Why Do We Keep Placing Women in Subcultures?

Are you “brat”? Do you have what it takes to be “brat”? Do you even know what “brat” is? You’ve probably seen these questions numerous times over the last couple of months, following the release of Charli XCX’s album of the same name.

In that time, the album has transcended its music, morphing into a viral, global, neon-green trend that’s inescapable online. Brat has come to represent a certain type of woman – a way of being.

The singer describes brat as “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes,” adding that its aesthetics involve “a pack of cigs, a BIC lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.” It captures the essence of a girl who feels like herself but may also have a breakdown – and kind of parties through it.

The brat trend is notable for its uniqueness, marketed as an antidote to mainstream popular culture, which is often seen as overly manicured and monotonous. A fan told the New York Times that the trend caters to a woman who “doesn’t conform to expectations.” But is that really the case? The past three years have witnessed a surge in female subcategorisations online that bear a striking resemblance to brat: popular with women under 40, each new trend generating millions of videos and billions of views on social media.

We’ve seen tradwives, mob wives, coquettes, and all varieties of “girl” – hot, feral, dinner, math, vanilla, clean, lazy, lucky, and delulu. These trends thrive on social media but don’t just exist online. They influence fashion, hairstyles, hobbies, and even marketing and advertising campaigns – including presidential ones. Last month, memes describing US presidential candidate Kamala Harris as “brat” were everywhere, culminating in Charli XCX herself tweeting: “kamala IS brat.”

These trends usually present themselves as a stark departure from whatever came before – feral girls rebelling against clean ones, mob wives responding to trads – a remedy to the previous online subculture that appeared to constrain women just weeks earlier.

However, if you take a step back, you realize most of these trends are indistinguishable from one another, a highly conscious performance, whether explicitly curated or pretending to be carefree. Even the professed messiness of brat is self-conscious and intentional. Rather than something new or spontaneous, these pseudo-original fads are exactly what we’ve come to expect online. Most of these trends are mindlessly parroted without much thought or seriousness. Many are harmless; brat, for instance, is largely tongue-in-cheek, with those “being brat” jokingly playing along with the trend and often just enjoying Charli XCX’s album.

The rise of “feral girl summer” in 2022, similarly, was more of a meme than a genuine suggestion for a new, unhinged way of living. It’s also no coincidence that these trends have emerged rapidly post-Covid, when the world feels both chaotically diffuse and depressingly monocultural. Proponents say they are an escape from the real world; a coping mechanism to deal with socioeconomic uncertainty.

While adults navigate a broken housing market, the cost of living, and dismal future prospects, girls get to be silly. Tradwives get to stay home and bake. Coquettes adorn themselves with pink bows and look pretty.

Nonetheless, the ubiquity of these micro-trends communicates a more damaging message: an increasingly popular, regressive image of women that encourages a shallow, traditional view of femininity. Some trends are explicitly conservative, like tradwives promoting a return to traditional gender roles, where women are homemakers and men go to work. The “clean girl” aesthetic valorizes restrictive diets and narrow views of female presentation, typically aligning with a conservative lifestyle.

Even when not expressly anti-feminist, these trends consistently promote an idea of womanhood synonymous with frailty and helplessness, adhering to the male gaze. There is no equivalent relentless trend cycle for men. Many trends revive the trope that all women want is a life of leisure, bought for them through marrying rich, with popular posts claiming women are not performing hyper-femininity to conform to patriarchy but as fourth-wave feminists “refusing to accept society’s devaluation of anything feminine as inferior.”

These trends cleverly repackage this misogynistic view of women as complexly feminist, portraying empowered women as craftily fooling men into doing the work for them.

Self-infantilization underpins nearly all these trends, with women portraying themselves as characteristically incapable of basic tasks, often using the patronizing refrain “I’m just a girl!” to perpetuate the idea that women can’t drive, lift weights, or even do their jobs effectively. It’s difficult to go online without encountering women’s personal achievements seen through a cloyingly childish lens.

A viral tweet responding to a video of Simone Biles, 27, celebrating the US women’s gymnastics team winning gold last week, described the scene as an emblem of “girlhood”.

The rationale often provided is that these trends are subversive – that you’re not performing for the male gaze, fitting stereotypes around thinness and sex appeal, but conforming to these beauty standards in a secretly feminist way. But it’s hard to see how the broader takeaway isn’t a generation of women being cast as weak and vapid, perpetuating a flawed belief that such messaging can override dominant aesthetics promoting adherence to traditional femininity. This essentially results in reactionary feminism touted as revolutionary, where a bleakly sexist image of womanhood is spun as empowerment.

These trends unfold against a backdrop of a real crisis for women’s rights and safety. Globally, there’s a mounting backlash to gender equality, seen in the rise of misogynistic alpha-influencers and a general move away from feminism among younger generations. In the US, abortion access is being egregiously rolled back; in the UK, a woman is killed every three days by a man. The attack on a girls’ dance class in Southport underscores this grim reality.

There’s an alarming need for women to be recognized on a mass scale as worthy of respect and valued for their autonomy. These trends are not to blame for deep-seated, violent misogyny, but we harm ourselves by pretending they are helping.

In a few weeks, brat will likely be out, replaced by a new trend. Some may argue that this new trend will deliver us from patriarchy’s constraints. We can hope that, like brat, it’s merely a few weeks of benign, ironic fun.

However, we deserve more than an online ecosystem that persistently sells us a reductive view of womanhood as salvation. We must resist trends that suggest such superficial categories are key to understanding who we are and what we are capable of.

Source: The Guardian