hot girls, brat, and the gravekeepers of language

everyone say thank you megan thee stallion

Megan Thee Stallion changed the world with “hot girl summer.” She doesn’t get enough credit for that.

Ever since the phrase broke into the mainstream, synchronous to the rap sensation’s own breakout moment in 2019, it has pervaded colloquial language throughout the western world. The ubiquity of “hot girl summer” in the current cultural zeitgeist cannot be understated. Every girl and woman between the ages of 15 and 35 has raved about their hot girl summer, or their “christian girl autumn,” or whichever rotating batch of words has the girls rushing from TikTok to Pinterest to curate the perfect summer moodboard (see: feral girl summer, tomato girl summer, coconut girl summer, and other words God never intended for us to string together). 

The allure of hot girl summer is perfect and simple: are you a hot girl? or do you want to be? that is, do you want to project the image of what you consider a hot girl? and we can all be hot girls, we can all have a hot girl summer.

Perhaps this sounds familiar.

Perhaps you’ve been bumpin’ that, but you’re not actually bumping that. Still, in essence, you are bumpin’ that. More on this later.

Being a hot girl is inextricably tied to Megan Thee Stallion’s branding. Her other names include “H-Town Hottie” and “Hot Girl Meg,” she dubs her fanbase “the hotties,” she has the braggadocious banger “Hot Girl” from her 2018 EP Tina Snow, and of course, there is the 2019 “Hot Girl Summer” collab with Nicki Minaj (and I think I was the only one who liked it when it came out). But what does “hot girl summer” really mean to Thee originator of hot girl summer herself? 

In a June 2019 interview with The Root, Megan says, “It’s just basically about women — and men — just being unapologetically them, just having a good-ass time, hyping up your friends, doing you, not giving a damn about what nobody got to say about it. You definitely have to be a person that can be the life of the party, and, y’know, just a bad bitch.”

Megan’s statement oozes confidence and fun — who wouldn’t want to become these things, to become a hot girl?

The term continued to gain cultural prominence as the season of freedom continued and the desire to epitomize the hot girl grew. Brands capitalized on the fun; Wendy’s (who is enemy number 2 in corporate social media marketing, Duolingo taking #1 in recent years) claimed their lemonade to be the official drink of hot girl summer in July 2019. TikTok’s popularity growth in summer 2019 contributed as well, her song “Cash Shit” going viral on the platform with various snippets. The snippet of the song’s intro — “real hot hot girl shit / yeah, I’m in my bag, but I’m in his too” — has amassed nearly 300k videos on the platform.

2019 was the perfect time for hot girl summer to explode. As the remaining embers of mid-2010s sexual-liberation-girl-power-that-bitch feminism burned, hot girl summer lauded ownership of a woman's sexuality — both in embracing that you are a hot and sexy woman, and in embracing the choice to be promiscuous.

One would predict the 2020 pandemic would put a damper on hot girl summer, but it did just the opposite. To cope with the uncertainty and solitude covid-19 brought, hot girl summer revived itself dripped in irony and longing. We distracted ourselves from the sadness of isolation by fantasizing about hot girl summer, listening to Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat and Flo Milli for the hot girl mantras. Or, we had a tongue-in-cheek attitude towards hot girl summer, calling for stay-inside-girl summer and advocating for vaccines with shot-girl-summer. 

This pandemic reinterpretation reinforced that hot girl summer is not just a season, but a mindset. This engraved hot girl summer into the cultural landscape; hot girl summer is now an evergreen affirmation and a playground for future iterations of summer.

Everyone wants the branding of “[insert here] summer.” Sometimes it’s a way to commodify your interests, a way to say, “with this lip combo and with these shoes, I’m having a ____ summer.” Sometimes it’s a way to flatten your interests into something easily identifiable to others. Tweet “it’s a Joan Didion summer,” and you can say so much with so little. Sometimes it’s more tongue-in-cheek i.e. “rotting in bed summer” or “sleepy girl summer.” And of course, companies use it to promote their products. “Buy this and you can have your ____ summer!” or arrogantly proclaiming the brand itself is the summer you want to have.

Megan said it best in her 2024 track, HISS: “ever since I claimed the summer, all you bitches want a season.” 

