Resistance is futile: Barbie is landing any minute now. As we’ve witnessed buzz for the new Warner Bros. feature film crest over the past year into a body slam of a marketing extravaganza, no meme, corporate partnership, urban environ, or pinkifiable acre of attention has been left untouched. All this for a movie? Ah, but Barbie is no longer just a movie. Barbie, you see, now qualifies as an epoch-defining event.

And how we have readied ourselves! We—grown-ups, most of us—have read nearly half a million articles about her. We have purchased her tickets. We have planned the Barbiecore premiere outfits. We have dissected the indefatigable press tour, delighting at the Barbiest humans Hollywood could find and their dress-up games. Truly, there has been nothing short of a mass-level commitment to the bit. They ran out of pink paint. They sent journalists on a playdate at her house. We exchanged results from her selfie generator like benedictions, gleeful to picture ourselves, for a moment, as fellow denizens of Barbieworld.

Can you feel it too? The way our brains have fritzed out into SMPTE bars of pastel and glitter, a giggly dial tone of the mind ringing in your ear? There is something deeper and eerier here about our collective response to what’s essentially another nostalgia grab. The dissonance of treating a toy doll with such pomp is not lost on director Greta Gerwig at least, who appears determined to thread an impossible needle of “both/and”-ness in portraying Barbie as both subject and critique. (In a recent interview, Gerwig gravely pondered Barbie as a totem of modern womanhood: “If Barbie has been a symbol of all the ways we’re not enough, the only thing that made sense to me to tackle in the movie was: How could we turn it to be enough?“)

In the meantime, or perhaps regardless, the frothy buildup aims unambiguously at our childhood sweet spots. That the faultless, thoughtless doll of our childhoods has risen once more as an icon of worship reveals a desire, in this moment in time, for a kind of transcendence: not of flesh and bone into plastic quite yet, but certainly for a smooth-brained subsumption into the coiffed insouciance of Barbieness. We seek not to be Barbie, but to adopt the form of a Barbie girl.

It’s this specific idea of girlhood that we are currently consumed by, everywhere we see: exuberant and hyperfeminine, playful and innocent—and therefore, almost always white. Gerwig herself, after all, has made a career out of depicting this kind of girlishness, ranging from 19th-century Massachusetts to 2000s Sacramento, for one. In this decade, we find our girlhood worship manifested in the most popular celebrity in the world: a tall, blond, 33-year-old woman who has upended the music industry with recreated heartbreak ballads from her youth and is now embarking on a literal tour of the eras of her former self. (Earlier this month, she trotted out a now married ex from her teenagehood for a backflip and much applause; her likeliest successor is a 20-year-old whose introduction to the extra-Disney world beyond Disney was a hit song about obtaining a driver’s license.)

There is a reinvigorated longing for a return to girlhood, or more accurately, a willful (and incentivized) luxuriation in the trappings of this imagined girliness. In “Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl,” published by the French anti-capitalist collective Tiqqun in 1999, the anonymous author identified the construct of the “Young-Girl” as the chief product and model citizen of capitalism separate from the figure of an actual adolescent: “The Young-Girl is old insofar as she is known to be young. There is therefore no question for her of benefiting from this reprieve, which is to say of committing the few reasonable excesses, of experiencing the few ‘adventures’ expected of people her age, and all this with an eye to the moment when she will have to settle down into the ultimate void of adulthood.” Onscreen, we watch and reminisce endlessly about such Young-Girls via Gossip Girl, New Girl, Derry Girls, Gilmore Girls, and of course, the classic 2010s period piece Girls—and beyond.

In beauty and fashion, Ozempic has reawakened an obsession with smaller bodies while Lolita-esque “coquettecore” is dancing around TikTok in a pair of Mary Janes, preppy school-Young-Girl staples and bows of increasingly cartoonish proportion. (When The Dare, New York’s indie sleaze redux poster boy—famous for the 2022 two-minute earworm “Girls”—put out his EP, the cover featured young women dressed in baby tees and a pleated skirt, leading to a tinny shriek about underage sexualization from the Daily Mail, who were apparently unaware that this was simply how every 20-something below 14th Street now dressed.)

Online, the anthemic “Hot Girl Summer” and a wholesale linguistic rippage of “girl” from queer slang and AAVE have given rise to a colloquial branding exercise wherein every possible action, from taking walks to listening to rock, is taxonomized and trendified by the attachment of “girl” or “girly” as a descriptor. We search for “cool girl” brands, “corporate girl” work fits, and “party-girl beauty in hopes of projecting the je ne sais quoi required to be “that girl,” or at least someone with lucky girl syndrome. How very delulu girlies of us. Self-selection as “one of the girlies” is not a matter of gender, but an inside joke: an identifying passcode for the unserious, untroubled femme modality of the life we wish to inhabit. An easy meal made without much effort at home, after all, is now girl dinner.

