Personal Diary

Nowhere Girls

Diary Entry #3: Pejorative names for women

Ryan-Ashley Anderson

27 Dec 2025 — 3 min read

When searching for a cover image to accompany this post, which is about how I came to learn the term “nowhere girls,” I used phrases like “poor girl,” “rebellious girl,” and “tomboy.” These seemed apt considering “nowhere girls” is a term* used to describe women who are uneducated, lack social and professional prospects, and don’t conform to normative beauty standards (among other things). Any ideas what kind of search results populated while using Unsplash?

Poor Girl: mostly very young, brown, female children, often without any context necessary to deem them “poor” or impoverished
Rebellious Girl: girls and women who have tattoos, are smoking and/or drinking, who are exhibiting silly/curious/playful behavior, and, most importantly, who exude self-possession
- One of the things I find most funny about the abundance of photos of women smoking is that the advertising campaigns which led to women treating cigarettes like a diet aid, was created by men. Men who knew cigarettes were unhealthy, caring more about cigarette sales and waist measurements during a woman’s prime. I mean, who cares what happens to us once we’re too old to reproduce, right?
Tomboy: According to Unsplash, “tomboy” is synonymous with words like “lesbian” and “gender queer” and has nothing to do with AFAB people engaging in “boy” activities. What I found here were, while consisting primarily of very attractive butch AFAB folks, not the kind of photos that illustrated the rough-and-tumble girls I was hoping for.

I am deeply interested in and disturbed by the feedback loop between consumer desire and media output because the exchange is like a game of telephone. Except unlike the slumber party version, this one feels like it’s taking place in a sick funhouse full of wobbly mirrors that are actually portals to hell. If when people search “poor girl” and come back with brown children alone or guys who type “girl problems” into search engines are met with incel forums, ‘we’ are reinforcing harmful stereotypes which reinforce harmful systems which reward people holding the harmful stereotypes and punish those who don’t.

This all started because I was making a list of “fall girls” as a brainstorming exercise for my thesis and trying to come up with a single word to represent each of them which spoke to the specific reasons each of them were targeted by the media. For example, when I think of Ellen Degeneres' nineties sitcom getting cancelled and her being forced for quite some time out of mainstream media, I think “lesbian.” When I think of Tonya Harding, I think “tramp.”

To be clear, I don’t think Tonya is a tramp by any estimation. I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with being Lesbian. Hell, people have called me both of these things with disdain at different points in my life. But they are useful for zero’ing in on the thing that made them so easy for people to hate.

Princess Diana is one of the women on my list whose life was irreparably harmed by the tabloid-consumer feedback loop and, in her case of course, she lost her life completely: chased to her death in a tunnel by paparazzi desperate for a glimpse. I couldn’t think of a single word, so I searched “bad words for difficult women” which ultimately led me to Pejorative Terms for Women which, of course, featured “nowhere girls."

I did get a particular kick out of “development girl,” as if being a "non-influential, entry-level staff member in a film production company” is anything worth mentioning. Isn’t this most people in Hollywood? Everybody’s non-influential until they’re not.

This post isn’t really for anything. More a meditation. And now I’m fascinated by the idea of a “nowhere girl.” Also, I’ve added Girl from Nowhere,* which came up during my search, to my watchlist.