I came across an ad for Pistols & Pilates and my first thought, instantly forwarding it to my friend, was: this is so Nadia Lee Cohen coded. It had to be a meme. The copy read something like ‘precision in every form, bring your own mat, includes firearm and matcha.’ It felt like a hyper-legible aesthetic gesture you might scroll past on something like @dumbbitchjuice and not think twice about until you realise it was a real and bookable class… obviously located in Texas.
Even the comments confirmed it. One stood out: “LETS FKN G00000!!! Body tea with the choppa on me!!!!!!!” Another proposed bringing “pistolates” to London immediately – honestly, although i DO NOT condone gun violence in any sense, I would be there. But what mattered was not whether it was a joke, but how quickly the language of the pistol had already been metabolised into a feminine digital register, absorbed into tone, humour and posture…
In fashion-adjacent visual culture, particularly in a sort of post-ironic feminist register we are absorbed in today, the pistol no longer reads as an index of violence but as aesthetic material. Micro-influencers pose in white coquettish lace with an M18 rifles captioned: which one is the weapon, the woman or the gun?
And yes, the whole girl-with-a-gun cinematic, ammo-print bikini, matcha in one hand, structural contradiction in the other, is undeniably cool. But it’s also deeply, unmistakably online. That’s precisely the point. Femininity in the digital age is no longer merely represented; it’s formatted into something instantly recognisable as a ‘vibe’.
What this signals is not a sudden fascination with weapons, but a shift in how femininity, and female rage in particular, is constructed under conditions of total and digital visibility.
Because the girl gun aesthetic is not new.
In fact, female rage has always appeared in visual culture, but its legibility has shifted.
In earlier cinematic forms, anger operated as disruption, something that broke narrative structure open. The “Good for Her” canon is often treated as a recent internet phenomenon, but it is better understood as a recurring cultural logic of exit. In Thelma & Louise, the final drive off the cliff is not simply an ending; it is a refusal of return. If the system cannot contain them, they simply refuse to remain inside it. The protagonists essentially arrive at one final conclusion: bye.
Then there’s Baise-moi, adapted from Virginie Despentes’s brutal punk manifesto, where female rage is pushed to its absolute edge. Violence there is not catharsis or symbolic justice. It’s narrative refusal. These films never ask whether female anger is justified. They ask what happens when anger exceeds the structures built to contain it. Even when tragic, when impossible, there is still the implication of an outside.
But, the contemporary visibility of female rage functions differently. Anger no longer has to be suppressed in order to be neutralised. It can be displayed, aestheticised, algorithmically circulated, instantly recognised, and still remain politically inert. What once functioned as refusal now collides with a culture capable of metabolising literally anything into content - in short even if we wanted to escape, we can’t.
So the issue is no longer the censorship of anger.
It’s its circulation.
This is why contemporary representations of breakdown no longer function as narrative interruption. If anyone has come across the character Pearl, played by Mia Goth, in the American Slasher films, Pearl, X and Maxxxine, in particular the viral circulation of her “But I’m a star” sequence, what is striking is not chaos but structure. Her emotional collapse is repetitive and theatrical in it’s questioning.
Pearl: What did I do wrong?
The Projectionist: Nothing. Calm—
Pearl: NO! Why are you leavin' me if I didn't do anything wrong? I don't understand, I thought you liked me!
The Projectionist: I do like you, I just—
Pearl: Tell me the truth! Why are you leavin' me? What did you see? Why did you change?
The Projectionist: You're scaring me, Pearl. Okay? I wish you the
Yes, it’s a Grade 1 crash out. But what’s fascinating is that Pearl is not incoherent. In fact, she keeps interrupting the Projectionist the moment he tries to smooth the interaction over with “calm down” or “I just…” What we’re left with is a character over-articulating herself inside a system that refuses to return meaning coherently.
Feminist theory anticipated this shift. Sara Ahmed writes about how emotions “stick” to bodies in advance of articulation: anger attaches itself to women as pre-judgement rather than response. In everyday relational life, anger rarely appears as pure rupture. It appears after mis-recognition. In heterosexual dating culture especially, there’s a familiar pattern of being dismissed or destabilised, only to then be asked to justify your reaction rather than the conditions that produced it. The original action disappears behind the visibility of your response, and a perfectly reasonable reaction can suddenly get you zipped into a straightjacket labelled “crazy” at 1 a.m. on a Thursday. The emotional labour, then, becomes the quiet calculation of how much of your own perception you’re willing to edit before it gets reframed as a personality defect.
This produces what might be called a regime of managed emotional legibility. You can be a little upset, a little affected, but not in a way that gets labelled as “too much” “toxic” or “crazy.”
What Pearl reveals, then, is not madness but failed reciprocity: being fully legible in form but unread in effect. She speaks into a system that continues to register language but no longer produces meaning in response. She is not outside communication. She is trapped inside a communicative loop that cannot return an answer, and it is precisely here that the collapse begins.
So, if the Pistols & Pilates figure represents rage after successful formatting, over-legible, stylised, seamlessly ‘circulatable’, then Pearl represents rage after interpretive failure. Between them lies the contemporary condition of feminine visibility. On one side: over-managed intensity circulating smoothly as style. On the other: emotional overflow that cannot be properly received. Neither escapes the frame. And crucially, both remain inside the same system of visibility and neither produce an exit that isn’t fantasy.
So what does pistols & pilates as an aesthetic actually represent?
It’s what rage looks like once it’s been pre-contained by style. Think about the formal ingredients: pilates-girl softness, coquette styling, a rifle held with manicured indifference. The control here is not repression but design. Pilates itself is already a discipline of alignment, breath, micro-adjustment, bodily optimisation. And even the gun doesn’t signify literal violence so much as withheld action: intensity permanently managed so it never becomes event. Everything remains held in aesthetic equilibrium.
And that’s why the image sticks.
The Pistols & Pilates girl doesn’t break that structure.
She exposes it.
It resolves absolutely none of its contradictions. In fact it literally stages them in a way that manages them beautifully. Between trad-wife softness and hyper-violent fantasy, surrender and retaliation, composure and collapse, femininity is no longer something stable but something continuously negotiated in public. And within this, older frameworks of female rage still linger, the “Good For Her” canon, the fantasy of the cliff-edge ending in Thelma & Louise. But even that ending has been absorbed into culture as reference, meme, image, GIF.
This is also why it resonates beyond irony. It is easy to misread it as satire because it borrows exaggeration, but what it reflects is a condition in which femininity is already structured as performance, and performance is no longer separable from sincerity in the feed. The question is not whether the image is serious. It is whether seriousness is still a readable category.
Underneath all of this is a more ordinary logic: the emotional economy of being constantly required to manage oneself in relation to others’ interpretations. To be too emotional is to risk dismissal; to be too controlled is to risk disappearance. So what emerges is continuous calibration between expression and legibility.
What remains is circulation without outside. Rage that does not break the frame but moves through it. Emotion that does not interrupt visibility but adjusts itself to it. Feminine feeling that is always already embedded within the systems that render it readable.
So when the immediate reaction becomes “this is so Nadia Lee Cohen coded,” that instinct is not superficial at all. It names a visual literacy where femininity is recognised through hyper-staged artificiality: images too precise to be fully ironic yet too performative to feel entirely sincere.
And that ambiguity is not accidental.
It is the structure.
Because what “Nadia Lee Cohen coded” ultimately signals is a wider cultural condition: femininity as hyper-conscious surface, perpetually aware of itself being looked at, endlessly performing its own mediation back to us.