"Girls" vs. "Girl" ?

A Google search of the word “girls” certainly yields interesting results. The love-it-or-hate-it HBO series Girls takes up the first few entries; the skimpily clothed “girls” of FHM, Maxim, and Spike trail after. Then comes a frilly, animated site with simple and fun online games for “girls,” followed by a website that supports “girls” and empowers them with its various resources. This succession of entries is somewhat alarming to me; according to this particular search, in any case, there is no popular way to define the term “girls” in today’s virtual society.  A number of the sites in this search depict “girls” that I would better describe as women, and often sexualized women at that. So is there a moment when “girls” become “women”? What sort of bridge, if any, need be crossed to move from one group to another? Or is the line between the two so blurred that membership is a matter of subjectivity? The virtual world seems to harbor confusion on this front, as the evidence shows.

While I certainly relate to many of the issues that the 20-something year old characters of Girls face, I cringe when my brother collectively refers to my sister and me as “the girls.” In considering “girls,” I generally think back to my adolescent years; websites along the lines of the latter two listed above seem to be accurate reflections of this time period. FHM, Maxim, and Spike certainly don’t fit into my particular image. At the same time, however, I still have trouble referring to myself as a woman. For a variety of reasons, both personal and otherwise, the term “woman” doesn’t seem to be a perfect fit for me at this moment in time. So while the virtual world does seem to provide extraordinarily broad, varied depictions of “girls,” it also seems that my own inner turmoil—my inability to exclusively identity—echoes this. Britney said it best when she belted out “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman”…

Interestingly, a Google search of the word “girl”—a search requiring the negation of a single letter, “s”—yields much different results. Aha! This search provides more uniform material, more familiar territory. This particular Google entry produces an online skateboarding catalog, a Wikipedia definition, links to Girl Scouts of the USA and American Girl, and various comic book sites. On the first page alone! These types of websites align with things that I perceive as being definitively related to “girls.” Though it is unsettling to dwell upon how manipulative and difficult search engines can be, I do find solace in the fact that a fairly uniform, clean idea of what a “girl” is—and what she needs—does exist out there. It seems that the definitions of  “girls” and of “women” are indeed still polarized…you just have to know what to type.