Why are we all so scared to be real adult women?

This publication started as a meditation on this question between ourselves as we navigated the worlds of not only womanhood but adulthood in our late 20s.

On the eve of the new year, every publication from NPR to Elle declared 2023 as the “Year of the Girl.” Capitalizing on the media storm that surrounded movies like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the internet was soon flooded with TikTok trends and think pieces celebrating hyper-femininity. Putting bows on hammers made them “coquette,” and nutrition-deficient meals became “girl dinner.” Commenting on the craze for Dazed Magazine, author and podcast host Oenone Forbat explained: “I really feel like women crave the innocence of childhood, frivolity, and childishness because it’s taken away from us too soon. We were taught that ‘girlishness’ was a bad thing, so it’s really fun and comforting to indulge in something a lot of us maybe feel like we shunned or couldn’t access in our adolescence.”

Girl Mania is meant to be a rejection of patriarchal systems that portray femininity as something shameful, allowing grown women to return to the highly feminine activities and traits they were forced to reject in order to be taken seriously when they crossed the bridge from girlhood to womanhood. This girly behavior is seen as cute and endearing when they are young. We all smile when we see a little girl wearing a princess costume in public, especially if it’s not Halloween. It is sweet to know that her desire to play princess, to be as archetypically feminine as she can possibly be, is so strong that it overwhelms all notions of social dress codes and seasonal propriety. But as she gets older, it becomes less and less cute. Her hyper-femininity and her lack of shame surrounding it make her a target of ridicule. Women who play princess for too long are not seen as endearing but as incompetent, immature, and unserious. Celebrating girlhood was supposed to counter that narrative, forcing the masses to understand that hyper-femininity was never a marker of how capable or intelligent a woman was. 

However, one must question how radical of a message this can really be. Like patriarchy, Girl Mania positions the best period of a woman’s life as being behind her, and that is surely something we have heard before. From the European nobility’s selection of virgin brides to the pedophilic marketing of teen pop idol Britney Spears, society has always had a hard-on for girlhood. The Atlantic editor Isabel Cristo wrote her own controversial take on the Year of the Girl in a piece for The Cut entitled “Woman in Retrograde,” in which she points out the dangers of women regressing in the hope of insulating themselves from the realities of patriarchy. She writes:

“The thing about girlhood is that it’s a before time: before puberty, before life, and, importantly, before feminism. Although in reality, girlhood can be (often disturbingly) pierced by the politics of the adult world, it’s a period that precedes those choices that feminism has always concerned itself with — choices about marriage, child raising, career building, homemaking, sex, sexuality, and caretaking. It’s also a time that’s free from the consequences of those choices. In girlhood, we’re not yet even ourselves.”

“Woman in Retrograde” not only picks apart Girl Mania as a capitalistic trend but as a coping mechanism for women who still feel ill-equipped to deal with adult life, choosing instead to escape from the very current and very real circumstances of womanhood by regressing into their girlhood. This begs the question: why are we all so scared to be real adult women?

This publication started as a meditation on this question between ourselves as we navigated the worlds of not only womanhood but adulthood in our late 20s. Bombarded by messages in 2023 that the glory days of girlhood were solidly behind us, we began to question why there was so little celebration of this less Instagramable period in women’s lives: when they are fully stepping into their own as women, learning to understand and deal with all the wonderful and terrible things that means.

Those who were on Tumblr in the early 2010s will remember how Rookie Magazine became a beacon for teenage girls who wanted to see their experiences in a way that was honest and artful. Stealing imagery and insight from Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, photographers like Petra Collins and writers like Tavi Gevison sought to make real teenage girls feel more seen, discussing everything from how to look like you weren’t just crying to losing your virginity. Rookie was a groundbreaking publication that sought to capture girlhood not as an idealized and innocent period in life, but as a painful and beautiful time of transition from childhood to adulthood. 

Antlers seeks to do the same for women transitioning from their 20s into womanhood. Taking our name from a species of dear that dies after age 25, this publication is meant to celebrate the transition from girlhood to womanhood and all the messy, scary, and exciting bits that go with it. Being financially independent but broke. Falling out of touch with friends from college and childhood. Dating in the age of apps and hookup culture. Mommy issues. Quarter-life crises. Antlers invites women in their late 20s and early 30s to share their stories, their art, and their thoughts on the things that matter to them.