It’s a brat girl summer . . . and, frankly, it’s a little alarming.
The summer of 2022 presented as feral girl summer, in which we were all called to celebrate our wild side. This led, in 2023, to rat girl summer, which encouraged females to scurry aimlessly outside their homes while nibbling snacks. Now, in 2024, we are celebrating the summer of the brat, a term to denote late-night partying, volatile female emotions, and a shade of lime green that looks good on exactly no one.
Adult females are, in essence, spending summer after summer in the least appealing ways possible and convincing themselves that it’s a cute way to celebrate their girlhood.
The primary problem with this is that they are no longer in girlhood and should have long ago advanced to womanhood. Charlie XCX, the British pop star whose album launched the brat trend, is thirty-one years old, and Rolling Stone defines brat as “a hyperpop roller coaster of post-Saturn return, early-thirties anxieties, and It-girl bravado.”
If I chose to be generous about extending youth beyond the time it is strictly necessary, I would say that a person is in adulthood when she reaches the age of a college grad. This is typically around twenty-two to twenty-four and allows for several years of post-high school shenanigans. By the time a person reaches her thirties, she should be well beyond youth and fully embracing mature adulthood.
But the unfortunate truth is that people without the grounding of marriage and children can struggle to grow up. Recent studies forecast that 45 percent of women ages twenty-five to forty-four will be single by the year 2030. This leaves us with a disconcerting number of lime green-clad women scurrying around the streets, eating snacks.
For further proof that our women are stuck in adolescence, we need not look beyond the album that gave us all these brats. Charlie XCX delivered catchy electronic club vibes with an honest analysis of her own insecurities and mean-girl tendencies. She discusses the frenemy who she couldn’t be even if she tried; living as 365 party girl, but often feeling like a wallflower at those parties; how it’s so confusing to be a girl; and how she wishes she could rewind to simpler times. In short, this album is loaded with lyrics that would be appropriate for pubescent teenagers, but it is somehow instead the anthem of our thirty-year-olds—and, in an especially alarming case, a fifty-nine-year-old who is running for president.
In short, women are regressing. Our extremely feminist culture has brought us from the early days of desiring that women have a vote, through the Sexual Revolution, and now to this new stage of encouraging women not to be women at all, but remain in a strange stage of volatile adolescence.
With this regression comes the same mean-girl bullying that we all learned to fear in our school days. This is showcased perfectly in the recent attack on the “Queen of the Trad Wives,” also known as Hannah Neeleman, published in the London Times. The article interviews Neeleman about her life as a mother of eight living on a farm that was made successful by her own efforts on social media. However, in spite her obvious success in multiple areas of the life she has chosen, she is slammed as being oppressed by her husband and children, who, the author claims, are constantly correcting, interrupting, and hanging on her. The message is clear: no matter how beautiful, successful, and fulfilled your life seems, you can’t possibly be happy if you have a husband and children suffocating your feminist potential.
This feminist trend of calling any conservative woman oppressed was also analyzed by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who comments that this same phenomenon is seen in the liberal reaction again J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha. Brown points out how condescending it is to assume that a woman is incapable of wanting something different from the feminist ideal: “This manifests as utter disbelief that women like Hannah Neeleman and Usha Vance could be happy co-pilots in the lives they and their husbands are leading. . . . But it’s not actually feminist to paint all women with one brushstroke. Women are not and will never be a monolith.”
Granted, not all of us want to live on a farm with eight kids, but in the same vein, not all of us want to throw ourselves into a career. Women should be free to live a variety of lives, but regressing to mean-girl adolescent tendencies is never going to be a successful solution for empowering women, and giving up on adulthood altogether and living the life of a volatile party girl is similarly useless. For women to thrive and succeed, we need all of humanity to thrive, and for humanity to thrive, we need the family unit to thrive. J. Michael Miller, in his analysis of the work of John Paul II, distilled it beautifully when he said, “Whenever a family fosters love, it performs an inestimable service to society and to the coming of the kingdom. If we are first a communion within the family, then we can later enter into communities in society. A civilization of love has its roots in a family of lovers.”
Trends come and go (thankfully), but truth is a timeless foundation to build your life on. Women cannot operate in a world separate from men and children any more than a child can survive without its mother or men can thrive without women. We all need one another.
When we crumble into a life that is selfish and self-centered, we rapidly become brats. As I have said to my children—and I’m sure many of you have said to yours—“don’t be a brat.”
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.