This weekend I went for a girl walk. I define a 'girl walk' as the following:

A walk that takes on a distinctly feminine aesthetic(1), usually (though not necessarily) within a metropolitan city, which considers and assumes the politics of the street that are so often violent towards women and nonbinary people. It is a feminist and anti-capitalistic act.

To frame it within more concrete terms: I put on make-up and dressed up with no destination in mind and no expectation that I would cross paths with anybody that I know in the street. I have the great luck of living in a city like Paris, and so taking a girl walk through these streets involved romanticising the fact that poets like Charles Baudelaire, Apollinaire, artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Constantin Brâncuși, musicians such as Chopin, filmmakers like Agnes Varda, tastemakers such as Gertrude Stein, authors such as Milan Kundera, all paved these paths before me, and in taking this walk, I was becoming one with their history. Taking a girl walk means deliberately not looking at one's phone. Instead, I look up. The Haussmannian buildings are made with a beige-yellow brick that, when the sunlight shines upon it in a certain way, casts a golden light across the city. I noticed an elderly couple wearing matching knitted jumpers. The Pont Alexandre III, which I had hoped to traverse, was cordoned off for god knows what reason this day; no matter. This inconvenience, too, constitutes a girl walk, accepting the insufferable bureaucratic infrastructures and the distinctly French 'Ce n'est pas possible, madame.' that constitutes walking in the French capital city.

Some context: I am typically somebody who does not enjoy going on walks for leisure. If somebody asks me, 'Shall we go for a walk?' my whole body shrivels up and it takes a concerted effort to not blurt out in defiance: 'Why? Where to?' As it happens, I've learned that I consider my body nothing more than a vessel, a vehicle, to transport me from place A to place B. Walking to attain a destination is acceptable, but I have never understood the principle of walking for pleasure; just for the sake of walking.

And yet, within the context of late capitalism, I am coming to believe that walking just for the hell of it is becoming an increasingly important act. The scholar and writer Matthew Beaumont explores the significance of walking in a metropolitan, modernised and capitalistic society in his book,The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City. From its introduction, the book explores the ways in which walking becomes a practice or a pilgrimage for those who are negotiating (often with some measure of desperation) what it means to be an individual, to have a sense of distinct identity, in a modernising society where all is becoming gentrified in not only the spatial sense, but also the mental and cultural. It is a fine balancing act: to hold on desperately to your sense of individuality, as society rampages onwards into a flattened future of 'modernisation', without becoming totally estranged and alone; to resist a gentrification of culture and mind without becoming an outcast.

The exemplary hero of the street, who manages to successfully navigate and assimilate this dilemma, is the flâneur. The Baudelairean concept of a flâneur is an upper middle class, decidedly male figure who wanders through the city streets with ease, taking on kaleidoscopic sensibilities that affords him an adaptability and agility to blend into the city's infinite variability and contradictions. With this talent, the flâneur becomes one with the city, practically invisible, and this provides him with the ideal conditions to observe without consequence. Through observation, artists and writers are able to capture the spirit, needs, desires, behaviours and ticks of humanity, which arguably led to 'better' artworks that appealed to a deep-seated and universal experience of humanity. Being a flâneur provides you with front-seat, privileged (hidden, of course, in the mysterious opera box) access to the spectacle that is communal life in the city.

Of course, the concept of a flâneur is problematic in multiple ways, but for the purposes of our topic, which is the girl walk, I will focus on the most glaring of these: the flâneur's distinctly male identification. Women are taught from a very young age to comport themselves in a particular way in the streets: don't wear that, don't walk alone, don't walk at night, keep your keys in your hand.(2) A girl walk as opposed to simply 'a walk', is therefore the deliberate act of stepping out into the street and, whilst being conscious of the dangers the city presents, assumes a certain form of agency. This will take on distinct forms depending on the woman, of course, but it often (in arguably and stereotypically 'feminine' fashion) consists of small, passive-agressive actions: dressing up for nobody, buying myself that silly little $7 ice coffee, wearing heels in a cobbled stone street, throwing on an oversized hoodie and blasting music on headphones so that nobody talks to me, smoking a cigarette and relishing the red lipstick stain around the tip of the butt, not checking social media and yet still whipping out the camera on your phone to take cute photos, and so on.

