Meet Halle Robbe, The Mind Behind Girls Carrying Shit
Image courtesy of Eleanor Bare
Sometimes, I can feel my grip expanding so it can carry everything I need to hold. The webbing between my fingers can stretch, and the way my knuckles protrude seems almost sub- or superhuman, an AI rendering, something humanoid, similar to a hand if a hand could unlatch itself and become the furled roots of a tree. People call this the “claw grip,” or “girl hands,” any label that can distance feminine physiology from the default humanity that is afforded to men.
Girls carry a lot of shit—physical and non-physical. This is the understanding that fuels Halle Robbe as the creator of the girlscarryingshit Instagram and Pinky Magazine. We carry water guns, sewing machines, vapes, live snakes, lighters, and stacks of cash. We carry our shame, pressure, ambition, love, and self-hatred. Without romanticizing or universalizing these struggles, Robbe puts them on display in both a legible and emotionally resonant way.
Strike STL’s Editor-in-Chief Eleanor Bare sat down with Robbe to discuss the history of girlscarryingshit, her editorial process, and her goals for the future.
Girlscarryingshit (GCS) started out as a joke about non-men’s tendency to carry everything that doesn’t fit in their pockets in a variety of creative and diabolical ways—referenced in GCS’s Instagram bio, “after thousands of years w/o pockets, non-men have evolved a superior grip to carry our shit.” When it comes to the non-physical shit that girls carry, Pinky finds a balance between recognizing the shared experiences that proximity to femininity imbues in people, while recognizing the diversity in experience that leads girls and other non-men to a variety of creative responses.
Robbe says that each issue of Pinky starts out with a theme, but she never really knows what direction contributing artists will go in their submissions. This element of the unexpected leads to a collaborative and truly unique feeling in each issue. “A lot of the time, when people go off-script or off from what I expected, it ends up being even cooler than what I imagined,” Robbe remarked.
Themes for Pinky typically start out as concepts that have been showing up often in Robbe’s life—sticking points, things that she and her friends are going through. But Pinky and GCS aren’t focused on the individual; it is the plurality of feminine voices, the multiplicity in what we carry, and the incongruities within us that shine on the platforms that Robbe curates.
“It’s weird that we have any shame around what we’re holding,” Robbe said. “I think that we should carry it all out in the open.”
Period products that we hid beneath our sleeves when we walked to the bathroom in middle school. Sneakily taking our SSRIs at the sleepover. Our belly fat, insulin patches, eyebags, body hair, stretch marks, dreams beyond what is acceptable, drunk texts, angry tears, shit in our teeth, and shit we write into the stars. We can take a sip from our collective Redbull—it was a 3-for-1 deal!—and slowly let our claws unclench.
You can find the GCS Instagram here, and its website here.
Strike out,
Strike St. Louis
Written by: Ellie Fischman
Edited by: Eleanor Bare and Cordelia Ramsey