There’s a trend that’s been doing the rounds on social media. You’ve probably seen it: grown women, often highly capable ones, declaring “I’m just a girl!” as they pretend they can’t understand their finances, navigate basic adulting, or make simple decisions. But it’s not cute. This trend is infantilising women and setting them back. Don’t get me wrong; I understand the appeal. We’re all exhausted. Life is relentless, adulting is exhausting, and sometimes, you just want to abdicate responsibility and let someone else figure out whether that noise your car is making is normal or a death knell. The joke lands because there’s a kernel of truth in it: society is overwhelming, and we’re all stumbling through it half the time. But there’s a difference between acknowledging that we’re all winging it and actively cultivating incompetence as an aesthetic.

The performance of helplessness

What started as a harmless joke has morphed into something more troubling. Women are now using the “I’m just a girl” trend as an excuse for not understanding taxes, simple mechanics, and more. It’s weaponised incompetence dressed up in florals, and it’s remarkably similar to the behaviour we’ve spent years calling out in men. Remember when we collectively rolled our eyes at boys who “couldn’t work the washing machine” or “didn’t know how” to cook a meal? We recognised it for what it was: a convenient performance of helplessness that ensured someone else would do the work. Now, we’re watching women do the exact same thing, except we’re calling it relatable content.

What makes this trend particularly maddening is that people have used all these arguments to keep women out of boardrooms, political offices, and positions of power by claiming we’re too emotional, too scatterbrained, and too incompetent to handle serious responsibility. They insist that our hormones rule us, that we’re incapable of rational thought, and that we need male guidance. And now we’re… performing exactly that? Why? Women didn’t fight their way into universities and professions just so we could pretend we can’t read a map or understand a bank statement.

Every time a woman performs this kind of helplessness, she’s giving ammunition to every person who thinks women shouldn’t be CEOs, shouldn’t be engineers, shouldn’t be taken seriously. Because if we can’t even pretend to handle basic adult responsibilities, why should we be trusted with actual power?

The sinister underbelly

There’s something else lurking beneath this trend, something that makes me deeply uncomfortable: it’s not just about being silly or relatable. It’s about performing a very specific type of femininity that men find non-threatening.

The “just a girl” persona is soft, confused, and in need of help. It positions women as eternal children who need looking after. And let’s be honest about who benefits from that dynamic. Definitely not us.

This isn’t about women reclaiming girlhood or celebrating femininity. Plenty of traditionally feminine things are brilliant. There’s nothing wrong with liking pink, or romance, or any aesthetic choice. But femininity doesn’t require incompetence. You can like ribbons in your hair and still know how to change a tyre. You can enjoy being “girly” without pretending you can’t understand a tax form. The trend conflates femininity with helplessness, and that’s not empowering. That’s just old-fashioned sexism in a new outfit.

The exhaustion excuse

Now, some will argue that this trend is really about pushing back against the expectation that women must be competent at everything. We’re tired of being the family project manager, the one who can do it all. Fair enough. The mental load is real, and it’s disproportionately carried by women. But the solution to being overburdened isn’t to perform incompetence; it’s to redistribute the labour. It’s to have actual conversations about fairness and equality, not to retreat into a persona that suggests we’re simply not capable.

When we say “I’m just a girl, I can’t do this,” we’re not redistributing responsibility. We’re reinforcing the idea that certain tasks are beyond us, which ultimately ensures we’ll either still end up doing them (because they need doing) or that we’ll be seen as less competent than we actually are.

What we’re telling the next generation

Perhaps most worryingly, young women and girls are watching this. They’re seeing adult women they admire performing helplessness and repackaging it as empowerment. What message does that send? We should be showing girls that they can be soft and strong, feminine and competent, girly and brilliant.

Someone on Reddit argued that feminists take everything too far, that the “I’m just a girl” trend is just a joke; it’s fun. But then so are jokes on women. They are also jokes, but they do reinforce harmful stereotypes, and that’s the case with this trend too. So, yes, this might be a joke, a fun trend, but turning stereotypes into jokes is even more harmful than the stereotype itself.

So maybe it’s time we retired the “I’m just a girl” trend. We’re not just girls; we’re women, and we can bloody well read a map.

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