Once upon a time, women were asked if they had danced with the devil and howled at the moon. Now, a more important question is being asked: Is she a girl’s girl?
Is Amanda Batula of Bravo’s Summer House a girl’s girl? How about Tituba? Anne Boleyn? Do you think Athena, goddess of wisdom and warfare, was Team Ciara? Even if she was not really a girl’s girl to Medusa?
Visit saltysenoritaaz.org for more information.
Girl’s girl is, in its simplest and most earnest form, shorthand for a woman who prioritizes her female friends as opposed to the men in her life. The term acknowledges that female friendship is special — magical even — and should be cherished. Girl’s girls don’t fall into society’s trap of pitting women against each other. Being a girl’s girl is a way to say screw misogyny without having to wade into complicated feminist theory.
Why I wrote this
As someone who watches entirely too much reality TV, it’s always exciting to me when something breaks Bravo containment and becomes a mainstream, pop culture story. For the past few months, that something has been the Ciara Miller-Amanda Batula-West Wilson love triangle on Summer House.
I’ve watched people try to catch up on the deep lore of this Bravo show, wrap their heads around the messiness, and quickly sympathize with Miller’s devastatingly beautiful breakdown in front of an Hermés store.
But the most striking thing to me has been how this saga has crystallized the “girl’s girl” phenomenon — a term that’s been a load-bearing pillar in reality TV conflicts for years, and has gotten more use in real life more recently. On the surface, it’s quite simple: You either are or aren’t a girl’s girl. But as Batula and this Summer House mess have shown us, one can’t exist without the other.
“Girl’s girl” can be a proud affirmation (I’m a girl’s girl). It is seeing someone scorn the most beautiful woman in your life and defending her vigorously. It’s also a stern assessment of loyalty (She is not a girl’s girl).
Our collective desire to celebrate girl’s girls comes from a good place. But it can also be wielded like a weapon, or a mafia threat — a way to collectively punish women who fail to live up to these standards.
How reality TV fell in love with a girl’s girl
The girl’s girl isn’t a new phenomenon, especially on the cable network Bravo and its streamer sister Peacock.
Back on season 10 of the Real Housewives of New York (2018), Ramona Singer famously yelled at co-star Bethenny Frankel, telling her “you don’t support other women” after Frankel made fun of her skincare line and did not, in Singer’s eyes, thank a fellow Housewife profusely enough for procuring her a Christmas nutcracker decoration.
It was also a major point of discussion during the “Scandoval” era of Vanderpump Rules, in which Tom Sandoval cheated on his longtime partner Ariana Madix with co-star Raquel Leviss. Leviss was seen as not a girl’s girl, while the women who supported Madix during this time were. Girl’s girl has, more recently, come up on newer shows like Real Housewives of Rhode Island, in which one cast member called another a “slam pig” for constantly spreading lies about her home, job, and colitis; at the same time, it appears that a different Rhode Island Housewife is being cheated on. The rest of the cast wants to be girl’s girls and support her, while also calling out her husband.
“The whole appeal of reality TV is that it helps us. It’s both a mirror and sort of a prism into looking at ourselves,” said Gibson Johns, Bravo aficionado and host of the reality TV podcast Gabbing With Gib. “I think everybody wants to be considered a girl’s girl. It’s the ultimate phrase, honestly. It’s a reflection of your values and how good of a friend you are.”
“My understanding is that a girl’s girl is somebody who places primacy of female friendship over romantic relationships — especially if it’s just the potential of a romantic relationship versus an actual existing friendship,” said Anne Peele, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind Love Island.
Love Island is the epicenter of girl’s girl-ing. For the uninitiated, the show is an amalgamation of competitive reality shows like Survivor and reality dating shows like The Bachelor. Women and men pair up, and face eliminations if they don’t have partners (or become “single and vulnerable,” in the show’s parlance). Peele explained to me that while girl-on-girl loyalty was always a component of the American version of the show, it wasn’t until season six that a girl’s girl pact was made.
The main women on that season — Serena, JaNa, and Leah — banded together, forming an alliance known as the Powerpuff Girls (PPGs). Instead of following Love Island’s unspoken rule of putting men first (which would ostensibly keep you on the show longer and get you closer to winning the prize money) and allowing production to pit them against each other, the PPGs rewrote the show in their own way.
“What was so moving about it was that they would give each other the time that ostensibly is supposed to be spent finding romantic love … comforting each other or encouraging each other,” Peele said, also pointing out that Ariana Madix, the Vanderpump Rules star who came out of Scandoval as the reigning queen of girl’s girls, hosted that sixth season.
