When I’m sitting on public transport or waiting at airport gates or scrolling social media or spending time doing any of the endless things that allow me the joy of eavesdropping on strangers, I encounter a chilling kind of trend. It’s there in conversations about “girl math” to justify ordering another cocktail. It’s there when adults stare, mouth agape, at AI slop videos fed to them in an endless scroll like kids with unlimited screen time plopped in front of Ms Rachel videos. It’s there when cinemas fill up with adults eager to participate in a noisy and destructive ritual during the Minecraft movie.
It’s a kind of regression that feels less ironic and self-effacing than it once did. It’s metastasised to the point where performing childishness is less a performance and more a personal identity. A brand and a belief system, even.
Self-infantilisation has become the house style of contemporary culture. Not just in what we watch, but in how we talk, what we buy, what we excuse. Everything is softened, rounded, made palatable. Nothing too sharp, nothing too demanding. Our pleasures are pre-chewed so they’re easier to swallow and digest.
You can see it in the way adults are primed to receive the new Harry Potter TV series: not as a piece of storytelling to be assessed, but as a warm, sedating bath to be re-entered. In how “Disney adults” treat a conglomerate as a lifestyle and any critical opinions on that lifestyle are met with, “just let people enjoy things!”
Supermarket shelves are stuffed with brands that look like they belong in day care: blobby fonts, soft pastel palettes, names that sound like they should be sung rather than spoken. Even the language we use to describe our lives has shrunk. Appetisers are “girl dinner”, exercise is a “hot girl walk”. This online vernacular has seeped into our own and I fear for the girlies who will wake up one day needing to navigate their lifetime health cover or perimenopause.
And then there’s the strange, puritanical turn hiding inside all this supposed playfulness. Every few months, a viral post circulates lamenting the “unnecessary” sex scenes in film and television, as if we’re drowning in erotic excess. It’s a funny complaint, considering we’re living through what might be the least horny era of mainstream media in decades.
Six months on from the premiere of Heated Rivalry, all people want to talk about is not the tortured adult romance but the perky butts on the main actors – so rare is it that mutual pleasure is depicted not just expertly but at all. The unspoken, underlying intention in media is to make even stories about adults palatable to this kidified generation.
Infantilisation thrives on a kind of strategic innocence. It’s easier to position yourself as soft, harmless, “just a girl”, if you’re not also claiming the full spectrum of adult experience, including sexuality, agency, appetite. The more we flatten ourselves into something cute and non-threatening, the less we have to contend with complexity. The less is demanded of us.
Despite knowing it will be unpopular to mention Taylor Swift here, based on previous inflamed responses I received the last time I wrote about her in this column, there is a lot to be said for how the billionaire artist and cultural force still manages to be viewed as a delicate thing on the brink of girlhood.
Her fans uphold her idea of fragility, defending her with the intensity you’d reserve for someone powerless, not someone orchestrating one of the most successful careers in modern music. Questioning her methods or expecting any artist to be complex and thoughtful is, in my mind, an act of care, not the work of a bully.
None of this means you have to renounce pleasure or swear off nostalgia. Watch what you want. Enjoy your stupid little treats from shoppy-shops. But there’s a difference between enjoying something and needing it to remain uncomplicated, unchallenged, untouched by adult thought. There’s something so satisfying in being pushed and prodded and still standing tall, not collapsing at the first hurdle like a jellyfish with no muscle tone. Bone density is important for growing up, after all.
