By Ning Chang
Between trying to sell us the sexy secretary look to a post-Me Too generation, and glorifying the materialistic trade of female agency in exchange for a husband’s gilded cage, the greater TikTok subconscious has been working overtime to prime us to regurgitate regressive gender norms.
It’s the newest marketing of a centuries-old hegemonic patriarchal agenda. And while agenda can feel like a strong word to describe “mob wives” and such, it is the right word. Picking an argument over “office sirens” as a feminist issue becomes something I take “too seriously” for ascribing feminist warning bells to something as simple as internet-oriented fancy-dress.
But the fact is that it’s not as simple as fancy-dress: what we spend our money on and how we choose to act has always been political. Why should this be different for our personal style and consumption habits?
The popularity of these disempowering aesthetics is part of this agenda, a part that we dismiss and trivialise to avoid looking too closely at how we are vectors of branding. It uses the mouthpiece of our peers who have to rely on the language of the system to interact with it.
These messengers, who are primarily young women, operate on an app that encourages engagement in these aesthetics – posting them, citing them, repeating and referencing them again and again – as the only way that their videos will gain traction. So, we reproduce it. End on end. And eventually, we internalise it.
By Ning Chang