This Week: Meet the egirls of TikTok
What The Teens are into these days: TikTok, a lip-syncing app that’s the preferred platform of choice for Instagram-loving youths to post memes and fun videos. And, as our Toronto-based BuzzFeed News reporter Lauren Strapagiel has discovered, “Somewhere in that mix of teenage yearning for identity and the drive for likes, the egirl was born. And she’s cooler than you.”
So........what is an egirl? That’s the question that Lauren explores in her latest report, TikTok Has Created A Whole New Kind Of Cool Girl, which is as much an explanation of Gen Z internet culture as it is an investigation into the way young women use technology to negotiate their sense of self in the world.
And if you’re still trying to wrap your mind around the egirl concept, older millennials and Gen X-ers might find this passage in particular helpful:
"You can think of them like a modern-day “scene girl” from the mid-aughts. And like scene girls, egirls have a reactionary factor. Scene girls and emo girls were a counter to the preppy, Juicy Couture look of the era (see: Paris Hilton) the way egirls may be a counter to the polished, Facetuned Instagram influencer."
International Hits:
So I tried peanut butter and jelly today for the first time and it's disgusting, how do Americans eat this 😷😷
In Australia 🇦🇺 — Literature is full of trash men, yes, but more importantly: Which One Will You Bang?
In Brazil 🇧🇷 — Make some pasta, and we’ll give you a show to binge-watch tonight. Consider your evening plans, made (in Portuguese here).
In Canada 🇨🇦 — This hilarious Tumblr thread is roasting male authors for the way they write about women!
In Germany 🇩🇪 — This one’s simple: pick a cookie, get a compliment! (German here)
In India 🇮🇳 — Life in your early 20s vs. life in your late 20s is a whole wild world of difference, you guys.
In Japan 🇯🇵 — This post on old-timey inventions that ~honestly tgod~ we don’t have to use, is getting shared 5x as much as a Japanese translation.
In Mexico 🇲🇽 — Sure, you’re single, but what **kind** of single person are you? (Spanish here)
In the UK 🇬🇧 — This piece on the double standards between Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle will change how you view coverage of yr fave royals.
In the US 🇺🇸 — And finally, it turns out that the rest of the world is NOT as impressed with pb&js as one might think...
Required Reading:
The latest from BuzzFeed News’ Tamerra Griffin, reporting from Nairobi, on how women in Sudan are using Facebook groups to expose abuse of power by the state police.
Because Sudan’s morality laws prevent women from gathering in public, private Facebook groups have become a way for millions of Sudanese women to chat and connect — first, over their crushes, but as the country’s anti-government protests progressed, to identify and dox police officers who are brutalizing demonstrators. You can read the whole report here.