By Anonymous A recent trend on TikTok is centered around the hashtag “girl dinner.” The trend sees females making videos of what they are eating for dinner while a sound plays in the background saying “this is my meal, I call this girl dinner.” The meals shown are generally very low effort, small, and nutrient deficient. Essentially, they are clearly not nutritious, filling meals. While a seemingly straightforward and accessible trend, #girldinner is the center of a fierce debate about feminism, unhealthy eating habits, domestic labour, and eating disorders. On one end of the #girldinner debate, critics of the trend argue that the unhealthy nature of the meals shown normalises unhealthy meals and non sustainable eating habits at best, and eating disorders at worst. For example, one user posted a “girl dinner” with hashbrowns, a cookie, and a vape on a plate and went viral, garnering over 1.8 million views. With the hashtag “slay” in the caption and over 200,000 likes, others can easily assume that such a meal is perfectly fine to eat because ‘everyone else’ thinks that it is acceptable and funny. The many comments praising and relating to the video make it clear that not normalising such an unhealthy meal is apparently not common sense. Aside from the dangers of normalising a meal that is not balanced, most “girl dinners” are also strikingly small meals. For example, one video with 8.5 million views and over 770,000 likes shows a simple yoghurt popsicle as being “dinner.” Another with 2.6 million views and over 184,000 likes depicts a singular tortilla with cheese shreds being eaten as a dinner. Finally, a video with 1.4 million views and a disturbing 160,000 likes shows an empty plate as being “girl dinner.” The comments on that particular video were turned off, implying that the video was likely met with much criticism, but the many likes still show a concerning amount of support. Critics of #girldinner hold that laughing about and normalising exceedingly small meals perpetuates eating disorder culture. As younger girls on tiktok see their older peers posting their practically non-existent dinners, they could feel guilt about eating more than what is being paraded on tiktok as “normal,” and think that they need to follow such a diet instead. However, the other side of the debate defends the #girldinner trend as being feministic and a means to counter the patriarchy. Their argument lies on the notion of domestic labour, and that women are typically expected to cook large, delicious, nutritious meals for their family every night. Since that is the expectation, the fact that women are publicly sharing disorganised, unplanned meals that they “should” be ashamed of making, is seen as countering patriarchal expectations and resisting the pressure to self-discipline themselves and hide their “shameful,” “un-womanly” actions. Additionally, the ease of making a “girl dinner” can bring attention to the disproportionate division of labour in heterosexual relationships, through highlighting the large amount of time that a woman would otherwise be expected to dedicate to making a meal for her family.
Of course, the girl dinner trend is a spectrum. With over 2 billion views on videos with the hashtag “girldinner” alone, not every video is necessarily an unhealthy dinner, or even something edible at all. There are clearly jokes in the mix, such as moldy dinners, or celebrity crushes. Maybe your perspective depends on which kinds of #girldinner videos come up on your for you page. Nevertheless, the debate rages on. a
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May 2024
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