The Feed: Microfeminism, vigilante creators and #ShikShakShok
The Feed
The Feed (@thefeed.global) is powered by We Are Social’s Cultural Insights team. We’re diving into the top three posts from the year so far – trends include TikTokers taking feminism into their own hands, and creators giving us the long-story short.
Read on to find out what they all mean, and why they’ve been taking over our social feeds.
‘Microfeminism’ is challenging the ideology gap between the genders
Putting the male CEO into CC, assuming your doctor will be a woman, refusing to move on the sidewalk for a man – these small but contentious acts are being defined as ‘microfeminism,’ according to TikTok. The term empowers women to counteract the pervasive microaggressions they encounter, particularly in the workplace (being excluded from email threads; facing assumptions about the gender of leadership) with exaggeratedly pro-women alternatives.
In a landscape where Gen Z boys are drifting towards the right, women are feeling more of a need to advocate for equality themselves. This mirrors the rise of girl trends, such as #girldinner, #girlmath and girl aesthetics, which aim to reclaim identity and challenge norms without infringing on male dominant spaces. With microfeminism, young women are taking their lo-fi feminism offline, asserting their presence and influence in ways that are subtle but determined.
Vigilante creators are trimming the fat from long form content
Shortening videos since 2022,” reads the bio for @heyitsyoon , a TikTok creator boasting 3.8m followers. He joins a wider group of creators, like Italy’s @accorciabro, who are mocking the wealth of TikTok and Instagram content that’s long in length, but short on substance. To conclude each video, Yoon and @accorciabro often note the length of the original video, and how much time they saved viewers – showing in stark terms that the OG content wasn’t worth the viewer’s time.
The rise of longer-form content is no coincidence: it’s a result of a policy from TikTok which means only content that’s over a minute in length can be monetised – a move reportedly designed to make the platform more appealing to advertisers. Creators like Yoon and @accorciabro are popular because they call out this user-unfriendly enshittification of platforms – pointing to a new era of user awareness and pushback against platform decay.
#ShikShakShok is modernising Arabic for the social media age
“[Shik Shak Shok was] my five minutes of fame. When I was young at weddings, my mom would make me stand in the middle and perform.” So goes one person’s description of dancing to 1900s oriental mix Shik Shak Shok. The track has historically been centre stage for all the fun found at Egyptian events and gatherings – but now, Arab Gen Z have repurposed its lyrics to describe situations of major comebacks and leaving others stunned.
As the past decade’s globalisation normalised English as an everyday language in parts of the Arab world, it’s led some young Arabs to feel that their language is positioned as secondary. In a backlash to this anglo-dominance, users and creators are finding ways to preserve the Arabic language while making it relevant in contemporary society. They’re modernising their language, as with the breakdown and Arabisation of popular terms. Shik Shak Shok, underscores this evolving behaviour, blending English and Arabic to adapt to TikTok’s platform landscape.
