This post examines how femininity in pop is not simply expressed, but performed — assigned, aestheticized, and sold as a set of pre-approved roles. Each quadrant in the collage references a familiar archetype in the music industry’s visual and branding playbook: the good girl, the bimbo, the cool girl, the sad girl. These roles aren’t new, and they aren’t neutral. As Sarah Banet-Weiser and others have noted, femininity in pop is often legible only when it is both hypervisible and highly contained. GURL’s “choose your character” grid makes this containment explicit.

As Kristin Lieb outlines in Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry, female artists are consistently expected to select from a narrow range of commercially viable identities, which she calls “market-ready” versions of femininity. These archetypes “are not authentic expressions of self, but rather representations constructed by teams of marketers, stylists, and publicists in order to maximize appeal.” In other words, identity is often optimized before it’s expressed. Elsewhere, Lieb adds that these roles are not stable but rotational: “Female artists are expected to evolve by cycling through a series of branded personae,” a performance of reinvention that keeps them relevant — and replaceable.

Released alongside “SECRET,” this post extends the single’s emotional core — blurred desire, withheld expression — into a visual critique of how femininity is packaged and performed in pop. Just as the song explores what can’t be said out loud, the collage makes visible the limited roles women are expected to inhabit. In both cases, identity isn’t presented as something stable or personal, but as something built to be consumed — shifting just enough to stay relevant, not necessarily to say more.

-Blurb by Joseph Mooney