The Rise of The Sexy Baby

We are all teenage girls in our twenties being delulu and doing girl math, but when is enough enough?

“Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby,” Taylor Swift sang in her latest smash hit, Anti-Hero. The lyric was met with resounding confusion. But I think I know exactly what Swift meant. 

I’ve noticed a growing movement in the copious amount of time I spend on TikTok and Twitter: a movement working to undermine women. The most disturbing part is that the main perpetrators of this trend are young women themselves. 

Women online seem to be on a mission to infantilize themselves, to cultivate an aesthetic of incompetence and helplessness, to romanticize mental illness and its devastating consequences, to incorporate financial illiteracy and sexual immaturity into the modern conception of the feminine, and undermine the potential of young women everywhere along the way. 

This may seem harsh or unforgiving, but I recognize that it is a symptom of modernity. As economic and political conditions deteriorate, everyone is more mentally ill, poorer, and lonelier. As more and more of our reality is cultivated within the digital sphere, aestheticizing these conditions feels like a rational recourse. But the project of language seems to have the goal of feeding into sexist stereotypes, turning women into overgrown but sexually viable adolescents, and producing a generation of Sexy Babies.  

I see the language of Sexy Babyhood all over social media, every day, and I feel like I’m going insane. 

Is this the natural consequence of the sexualization of teenage girls in response to third wave feminism? Is it a harmless byproduct of meme culture? Am I oversensitive for finding this language distasteful? 

Let’s take a look at some of the specific language I keep seeing online: 

Adult women will listen to a new Olivia Rodrigo album, find it relatable, and get online to say that they must really still be adolescents. “I’m just a teenage girl in my twenties!” they post, to a chorus of likes, comments, retweets. “Me,” we all say. “This is so me.” 

Adult women will shorten words to make it sound cute when they call themselves insane and undermine their own credibility. “I’m so delulu,” they cry, and the word becomes a meme, gets repeated over and over, and enters the lexicon. 

 They pathologize romantic yearning, which is natural and sometimes even healthy, as a symptom of some adorable mental illness. It is natural to want love and companionship, even the kind that involves a commitment (gasps, clutches pearls.) But the normalization of hook-ups and the ever popular “situationship” feels symptomatic of a larger issue, a lack of emotional maturity among young people of all gender expressions. Admitting that you aspire to marriage is somehow regressive, but withstanding the emotional torture of a man who won’t commit to you is chic. 

Eating a strange assortment of snacks for dinner is not a symptom of being unable to feed yourself like an adult, it’s now cute, and it’s called girl dinner. (It has long been acknowledged that any female born after 1993 doesn’t know how to cook. All they know is mcdonald’s , charge they phone, twerk, be bisexual , eat hot chip & lie.) 

Perhaps the most insidious of them all: Using illogical equations to justify spending money that you barely have is not stupidity, its girl math. 

I do what they now call “girl math” all the time, but I’m fully aware that it’s because I am literally financially irresponsible. This is because I was stupid enough to decide to go to graduate school, not because I am a girl, and not because it’s cute. It’s not cute that I am twenty-five years old and don’t have a cent to my name. And its not a symptom of late capitalist excess that I may never own a home, or retire, it’s because the federal government was doing girl math with our social security checks, probably. 

I want to be an adult, with all the responsibilities and privileges that entails. I am convinced that good things lie on the other side of childhood, and we can’t extend our adolescence forever. I’m begging my sisters in Christ to acknowledge this and embrace the idea that being mature, in a real and meaningful way, could be even hotter than being stuck as a Sexy Baby. 

Stand UP! Spell Pharaoh! Tell me what the FTC does!