Why can't we look at our phones during a girl walk? Of course, we can, and on multiple occasions during my stroll this weekend, I inevitably took out my phone to check where I was going, or to record voice notes for this blog post. But in general, a girl walk should distance the virtual realm as much as possible, in order to privilege the present moment and heighten our awareness of our spatial surroundings. This posture not only allows for the appreciation and observation of the beauty and dynamics of the city, but it is also an anti-capitalistic act.(3) In The Walker, Beaumont states:

When we use our smartphones as we circumambulate the streets, perhaps simply in order to navigate them with a virtual map, we fail to notice the ways in which public space is covertly being colonized by corporate interests and reinvented as an archipelago of private spaces to which ordinary citizens have at best limited access. (4)

Returning to my sentiment that I typically dislike walking for leisure, that I see my body primarily as a means to commute, this quote from The Walker shocked and awakened me into realising that I had allowed myself to become yet another cog in the machine of capitalism. Beaumont discusses how we cannot occupy both physical and virtual space at the same time—one will always reign supreme over the other, and it is the virtual that always wins.(5) The fact that we may walk in the street and a text message, social media notification or phone call will stop us in our thoughts and tracks to respond with immediacy is proof of this. The fact that our absorption into smartphones is a major cause of accidents in the streets is another. It also blinds us to the covert forms of surveillance that exist, not only in the city, but also in the background of our applications as we run them:

Staring at a phone, people fail to notice the increasingly authoritarian mechanisms through which the state and various private interests police their activities as citizens and monitor and manipulate them as consumers. ... Distracted walkers are senselessly, unreflexively fixated on virtual [spaces and events], and remain almost completely atomized.(6)

'Atomised' is a key word for me in this sentence, as it echoes the increasing sense of loneliness that many of us feel when living online; the vicious circle of logging on to feel a part of a greater, global virtual community, only to feel disappointed and exasperated when we realise our isolation from them, only then to return to seek out that sense of belonging again.

I believe that the themes on how capital has influenced our cityscapes explored by Beaumont in The Walker have come to their apotheosis in the context of technology and the internet today. We see a gentrification of the internet due to the monopolisation of our virtual space by the Big 5 (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft). Algorithms know exactly how to inject us with hits of dopamine so that we stay chronically logged on and we thus feed them with millions of bytes of data that will only serve to continue to ensnare us. We write, speak and behave online in a certain way, in order to capture the attention of other netizens and boost our posts in the feed. Our individuality effectively becomes flattened. Just as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, and other authors cited in The Walker use the act of walking as a means to parse out the complexities and problematics of retaining a sense of self whilst also seeking belonging in the zeitgeist of their times in the city, I am convinced that we must do the same in our current social and technological climate. The girl walk is both an awareness of and an active response to the patriarchal and capitalistic aspects of our contemporary era.

And so I went on a girl walk this weekend. Dressed up, looking pretty, with no objective in mind and no expectation that I would cross someone I know in the street. Except I cheated a little bit. I did have a destination in mind. I went to fetch a couple of cans of pumpkin purée from the American store in the 7th arrondissement. But in true flâneuse (girly) fashion, I accept and embody this contradiction. At least the journey was 45 minutes on foot, and allowed plenty of time for me to mull over the themes that became this blog post. And, most importantly, it allowed me to observe the city that I have lived in for the past five years—something that I never have the time to do and haven't done for a very long time, due to the ceaseless rhythms of what it is to work and live in a capitalistic metropole. So perhaps I have not fully managed to pry myself from my old habits of walking from place A to place B. I have not yet mastered the art of wa(/o)ndering. But I still like to consider my little attempt at a girl walk as a small protest against technocapitalism and the patriarchy, one small size-36 footprint at a time.

(1) By 'aesthetic' I do not mean the flat definition that refers to surface appearance, the definition propagated by social media. Instead, I appeal to the original terminology that is derived from the Greek aisthetikos, which means 'perception of the senses; perceptible'.

(2) Is this another form of behavioural gentrification? It is, at bare minimum, certainly a conditioning.

(3) Incidentally, it also allows for greater self defence.

(4) Beaumont, M. (2022). The Walker: On Losing and Finding Yourself in the Modern City. Verso. p13.

(5) Beaumont, The Walker, p11.

(6) Beaumont, The Walker, p12.