last updated: 11/27/25

People are so quick to call a girl crazy! For Luiza’s Core III class, I started with the belief that crazy girls don't exist, and from there I explored the narrative of girls online and the conditioning of girlhood.

Girl as Doll/Dog is a compilation of conversations, mainly on TikTok, surrounding how girls should be. Girls are expected to be selfless and to behave like dolls. When a girl steps outside of these expectations, she is viewed as a wild dog that needs to be captured and tamed. If she chooses to embrace being “crazy” or “selfish,” men try to reclaim their power over her by going online to talk about how much they love crazy!

Girl is a booklet that expands on the idea of girls as dolls and dogs. It dives deeper into the various ways girls are tamed. All of which views girls as, and wishes for them to be, vessels for projections and ideals.
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This website contains the words, thoughts, and experiences, from girls, from my research. I welcome you to explore where they come from, and to share your own words which will then be added to this site <3


One of the most prevalent compliments that mothers receive are how selfless they are, and of course no one wants to be qualified as ‘selfish’, but also if I turn that word over in my head over and over again it doesn’t sound like a compliment. Selfless? She doesn't have a self? and that’s supposed to be the thing to strive for.

My whole life, I thought that's what being a woman is, it's this smallness, it's containment of the self. And that was really difficult for me, I always felt I was too much. And it wasn't until I let go of that that I really became someone.

No aspect of the feminine I’d seen felt natural to me, but I wanted it to be desperately. As a messy child, such grace felt out of reach.

I should be starving for this life of freedom that I have
for there have been so so many before me
who died so so hungry for it

The first examples of femininity presented to me were through my upbringing in a household of extraordinarily beautiful women. The women in my family; my grandmother, aunts, cousins, and my very own mother, were all known for their beauty in their time, it glowed out of them. On top of that, they were extremely well dressed and mannered. They never spoke out of turn, expressing emotion in glances, and rage in backhanded compliments, always hiding the depths of what they felt in smiles. They were shining jewels for the powerful men in my family to assert their wealth and power with. My mother once told me that it is looked down upon for a man in Colombia to have an ugly wife, because if he had money he’d provide her the necessary cosmetic procedures to make her beautiful.

These women in my family were not human, they were dolls, and I was blind to their dehumanization at the time because there is nothing a young girl loves more than her dolls. They held themselves to the highest standard of female expression. They saw me as one of them, and educated me as such, though I never quite caught their sight of their vision. I was “too much” in the way little girls were never supposed to be; always full of bruises on my legs from careless falls, and stains over my dresses from playing with paint and food. I was quite vocal and extremely opinionated from a very early age.

I ask now for your guidance and strength,
so that I may carry your lessons and wisdom with me well,
as I pave a new way for us all.
I will not follow the path you wish me to take
but I will honor you by walking my own.
One in which you are invited to come along.

...I watched many of my friends during their teenage years lock their inner whores deep inside of themselves after being publicly shamed for daring to explore the sexuality they’d been gifted in growing adolescence [...] They were messy, but they were brave. When one is given the power that is sexual desire without method or context, what else can one expect? More so in a society that will find a way to villainize you for it regardless of the way it’s used.

She’s never the overt center of attention, but her boyfriend is always posting film of her #35mm on his Instagram story. And she’s always just kind of like… [tilts head poses]. The Candid Girl™ is the patient zero of The Pick-Me-Girl. She’s not even trying to be pick-me, she just authentically has nothing going on in her brain.

Spoiled, selfish, self-centered. This woman believes the sun should rise and set according to her needs. Her uncontrollable temper flares up at the slightest imagined provocation.

Instead of “she’s a sex symbol” it becomes “she’s a whore”. Instead of “she’s anarchic” it's “she’s a fucking drug addict”. Instead of “she’s intelligent” it’s “she’s pretentious and said a whole load of nothing” and so on and so on.

I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger in certain people and I think it probably all boils down to the fact that the patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all. We are still trained to hate women, to hate ourselves and to be angry at women if they step out of the neat little box that public perception has put them in.

I think subconsciously people still believe there is only room for women to be a certain type of way and once they claim to be one way they better not DARE grow or change or morph into something else.

I felt generally welcomed to the community but also did see the small wave of people being annoyed I’d broken down the walls of my box they were determined to keep me in, the box, or should I say the brand, of the party girl who smokes cigs, does coke, loves the color green and has the capacity for nothing else.

To them I’m a silly little idiot because that’s what they desire me to be.

male artists' brand can always just be them being hot and not interesting. women artists have to be hot and interesting and well read and well spoken and kind and perfectly positioned and

She's made a gorgeous box for herself, one she can't escape from.

When people want to control women, the first thing they do is go after our beauty, the way we look. And that's true across the board, across the political aisle: women feeling like they have to show up in this one Barbie doll kind of image to afford being attacked.

It is the habit of the culture of the world to put women in their place by attacking their physical being.

When I asked my mother, “After all these years, are you happy?” She did not hesitate to say, “My happiness is to see you happy.”

“When I think of my women, sometimes I have to cry because of love, sometimes I think I’m inferior because I am not as generous as them. But I never wanted to be them.”

I feel as if, especially with a modern online discourse, society’s view on men expressing radical emotions is no longer viewing them as weak, more so praising them for doing so, which is great, but I’ve also noticed that society’s view on women expressing radical emotions has not changed from being hysterical.

Once chosen, she asks nicely if she can please sit quietly in the corner taking up as little of his time, space and energy as possible. Oh too much? She can be smaller. Too loud? She can be quieter. She’ll be cool, she’ll be chill, just whatever you do, please don’t leave her.

Confusing self-erasure with virtue

Main character energy is not a matter of being ‘individualistic’ or singular but rather of being extremely legible

There's a lot of people that will interject and try to take control of a young impressionable woman who's figuring out who she is and telling her what she should look like and who she should be and how she should sound.

...and not being "you have to do this cuz I want to live my dreams through you," but more "I just want to see my daughter live her dreams." And it makes me like emotional sometimes cuz she's so selfless um and has been that way her whole life with me and my sister.