Dylan Mulvaney is nothing if not resilient. Having spent the better part of 2023 weathering the ‘Bud Light boycott’ (when the beer brand tried to re-energise itself through a doomed partnership with the influencer), Dylan has sparked fresh controversy with her song ‘Days of Girlhood’, which includes the lyrics, “Monday, can't get out of bed / Tuesday morning, pick up meds / Wednesday, retail therapy / ‘Cash or credit?’ I say yes / Thursday, had a walk of shame / Didn't even know his namе.” You get the idea.
Fundamentally, it's a silly little pop song. But, as Dylan and her team must surely have anticipated, ‘Days of Girls’ has riled a lot of people up – and the people who have the most to say are invariably cisgender women, who believe that the song whittles down womanhood into reductive categories.
Over on TikTok, many creators have taken the song personally, with one noting, “I didn't birth a whole child for this to be a song supposedly summoning up womanhood [sic]”, while another commented, “Dylan Mulvaney just runs with stereotypes, its damaging to women. We are more than high heels and makeup. She doesn't know what it's like to be socialised as a girl.”
Several think pieces have run with the idea that because Dylan transitioned in her twenties, she has no claim to girlhood and is inherently ignorant of the traumas that so often accompany it.
In an op-ed for The Critic – in which Dylan is routinely misgendered – feminist activist and writer Jean Hatchett argues, “In Mulvaney’s fantasy female landscape there are no builders leering from buildings screaming at Mulvaney to get his “tits out for the lads” and frightening him into thinking he might be raped; he does not have to endure menstrual cramps or excessive bleeding, and he doesn’t worry about the drunk pervy uncle at a family party.”
As a cisgender woman whose own girlhood was marred by sexual harassment, sexual violence, and domestic abuse, I understand the protective urge that many of us feel over the gendered violence we've endured. But we shouldn't become so attached to our pain that we waste our energy defending it from non-existent threats – such as pop songs – rather than questioning who inflicted it in the first place.
And there's a jaw-dropping trailer.
Sure, a song written by a man that reduces the feminine experience to a “code-pink emergency” sounds grating. But Dylan Mulvaney isn't a man. And girlhood isn't the sole preserve of cisgender women. Indeed, Dylan's lyrics – as reductive as they are – allude to her experience of girlhood being different to that of her cisgender peers. The lyrics “Playin' catchup ‘cause we missed the pre-game” probably don't just apply to alcoholic drinks.
While Dylan's experience of girlhood may look different or have come later, it's still valid. I'd even go as far as to say that it's beautiful.
In her op-ed for the Daily Mail, Amber Duke further imposes a moral responsibility on Dylan, arguing that the song “perversely pushes alcohol, pills and risky sex on young girls.” Was the same criticism levelled at Raye – “In the back of the taxi / sniffin' cocaine / Drunk calls, drunk texts, drunk tears, drunk sex” – when she made history at the Brits earlier this month? Mercifully not. In the same breath that Dylan is denied womanhood, she's also held to a higher standard of it.
Dylan has responded to the backlash, saying, “I was not trying to start a substantial music career. This was a fun project to celebrate the early days of transition and the joy that I found because so much of my personhood and my series got used against me by really extremist conservative media, and I wanted to find a way to find the fun and the joy of those initial moments that I had in my transition.”
Thankfully, Dylan received plenty of support from her fans, with one person commenting, “It’s ok because this is YOUR girlhood, not anybody else’s” under the video.
Anyway, you watch ‘Days of Girlhood’ below. It's a bop.
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
