Girl Defined is a Christian lifestyle blog and

YouTube channel YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San B ...

run by sisters Bethany Beal and Kristen Clark which focuses on

purity culture Purity culture was a movement in the 1990s within Christianity which emphasized sexual abstinence before marriage. Components Purity culture places a strong emphasis on abstinence from sexual intercourse before marriage. Women and girls are to ...

and navigating mainstream America as an

evangelical Christian Evangelicalism (), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide, interdenominational movement within Protestantism, Protestant Christianity that emphasizes evangelism, or the preaching and spreading of th ...

History

Sisters Bethany Beal and Kristen Clark started ''Girl Defined'' with a focus on high school and college-aged girls, after their first project, bairdsisters.com, failed to gain traction. In 2016, the sisters began posting videos on YouTube and published their first book, ''Girl Defined: God’s Radical Design for Beauty, Femininity, and Identity''. Girl Defined became the subject of an

Internet meme An Internet meme, or meme (, Help:Pronunciation respelling key, ''MEEM''), is a cultural item (such as an idea, behavior, or style) that spreads across the Internet, primarily through Social media, social media platforms. Internet memes manif ...

in 2018 after comedy YouTubers

Cody Ko Cody Michael Kolodziejzyk (born 22 November 1990; , Polish: ), better known as Cody Ko, is a Canadian YouTuber, podcaster, comedian, and rapper. His style of content is often crudely comedic and profane. , his five YouTube channels have collec ...

and Noel Miller featured Girl Defined's content on their series ''That's Cringe''. This began a trend on social media in which influencers and regular users made videos parodying and mocking Girl Defined. The sisters started posting on the platform

TikTok TikTok, known in mainland China and Hong Kong as Douyin (), is a social media and Short-form content, short-form online video platform owned by Chinese Internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which may range in duration f ...

in the 2020s. In 2021, Beal went viral for sharing her story of having her first kiss at the age of 30 during her wedding.

Views

Girl Defined promotes biblical womanhood. Many of their ideas are borrowed from purity culture which was popular in the 1990s and early 2000s. The organization has been labeled as Christian nationalist by

Hope College Hope College is a private Christian liberal arts college in Holland, Michigan, United States. It was originally opened in 1851 as the Pioneer School by Dutch immigrants four years after the community was first settled. The first freshman coll ...

scholars Sage Mikkelsen and Sarah Kornfield.

Feminism

Girl Defined has referred to

feminism Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...

as an "attack on God's design for womanhood." They have stated their intent to build an online community to support women and girls while "taking a stand against feminism."

Gender and sexuality

The sisters discourage

kissing A kiss is the touching or pressing of one's lips against another person, animal or object. Cultural connotations of kissing vary widely; depending on the culture and context, a kiss can express sentiments of love, Passion (emotion), passion ...

and other sexual or sexually suggestive acts before marriage. They advise girls who are attracted to other girls to "seek God" instead. They also argue that

transgender people A transgender (often shortened to trans) person has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. The opposite of ''transgender'' is ''cisgender'', which describes persons whose gender ...

should renounce "choices" that they have made about their gender.

References

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External links