It’s easy to laugh at “I’m just a girl” on social media. It’s funny, it’s ironic, it’s low-stakes. “I’m just a girl” becomes the punchline for everything from not knowing how to file taxes to pretending Venmo isn’t real money. It’s harmless, right? Just internet culture doing what it does. To modern feminism, it’s exaggerating, dramatizing, self-deprecating. But under complexity theory, there’s no such thing as harmless repetition. In complex adaptive systems, even a joke is data. Even irony is reinforcement.
What we see, what we reward, what we repost all feeds back into the system. And the system learns.
So when “I’m just a girl” becomes a go-to script for feigned incompetence, when it wraps helplessness in glitter and giggles, it starts doing something. It begins to teach. It reinforces that incompetence is relatable. That infantilization is aesthetic. That pretending not to know is preferable to risking rejection for trying. What looks like softness and charm is often strategic disempowerment, as Turner and Baker describe in Complexity Theory: An Overview with Potential Applications for the Social Sciences as an adaptation to a culture that still penalizes competence, especially in women, when it appears too direct, too confident, too unpretty.
And complexity theory helps us understand that this isn’t just individual behavior. This is system behavior. It’s the system evolving toward what draws attention, what avoids conflict, what earns approval. In other words, what works. When social media is the environment, the algorithm is the ecosystem...and helplessness, when it’s cute or clever or clippable, becomes adaptive. It’s not that people believe they’re helpless. It’s that the system rewards them more for performing helplessness than for demonstrating agency.
Eventually, the performance settles in. Not because people forget us divas are joking, but because repetition has power in a man's world. In complex systems, patterns repeat because they’re stable, not because they’re true. And so the self-deprecating script becomes second nature. Learned helplessness isn’t taught through trauma alone, but it can be taught through memes, through norms, through cute captions that quietly rehearse powerlessness until it doesn’t feel like a joke anymore. It feels like personality.
This is what makes “I’m just a girl” more than a joke. It’s a node in a system, a signal that’s been shaped by countless micro-reactions. Likes, laughs, shares. Complexity theory tells us these micro-responses aggregate. They don’t just reflect culture; they create it. Not all at once, not with dramatic force, but gradually, subtly, until the system stabilizes around a behavior that looks free, feels funny, but actually signals something deeper: disempowerment that doesn’t feel like disempowerment anymore.
We think we’re joking. But the system isn’t. The system is just learning what to keep.