The Girl economy is going strong — despite the manosphere

By Beth Kowitt

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, two girl-centric movies about female empowerment — one starring an animated Polynesian teenager and the other a bunch of singing witches — crushed at the box office.

Moana 2, from Walt Disney Co, had the biggest Thanksgiving Day opening in history. Universal Pictures’ Wicked, which debuted the week prior, set a record for a Broadway-to-screen adaptation. Together, they led the holiday stretch to its best numbers ever. And it was women who drove the results. Moana’s audience was two-thirds female, while Wicked’s opening weekend topped that at 75 per cent.

The election might have been won by the manosphere, a collection of “anti-woke” influencers who extoll traditional gender norms and hypermasculinity. But the Box Office results were a reminder that girl culture is still driving large swaths of the economy. And expect demand for it to build during a second Trump administration. Companies should pay attention to a female audience looking for ways to immerse itself in art and entertainment that embraces overtly feminist themes and takes seriously the complexities of being a girl and a woman — precisely because the political sphere will not.

The girl power energy of this moment feels more subdued than it did in the summer of 2023 when the troika of Barbie, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift not only shattered records but drove a level of spending that was credited with helping head off a recession. Deflating the vibes, of course, is the painful reminder that the US presidency still remains out of reach for women.

However, the numbers show that commanding the culture is not. Beyond the Thanksgiving weekend, Inside Out 2 — a movie about the feelings of a teenage girl — is set to become the biggest film of 2024. On the small screen, the original Moana is the most streamed movie of the past half decade, racking up more than 1 billion hours watched. In the music world, Swift on Sunday played the final performance of her nearly two-year, five-continent, 51-city Eras Tour, which became the first to surpass $1 billion in revenue even before it hit its halfway point. Women dominated the Grammy award nominations, led by Beyoncé — now not just the most-winning but also the most-nominated artist in history. She was honored alongside a slew of other female stars including Swift, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan.

While young women are attempting to live their best lives in the girl power economy, young men increasingly are residing in the manosphere. On some level, its rise can be read as a reaction to the forces that are driving girl culture: More women in the workforce than ever before — where it’s increasingly common for them to outearn their partners; women more likely to go to college and to graduate, and less likely to be living at home with their parents. The manosphere peddles the idea that men have been emasculated by the success of women, and that the breakdown of traditional gender roles is responsible for their feelings of loneliness and aimlessness.

The playbook of the manosphere — and those who capitalize on it — is to grow its influence by undermining women’s progress. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s 43-minute diatribe against the Barbie movie — in which he lights a bunch of the dolls on fire in a trash can — has been viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube. To Vice President-elect JD Vance, the powerful women at the helm of the Democratic Party are just a bunch of “childless cat ladies.”

The culture young men and women are consuming reflects their feelings but also reinforces them. Even the way it is consumed supports their diverging worldviews. The girl power economy is comprised of massive, joyful and optimistic cultural moments that are shared together. (Nearly half of Wicked purchases are for three or more tickets, for example.) Meanwhile, the manosphere is mostly absorbed in isolation, on podcasts and YouTube off in the splinted parts of the internet.

Nowhere has the consequences of this split played out more starkly than in the 2024 election, when Vice President Kamala Harris leaned into girl culture and Donald Trump embraced the grievance politics of the manosphere. When the vote was tallied, the gender split was greatest among the youngest voters. An analysis by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that women under 30 voted for Harris by a 17-point margin, while their male counterparts went for Trump by 14. Young women, whose worldview has been informed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the #MeToo movement, are 15 percentage points more likely to say they are liberal than men of the same cohort, according to Gallup. Twenty-five years ago, the gap was just five percentage points.

Some businesses are viewing the election results as a reason to reallocate their investments — away from themes that embrace women’s progress and instead double down on retrograde notions of gender. We have already seen this kind of reactionary reversal play out as companies scurry away from their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. But smart executives will see the demand for content that speaks not only to women’s empowerment, but also to the frustration they feel over stalled progress and what remains out of reach.