Should You Buy Into Hot Girl Summer?
Graphic by Mari Tapia
If either by some strange misfortune or another you become single by the time summer arrives, you are more than likely going to be reminded of a phrase — and often. Your friends will use it as a way to beckon you from the world you have shut yourself in, one that can only exist in the quiet and in the brooding. Your friends will use it as bait for the other suitors that you have no interest in, and who after seeing from across the bar you certainly have no attraction in. Your friends will shout the phrase off of the mountain tops, the rooftops, tops of cars, from the top floor of parking lots you paid too much to be in, and at the top of the hill you spent hours climbing. It’s something you’ve never spoken aloud but something your tongue has examined in great detail, the walls of your mouth washing the consonants back and forth like Listerine. You stay silent while your friends wail –– “Hot Girl Summer.”
It was Megan Thee Stallion who coined the term in 2019 after the release of her album “Fever,” and it must have been rap culture that popularized it. In any case, whether you listen to Megan Thee Stallion, or rap at all, and whether you indulge in rap culture, or culture at all, the term has accumulated meaning in its travels and has more than likely kicked up on your radar over the years. For those wholly unfamiliar, I will attempt to define it as best I can:
‘Hot Girl Summer’ (n.) is a term used to describe the act of spending the season of summer indulging in the embrace and exploitation of the relational period that is being single. Usually in the form of interloping between situationships, confronting the embarrassment of meeting any person off of a dating app, and often requiring constant bar visits with trusted friends, ‘Hot Girl Summer’ is not only a seasonal sport but a year round mentality establishing the will to remain stubbornly reformed in independence and extended solitude.
Like many arbitrary laws of our world, this term will inevitably bend in its definitions, and I can be certain that it already has. Trapped by our modern era with its infiltrating influence of social media, the idea of “hot girl summer” has now been loosely applied to the likes of certain material possessions and activities. While these material manifestations have at one point acted as an intuitive choice for one’s own individual expression, they now demand coalition. Found in the types of clothing you wear, the fit of that clothing, workout routines, skin care routines, choosing between walks or runs, the shape of your sunglasses, the shape of your acrylics (a constant battle between squares and ovals), even extending into the subconscious dilemma of choosing between a tote bag or a baguette bag, these possessions have started to converge the public eye with an exclusive identity. What once began as the nominal attribute of breaking off a relationship in search of extending the youthful reconnaissance of hook-up culture has since been catapulted into the canonization of the female commodity; and it has attached itself to marketing ploys and pools of mindless consumption.
If you have in fact bought into hot girl summer you more than likely have already also bought numerous other things: going out tops, a new swimsuit, probably new heels or boots, maybe a plane ticket to explore several European countries. You may have gotten your hair lightened, or dyed, cut, or fully changed. If you have bought into hot girl summer there is a high probability that you have also bought into a jaded depiction of the ‘appearing versus being’ matrix.
To define this matrix is simpler than it may seem. If you have by chance created or inherited a substantial amount of wealth and can therefore afford appearing like the socially acceptable “hot girl,” then there is a good chance you will believe you are one. If you did not become so lucky, you might feel as though your appearance does not match the criteria of being a “hot girl,” and you thus cannot become one.
That is to say, whether you appear as a marketing prototype of “hot girl summer” directly correlates to your ability to be attached to, or feel a part of, “hot girl summer.” If the woman who can afford a fake tan, highlights, a Miaou mini skirt and Prada sunglasses is the blueprint of a “hot girl,” then the woman who can’t afford it feels failed. And yet, I must make it apparent, that if you are solely basing your inability to be a “hot girl” because you don’t look like a “hot girl” then you are buying into the materialized commodification of an ingenuine sense of independence.
There exists a temporary satisfaction from boiling down a lifestyle into the particles that can palpably force-feed fulfillment with a plastic spoon. To buy into these particles yields only a constant limit of swallowing so as to not digest any absent or unrequited calories. In other words, only committing to the material representation of “hot girl summer” and expecting liberation is the equivalent of committing to the 100 days of squats and expecting a Brazilian butt lift –– this process lacks consistency and can only produce a fraction of the desired result.
Remove the materialization, and the essence of the hot girl narrative is simply radical independence. It is a lifestyle and a mentality built around pleasure and resilience which cannot be codified into owning enough wealth to afford certain luxuries, and buying into such an idea is merely paying for a free trial that will only expire and depreciate as your results taper.
This is not to suggest any sort of deterrent for embarking on a “hot girl summer,” let it be known. In fact, I am in full support. However, your mood following “hot girl summer” could be determined by whether your fulfillment comes from tabling your ego on a mannequin or from the bellowing scream of your deliverance. I recommend the latter, but that’s just me.
Before you buy that viral perfume, or that $100 gym set, make sure you have bought into yourself first. This is a mentality you can practice, a mentality you don’t have to lose even if you lose being single.