The soft girl era lookS like relief. Like permission to stop hustling. Like feminism had finally figured it out.
But here’s the thing: I’m not sure it actually has.
The Girl Boss Hangover Is Real
Let’s be honest—the girl boss movement is exhausting. It tells us that if we just work hard enough, stay resilient enough, accept enough corporate crumbs, we’d finally be equal to men. Spoiler: it doesn’t work. Instead, women end up doing twice as much—succeeding at work and maintaining the expectation of being the emotional laborers at home. The hustle never stopped. It just has better branding.
So the soft girl era arrived like a breath of fresh air. It said: You don’t have to be hard. You can rest. You can be feminine. You can prioritize yourself.
That’s genuinely powerful. Women, especially Black and working-class women, have been denied leisure for centuries. The idea that you can slow down, embrace softness, and not apologize for it? That should be radical.
But then I watched more carefully, and something didn’t sit right.
Pretty Cages Still Confine You
The problem with the soft girl movement isn’t that it celebrates femininity or rest—it’s what often comes packaged with it.
Look at the most popular soft girl content: it frequently centers on financial dependency (often on men), disengagement from careers, and the romanticization of a lifestyle many women simply can’t afford. There’s this implication that the “best” version of softness is one where you don’t have to work, where a man provides, where your only job is to be beautiful and emotionally available.
Sound familiar? That’s because it’s… well, it’s basically a rebrand of traditional femininity.
The softness gets packaged as a choice—you can choose softness!—but it’s marketed as the better choice, the smarter choice, the choice that makes you more desirable. Which means it’s not really a choice at all. It’s just a different cage, one with better lighting and more Instagram-worthy aesthetics.
The Luxury of Opting Out
Here’s where class becomes impossible to ignore: the ability to “opt out” of hustle culture is a privilege many women don’t have.
If you’re a single mom working two jobs, you can’t just decide to embrace softness and financial dependency. If you’re a Black woman facing the “strong Black woman” stereotype, softness might be a reclamation—and it is—but only if you have the economic security to support it. The soft girl lifestyle, as it’s typically marketed, requires time, money, and the stability to literally afford to step back from productivity culture.
That’s not feminism. That’s just luxury branded as enlightenment.
So When Is Rest Actually Radical?
Okay, I don’t want to throw the whole thing out. There is something important about reclaiming rest and gentleness as feminist acts. Thinkers like Tricia Hersey have written powerfully about how rest—especially for marginalized women—is resistance against systems designed to grind us down.
The difference is autonomy.
When you’re resting because you’ve chosen to, because you have economic security and the power to set your own terms, that’s different from resting because it’s been repackaged as your “natural” role. True feminist rest isn’t about being confined to softness. It’s about having the freedom to be soft or hard, to work or rest, without it being weaponized against you.
The Real Question
Here’s what I keep coming back to: Can you actually be soft and maintain full autonomy? Or does softness, the way it’s being marketed, inherently demand a kind of passivity?
I think the honest answer is: it depends entirely on your context.
For Black women rejecting the “strong Black woman” stereotype, embracing softness might be genuinely liberatory. For a woman choosing a domestic role and maintaining financial independence, that’s her choice to make freely. But for anyone—and especially young women—absorbing the message that softness is better, that femininity is the goal, that being taken care of is the dream? That worries me.
Because I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends.
What Actually Radical Looks Like
Radical femininity doesn’t mean choosing between being hard or soft. It means having the economic security, the legal rights, and the cultural respect to choose whatever the hell you want—and to change your mind whenever you want.
It means softness doesn’t come with a price tag. It means you can work and rest without judgment. It means femininity isn’t performance. It means dependency is chosen, not compulsory.
The soft girl era might feel like freedom, but ask yourself: Am I choosing this, or am I being quietly redirected toward a role I’ve already tried to escape?
If you’re soft by choice, with full autonomy and security? Beautiful. Soft away. But if you’re soft because it’s been repackaged as feminist, as enlightened, as better? That’s just a softer version of the same old cage.
And honestly? I’m done with cages, no matter how pretty they are.
What’s your take? Is softness radical in your world, or does it feel like a trap dressed up as choice? Let’s talk about it.
AUTHOR BIO
Treasure Affia is a Nigerian sexuality educator, feminist activist and founder of The Feminist Code, a youth-led, pan-african and global south feminist platform. Through her work, she dismantles Western sex-education narratives by centering decolonial feminist, queer, and African epistemologies. She’s reshaping what liberation looks like when we stop teaching from the Global North’s playbook.
