I’m swiping through TikTok last night when this stops me. It’s a male voice; pleasant, fun. It could be the drawl of your friendly gayborhood Spiderman, appraising a girlfriend in a new outfit. There’s nothing offensive, predatory, or threatening about it: on the contrary, the woman hearing this is clearly meant to be empowered by it.

The woman in question?

This tree:

Click to watch on TikTok

This is one of thousands (or possibly millions) of examples of “she” in action on TikTok. She’s used to refer to everything from plants to clothes to sourdough starters, to makeup, nail polish, skin, water bottles, to a truly impressive bunch of green onions someone left in the back of their fridge.

She is having a moment.

So What?

This isn’t new: as with most slang you find on TikTok, she has roots in African American and Afro-Latine ballroom and drag.1 Since the seventies, black and latine LGBTQ+ communities have been using “she” to refer to their attire, as they compete in performances designed to showcase creativity, identity, and fierceness.

She might be a shoe that began life as a drab work heel and was elevated to couture status by the DIY handiwork of a thrifty drag queen. She might be a wig, or a corset, or a bra, or the padding inside the bra, or the (thicc) makeup you apply before stepping out onto the floor.

When reality shows like Ru Paul’s Drag Race brought drag to the mainstream, the lexicon came with it.2 Twitter/X was the first to pick it up, and then it inevitably made its way to TikTok, where it was stripped, flattened, and served in a whole new way: by The Algorithm.

She’s Trending

We talk about The Algorithm a lot on this Substack. As a writer forced to disseminate my work according to its whims, I’m pretty attuned to it. So I wanted to know: how does a word meant to elevate the work of a crafty drag queen end up being used to describe a toaster?

It starts with algorithmic flattening. When content is served on social media, it’s done so completely out of context.3 This ad for a toaster might appear next to a dog getting a pedicure, or 30-50 feral hogs on a Ring camera, or a BookTok review about a well-hung fairy (no, like a real fairy. With wings and stuff.)

A video using “she” in this way is stripped of history and meaning, and presented as one part of the same whole: Content.

From there, a couple of mechanisms unique to TikTok (and now Reels and Shorts) allow it to spread incredibly quickly:

• Reusable sounds: TikTok allows users to create their own video using the audio of another video. A single phrase becomes the template for millions of unrelated moments.

• Rewarded mimicry: TikTok isn’t about uniqueness. Its algorithm explicitly rewards mimicry. Users don’t need to invent anything new: in fact, it’s better they don’t. Applying an existing trend to your own life will get you more views than trying to come up with something original. Combined with popularity bias (the tendency of people to want to do what everyone else is already doing) this spreads catchy phrases like wildfire.

• The For You Page: high engagement triggers high transmission. The more people use the sound, the more it gets pushed to new and more disparate users.

This all adds up to algorithmic homogenization, which is what you get when a recommendation system begins reinforcing its own signal and pushing whatever already has engagement. Essentially, it’s TikTok smelling its own farts.

Even More History

Part of the reason I find the “she” trend so fascinating is because, as a writer who spent the last five years living on a sailboat, I’m part of a tradition that’s been gendering objects for centuries: boats are famously female.

I have mixed feelings about this. Our boat’s name (not chosen by us) is Loki, a historically male name — of a God, no less. When we bought the boat and my mom (who spent a decade at sea back in the eighties) referred to it as “she”, it really threw me for a loop.

These days, it’s pretty common to refer to boats as “it” (as I do), although if you hang out with a lot of salty old dogs who’ve been circumnavigating since the seventies (as I also do), you hear “she” quite a bit.

In this way, sailors and drag queens are surprisingly similar.

Where Does This Come From?

Historically, ships were referred to this way for a number of reasons — some more forgivable than others.

Grammar

In Latin, the word for “boat” — navis — is female. Many languages derived from Latin (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) retain gendered nouns — although ironically, the general word for “boat” in most of them is male.

The Queen

Back when countries like England, Spain and France were busy establishing colonies doing genocide, they were doing it by ship. Usually, the person sending those ships was the queen, so they often bore her name — making them lady-boats.

Mommy

Sailors are notoriously superstitious. Many considered the ship to be the protective womb that would carry them safely across the vast and tempestuous sea. Treating her with the same respect they would show their own mother would ensure good luck and safe passage. She was home. She was safety. She was mommy.

Good Old Fashioned Sexism

Which brings us, inevitably, here.

Because while it’s kind of adorable that sailors were so scared of the sea they needed their mommy to protect them from it, let’s not forget that the sea was also “she.”

Why? Because she was tempestuous. Dangerous. Unknowable.

(Not to take anything away from sailors. The sea is tempestuous and dangerous and unknowable.)

Let’s also not forget that just because a boat is a woman, doesn’t mean you respect her. The joke I hear from the sea-dogs who’ve been circumnavigating since the seventies goes something like, “A boat is like a woman because she’s expensive to keep, needs a man to guide her, and won’t look good without a fresh lick of paint.”

At the end of the day, a ship is a vessel. She needs a man to steer her. She doesn’t have agency. She carries life. And that’s it.

The Double-Edged Sword

So the adoption of “she” by drag communities could be seen as a reclamation. Applying “she” to a dazzling shoe was a way to elevate not only the shoe, but the word herself, and dare we say…femininity?

But “elevating” comes with risks. Pedestals are precarious. And just as when sailors used her, “she” in the drag scene was a double-edged sword.

Anyone who’s ever had to appear onstage in a wig, corset, or pair of heels can tell you that shit is nerve-wracking. Years ago, I was in a production of Hairspray that required me to staple on a bee-hive and do the Pony for 90 solid minutes in an A-Line dress and heels, and it was daunting.

You pray for the Gods to be kind, is what I’m saying. Kind of like how sailors did when they crossed dangerous oceans in their mommy-boats. Because ultimately, you fear this thing might turn on you. She is tempestuous. She is powerful.

“Girl, I love you,” you imply, as you don your wig, or cast off from the dock, “but please don’t fuck me out there.”

A Reclamation

For all that I bang on about The Algorithm (and for all that there is a whole other post to be written about how easily it enables cultural appropriation at scale), I weirdly think the way “she” is being disseminated on social media these days is a better reclamation. The word has been severely diluted since its time in drag, but in a way, it’s a good thing. By using “she” to describe a toaster, or a house plant, or a water bottle, rather than something terrifying like the ocean, or dazzling like a heel, we’re not elevating (which comes with all sorts of problems) we’re normalizing.

If everything is “she”, then the word is just another default, like “he” already is. She doesn’t have to be thicc, or dazzling, or mysterious, or dangerous. She isn’t mommy, or queen, or the thing that might fuck you out there. She isn’t all-powerful.

She just…is.

Liz Shipton is the critically-acclaimed author of Dot Slash Magic. Her female-rage-fueled dark fantasy satire Mother & Slaughter comes out July 1st. Pre-order it for Kindle here, or get it wherever else books are sold.

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