In 2025, The Hmm has been exploring gender expression online with the theme “This is who you’re being mean to”.
You must have scrolled past this meme at some point: an image of a cute, sad, and/or esoteric creature accompanied by a variation of the line, “When you’re being mean, this is who you’re being mean to”. Posts like these are a conduit for self expression, in this case relating the poster to a miniature being with limited agency in a fast-paced, overwhelming world. This trend can also be interpreted as yet another marker of how cuteness is adopted as a digital skin. A similar dynamic can be observed in trends like “girl dinner”, or “girl math”, where users reclaim and put an ironic spin on infantilizing female stereotypes.
Looking back to the origins of these trends, we often see an early Internet that was viewed as an emancipatory space where people explored and experimented with identity and gender. Today, this spirit of identity play exists simultaneously alongside a broader trend that leans toward more cisheteronormative gender roles. We asked ourselves what these tensions show us about internet culture today.
Social media has been embedded in our daily lives for over twenty years, and for the last ten years we have been consuming content via an algorithmic feed, which uses collected data to show us what it thinks we will like. This creates a feedback loop that changes us into much more extreme versions of ourselves. As a result, femininity and masculinity are amplified to extremes. From lip fillers for women to bulging muscles for men. Because our looks can be shaped, improving them has become a form of social and financial capital. For young people, adapting your look to suit the algorithm can now be a means of income and survival in an increasingly unbalanced economic landscape.
Over the past year, we have examined various forms of gender expression. In addition to our symposia focused on self-infantilisation (Girl Online) and self-optimisation (The Best Version of Yourself), we produced the first season of our podcast Thinking Face Emoji, which explored various archetypes of gender expression: from the girlboss to the Gigachad to Sock, the Bushwick enby. And in this research dossier, this exploration is expanded through three new commissioned contributions. Senka Milutinović prepared a quiz about how gender is mediated online and how we can resist the way algorithms try to control our self-expression. Tackling the world of brainrot, Mel Ghidini wrote about masculinity and the links between Italian brainrot, fascism, concrete poetry and Futurism from a transmasculine and queer perspective. And finally, the essay SLOWwwww, by Socrates Stamatatos, uses slowness as a subversive response to the elitism and exclusion embedded in accelerationist thought, using Britney Spears as a pop-cultural oracle of resistance. Have a nice read!