One could argue hot girl summer is the predecessor for terms like “girl dinner” and “girl math” and the “girl” apocalypse of 2023. Of course, there are other circumstances that contributed to the popularity of these terms, such as the movement to reclaim femininity following the corporate-girlboss-girls-like-and-do-what-men-like-and-do feminism of the 2010s and the “not like other girls” phenomenon. There is also the two-pronged response to the rise in alt-right content domination online: (1) pushing back against misogyny by indulging in femininity and (2) indulging in femininity to reinforce patriarchal expectations valued by the alt-right (see: tradwives).

Regardless, I believe Megan’s “hot girl summer” catchphrase was a large factor in the commonality of girl-speak, girl this and hot girl that has become its own subgenre. In the throes of our pandemic girls around the world asked, how can I be a hot girl in these conditions?, and the response was: hot girl walk. As I’m writing this, Charli XCX is the cover of Spotify’s hot girl walk playlist — so let’s finally talk about BRAT. But make no mistake, this is not “about” BRAT. It’s about all of us. 

There is no more topical way to explore the “____ summer” phenomenon than brat summer, the cultural commotion surrounding Charli XCX’s 2024 album BRAT. As summer comes to a close and the internet pumps out its last thinkpieces and quips and celebrations of brat summer, I’ve been pondering the marketing of BRAT. BRAT has become bigger than the album itself, it’s now a way of being.

Many things are instrumental to the brat marketing campaign, but perhaps the most simple and effective aspect is the idea of brat summer. The phrase is quick and essentializes being brat. It emphasizes how being brat is a mindset that anyone can have. It’s a phrase that easily permeates the social media landscape. It works well in conjunction with the color green or a pack of cigarettes, something you could easily post on your IG story and with the caption “brat,” and everyone knows what you’re talking about.

In this pondering, I asked myself a contentious question: would we have “brat summer” if Megan never coined the term “hot girl summer?”

I don’t think all of BRAT’s success could or should be attributed to the singular phrase “brat summer,” nor do I think it’s impossible that phrase could have existed even without “hot girl summer” to predate it. That said, I believe language is an undeniably important part of how we experience culture, especially on the internet. I believe Megan was the blueprint for common contemporary social media language and marketing. I believe she demonstrated the cultural impact of curating an entire summer around a lifestyle whose allure lies both in its accessibility and the façade of exclusivity. Because yes, everyone is a hot girl, but we still said hot girl and not just girl— this causes one to strive for embodying the hot girl. Just like how if you ask the internet, it seems like anything and everything can be brat, yet there is still the striving to be affirmed as brat by others participating in brat summer.

In times like this, I am reminded about how many people owe Megan Thee Stallion a lot. Many people owe black women a lot. Black women lay the groundwork for everyone else, and yes, even in something as seemingly frivolous as hot girl summer.

This work often goes uncredited and uncompensated for. Branding campaigns from businesses or media moguls or public figures will sell products using the term Megan coined (or its variations), yet there is no compensation and seldom acknowledgment of credit.

Black people will create value in the form of cultural currency, which others (often non-black) appropriate and commodify into their own monetary success. Meanwhile, the black originators of this cultural value do not reap the monetary benefit. This issue has long existed; the internet just brings it into a new form. Black people will go viral for funny lines or fun dances that are remembered and repeated for years to come, yet they don’t see the profit and are not recognized for their personhood. 

And my word, don’t even get me started on the butchering and misuse of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and the flattening of AAVE into “internet slang.” The internet homogenizes language and culture, and those who did not grow up in the culture nor care to understand and learn of the culture further muddle the homogeneity, effectively erasing the culture’s roots i.e. you are from Ohio why are you saying “jit?”

Language is so beautiful to me. It’s how we communicate with others, how we share how we feel, and it is an art. I find it beautiful how we can learn and share and exchange language with one another so we can understand each other better. Thus, it is important to me that we treat language carefully and maintain its histories. 

History seemed so precarious when oral storytelling was the only way to keep it alive. The internet is a living, unkillable, constantly updating archive and a seeming solution to history’s precarity, but unfortunately the false sense of security produces the opposite result. People take what they see in front of them in the present as the extent of history. They then proliferate false histories devoid of context, much rapider and in larger multitudes than ever before. 

In twenty years from now, I wonder if we will still be saying hot girl summer and its many variations. I wonder if the new generations will continue to say hot girl summer. I wonder if people will remember it was a black woman who created the term first, and I wonder if they will remember her name was Megan Thee Stallion.

As each summer comes to a close and we lament the end of everything that defined it, I encourage us to keep a careful memory of the history that precedes us and those who helped build it – lest we spend a future grieving our current present.