Emy G opens with two questions that sound like dictionary entries, "What is a Female? / What is a Mother?", and then answers them the way the world seems to answer: with complaints, not definitions. The central idea of "Expectations" is that both roles are defined from outside, by contradictory demands, so that no real woman can fit them and the person herself disappears.
The first stanza defines a female as a list of body parts: "Tight waist Luscious lips Big hair / Big butt". With no punctuation, the items pile up like a checklist read at speed. Then, with no change of tone, comes "your a slut". The insult sits in the list as if it were one more item, and the unpolished grammar makes it sound overheard rather than composed. The point is a trap: the body must be desirable and is punished for it. "Never enough Never Enough" repeats the phrase like a chant.
The mirror image that follows suits this idea. "Females are like a cracked mirror / A once clear image now with split personality." A mirror is what we measure ourselves against, and a cracked one gives back a fractured self. The next line explains the fracture: "Acting too old being to young." She is asked to be two incompatible things at once. "Broken skin soiled surface" and "the great facade" keep the focus on surfaces, and "No fine line" seems to twist the familiar phrase into something bleaker, as if there were no safe middle ground at all.
The mother stanza reuses the pattern. "Too young Too old Too alone" echoes "Never enough," and "Too much Too much" doubles it. Read together, the stanzas close the trap from both sides: a female is never enough, a mother is too much. "Breast got you pressed" has a jingle-like internal rhyme that turns sour, and it suggests the pressure and scrutiny around feeding a baby. The poem's strongest image comes next: "mothers are marionettes made to be mutilated." The repeated *m* sound is heavy and almost spat out. A marionette is moved by someone else's hands, and "mutilated" pushes the image from control to violence. "Made to get shamed" repeats that passive "made," and "Hide this hide that" sounds like a stream of orders. The stanza ends on its most human line, "What ever happened to caring for her baby," which has no question mark, as though the speaker has stopped expecting an answer.
The last stanza changes register from abstraction to noise: "Lips smacking Car is hissing Baby is crying." The poem doesn't explain the scene, but judging by the sounds it is an ordinary, untidy moment of care. It may also be a deliberate echo, because the "Luscious lips" that were an object of display in stanza one now do something real. The poem then turns to labels: "A E-girl A soft girl a VsCo girl." These internet-born aesthetics suggest the pressure is not old-fashioned but constantly updated, with a new costume for each season. Against them stand "A mom a sister a daughter," roles defined by relationship rather than appearance.
The ending depends on its verbs. Females are "acting," mothers are "made to be" and "made to get shamed," and the final question asks about "just being / Herself?" The line break leaves "Herself?" alone as the poem's last word. The self has been absent from every earlier definition, and the poem finishes on it, as a question rather than a claim.
Emy G uses no regular rhyme, no consistent rhythm and almost no punctuation, and the poem is stronger for it. The capitalised fragments, repetitions and missing full stops give the feeling of a voice that cannot stop listing what is wrong. Its significance lies in this directness. It names contradictory expectations plainly, ties them to the vocabulary of social media, and refuses to offer a tidy solution. By ending on a question, as it began with one, it suggests that the right answer to "What is a Female?" may be to stop defining her.