It’s become an internet trope, but the art of girl rotting dates back at least to the 19th century.

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I went for a walk after spending a day rotting in bed. My flat was out of bin bags, I needed fresh air, and I wanted wine. It was a short walk to the local superette, and I had Fiona Apple and Hole on repeat. Although no longer wrapped up in my bed sheets, I was wrapped up in my own melancholy; had been stewing in it all day. The fresh air helped because when I got back from my walk I began to write about rotting in bed, rather than returning to rot. 

I’m an avid practitioner of “girl rot.” For those not in the same online circles as me, girl rot is the act of wallowing in your emotional turmoil in a grotesque yet aesthetically refined way. Moping, rotting away, but remaining pretty enough to post selfies from your bed, if you had the energy to. 

The phrase “girl rot” arose among young women online, mostly teenage girls, who describe themselves as “femcels”, “girl-bloggers” and “coquettes”, among other labels. This girl listens to Lana Del Rey. She knows every scene from The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999) and Girl Interrupted (James Mangold, 1999). She’s read The Bell Jar and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. If she doesn’t smoke already, she has pictures on her camera roll of pretty girls who do. If she hasn’t started drinking yet, she plans to use empty vodka and wine bottles as vases in the near future. 

The girl rotter eschews seed oils and ultra-processed foods; her eating habits combine the Ancestral Diet with heroin chic. She likes bows in her hair, doe eyes, and pouting in pictures. She wears Brandy Melville, a California-based fast-fashion brand notorious for selling clothes only in one small-and-tall size. She cries, starves, and stays in bed until Rory Gilmore, Blair Waldorf, or Nina Sayers draws her into an obsessive goal of perfection. 

I am not disparaging this girl. I am her. 

I began partaking in this lifestyle in between its peaks. I was late to the party for the Tumblr sad girl movement of 2013-2014, as I was nine, and playing Club Penguin. For the 2021-2022 coquette trend, I was ahead of the curve. In a way, I kept these branches of the melancholic female alive, especially once I discovered Lana Del Rey at age 13. It was at a friend’s sleepover in 2018, early morning, just beginning to get light outside. My friend was still asleep. I was scrolling on my phone, looking at mood boards on Instagram. One based on Lana’s Born to Die album popped up, featuring a gingham top and skirt set, cigarettes, cherries, and glass bottles of Coke. I vaguely recognised her name. I went on YouTube and watched the music video for Summertime Sadness. Then Born to Die. Then Blue Jeans. Then Video Games.

Then I watched Carmen. The opening strings with the blooming rose, intercut with shots of Lana and an unnamed lover. I watched it again and again and again. Playing the song on a loop, I closed my eyes and heard the “white lightning” refrain as I dozed in and out of consciousness. When I woke up, I downloaded the Born to Die album. I haven’t gone back to a world without Lana since. 

In 2019, when I was 15, I read The Bell Jar, another girl-rot classic. The cover was red and featured a girl applying lipstick in a mirror. I read it in one sitting. I was on the verge of tears by the end of every chapter, but the part that pushed me over the edge was when Esther told Buddy that she didn’t want to get married, ever. His flippant response – “You’ll change your mind” – made me cry. I still don’t know why this particular passage produced such a reaction. Maybe because I felt so connected to the struggles of Esther (and Sylvia), and like Buddy’s dismissal of Esther was a dismissal of my feelings. Maybe because I was on my period. 

I wanted to be rebellious but I didn’t know how. All I could do was read and write until I was old enough to buy alcohol, because I didn’t know how to get it underage. I was desperately sad and bored, scrolling Pinterest and Instagram for hours. I discovered an online community of stylish and well-read girls who were isolating, starving, and weeping, just like me. We idolised the sad girl, we liked vintage nightgowns, we listened to The Smiths and 90s grunge; Lana and Mitski. 

By the end of 2021, I was a fully devoted girl rotter, dissatisfied with my life and happy to wallow in my dissatisfaction because it made me seem cool and cynical. Girl rotting became a perverse form of self-care. It made my symptoms of OCD and anorexia (intrusive thoughts, starvation) feel like divine intuition and penance. An incredibly unhealthy way of coping, but a way of coping nonetheless. 

Why do we rot? 

In the 19th century, girl rotting was legitimate medical care encouraged by doctors. At least, that’s how it looks to me. Attributed to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the “rest cure” was prescribed to women suffering from various ailments like hysteria, mania, and exhaustion. The rest cure required total isolation and sensory deprivation. For six weeks, a woman would lie on her back in a dim room. She was not allowed to read or speak to anyone other than the doctor and nurses. She was fed bland, soft food, meant to help her gain weight. Her entire body would be massaged every day, for one hour, with increasingly vigorous strokes as the treatment progressed. 

It was a popular cure for the emotionally exhausted woman, as it was physically painless. Results varied, however: some women undergoing the rest cure experienced so much distress that their doctors would recommend they embark on another six week course. Some women reported being physically bound to their beds.

