The most interesting pop story of 2024 is undeniably about Charli XCX. Following the release of brat in June, the British singer-songwriter’s clubby sixth studio album instantly seeped into the cultural groundwater (and at least one presidential campaign). It has now become both an ubiquitous earworm and meme: In our era of famously splintered attention, Charli has captured almost all of it, managing to lay claim to synonymous association with an entire color, adjective, viral TikTok dance, party-girl lifestyle, and several news cycles regarding the album’s deluxe and remixed progeny.
Her ultimate coup de’grace revolved around “Girl, So Confusing,” the brat track where Charli muses over an uneasy jealousy she harbors for an unnamed pop star, singing, “Yeah, I don’t know if you like me / Sometimes I think you might hate me / Sometimes I think I might hate you.” Then, rather than letting the rumor mill churn for too long after its release, Charli quickly put out a remix of the song featuring the object of envy herself, Lorde, whose own verse acknowledges the pair’s previously strained relationship and professes her own insecurities (“your life seemed so awesome / I never thought for a second / My voice was in your head.”) At Charli’s sold-out Madison Square Garden show in September, the women performed that remix live; footage of the pair strutting down the stage in fur coats sent the fandom into ecstatic overdrive. It was, as the historians say, a highly maximized joint slay.
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked.
Throughout this year, similar portrayals of now-reconciled female rivals in pop culture have proved compelling. After all, the movie event of the season, Wicked, is itself a tale of two roommate witches who eventually get over their differences and join forces; the film’s co-stars, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, are almost never not holding hands while out on the promo circuit. Elsewhere in music, Chappell Roan has constantly credited the support of fellow rising artists like Sabrina Carpenter. Brandy and Monica reunited on Grande’s “The Boy Is Mine” remix 26 years after their original. In sports, Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles literally bowed down to Brazilian gymnast Rebecca Andrade on the Olympic podium after Andrade bested them for gold. At the DNC, Hillary Clinton threw enthusiastic support behind the nomination of Kamala Harris, who had endorsed Barack Obama and not Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. Even J. Lo and Jennifer Garner seemed pretty chummy while the former was married to Ben Affleck.
It’s not totally cynical to consider these implied bonds or reconciliations through a PR lens; female solidarity has been a useful marketing gimmick for as long as “girl power” has been around. And in the attention economy, anyone can be a rival just as easily as they can be a collaborator (and no one has an easy time saying no to potentially doubling their audience). But lately I’ve been wondering if we’re witnessing a return to the placable pop feminism of the mid-2010s—the era of “I’m with her,” Taylor Swift’s ever-present squad, the Women’s March, the reign of the girlboss—after the knottier gender politics that emerged following Clinton’s defeat and the George Floyd protests in 2020. Compared to the granular work of institutional reform (and faced with the defeat of Roe v. Wade, as well as anti-queer legislation across the country, and Donald Trump’s second presidential term), it’s much easier to settle for the performance of visible solidarity in which to approximate the sensation of progress.
Online, for example, in the throes of 2023’s year of peak girlhood—when it became en vogue to cultivate an ironic fantasy about one’s personal regression and lack of agency—there became no greater compliment than being a “girl’s girl.” The girl’s girl stands in opposition to the off-putting “pick-me girl,” who orients energy and attention toward the male gaze. A girl’s girl does the opposite: She prizes female friendships, refuses to gatekeep neither information nor makeup tips, and always chooses the woman’s side in any conflict.
The implication is that women (and often anyone who doesn’t identify as a cis hetero male) owe each other a primary blind allegiance by default based on shared gender. It’s essentially TikTokspeak for the way a new generation has metabolized lessons from recent feminist history (“Believe women.”) and cautionary tales of the Britneys, Monicas, and Dianas of the past. The result is a kind of dogma best embodied by the viral Twitter sentiment: I support women’s rights, but more importantly, I support women’s wrongs. But female solidarity, though empowering, can be confusing, too. If last year was all about communing with our shared girlhood via mainstream culture, this year reminds us that celebrating (and defending) womanhood is always more complicated than the Barbie-pink utopia we so enjoy imagining it to be.
Simone Biles (left) and Jordan Chiles (right) bow down to Rebeca Andrade (center), who won gold at the women’s floor exercise event of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Where does this kind of personal politic land us? We saw it manifest in the aftermath of the 2024 election, where women supported Harris by a smaller margin than they had with Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. And according to exit polls, a little more than half of white women voted Trump in. In recent conversations with friends, I’ve found that the girl’s girl ethos, with its presumption of all women supporting all of each other all the time, leaves us ill-prepared and grasping for earnest vocabulary to discuss the inevitable failings and missteps of women in power and in the public eye. Getting Kamala in the White House would have been one thing, for example; having unequivocal support for all of her policies was another. Critique and confrontation are necessary to feminism, even—or especially—when feminism feels threatened by them. But these actions resemble the threading of an infinitely smaller needle, especially now that any passing judgment of a woman’s actions essentially takes place via global livestream.
This year reminds us that celebrating (and defending) womanhood is always more complicated than the Barbie-pink utopia we so enjoy imagining it to be.”
If there’s now a special place in hell for anyone caught not being a girl’s girl, truly productive (and messy) reconciliation must appear seamless; to allude to anything more complicated is not only gauche but unimaginable. Charli—who has mused over the expectation that “If you’re not a girl’s girl then you’re a bad woman” in interviews—and Lorde came close on “Girl, So Confusing.” They point out that the music industry at large pitted them against each other, which they internalized: “It’s you and me on the coin / The industry loves to spend.” It’s much easier to cheer the singers on after they sorted out whatever their deal actually was rather than pressure the music business, and society at large, to stop doing this to women. In fact, this Wicked installment hews to the first act of the musical, which ends right when Elphaba’s politics jeopardize Glinda’s ambition, prompting an irrevocable split—so it’s actually hardly the female solidarity story of our dreams.
Ultimately, the pop feminism of our current culture runs the risk of leaving us less focused on what society owes women and more fixated on what women owe each other. Having fallen short of meaningful political cohesion once again, we settle for vague moral superiority and likes on the internet. Perhaps in lieu of actual material gains, which apparently only ever take one odious administration to unfurl, that’s all that feels within our agency. We’re just girls, after all.