The most recent example of reality TV girl’s girl discourse is a rift among Summer House’s Ciara Miller, her ex West Wilson, and her longtime friend Amanda Batula. Miller and Wilson dated a while back, broke up, and have, onscreen, had a tenuous friendship since. At the same time, Miller and Batula were allegedly good friends until a March 31 joint announcement from Batula and Wilson that they were dating. The sudden confirmation of rumors that had been circulating for months — which Batula and West had previously denied — set the women’s friendship on fire.
Of all the men in the world to date, why did Batula need to be with Wilson? And of all the women in this world, why did Wilson betray Miller by choosing Batula? The backlash from fans was swift and unforgiving, and mostly directed at Batula.
“If you’re a woman on Bravo, one of the worst things you can be called is not being a girl’s girl,” Johns said. “Nobody wants to be slapped with that label.”
Obviously, Love Island and Summer House aren’t real life. But no matter how unrealistic these programs are, they’re designed to tap into very human feelings of desire, lust, and jealousy. The twist, as the PPG showed us, is that these shows are also capable of showcasing more positive, less toxic, and genuinely aspirational versions of female friendship.
That a reality dating show became a bastion of feminism and female friendship is not completely surprising to Yalda Uhls, a developmental psychologist. Uhls is the founder of UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers, which studies young people’s relationship to entertainment.
She and her cohort have found that teens and young adults have continually expressed more desire for depictions of friendship in popular media. It just so happens that the young women on reality TV, like Love Island’s Powerpuff Girls, created the media they want themselves.
“It kind of makes sense, and I think it’s a really positive thing,” Uhls said, noting that it’s also possible that producers would also encourage friendship-building, especially if it resonated with audiences.
“I hated those reality shows, which would just make all these women fight over men, and that’s so unhealthy,” she added. “So if we’re encouraging women to have healthy relationships with each other first, then they can start having healthy relationships with the opposite sex if that’s what they’re interested in.”
When being a girl’s girl is actually a knife
Peele told me that you can’t really be a girl’s girl of one; the term exists to explain how you relate to other women. Perhaps that’s why, so often, it’s defined by its absence: She’s not a girl’s girl. In fact, she is their foil.
Plug “Amanda Batula” into the search bar of any social media platform — Reddit, X, TikTok, perhaps even LinkedIn — and it will yield various posts and countless more comments about what a terrible person she is. The backlash to Batula stems from the perceived betrayal, says Peele. To the people most invested in this drama, Batula is not a girl’s girl.
Peele pointed out that many viewers just accept Wilson’s villainy as a given, much like they do when it comes to the men on Love Island. There aren’t belabored dissertations about how Wilson’s hair could be a sign of terminal laziness or, worse, a moral failing. Nor is there a comparable number of Reddit threads about how his friendships have all been manifestations of a deep-seated, incurable insecurity.
Uhls, the researcher at UCLA, told me that the criticism might be tied to just how much young people, and young women, value friendship.
“I think it’s unfortunate to have backlash, but I guess in some ways it’s sort of trying to reward the good behavior and punish the bad behavior,” Uhls said. (To be clear, Uhls was not fully versed in the trials and tribulations of Summer House or Amanda Batula, and was speaking in a more general context.) “When someone is not modeling a positive relationship with another woman and there’s backlash online, it might be reinforcing that young people want to see positive relationships.”
The ongoing Batula pile-on raises a conundrum, though. If everyone’s a girl’s girl and if girl’s girl means supporting women, the girl’s girl thing to do would be — as difficult as it seems — extending this girl a shred of grace, even if she didn’t do the same for her female friends. That she’s being punished so vigorously points to girl’s girl being less about positivity and more of a weapon to use against girls — women — who don’t pass the litmus test.
Despite — or perhaps because of — the recent uptick in the term thanks to the Summer House fallout, the term might be on the wane. People have begun to recognize that “not a girl’s girl” can be applied to anyone and everyone (except men), for all manner of alleged crimes against women, and that there’s really no way to litigate it. There also seems to be a growing awareness that while holding women accountable for shitty behavior is good, witch hunts are bad, and so is letting men off the hook.
“I think that it means the most when coming from somebody else,” Johns said. “If somebody leads with being a girl’s self-identified girl’s girl, I think there’s probably reason to be suspicious of it.”
Peele, the author who has consumed an unfathomable amount of Love Island, explained to me that a contestant on the eighth, now-airing season, quipped that anyone still describing themselves as a “girl’s girl” earnestly is a red flag.
“Being a girl’s girl is obviously a principle that we should all strive to live by,” Peele said. “But it’s too meta at this point, and so it’s like, I don’t know, like a guy wearing a shirt that says Feminist.”