If a dress is on sale, I just made money!
If you don't spend enough to qualify for free shipping, you're wasting money!
If something is under $5, it's free!
If you pay with cash, it's free!
Jokes like this have taken over the internet -- users justifying their spending habits by joking about the psychological forces at play whenever they make a purchase. As a girl whose father brought her up to buy 10kg bags of flour because the unit price is cheaper, this trend is such a perfect, facetious encapsulation of what it's like to be a consumer in America.
There's just one problem: every time I see any video about this trend, I get inexplicably angry. I honestly couldn't figure out why it bothered me so much until a classmate in my math class posted a Girl Math joke on his Insta story. Then it clicked. I'm annoyed because 'Girl Math' is the latest in a long line of trends that infantalize and diminish women and their intelligence.
I actually don't talk about it much on this blog, which is funny because it's all I ever talk about everywhere else, but I grew up doing competitive math. My father shoved me into my first math competition at five, and I scribbled numbers down for a total of five with my fat fingers and triangular pencils before confidently marching out and informing my mother that I'm most definitely a prodigy. I wasn't, but it didn't matter -- I had found my first love. I spent every weekend in high school at an enrichment center, trying to be better and better and better and better and...
Somewhere along the line, I began to notice the girls drop off. A class that used to be 50% women fell to just me and one other girl, and what used to be uncomplicated friendship became misogyny, isolation, and this weird feeling of clawing my way through the sand, trying to get to the beach that the boys club was partying on.
I was raised by my mother -- a woman who, in the 1970s in India, became a highly specialized doctor, waited until she was nearly 30 to marry (and then, too, a love marriage, not arranged). It's the kind of feminism that only comes from a place and time like that: the understated, quiet kind where, despite it all, she refused to think of herself as a woman in a man's world. As much as I try, I'm not like that. Since middle school, I've been acutely aware of how much of a minority I am in the competitive math world. And now that I'm in college, the bone-deep exhaustion of that awareness has sunk in.
When I reference 1989 as being Taylor Swift's birth-year at the same time a boy in my proof-writing class mentions that it's two years before the USSR fell, he looks at me with pure disgust and remarks, "I'm not surprised we said such different things". I almost laugh -- I made AP World History my entire personality for an entire year, and he thinks I don't know when the USSR fell? Maybe if I had mentioned the Cubs winning their championship instead he would respect me more.
I'm ranting about the club application process to a boy in another one of my classes, and he turns to me and pumps his fist. "DEI will help you out," he remarks. Every fiber in my body burns. The packed room at the Quant Finance club meeting has two women, including me. My computer science class is filled with women who say they don't know what they're doing and get 100s, and men who claim to be Mark Zuckerberg but can't figure out the homework.
For how long am I expected to excuse this behavior? How much longer must I smile and nod when Men Explain Things To Me? We're as progressive as ever, and yet I feel like feminism is dying out.
Which brings me back to girl math, and how something gnarly in me is awakened by a trend that perpetuates the notion that women can't understand finance or numbers. Moreover, I'm frustrated at yet another TikTok catchphrase that acts like the only women worth trend-ifying are young, whimsical, main character girls. It conflates loving Target with reckless spending, youth and immaturity with femininity. Something about full grown adults calling themselves "twenty-something year old teenagers" eating "girl dinner" seems a little ridiculous, doesn't it? We can like Taylor Swift and spend more than we should buying granola because the packaging is pretty and still not want to be younger than we are. And still know when the USSR fell and still be deserving of our places at the top.
But I might as well stop writing the same thesis over and over again -- at this point, I'm just shouting into the void. I know what most people with less time on their hands will say -- It's just a trend, Deepti. It's not that deep. You're being irrational.
And well, it wouldn't be the first time I've heard that, either.
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