A look back at MTV's 'Girl Code'
Melinda reminisces on "Girl Code," the MTV comedy series, in issue 3 of Girls Month.
Welcome to Week 3 of Girls Month! If you’re just tuning in, be sure to check out last week’s issue, where ’s shared her girlhood reading list, and Week 1’s issue where Lilly analyzes Emma Cline’s 2016 novel The Girls.
It’s just the four of us. I’m laying on my back, clutching my knees to my chest for dear life. The breeze of the air conditioning grazes my vagina, but I can feel sweat on my lower back clinging to the paper sheet that’s been laid down. I’ll try not to look at the stains when I leave, just scurry over to where I left my underwear balled up just so as not to expose the lining to the room. I don’t want this to be any more intimate than it already is.
I stare at the ceiling and try to think of anything else. “Sorry, I’m so bad at this,” I hear myself say through the silence to the gloved woman, trying my best not to jump away from her grasp. She forces herself to smile in a straight across line, I can tell she doesn’t want to talk to me. She actually might be really bored. I turn my head, and shift my gaze to meet eyes with the two perfect women plastered against the wall. They have dark, long hair, they are genuinely smiling with all their bleach white teeth, frozen into raising their perfectly manicured brows. There’s an awful, corny synth pop song playing softly in the background, like this is a bad party.
I can feel the gloved woman’s frustration with me, her touch becoming tense in a way that makes me tense back. The perfect women stare back at me. They look like the kind of women who would never be in this position, or wouldn’t even flinch if they were unfortunate enough to be in my place. I wonder how many others laid in my spot today, subjecting themselves to such a stupid humiliation. I don’t know why I started coming here, only that once I did I didn’t wanted to stop, despite the pit in my stomach when I walked through the red doors. I had tried it on a whim right before graduation. Even though I came routinely a few times a year, I still felt like that scared college student on the table every time. The feeling never goes away.
I think of Girl Code as I walk out, triumphant, a new woman with no hair down there, no memory of who I was fifteen minutes ago.
Girl Code was a roundtable comedy series that ran from 2013 to 2015 on MTV, a spinoff of their other show Guy Code. Up-and-coming female comedians (including early-stage Awkwafina) and some male comedians (like Charlamagne Tha God for some reason) give their takes on girl culture, from topics that could range from dating advice (“Getting dumped,” “taking a break,” “rebounding,”) to social etiquette (“Roommates,” “apologizing,” “your friends’ boyfriends”) to the everyday absurd (“Picking and popping,” “puberty”, and yes of course, “waxing.”) Through anecdotes, jokes and bits, and colorful illustrations, Girl Code and its cast painted a portrait of girlhood that was wacky and loveable, even when it could be confusing or infuriating or repulsive. I was an eldest daughter, but they felt like my crazy, comforting older sisters.
I would watch Girl Code immediately after school with my sister and a friend or two, snacking on whatever we could find in the pantry. The narrator’s voice was soothing, as was the methodical format of the show. It had the perfect amount of commercials, the beats were easy to follow, the girls were pretty and so funny. Some of the jokes were raunchy enough that I worried my mother would overhear — “If a girl sits instead of squats [on a public toilet], it makes me think she’ll sit on anything with her pants off,” “Beer will get you drunk and bloated, tequila will get you drunk and pregnant,” “Girls will stop lying about being good drivers when guys stop lying about what eight inches actually is,” “I think masturbation is super important for girls, it’s up there with voting.”
I couldn’t relate to all of it — I was around 14 years old when I first watched the show, and it ended the fall of my senior year of high school — but it made getting older seem like an exciting world around the corner. The girls were edgy, experienced, and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Nicole Byer stuck out to me in particular, a bigger Black woman who was expressive without pandering. Jessimae Paluso reminded me of Jenna Marbles, and Carly Aquilino’s ever-changing hair and dry humor always landed for me.
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While the women on Girl Code ushered viewers towards all of the typical guidance of Big Girl Power — being yourself, never settling, and being a good friend — they also upheld much of the status quo themselves. Like women do in reality, while looking out for each other, they also try to keep each other in line. During the first episode of season one, a segment focused on drinking says that a cardinal Girl Code rule is to not to take drinks from strangers for safety reasons. A few breaths later the audience is also warned to “never get too sloppy” because you don’t want to be “that girl.” In a brief skit, a comedian is seated with other girls at dinner, and free bread comes out. She argues with herself internally, wanting to take a piece but refusing to be first to do so, afraid to do so in front of her friends, average-bodied women who she refers to in her head as “anorexic skanks.”
The show holds up in some ways, but falls flat in others. Upon rewatching, it’s clear that its humor is dripping with all of the pitfalls of the millennial generation and the internet of those years. Mini segments titled “#IsThatWeird” and “#ICant” are vehicles for short complaints and ponderings that are more like verbal tweets: “Sometimes I get legitimately angry at my nipples. Is that weird?” When a comedian appears on screen, they are accompanied by a small chyron with their Twitter handle. Pinterest is given similar weight in an aside about social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. On the topic of snooping, a cast member suggests looking through your partner’s phone as a place to find dirt on them, an idea that is so obvious it goes without saying at this point. Another cast member shares her hack for reading their partner’s Facebook messages — if they’re logged out, hit the back arrow and you can often bypass the sign-in page with no effort.
