Am I a Girl Blogger? Or Just a Girl With a Blog
Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. Similarly every girl blogger is a girl with a blog but, not every girl with a blog is a girl blogger. I stumbled upon this niche aesthetic (community? genre of person/content?) when I was trying to add hashtags to a tik tok about this blog of mine (which, if you don’t follow me on tik tok my account is linked at the bottom of the page). I tagged my last video #girlblogger assuming the tag would fit my content perfectly since I am a girl and a blogger. I might have been wrong. Not entirely wrong, but the girl blogger aesthetic is incredibly niche. It’s still emerging so I thought it would be fun to do a deep dive and determine how well (or how not well) I fit into it. Before I go any further, this aesthetic does seem to glorify thinness (at least through imagery, if not in words) and I will be talking about that as well as disordered eating in this post, so if weight is a sensitive or uncomfortable topic for you this is a warning and/or a chance to click away.
According to the aesthetics wiki (which is an excellent place to explore all sorts of niche aesthetics), “girl blogger” is just an alternate name for the waif aesthetic. Girl blogger doesn’t actually have it’s own page, so anything I quote from the aesthetics wiki will be from the waif page. The page defines a subscriber of this aesthetic as “a type of blogger who posts content relating to rich, beautiful, intelligent, self-destructive, and manipulative teenage girls, wherein the imagery reflects the lifestyle that such a young woman would have”. Everything I’ve seen on social media confirms this, but this aesthetic isn’t quite as Gossip Girl as that description makes it sound, it’s a little more grungy than that. Imagine if Serena and Blair looked sickly pale, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and read a lot of classic literature.
The real life idols tend to be really thin, white models and starlets who came to be famous via their famous parents or nepotism. Lily Rose Depp, Kate Moss, Anya Taylor Joy, Sofia Coppola, and Alana Champion seem to make it into a lot of posts across tik tok and tumblr tagged as girlblogging content and/or “waifspo”. These posts seem to be rounded out with pictures of Lana Del Rey and Marina in their early album eras (Born to Die, Ultraviolence, Electra Heart), Natalie Portman from the Black Swan, vodka, cigarettes, ballet clothes, Dior cosmetics, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. It's jarring to see such pretty pastel pictures juxtaposed with cigarettes and motifs that suggest mental decay. It’s dangerously alluring too.
I think I’m close to the target audience for posts like this. I’m a fairly thin, white, young woman. I feel pressure to succeed at something and theoretically have the means to set myself up well but, at times I’ve had to struggle against my mental health to do so. All of the albums I listed earlier used to be staples of mine when I was younger. Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favorite authors that I’ve discovered in the past year. I like reading and writing. I enjoy fashion and art. I’m somewhat attractive and smart but I’ve still struggled to fit in.
I think this aesthetic and coordinating online community can feel really comfortable for someone like me. I think that’s why it could easily become toxic. I’m an adult and I have a good offline support system but, if one of those things weren’t the case I could see where I could get sucked into the more harmful aspects.
The first toxic part of the community is the segment that calls themselves female manipulators. There’s something kind of exciting about a woman who has everyone under her control. It takes a certain level of cunning to effectively manipulate people. Where’s the line though? Where does it become truly toxic? Personally I don’t have enough of a backbone or the general awareness to manipulate anyone. I can’t, so I don’t even bother trying. I have to imagine the need to or desire to manipulate those around you comes from a deep, unaddressed, pain that instead of working to heal you have passed on to other people. This seems to be just one facet of the romanticization of self destructive behaviors that runs rampant.
The most alarming thing I’ve seen is some crossover with pro-eating disorder content. I’m disappointed but not surprised. When a community idolizes a lot of people simply because they’re thin and fashionable, diet culture is of course going to rear its ugly head. Tagging things as “thinspo”, labeling black coffee and cigarettes as a meal, and the like are dangerously close to actually encouraging eating disorders. At the very least it encourages disordered eating habits.
The glorification of being a manipulator and disordered eating are perhaps the two most tangible aspects of self-destruction this community has built itself around. The general sense of consciously allowing yourself to deteriorate put me off. I don’t find anything wrong with finding some beauty in one’s struggles, but don’t encourage wallowing in them for the sake of beauty. For many people posting this type of content it’s probably not that deep. It’s an aesthetic. By its very definition it is superficial.
Aesthetic communities have never completely appealed to me because they’re limited by the superficiality that makes them what they are. A community like this is a disjointed mess because many are just staying on this surface level of pure aesthetics while vulnerable teenagers are taking the self destructive messages to heart. I find myself stuck between saying it’s probably not that deep and then worrying if maybe it is. In truth it is both. It simply depends on the viewer.
In conclusion, I am not a girl blogger. I am just a girl with a blog. I like many of the media and styles associated with the aesthetic but I can’t say it’s entirely me. I don’t know if there’s a larger lesson to be learned here. I could draw the conclusion that the internet’s obsession with aesthetics has a dark side. I could warn against getting too far down any internet rabbithole. I think that would be too reductive though. The internet and the communities therein are rarely completely good or bad. The internet is just a reflection of people who use it. It’s messy, inperfect, and sometimes hurtful. It is what it is, and it is what we are.
