On ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’, and why ‘Fun’ is still radical.

While the Lynx Africa-scented fug of the manosphere still saturates socials, hearing Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 classic ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ in my local coffee shop this week felt like a palate-cleanser. Of course, it’s a banger in and of itself – but also, like all the best bangers, it’s a banger with meaning.

As the song suggests, ‘Fun’ is a privilege. Fun isn’t experienced by everyone equally – in fact, it’s a scarce commodity: one might argue even more scarce in 2026 than it was in 1984. Lauper’s line, ‘when the working day is done’ is probably one to which a lot of people would respond ‘…and when exactly is that?’. The life of a worker doesn’t neatly finish at 5pm, by any stretch of the imagination. Alongside the day job, there’s household and caring labour, and we all know this weight isn’t fairly divided. Parents, too, have less access to fun, unless you really vibe out on 12-minute snatches of conversation between your child’s last and next grievous calamity.

What is fun, in today’s world?

Let’s say you make time to go have some fun – your working day is done, just like Cyndi’s, and you’re off to go walk in the sun (I accidentally typed ‘work in the sun’ there first: make of that what you will). Where are you going to go for it? You’d probably want to meet friends, but that will be harder if you or they are shift workers. You might decide to get some food, but that can cost a lot, and it’s tricky to find somewhere that works for everyone. Maybe you’re going to go ‘out out’ – but again, how much does entry cost, how much do drinks cost, and how much do you want to be drinking if you want to dodge the anxiety tomorrow – and, what about if you’re sober?

This stressful little paragraph above shows how complicated fun today is, and makes the privilege piece even more visible: if none of the concerns I listed affected you, you’d be much more able to go out and get that good hit of fun. However, for lots of people, there are all sorts of barriers in the way of fun – and this means that it’s not necessarily accessible in our day-to-day lives.

Without fun, what happens?

So maybe you can’t get much fun in your life at the moment – does that matter? Unsurprisingly (after this much typing, it would be very weird if I didn’t), I believe fun matters a lot. My answer for why is in two parts: because of a) the ingredients it requires and b) what we get from being in the environment the ingredients create. That’s a bit garbled as a thought so far, so let me flesh it out:

The ingredients of fun

If you’re going to stir up a brew of fun, the number one ingredient you need first is safety. You can’t have proper fun unless you feel safe – it’s impossible to enjoy hanging out with your friends while being stared down by a group of Reform voters, for example. The other two essential ingredients for fun are acceptance and trust. Feeling judged by your friends or walking on eggshells around them snuffs out fun immediately. Likewise, you have to put some trust in others in order to properly let loose – if you’re holding yourself back, you’re not going to be relaxed enough to have proper fun. Think Mark from Peep Show, for a reference on the trusting others front: we can safely say that if we want to have fun, we should probably do the opposite of literally everything Mark does.

Perhaps we can already see why fun is such a big deal, as the items this recipe demands are pretty impactful in themselves. But, there’s more! We’ve got the recipe to build the fun environment – what happens once we’re in it?

Alongside the fun itself, we get a few excellent by-products. Of course, there’s connection to others, and forging a shared history together. This leads into identity – what gives us fun also gives us a sense of who we are, both in and of ourselves and in relation to the group we’re in. Finally, there’s creativity: fun means play, and play is an excellent facilitator of creativity. Whether it’s a long-running in-joke, re-telling the story of your week for the audience of your friends, or making plans together to go and do something new, there are many ways in which we are at our most creative when we’re having fun.

How does fun factor in therapy?

People often have an idea that therapy is strictly a place for melancholy – and, of course, the therapy room houses lots of difficult and big emotions. However, therapy is there for all aspects of life, and all aspects of you – and as fun is a big part of that, it’s just as welcome and relevant as anything else that’s on your mind. In fact, as we’ve seen, fun may be an even more pertinent subject to explore and make space for now – especially if you’re someone without the privilege of fun being freely accessible (like Cyndi’s iconic narrator). Perhaps we could say, it’s time to start taking fun more seriously – after all, that’s all we really want…