Society has never been short of an opinion on the best way to be a woman, and since the advent of the internet they have come in thick and fast. Photo: RNZ / Quin Tauetau
By Emily Brookes*
Tradwife doesn't go to work. Brat turns up late and hungover. Demure is on time and appropriately dressed.
Society has never been short of an opinion on the best way to be a woman, and since the advent of the internet they have come in thick and fast.
Here are the ways we were told to be a woman in 2024.
Tradwife
Cover up your "Girlboss" tattoo - preferably with a frilly apron.
As 2023 rolled into 2024, the Tradwives of social media were rolling the clock back to the 1950s, where they eschew jobs outside of the home in favour of cooking from scratch (like an entire lasagne, from the pasta up), home-schooling their (many) children, and keeping their pastel-toned homes immaculate while their husbands go out to work, all while dressed in evening wear and smiling in a way that is both creepily beatific and disconcertingly sultry at their immense satisfaction with life.
Forget your educations, professional ambition, financial independence or, you know, four decades of women's lib, the Tradwife movement was here to tell you the 21st century was doing womanhood all wrong and what we really needed to be fulfilled was a wealthy husband, a standing mixer and an iPhone 14.
Oh, and, it became clear as the internet delved further into the lives of prominent Tradwives like Nara Smith and Hannah "Ballerina Farm" Neeleman - perhaps, also, to be Mormon.
Hannah and Daniel Neeleman with their eight children. Photo: Ballerina Farm/Instagram
The Tradwife movement is both controversial and contradictory (some of the so-called housewives were out-earning their husbands in endorsement and sponsorship deals), but that did not stop millions and millions of people following its advocates on social media.
Clean Girl
As recently as five years ago, women's faces were maximalist affairs. Encouraged by the uber-influencing Kardashian/Jenner clan, we were aggressively contouring, plumping our lips, and applying false lashes.
A slow change that began during the pandemic culminated in the Clean Girl movement, led by high priestess Hailey Bieber, which asked us to adopt a lengthy and complicated skincare routine that would make it look like the makeup we were still applying wasn't there at all. It makes sense if you squint.
Ironically for a movement that espouses healthy eating (a Clean Girl is frequently pictured drinking a kale smoothie from her Stanley cup), its beauty trends had names like "Vanilla Girl", "Latte Girl" or "Glazed Donut", referring to the skin it aimed to achieve: dewy, glowing - and bland.
That adjective could equally be applied to the broader Clean Girl aesthetic. Bringing with it an aspirational skinniness not seen since Paris Hilton's pelvic bone protruded above her low-rise jeans in 2001, the Clean Girl was about slick ponytails, simple gold jewellery, French manicures and crisp white shirts. All of it designer, of course.
Brat
No, declared Charli XCX as she released her sixth studio album at the start of June, to hell with all that. Brat Summer had arrived (it was of course early winter in New Zealand, but such semantics are tiresome where cultural phenomena are concerned).
Like Brat, the album of which it is the mass cultural expression - Mercury Prize shortlisted and, according to Metacritic, the highest critically rated of 2024 - Brat channelled the illegal London rave scene of the early 2000s. Charli XCX herself described its spirit as a "pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra". It urged women towards a grungy sort of hedonism.
Charlie XCX's album brat launched a new interpretation of an old insult. Photo: RNZ / Quin Tauetau
Now we were lining our eyes in heavy kohl and deliberately streaking it, moshing and sweating in clubs until dawn, radically accepting our bodies while also abusing them, asserting ourselves while embracing our own vulnerability.
Torn fishnets were Brat. Anything lime green was Brat. Kamala Harris was Brat.
Demure
Those who hadn't braced for impact may have suffered serious whiplash by summer's end - and here I mean, again, the cultural summer, not the literal one - as the chaos of Brat was replaced with the serenity of Demure.
Tradwife doesn't go to work. Brat turns up late and hungover. Demure is on time and appropriately dressed. "I'm very modest, I'm very mindful," as Jools LeBron, the content creator behind the catchphrase, puts it in one TikTok. "The way I come to the interview is the way I go to the job."
Demure started as a satire of the performative kinds of femininity of which Clean Girl is a key example, and for content creators it never really stopped being that ("I'm not like you other girls" was a phrase commonly deployed by TikTokers demonstrating how to demurely eat a pizza, say, or sit in traffic).
But it acquired a more literal life outside the internet with women taking on board the advice to be "very demure, very mindful" in all aspects of their lives: quiet, reserved, courteous, respectful.
4B
The regressive misogyny inherent in Demure could not have been better illustrated than by the wave that came next: 4B.
The 4B movement began in South Korea. Its name comes from four Korean words that begin with "bi", which means "no" in Korean, and translate to no dating, no marriage, no childbirth, and no sex. Women pledged to swear off these four tenets of heteronormative femininity in protest after it came to light videos of women filmed without their knowledge while using public bathrooms had been circulating on the internet.
When Donald Trump was elected to the US presidency in November, as his far right supporters began proclaiming things like "Your body, my choice", American women began embracing what had been a fringe, radical campaign in Korea.
Protesters attend the Women's March to protest President Donald Trump in Washington, USA on January 21, 2017. Photo: AFP
Like the other models for womanhood of 2024, 4B is a trend that was online first and adopted in the real world second. Unlike them, it has no connections to a commercial product and is not in thrall to largely male-led corporations that operate on the basis of making women feel bad about themselves in order to take their money.
The teeniest, tiniest of wins. Maybe. If you squint.
* Emily Brookes is a freelance writer.