And who could blame us? The fetishization of girlhood is patriarchy’s oldest trick in the book, not to mention a distinctly national tradition (As Katharine Hepburn’s character decries in David Lean’s 1955’s American-abroad romance Summertime: “In America, every female under 50 calls herself a girl.” The film was written by two British men, for the record.) Modern times have forced modern women into ever-contortionist measures of qualifying gained sociopolitical and financial power (see: the “girlboss”) at an acceptable, nonthreatening level. We even famously prefer our fictional women to be “girls.” In the aftermath of “I’m with her!”–era feminism and a national flinch away from “girl power,” it’s no wonder that once-outdated templates of femininity have regained appeal.

Hence the popularization of the tradwife and her pie-baking, cottage-dwelling homemaker lifestyle, and the guileless “bimbo” of Y2K we must have misunderstood. Like tradwife and the bimbo, the Young-Girl of today relies on the romanticization of an imagined past where personal responsibility for the greater state of the world does not exist. Life, therefore, cannot be all that disappointing. We crave our girlification as a coping mechanism. Adults have to worry about rent, student loans, climate change, political demagogues, bodily autonomy; “girls” don’t. At the heart of this imagined girlhood is an expression of femininity without consequence. Barbie doesn’t need birth control, anyway. (Per Tiqqun: “​​The Young-Girl knows everything as devoid of consequences, even her own suffering. Everything is funny, nothing's a big deal. Everything is cool, nothing is serious.”)

The irony, of course, is that while such obliviousness is the whole appeal of this fantasy girlhood, what actual adolescent girls are encountering in real life is a kind of enforced ignorance. In 2006, feminist scholar Marnina Gonick noted two particular trenchant discourses surrounding girlhood. There was the “girl power” camp, who believed in an assertive “new girl” unbound from the constraints of femininity (think Greta Thunberg), and there were the ideas proffered by the “Reviving Ophelia” camp, named after the 1994 book that psychologist Mary Pipher wrote and compiled from her case studies of adolescent girl patients. This latter camp maintained the view that girls were vulnerable, fragile, and in need of rescue; think of our true-crime obsession and which victims we usually become most fixated upon. At the moment, the “girl power” credo of a generation ago, has deflated into the reality of widespread depression amongst teen girls, whose lives revolve around the whims of byzantine algorithms—and whose digital selfhood more or less requires whether or not they can perform girlhood correctly according to those mysterious forces.

Elsewhere, girls are also kept in a state of ignorance by design, in keeping with the “Reviving Ophelia” worldview. With alarming frequency over recent years, many of today’s kids can no longer read the books they want, or learn the history they require, or seek the gender-affirming care they need; female children now live without the guaranteed reproductive rights that most other generations of women today have grown up enjoying. These restrictions are fueled in no small part by conservatives’ obsession over protecting their own fantasy of childhood innocence—a definition that has expanded essentially to the moment of conception in certain states—by any means necessary (at least, up until the point it interferes, of course, with economic goals or an adult’s predilection for automatic weapons). As we’ve seen with the rise of QAnon conspiracies and other pseudo–“save the children!” controversies, the posture of protecting girlhood in the abstract often has little to do with preserving the well-being of actual children. And the latter certainly does not get in the way of commodifying the Young-Girl and her easy-pack femme innocence as merchandise itself.

But of course, engaging with these conflicting accounts of real and imagined girlhood would require yet another bid for our already confused sense of personal responsibility. In this sense, our idea of girlhood and the Young-Girl has always required a consequential reckoning with our idea of agency itself; as Gonick noted of the two camps: “Both participate in processes of individualization that, as we will see, direct attention from structural explanations for inequality toward explanations of personal circumstances and personality traits.” It’s the system, girl.

And so here we are, with Barbie gunning down the road at 120 mph in a pink collectible Corvette. Is it reactionary or radical, then, to don the pink dress and beribbon ourselves in spite of what we know? Is it possible, then, to think of Barbiemania and our current expressions of hypergirly theatricality as something more than just a line of magical thinking? Consider it, maybe, not as a statement, but a series of exclamation points at the end of a trapped, guttural scream: That if they’re going to treat us like little girls, we might as well act the part.