Some of the jokes are also a true reflection of a time in which Jersey Shore was a cultural fixture (Vinny Guadagnino even guest stars in a few episodes, claiming in one that girls likely dance in a circle because “they’re always judging each other and have to know what the other is doing.”) In an episode segment about dancing, filled with jokes about how to expertly do so without spilling one’s drink, or how to fend off a man you don’t want to dance with, a cast member also stresses that one should never take your shoes off at the club. It’s sound advice, but does such a going-out culture even exist anymore? I long for the kind of night that makes me consider going against such sage wisdom.
It was simple, it was crass, and it was my first memorable foray with “relatable” content at that scale — the memeable detritus of the internet that is still being compounded into a girly digital garbage patch today. The onslaught of “girl content” from the early 2010s to the present day — its memes, vocabulary, aesthetics, and accompanying narratives — has a complex arc on the internet, where its joys and problems prevail. To my memory, Girl Code centers a mostly cisgender, heterosexual experience; while it had some diversity in the cast when it came to race and sexuality, much of its perspective, like that of the girl internet today, can tend to assume that its baseline audience is a basic, straight white girlboss-in-training type. In a 2017 article for The Daily Beast, reporter Lizzie Crocker wrote that the show “purports to offer tips that ‘push the envelope’ and ‘open the dialogue about the wonders and woes of womanhood,’ as MTV describes it. But the advice is so obvious and the jokes so disjointed that you’re left wondering what the hell the takeaway is supposed to be.”
It’s worth noting that its release came a little over a decade after America was infatuated with Y2K It Girls and size zero models, demanding perfection of young women everywhere. Girl Code pushed back on the idea that girls couldn’t be funny, and instead focused on the messiness of our lives. It was a cultural reaction to a world where we were previously laughing at women for their perceived failings and silly rituals, not with them. By creating a space to discuss the disarming awkwardness and loneliness of growing up a girl and going through your twenties, it broke through a cultural silence that made the experience less disorienting for the young viewers the comedians coached.
It was entertaining from my teenage vantage point, and still is in ways, even if it makes me laugh and think sideways about some of its now apparent flaws. They recount kicking their waxers in the head in a panic, cursing them out. Girls should not get waxed at the request of men, they advise. All good! At the same time, girls don’t have to wax, a comedian muses, but she doesn’t want to “go to the beach and meet the yeti.” Another defines waxing as “when you remove hair from the parts of your body that you want people to touch.” Animations make a glossary of pubic hair design — perhaps “a triangle that points to where all the action is happening?” And by no means should you trust your waxer “if she has a mustache.”
For all of their talent, most of the cast unfortunately faded into the ether — relics of their time. Some of them are still doing small stand up shows around the country. Many of them became small-time television actresses or podcasters. Awkwafina is still doing her Awkwafina thing, although her fame has tapered off as our culture has lost its tolerance for her blaccent. Melanie Iglesias, a model and OG Insta baddie I can remember boys in my class snickering about, became mostly quiet on social media in 2022 due to a stalker and has slowly started posting again. Carly Aquilino goes viral on TikTok occasionally. Nicole Byer has had more success, with a Netflix comedy special, hosting a bake-off TV show, and being recently cast for Travis Kelce’s game show. Nessa Diab has a kid with Colin Kaepernick?? I do wish the cast had become bigger, but I don’t know that they could leverage their platforms in that moment the way people can now. Every few years I remember them and check up on them with a fondness.
For better or for worse, experience is the most important and valuable commodity within what we largely consider to be “girl media,” which does demand critique but is also a part of how we bond, IRL and online. Through memes, in comment sections filled with jokes, in subreddits or the now Bumble owned message board app Geneva, wherever girls are, we’re asking each other “Does this ever happen to you?” And the answer is often yes — the verbal diarrhea when you talk to a crush, that fart forces its way out the front of your leggings, and the humiliation of European Wax Center. It might not amount to much, but those little connections make a mirror that’s fun to look in together, despite the cracks. — MF
Mama let’s research
Find Melinda’s Girls Month reading list below!
“How the Brazilian Bikini Wax Conquered the 90s” by David Friend - Vanity Fair — A brief history lesson!
“Girl trends and the repackaging of womanhood” by Rebecca Jennings - Vox — On the girl internet!
“The Girl Internet and The Boy Internet” by Rebecca Jennings - — And then on the boy internet!
“Jersey Shore: An Oral History” by Molly Fitzgerald - Vulture — Just a reminder of where MTV was, and where we were as a country only a little bit before Girl Code and Guy Code came out.
Why Not?
Why Not? is our biweekly list of recommendations. Think recipes, gift guides, podcasts, clothes, and anything we consider to be generally chic. Have a suggestion? Let us know!
Daphne Heels - Dolce Vita — To kick off your Memorial Day weekend sale surfing, check out these black and white flower heels I just grabbed for $80. So cute, will match with anything. — MF
Organic Puffed Kelp Chips - 12tides — I’m such a sucker for snacks that let me pretend I’m being healthy, so Whole Foods is really a dangerous place for me to be. These kelp chips in the sea salt and everything flavors are my latest kryptonite. — LM
If you liked this issue, that’s just girl code! Tell us your thoughts in the comments or on Instagram (@lilly_milman | @melindafakuade), and share it with your fellow girls!