When she says, ‘we run this motha, girls’, Beyoncé may be onto something. The Young-Girl is everywhere in popular culture: there are the nostalgia-draped girls of Stranger Things, Riverdale and Twin Peaks; the pop-punk stylings of the Broad City girls; Lena Dunham’s Girls; the Gilmore duo; the never-ending parade of international bestselling books with one titular aspect in common; the virginity-obsessed Jane the Virgin and her more anxious British counterpart Tracey from Chewing Gum. Yet we can’t claim actual flesh-and-blood girls are any more likely to run the world because of this apparent ubiquity.

This is not to say that the Young-Girl is without power. If we consider ‘power’ to encompass both an individual’s capacity to act as an independent agent and their ability to influence others’ behaviour, then the Young-Girl’s power is precarious. For she is not a figure of authority; her age and gender constrain her. Yet she does have the ability to exert power through influencing others’ behaviour. The Young-Girl’s is an ambiguous, soft power. For philosopher Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, the essence of seduction is ‘strength implemented through weakness’—a notion that captures the Young-Girl’s ambivalent influence. But what is this precarious power? Who or what is its object? And what is the relationship between the idealised, figurative assemblage of the Young-Girl represented in popular culture, and the flesh-and-blood girls of our contemporary world?