The media cycle is like doing laundry. You think you can step out for a bit, but unless you’re terribly vigilant, you’ll always feel mistimed.
So my laundry is a very damp, but here I am. Girl Dinner happened. Girl Dinner, if you don’t know, came from this TikTok. It’s relatable! We are shown the private dinner a Girl makes when she’s eating alone. It’s bread, cheese, meat, fruit, sparse, messy, abundant, whatever. It’s mostly just whatever!
This concept is a little more proximate to my experience than I might want to admit. Paid subscribers know, through a little audio recipe, that Girl Dinner is what I utilitarian-ly call Boards. I love to make a board for a Party of 1: Me. It’s just fun! Different little protein snacks that pair well with wine, sweet and salty, easy. Again, one word comes to mind: whatever.
But boy did this take off! The Times went in. Also, the inevitable wave of back-and-forth: that it is problematic, or actually a snack plate. Then, of course, there is Husband Meal because well… that’s what we’re into these days. Popeyes just launched their own Girl Dinner, which is literally just sides. This is a funny idea, great marketing, and I get it. It also comes with no chicken. What a smart way to sell sides!
Jocelyn Silver wrote a great take on Girl Dinner in Vogue, describing the way I feel it all terribly well: “I generally enjoy the female experience, bedside the obvious downsides.”
I also haven’t seen Barbie yet, but it doesn’t feel like an accident that there’s some furtive gaze towards on the camping of the feminine. The double-edge, the duality, and then finally: the production, for TikTok.
What fatigues me is something about familiarity. This feels very Hot Girls Eat Tinned Fish, to me (wow side note my posts used to be so unreasonably LONG lol thank you guys for reading them if and when you did!). There’s irony in how Girl Dinner is intended first as practice to avoid the gaze; a cozy night in, spending no money, eating random things. Next, the desire for the mundane to be phenomenon: the ‘inventor’ of GD to document their dinner. This brings the media gaze towards a private practice. Something explodes.
Girl Dinner is to be consumed by one person, unwatched. Then, we watch her do it. How quickly, once we have a portal into this privacy, do we analyze its substance for the good of the collective. Is Girl Dinner amazing? Is it literally feminism? Is it just eating sides? Is it disordered? Is it indulgent? I wonder, in moments, if these questions are simply the desire for life to be a little more interesting on a detailed level that it actually sometimes feels like. Judgement can be so quickly transmuted to meaning-making, awarding the satiating feeling we’re looking for. It is hard, however, to be sated online— but we do try.
As a collective, we seem urgently to want an answer to how to locate this very mundane practice. As individual humans, we literally eat a snack. We do it standing up or at the table or even in bed and then we and wash our dish and move on with our day and it changes our breath and the food becomes nutrients and cells and fat and lingers on our tongues and fingers and we digest it as best we can and we know, too, we will be hungry again soon. And honestly? In not too long at all.