The most famous depiction of the rest cure is in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Based on her own experience of the rest cure, the story depicts a woman suffering from postpartum depression and her descent into madness as a result of mandatory bed rest. Funnily enough, Gilman’s doctor was S. Weir Mitchell. 

If a woman did too much of anything, it seems, it was reason enough to be prescribed the rest cure. If she spent too much energy on intellectual pursuits, she’d cause a battle between her brain and reproductive organs (according to the prevailing medical opinion of the time), thus exhausting and crippling them. The rest cure would restore energy to her reproductive organs, and she could fulfill her duties. But, if a woman focused all her energy on reproductive duties and didn’t do much else, then that was a problem requiring – you guessed it – the rest cure.

Think of Allison from Donna Tartt’s novel The Little Friend. Allison spends most of her time asleep or in a daze. She has to recount her day to figure out if it was real or a dream. Most of her waking moments are spent crying. She’s waifish, wispy and one of the boys; Pem falls for her despite – because of? – her listless mood. A true, underrated girl rotter. If The Little Friend was set in the 1890s rather than the 1970s, Allison would’ve received the rest cure to stop her from resting so much. 

Here is one retrograde medical opinion I’m willing to defend: it was considered dangerous for women to be active during their periods, according to the medical journal The Alienist and Neurologist, as this would negatively impact her mental state. Women were believed to be commonly affected by “acute mania” and likely to suffer “acute hallucinatory psychosis” during menstruation, so they were advised to rest and avoid stimulation of any kind during this time. Maybe this is my girl-rotting tendency coming through, but I agree. I should not have to do anything more than rest while I’m on my period. Many would agree that I suffer from “attacks of mania or melancholia.” During that time of the month, I once shed tears in the supermarket because I didn’t know what I wanted for dinner. Just let me have a mini rest cure. 

Female invalidism is a repeated theme when it comes to women’s health: the idea that, no matter what she focuses on, be it rest or intellect, the woman is inherently weak. The 19th century saw two “types” of womanhood emerge: the “New Woman” and the “True Woman.” The New Woman was the suffragette, the woman fighting for liberation and a place for women in the public sphere. The True Woman is a sort of parallel inversion: she wanted social progress and moral improvement, except she believed it came from women in the home. 

However flat and reductive these types might be, women at least took them up themselves. The Invalid Female, on the other hand, was created by men and held up as an ideal against these types. Where the New and True Women went out of bounds, nagging and insolent, the Invalid Female was too frail to do anything improper or troublesome. You can see her in Millais’s Ophelia, Tennyson’s Mariana, even Beth in Little Women. She was beautiful, pale, too self-effacing to ask men to do anything more for her and too weak to do it herself. She waited for death, or her lover. Sometimes both. 

What’s interesting about this triad of womanhood is that we’re facing a similar situation today. The New Woman has become the Girlboss; the influencer, Elle-Woods type. The True Woman has become the Tradwife. She probably suffers from orthorexia, homeschools her children, and makes her own bread. 

The comments surrounding these modern types echo each other: “You don’t need to be a wife and mother to feel fulfilled, the career you choose is just as important”, or “you don’t need a career to feel fulfilled, choosing to be a mother is just as important.” Both types are pitted against each other, yet both struggle with the expectations of perfection. 

The girl rotter – the modern-day Female Invalid – is a reaction against these two types. She doesn’t have much of a career outside of her Substack, or children yet, but she wants to nurture something. She rolls her eyes at political arguments online, considering herself too intelligent to be tied down by the quotidian debates of the day. You could argue that the girl rotter is more feminist than her counterparts – unlike the tradwife, she doesn’t follow traditional gender roles; unlike the girlboss, she’s not a capitalist shill – except that she is decidedly unpolitical; she refuses to take action. 

The greatest parallel between these 19th and 21st century triads of womanhood is, of course, that they aren’t real. No woman fits neatly into the boxes of New or True, and the Female Invalid is pretty much just a subject for painting. The Girlboss is a stereotype sold to us online, the tradwife is a paradox – how “trad” is it to market your lifestyle on the internet? – and the girl rotter has to get out of bed at some point. Despite centuries of women being sorted into neat categories, we know they’re just people; complex beings with fears, desires, and contradictions, just like men. 

So why are these categories of womanhood so pervasive? What compels us to create (and recreate) them? 

We seem destined to conjure up simplistic identities for ourselves, to feel as though we understand ourselves and to experience solidarity with others. Then contrarians create second opposing categories in retaliation, and the dropouts who see nothing to like in either create a third. 

That’s my best guess anyway. Who knows. There’s probably some deep psychological reason that we sort ourselves and each other into categories, that we simultaneously desire being individuals and part of the collective, but I don’t have the energy to look into it, I’m afraid. I’m going back to bed.