Where did this thing come from? Along with the stereotype of girls drinking coffee and eating nothing else? And the “almond mom” thing? Do women not eat? What’s the history of this cultural thingy?
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Since about the 1970s it has been fashionable for women to be very thin. Thus lots of extreme dieting, eating disorders, and jokes about the same.
While I think the cultural expectation of women eating less is relevant, I think this joke came about more in reference to not wanting to put the effort into cooking a full meal, or not having the money. The jokes tend to fall more in line with self-deprecating joke about mental illness. It seems to me to be another version of “depression meal”
It is definitely related to cultural expectations around thinness, but I also think there is a part of the “girl dinner” thing that pushes back against ideas of female domesticity. Girl dinner is not something that married women with kids eat— it’s associated with a kind of freedom to do whatever the heck you want for dinner and not worry about making a balanced meal for anyone. I see it as a kind of celebration of laziness (in the best possible way) and independence.
I threw this in a comment but posting this as its own comment bc I don’t see girl dinner as a harmful stereotype and it’s not about girls not eating. What it was and is was grown ass women finally admitting to each other and to the public that we do *not* adhere to the stereotype of cooking a full meal each night for ourselves or family. Girl Dinner is a nickname for the coping mechanism we use when we can’t be bothered to cook a “full” or completely giant/well rounded nutritious meal for ourselves and our families. We do not have that desire nor need to do that labor every single night.
Instead girl dinner is where we simply take a bunch of random stuff that we feel like eating (important to feed ourselves food we actually want) and eat that instead. The total amount of food is not problematic or telling girls not to eat. It is that we take a lot of food from a lot of different sources – so a handful of blueberries plus some chicken nuggets plus some Reese’s pieces etc etc until we have a very easy, randomly put together, satisfying meal that we *actually* want to eat – but it does not adhere to what society would call a well balanced meal. It is a highly feminist idea and by real women sharing their real lives with each other we finally realized that we all love to feed ourselves whatever we want, no matter how random it is and that was a very powerful thing – hence the viral nature of it.
It is nothing like almond moms, or people who are restricting eating for weight or body image issues. Girl dinner is about listening to our bodies and giving them what it wants and not feeling bad about it bc society says it’s not a “real” meal.
>girls drinking coffee and eating nothing else?
…. I resent stereotypes based on my real life.
In the 70s there were literally diets printed for women in women’s magazines like “eat a hard boiled egg, some nuts and a glass of wine” it’s always been about making women less substantial, both physically and contextually.
This is a pre-Internet stereotype that was around for a long time before the Internet was really a thing. I remember hearing it a lot from standup comedians back in the 80s, like Eddie Murphy had a bit about it in his standup (Delirious, I think) and I remember even Roseanne Barr in her first big comedy special doing jokes about how *other* women never eat anything.
I’m sure it wasn’t a new phenomenon back then either, but that’s when I remember first hearing people say it.
Girl dinner isn’t about the size of the meal or not eating enough, it’s about cobbling together random stuff rather than cooking a meal. Like having a dinner made of some baby-bell cheese rounds, a cup of noodles you found in the pantry and a bowl of breakfast cereal.
Technically have your grains, proteins, and fats, and it’s enough food but it’s not like a “meal” in the traditional sense. A lot of people do this it’s not something new or exclusive to girls/women, but the name “girl dinner” and women being open about this on social media was a way of low key subverting expectations of domesticity and these perfect “instagram-able” meals, and/or part of the larger trend of being more candid about mental health and struggling (eg. goblin mode).
Almond moms is a whole other unrelated thing, girl dinner has nothing to do with diet culture or not eating
It’s about how young women will often barely eat and when they eat it will be completely nutritionally unbalanced or garbage food. I think the biological drive for food for women ages 18-25 is substantially less than for men at that age because the men are still growing and supposed to become more muscular and often taller during that period, whereas the women are more or less done. Also it’s very easy to get enough calories to sustain an inactive lifestyle by eating a bit of junk food
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