Since mid-2023, ‘girl dinner’ has been trending on TikTok and Instagram. For those less acquainted with social media, ‘girl dinner’ involves women enjoying an assemblage of low-effort snacks or leftovers from their fridges as meals. TikTok user Olivia Maher coined the term with an accompanying jingle, dubbing her plate of bread, cheese, pickles, wine, and grapes as a ‘medieval peasant'-inspired ‘girl dinner’.
The viral trend sparked a fascinating controversy: Is ‘girl dinner’ liberating or oppressive for contemporary women? Some argue that ‘girl dinner’ is a form of self-care, relieving women from the traditional physical and mental labour to serve a robust meal. As Maher tells the New York Times, “it feels like such a girl dinner because we do it when our boyfriends aren’t around and we don’t have to have what’s a ‘typical dinner.’”
Does this mean that women only cook hearty meals for others and solely out of duty because they themselves don’t eat much? Many people have challenged this notion by pointing out the romanticization of disordered eating that repackages modern women’s eating habits under hetero-patriarchal gender norms. I believe the gendered language of this phenomenon reeks of gender essentialism. After all, it reduces women’s eating habits into neat little marketable stereotypes.
‘Girl dinner’ operates as yet another neoliberal capitalist spectacle prescribing what women eat and how they eat. No matter how ‘woke’ and ‘feminist’ such trends proclaim to be, they continue to police women’s bodies and food consumption.
To me, if there’s any escape from this expectation to perform ‘femininity’ through food habits, it is through horror.
Horror isn’t just about fear. Fear is a subjective yet collectively felt emotion deeply embedded in our societal structures. To breathe life into this fear, horror becomes a genre of excess that defies societal taboos and exposes the dark overflowing realities of our social systems. Therefore, hunger is everywhere in horror—from voracious monsters to insatiable zombies to flesh-eating cannibals. In a world that functions on depriving certain sections of society of their basic physiological needs, food is a visceral metaphor holding many meanings. One of which is women’s act of eating.
Horror movies confront the gendered expectations surrounding women’s relationship with food. Being a woman is all about self-denial. Our bodies exist to fulfil the desires of others rather than our own. We regulate our bodies through dieting and cosmetic culture, following every rule and regulation that dictates our ‘girl dinner’. That is precisely why, as Laura Maw writes, “there is something uncomfortable and enthralling about watching a woman devour what she likes with intent in horror movies.” Her words take me back to my ravenous and repulsive craving for food when I watched Anya Taylor-Joy devour a cheeseburger in the climax of The Menu.
Food is everywhere in The Menu, a satirical comedy-horror on the modern restaurant industry steered by the capitalistic forces of the top 1%. It presents a terrifying prospect: Picture an exorbitantly lavish dinner where your deepest insecurities and your very body are on the menu. The denial of appetite is threaded throughout the movie, exploring the dynamics of class, privilege, consumption and extravagant performativity around food. In an exciting ending sequence, Anya Taylor-Joy escapes the horrors of the fine dining kitchen because she never belonged within a socio-economic class that systematically disenfranchised her. Her choice to indulge in a burger becomes more than a desire to eat. It is her desire to be allowed to desire food. The satiated hunger of a marginalised woman is satisfying because her body is her own, no matter how horrifying that may be to society.
In horror, women often reject the societal expectation of feminine food denial, embracing their appetites and becoming monstrous in the eyes of society. In Jennifer’s Body, Megan Fox’s Jennifer embodies this rejection as she develops a voracious appetite post-possession. The act of eating becomes a symbol of her possession, and what follows is her taste for devouring boys. Bones and All also takes on the cannibalistic theme where Maren (Taylor-Russell) devours the flesh of people who love her. Unlike the women conditioned by society to suppress their desires, Maren has no trouble complying with her bodily urges.
The horror genre makes room for conflicting emotions like desire and disgust, mirroring the complex and contradictory relationship women share with food. In horror, the ‘excess’ neither inherently praises nor condemns a woman’s hunger. Instead, her hunger is the co-existence of disgust and desire, revealing that the relationship between women and food cannot be categorised in binaries.
In an era where women’ girlboss’ and do ‘girlmath’ with their ‘gorgeous gorgeous girlies’ during ‘hot girl summer’ and eat their ‘girl dinner’, is there anything scarier than an unconstrained appetite of a woman whose ‘girl dinner’ refuses to be a marketing spectacle of ‘femininity’? A woman’s hunger in horror wrestles her desire with her shame. But she gorges anyway in a way we have longed to do in our guilt.
Picture Credits -
Top: Anya-Taylor Joy, The Menu 2022
Image Courtesy (https://uproxx.com/life/the-menu-ending-explained-new/)
Bottom Left: Megan Fox , Jennifer's Body, 2009
Bottom Right: Taylor-Russell Bones and All, 2022
Image Courtesy (https://screenrant.com/bones-all-movie-real-meaning/)
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