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Style|Their Superpower? Holding Things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/style/claw-grip-women-holding-things.html
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Known as “the claw grip” online, women are making videos about how many objects they can hold without a purse or functional pockets. What is the larger message?
Video
July 23, 2025Updated 10:19 p.m. ET
Everywhere you look, women have their hands full.
They are clutching water bottles, phones, cups of matcha and wallets. Now that it’s summer, sunglasses dangle off the pinkies of already stuffed hands. Never mind that women’s handbags, where these items could theoretically live, make up an entire industry and that bigger bags, in particular, are having a moment.
The phenomenon, in which women are gripping their necessities without the aid of pockets or bags, is called the claw grip, and on social media, it has been crowned as a secret superpower.
In one video on TikTok, a woman challenged herself to carry as many items as possible in one hand. She managed 15, including a lip balm, a pen, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a Kindle, a notebook, a wallet, a power bank, a comb and three water bottles. An Instagram account dedicated to girls carrying things (which uses a profane synonym for things and sometimes goes by G.C.S.) posts images submitted by users of their hands full of various bric-a-brac.
Some social media users have gone as far as displaying their hand-held necessities in disposable coffee trays.
Others say that men could never successfully pull off this Jenga act, nor would they understand it. And these videos or photos of women clinging to their belongings are not polished; they are presented as the most mundane of girl experiences — the equivalent of posting your unaesthetic breakfast. They are also hilarious.
