux pas that exclude you from their exclusive girl’s girl club. It usually comes down to some predetermined wrongthink they use as a vibe check to see whether you’re trustworthy or pick-me coded. These may include not liking Taylor Swift, being polite to men, or “gatekeeping” products you use or clothing you wear, even if you genuinely don't know where you got something or have no interest in disclosing it for whatever reason. This might sound like a rather silly transgression but it's one of the biggest perceived infringements on women’s implied right to level the playing field.

Mooknee notes a concerning amount of girl’s girl discourse bizarrely revolves around consumerism and a histrionic level of transparency. They want women they run into on the street to give them an itemized list of every product, every clothing item, complete with links, prices, and hell, maybe even a free sample. This starts to feel like a normalization of boundary violations, enforced by a loose gang of women who want to flatten differences in outcome, whether that’s having the cute outfit, the makeup technique, or even swapping cosmetic doctors. 

Innocuous quirks like simply not liking what other girls like, not even for male attention or to make other women feel bad, get interpreted as “red flags.” You realize pretty quickly this isn’t about solidarity at all. It’s a facade used to police women’s behavior and individual differences under the guise of “benevolence” and “sticking together.”

It’s a facade used to police women’s behavior and individual differences under the guise of “benevolence” and “sticking together.”

These spaces pride themselves on decentering men to an extent that resembles repression. It’s not healthy for most women, and it honestly feels like a weird cult tactic meant to force loyalty to the group. Charles Manson may have told his followers to leave their family, friends, and jobs to follow him, but the girl’s girl cult asks women to abandon all forms of male validations and relationships to pledge allegiance to girlhood. If you think about it for a moment, it’s incredibly unnatural. Sure, women can overidentify with male attention at their peril, but that doesn’t make it inherently worthless or pathological. 

The “male gaze,” once upon a time, was a film theory term, not a catch-all for “men happen to like this, therefore it’s bad." Trying to erase that impulse—appealing to men, you know, the evolutionary driving force behind heterosexuality itself—entirely and pretend it’s something to purge rather than to integrate it in a healthy, balanced way is not empowerment. 

Men and women are not natural enemies. We are yin and yang. But women are also not all natural sisters, either. The insistence that total strangers owe each other some kind of automatic allegiance, like we’ve all taken a blood oath by default, has the same creepy homosocial cult energy as men in the manosphere who consider themselves part of a “brotherhood” and seem to prize, at all times, the peering eyes of their “bros” above “hoes.”

In Defense of Opting Out of Sisterhood

Gynocentrism is “a worldview that prioritizes female perspectives, values, and needs, often deeming them superior in certain contexts.” This is where I get really uncomfy. Suddenly, it’s not just that women have some shared gendered experience in common, not limited to the complexities of female friendship, coming of age in a body that is inherently subject to higher risk of sexualization and assault, or that historically there were laws that governed what freedoms we did or did not have based on this shared experience of womanhood. 

It starts to shift from that to something more sinister, like something out of the Apple TV sci-fi series Pluribus, which follows a seemingly benevolent alien race forcing everyone to join their hivemind against their will under the guise that we’ll all sing Kumbaya and hold hands. That it’s for our own good. But the goalposts keep shifting, the purity tests keep broadening, and the skepticism of other women grows exponentially. It feels like just another weapon of choice to police women’s behavior and erase their individual differences. 

I often see young feminists throwing around “wow, you are NOT a girl’s girl” as a go-to pejorative when they dislike a hot take I’ve posted on or an argument I’ve made, treated as an affront to a kind of sacred feminist cow. It’s typically weaponized in response to a perfectly valid, albeit heterodox, point that falls outside mainstream liberal feminist thought. However, it’s used just as often over apolitical differences of opinion involving women. 

They intend to induce in you a grave sense of shame and deviance, as if you’ve committed some unjustifiable harm that’s set back women’s rights 100 years, by literally making up a sexist interpretation of your opinion and instantly believing that’s what you meant. This opinion could be about an artist’s music or an actress’s performance, or you could even just be uncontroversially stating a lifestyle preference. 

The goalposts keep shifting, the purity tests keep broadening, and the skepticism of other women grows exponentially.

The layers of hypervigilance and paranoia when it comes to scouting “male-centered women” and casting them out have driven so many women mad that they work themselves up in a fit of hysteria over frivolous arguments on X to purify the feminist movement and prime young women to be good, obedient allies with no proclivities toward heresy against their own gender. All the while, they’re unwittingly causing young women to fall out of favor with the entire enterprise of protecting women’s interests for the sheer reason that a healthy adult woman with a fully developed prefrontal cortex cannot help but feel naturally repulsed by authoritarian control.

Because, as the brilliant writers of Andor put it, “Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction,” whereas “tyranny requires constant effort.” Freedom of thought functions in much the same way. People can intuit social masks, performance, and plausible deniability. They recognize when the usual suspects, who extend no such grace or understanding to others, cue the constant rallying cries for “sisterhood” and “solidarity” because this language obscures the real desire: social control and conformity enforced by peer pressure.

Where the girl’s girl claims to stand with her sisters, it presents quite an unsophisticated and performative form of allyship that has more to do with individual women’s desire to flatten another girl’s hotness by ascertaining who her cosmetic surgeon is or where she got her jeans from. 

When a girl steps out of line, though, by committing the sin of heresy by being conservative or siding with a man in a conflict (even if he’s literally in the right), or you criticize one of their sacred cow celebrities who act as a stand-in for all things women’s empowerment, you’ll see just how flimsy the philosophical foundations of the girl’s girl truly are, as she sends the vipers on you, to bring you down a peg—that if you’re not silenced, you’re too afraid to dissent. But at least you got the number to Kylie Jenner’s lip injector.