The Smart Girl Industrial Complex: How Performative Intellectualism Replaced Being Hot Online
Words: Isobel Slocombe
It is 2016 and double maths begins at 9am. A shrill alarm cuts through hazy slumber and you begin your perfected routine. A sunset cut crease, Anastasia dipbrow, concealer carved eyebrows. If the clock permits, you may even ‘bake’ your under eyes with loose powder.
Fast forward to 2025. You sculpt two neat skinny-brows with a dermaplaning tool, and spray your micro fringe lightly with water in an attempt to get it to sit flat against your face.
Expectations for how women present both online and in person ebb and flow with the tides of trends. While such pressures have always been prevalent, the digital stage promotes relentless self-optimisation, redefining social standards for women and intensifying the performative nature of constructed femininity. While the actual rules for women online are in constant flux, the demand for performance remains. Historically, these performances centred primarily on surface-level ‘hotness’. However, we’ve seen a new paradigm emerging: the aestheticisation of intellect, whereby women are compelled to enact a carefully curated performance of ‘smartness’.
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Feminist theorists such as Naomi Wolf in ‘The Beauty Myth’ have illustrated how shifting aesthetic standards function as mechanisms of social control, continually policing women's bodies. As women gain legislative ‘freedoms’ elsewhere (to vote, to work etc.), beauty standards prevail as a system of regulation. The regime of appearance operates as a form of invisible labour, demanding continual time, money and energy. This prevents women from existing outside the confines of social expectation. Crucially, through the growth of mass media, the pressure to conform to these unrealistic social standards is widely disseminated, further embedding standards in daily life. Thus, beauty culture acts as a disciplinary structure reasserting hierarchies of gender.
I’d suggest, however, that we’re approaching a new frontier for women’s self-curation online. Looks have always ruled, and digital trends have long conceptualised women’s femininity as the sum of their ‘hotness’. However, with the prevalence of AI, knowledge is championed. It seems that there is a pressure to overcome ‘brainrot’ or low-brow content. When effortless beauty wasn’t enough to emulate alone, the internet found a new virtue. What matters now is not simply being intelligent, but curating the appearance of intellect.
“Though one might initially assume that encouraging women to read offers autonomy, doing so through the mouthpiece of social media can make it feel as though the liberation remains a performance.”
A quick, mindless, scroll on my Tiktok feed, and I come across a plethora of a very specific type of content. A butter-yellow, scrawling calligraphy font reads ‘anti-brainrot content I have consumed this month’. A girl vamps with her Penguin Modern Classics selection. Another video advertises somebody’s personal Substack account, which features monetised longform essays. Captions claim that the most attractive thing a woman can be is ‘disgustingly well educated’, and offer products through which to become so. These are all carefully constructed, mini performances showcasing curated intellectual tastes. Beyond my own impulses to go away and buy the products that are presented as the keys to my own intellectual liberation, these posts strike a sort of unease in me. These posts suggest that even the freedoms to learn, read and think must be packaged and displayed for validation.
These observations, of course, are no diatribe against the women who want to recommend their favourite literature. To brand them all victims would disregard the fact that perhaps some are genuinely enthralled by the content they advertise. At times, it is genuinely refreshing to see this kind of content amongst the ‘AI slop’. But are we caging ourselves with yet another consumer-based identity trend?
Andi Zeisler in ‘We Were Feminists Once’ argues that feminism has been hijacked by capitalism: empowerment is sold to us as a purchasable aesthetic. Even adopting the identity of ‘Feminist’ now requires consumption. One must buy books on feminist theory, and perform feminist ‘activities’ for an audience. This is evidenced by the endless stream of stylised, painstakingly curated bell hooks and Clarice Lispector hauls. Thus, female empowerment becomes an online identity rather than a method of resistance. The commodification of identities is ultimately a capitalistic tool to ensure that women remain subservient. As noted by Jia Tolentino in her essay ‘The I in Internet’, the internet teaches users that simply expressing an opinion is meaningful action, whilst it steals the time from them that could be used to create change. Though one might initially assume that encouraging women to read offers autonomy, doing so through the mouthpiece of social media can make it feel as though the liberation remains a performance.
To be a woman online challenges us to the greatest performance of all – a performance defined by whatever consumerist identity is trending. Like the beauty trends before it, curated intellect is now sold as empowerment; it is just another way for women to self-police. The feelings of inadequacy regarding ‘prettiness’ are joined by feelings of not being smart, cultured or well-read enough. So, while I will obviously never dissuade a woman from picking up a book, I simply ask her to consider who she is doing it for.
