♡the girls are blogging♡

❀ meet Girlhood, the new blog on the block ❀

I’ve just logged onto a Zoom call with two girls who look like they could literally be me Rubes, or Liv when we first started Shit You Should Care About - we’re excitedly talking over each other about our cute pink outfits, our TikTok habits, and how we’re all so impatient for everything, all the time.

That impatience is evident right now, as I’ve launched into this piece without even introducing what the hell I’m doing here!! I’m hanging out with Mia Sugimoto and Sophia Rundle, two seventeen-year-old besties who’ve just launched the newest blog on the block - Girlhood. I reached out to the girls behind it wanting to interview them, but also wanting to hopefully be able to pass on some of the things I’d learnt from building something similar. I was deeply unsurprised to learn that we had a freaky amount in common - from being told we were ‘not professional’ enough to be starting something like this, to building websites purely on the belief that we grew up online and it couldn’t be that hard - I can’t wait for you to meet them!

A few months ago when I first came home and re-read all my Rookie Yearbooks I found that I was mourning the loss of the coolest place I had on the internet as a teenager. I’ve been spending a lot of time wondering if I’d ever find a place like that again, so when I first stumbled upon Girlhood on TikTok I was immediately obsessed - was this it?

@gir1hoodgot that upperhand 💋 website is linked on insta! #girlssupportgirls #positivity #adviceforgirls #teensupport

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When I started chatting to Mia and Sophia the first thing I did was ask them what they were studying, and they gently reminded me that THEY’RE STILL AT HIGH SCHOOL (exhibit number 57485437 that gen z are so fucking cool.) The next thing I did was ask if they wanted me to refer to Girlhood as a blog (back in the early days of SYSCA no one knew quite what to call us and we would insist that we weren’t a blog) but they assured me that yes, they’re a ‘modern blog.’

Girlhood, in its own words, is:

”a blog encouraging girls to share their stories and to talk to other girls. Stories can be funny, scary, relatable, or entertaining! We want every girl to know that they belong and that there are girls all over the world willing to help. Every girl has a story, and Girlhood gives them a chance to share it.”

Since it’s only about three weeks old, I wondered if the blog was born out of the girlhood renaissance we’re seeing all over the internet right now, and Mia says it was literally inspired by the feeling she got after watching the Barbie movie.

“I was watching the Barbie movie and I was looking around at the end seeing people from my age to 90 years old, and we were all like, tearing up. I thought ‘man, I’m really comfortable right now and this is just a safe environment,’ and I wanted to create a platform that encapsulates that.”

Since its inception about three weeks ago, their TikTok has 85,000 followers and is their promotion/ outreach spot, their Instagram has 13,000 followers and is a more curated representation of the brand and the mission, and the blog is for longer form advice and stories to hopefully help other girls. Sophia says that when she’s working on the website specifically, she goes in “with the intention that everyone that needs to see it will see it,” which I took to mean that they’re not unrealistically expecting that the views of a TikTok will correlate to those of the blog and that that’s ok!

When I asked them about their blog traffic (knowing first-hand how complicated it can be to galvanise the same kind of engagement you get on social channels onto a website) they told me that since moving their site to Squarespace they haven’t yet dived into the analytics tab, but at the time of us hanging out, they had about 20,000 people who’d submitted advice to be answered, 7,000 volunteer applications, and almost 1,000 blog submissions to get to. To put it bluntly, it’s popping off.

One of the things I love the most about the internet is that you really can just decide to start something, and people will want to be a part of it. As well as publishing Mia and Sophia’s own writing, Girlhood accepts submissions from girls all over the world and has a volunteer program that anyone over 15 can apply to. Their volunteers do whatever their skills allow them to, whether that’s helping to build the website (everything from graphic design to setting up the system of checks and balances it takes to become a volunteer), or being a ‘Big Sister’ where they email with girls who’ve submitted their problems and try to help them out. They tell me that their volunteers are from all over the world because they want to give out universal and versatile advice. “That’s kind of our brand,” Mia says. “You get advice from people all over the world, and we have people asking for advice from all over the world. We think that’s really cool.”

As we’re chatting about this, Sophia notes that volunteers go through quite a rigorous process before they’re accepted (answering multiple mock advice questions in the initial sign-up form.) “We want to make sure our volunteers are not only embodying our brand, but are giving out safe advice,” she says. Right now they have about 45 people helping them out, but they’re looking for more every day.

“We don’t want Girlhood to be like Reddit where it’s just random people giving you advice that you can’t really trust.”

We chatted a little bit about the other media requests they’ve had and the other interviews they’ve been doing, and they told me that they’d seen some articles that had been published about the blog that brought in experts who said that they weren’t equipped to be giving out advice to other young girls because they’re not “professionals.” But the thing is, they’re professional at being teenage girls because they are teenage girls. They also say - loud and clear - on the website, they’re not mental health professionals, and give sources to seek that kind of help.

on the front page of Girlhood

They also mentioned that they’d had some questions about their role as activists or whether they’d call themselves that and honestly, I remember this All Too Well (SYSCA’s Version.) It feels like when you start something new (like idk, talking about the news AND Harry Styles, for example), people really wanna chuck a label on you or pigeonhole you, and then watch you not meet the expectations THEY’VE set for you. The is…. it’s not that deep. They aren’t claiming to be activists, mental health professionals, or anything but teenage girls helping other teenage girls, and that’s ok! It’s kinda the point of the internet! If we put up barriers around who’s allowed to build and create things, nothing cool will ever get built or created.

To finish our chat I asked them a question I famously hate being asked (but now understand why everyone wants to know): What’s next for Girlhood? And they’ve got PLANS bro! They’re getting ready to release their first ever merch (it’s a Girlhoodie - obsessed), and they’re looking at getting ‘more into journalism’ by setting up a page for interviews with girls about their different experiences in the world. But in the meantime, they’re just looking at growing their volunteer base and continuing to get through all the blog submissions they’ve got.

Oh, and getting through high school!

You can find Girlhood’s blog here, their TikTok here, and their Instagram here.