For years, girlhood has been treated like a problem to solve. Everywhere you look, someone is being encouraged to brand herself as singular: not emotional like other girls, not dramatic like other girls, not into clothes or makeup or romance or whatever other trait currently signals triviality. It wasn’t personal—it was cultural conditioning, a quiet incentive to exist above the collective, to be exceptional enough to earn legitimacy in spaces that don’t respect women unless they’re outliers. But something is shifting. Suddenly it feels more radical, more interesting, more honest to be unexceptionally female—to say, with your whole chest, that you are just like other girls, and that is precisely the point.
There is a quiet power in rooting for the group you are part of. It resists the subtle training most women received from childhood: that other girls are competition, that femininity is unserious, that solidarity is weak. Now, a new generation is rejecting that framing outright—digitally, socially, politically. Friendships are no longer something to outgrow once a boyfriend appears. Group chats have become war rooms of emotional intelligence and logistical coordination. Seeing a woman succeed doesn’t imply scarcity anymore—it’s evidence that the door was unlocked from the inside. If older narratives felt like high-stakes auditions for womanhood, this one is a communal living room with room on the couch.
Part of this realignment comes from the recognition that the structures demanding individuality were never neutral. “Not like other girls” was rarely about personal expression; it was about distancing oneself from a demographic treated as unserious. To be “unique” was to survive the patriarchy’s job interview. To blend in was to risk being dismissed before getting a line of dialogue. And when that pressure dissipates—even a little—something expansive happens. The performance relaxes. The defenses lower. Women start noticing that they weren’t isolated from one another by personality, but by architecture.
The internet accelerated this discovery. In earlier decades, women only had access to the girls in their immediate radius—those in the same school hallways, hometowns, or office cubicles. Now, the average 22-year-old can find thousands of girls who think the way she does in under a minute. TikTok has turned shared emotional experience into a form of data visualization: hundreds of thousands of people nodding along in the comments, saying, “I thought I was the only one.” It feels deeply political in a small way—like consciousness-raising meetings disguised as memes. And in a landscape where institutions are less trusted than ever, these self-made communities feel strangely more reliable than the systems meant to protect them.
Of course, solidarity isn’t polite all the time. It can be chaotic, messy, unfiltered, and deeply inconvenient to the world that expected women to stay small and separate. But there’s also humor and tenderness in the chaos. A group of girls in a coffee shop can unravel geopolitical tension faster than most congressional subcommittees—if only because they have practice discussing problems that don’t have easy exits. They’ve been trained by life to diagnose power, notice harm, and find work-arounds in real time. Girlhood has always been a think tank, even if it was never labeled as such.
And so embracing similarity—not uniqueness—becomes oddly freeing. It means you don’t have to invent yourself from scratch every morning. You don’t have to be original to have value. You can like the same lip gloss as everyone else and still have a subversive mind. You can post your iced latte, send the same memes, read the same books, and still be working out a political worldview behind the scenes. Conformity to aesthetics doesn’t stop complexity of thought. The fact that so many women share the same tastes is not evidence of homogeneity—it’s evidence of shared conditions.
Declaring yourself “exactly like other girls” is not self-erasure. It’s a refusal to be pitted against your own demographic. It’s a reclaiming of what has always been true: femininity is not trivial, collectivism is not weakness, and identification with other women is a form of political alignment. It is not that the individual disappears—it’s that she is held up by a thousand others.
If there is a thesis to this new era of womanhood, it might be this: the world benefits when girls talk to each other, stand by each other, and yes, even dress like each other. Similarity is not a failure of identity—it is proof that many people growing in the same environment learned similar survival strategies. That’s not embarrassing. That’s sociology.
So no, we don’t need to be anomalous girls to matter. We can be deeply typical. Utterly recognizable. Matching, even.
And in that exact sameness, we might find the kind of unity that unsettles the structures that trained us to separate in the first place.
Kithéa 