In an extremely tone-deaf attempt to appeal to women, Sky Sports’ ‘Halo’ borrowed from ‘I’m just a girl’ culture, causing a litany of backlash.
It’s November 2025, and someone at Sky Sports has decided women are finally ready for the big leagues. We’re ready for football and F1. Just not, apparently, without pink subtitles and dating metaphors.
The broadcasting giant recently unveiled Halo, a vertical video channel for the elusive ‘female sports fan’. The pitch was simple: women like sport, but it’s scary, loud and technical. Women also like aesthetics. So, logically, we’ll explain F1’s ‘Crashgate’ scandal via ‘girl terms’ and liken Erling Haaland scoring a hat trick to a ‘matcha and hot girl walk combo’, because that ‘hits different’. In case you can’t tell, the idea was appallingly executed, subjecting us to 72 hours of corporate condescension.
Sky billed Halo as the ‘Lil Sis’ to their main channel. That was the actual marketing copy. ‘Lil Sis’. The posts soon vanished, leaving only screenshots and a PR apology that essentially read: ‘We’re sorry you didn’t like the pink font. We thought you loved pink.’
It is easy – and fun – to dunk on Sky Sports. But treating Halo as an isolated corporate blunder misses the point. Halo wasn’t an anomaly; it was a mirror. Sky Sports didn’t pull this infantilising language out of thin air; they scraped it from our feeds. They were simply trying to speak the lingua franca of the 2020s internet: ‘Girl’.
The great regression
For the last few years, we’ve lived through the great girlification of culture. It hasn’t been enough to be a woman anymore. ‘Woman’ felt heavy, serious, burdened with the expectation of adulthood. ‘Girl’, however, was light. ‘Girl’ was fun.
We saw the rise of ‘girl math’, a viral trend where women joyfully explained that paying with cash makes something free, or that returning a £100 coat to buy a £50 dress means you’ve made £50 profit. Superficially funny – until you remember that women in the UK couldn’t open a bank account without a male cosigner until the mid-70s. We’re barely a generation on from enforced financial infancy, and we’re giggling on camera about not understanding money.
Then came ‘girl dinner’: a plate of pickles, cheese, grapes and maybe a slice of ham, framed as a rejection of the trad-wife roast but looking suspiciously like disordered eating packaged as a whimsical quirk. Add ‘hot girl walks’, the ‘clean girl aesthetic’, and the catch-all phrase for any error, from crashing a car to forgetting a deadline: ‘I’m just a girl.’
‘I’m just a girl’ has become the mantra of the 2020s. It is a plea for leniency. It suggests that because I am small, cute, and wearing a bow, I cannot possibly be held responsible for my actions. It is weaponised incompetence.
The ‘harmless fun’ defence
If you criticise these trends online, you instantly meet the ‘let us enjoy things’ defence: we spent the 2010s ‘leaning in’ and ‘girlbossing’; now we’re exhausted. Reclaiming ‘girlhood’, the argument goes, is about healing our inner child. It’s harmless fun, it’s irony! I’d love to believe that; there is a seduction in putting down the heavy burden of female responsibility and just being a girl for a while.
But irony, repeated to millions, calcifies into reality. When a woman jokingly calls herself financially illiterate enough times, the joke evaporates, and the stereotype remains. When we call our eating ‘dainty snacking’ and our exercise ‘looking hot while walking’, we aren’t subverting the male gaze, we’re curating ourselves for it.
And what makes it worse is that men don’t do this. There is no ‘boy math’, no ‘boy dinner’ (it’s just called a meal). We rarely call grown men ‘boys’ outside ‘the boys’ – a phrase about camaraderie and power. Calling a man a boy at work is an insult, but calling a woman a girl is, increasingly accepted and a very lucrative marketing strategy.
The sociology of ‘smol’
So, why is this happening? Why, after decades of fighting to be treated as adults with agency, economic power, and political weight, are we voluntarily retreating into the nursery?
The answer is uncomfortable, but I believe it’s this: the ‘girlification’ of everything is a coping strategy in a world that feels increasingly hostile to women’s rights.
We are living through a resurgence of violent misogyny. Andrew Tate has millions of followers; abortion rights are being questioned; the ‘trad wide’ movement tells us our place is in the kitchen. In this climate, a woman, a full adult with demands and boundaries, starts to look dangerous.
A woman is a threat. She demands equal pay, reproductive rights, and respect. She takes up space and competes for power, which makes her a target. A girl, however, is safe. A girl is non-threatening. She doesn’t want a seat at the board; she wants a matcha latte and a cute sweatshirt. She doesn’t understand politics, she’s ‘just a girl’. She is not competition.
In sociology, this is known as a patriarchal bargain: a strategy women use when survival starts to feel precarious. If I make myself small – linguistically, physically, intellectually – I might avoid being seen as a threat. If I am ‘just a girl’, I’m not competing with men for dominance, so maybe they won’t hurt me. Maybe they’ll protect me instead.
We are trading power for the illusion of safety, adopting harmlessness as a survival mechanism in a culture where female power increasingly puts a target on your back. This is internalised misogyny, but I think perhaps it’s less ‘internalised’ than most believe. It seems to be a calculated survival tactic. A rational response to an irrational situation. But rational or not, it is still surrender. We preemptively shrink ourselves to avoid being shrunk by force. We say: I’m not one of those scary, loud feminists. I’m harmless. I’m bad at maths. I just want to buy pink things. Please don’t hurt me.
And corporations love this. They love girls. Girls are easier to sell to. Every time we perform ‘girlhood’ for the algorithm, we’re sketching the blueprint for how to market to us: treat us like children, and we will spend like them too.
The ‘lil sis’ legacy
Which brings us back to Halo. When Sky Sports branded the channel as the ‘lil sis’, they told us that they don’t see us as equal fans or paying customers, but as the little sister, allowed to play with an unplugged controller, to watch as long as the rules are explained slowly.
The failure of Halo should be a lesson. It was a rare, collective, and gloriously public rejection of the idea that women need to be coddled to engage with the world. We do not need our sports, our politics or our finances filtered through a ‘coquette’ aesthetic to understand them.
We are not ‘just girls’. We are women. We are tired, yes. We like pink, sure. Some of us even enjoy a matcha latte. But we also pay taxes, raise children, lead companies, and understand the fucking offside rule.
The current political environment requires that we act like adults, not with a ‘teehee’ and a shrug, but with the full weight of our adulthood. Performing girlhood might feel like respite, but it is a trap. The patriarchy doesn’t need to take our power if we gift-wrap it and hand it over. Whether you realised it or not, this performance is essentially giving up, and we’re stronger than that.
It is time to retire the ‘girl’ era. Every time we call ourselves ‘just a girl’, we make it easier for the world to treat us like children. We deserve better than that. We are better than that. And Sky Sports, at least, has learned that the hard way.
