The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

'Feral Girl Summer': Why TikTok's Latest Trend Invites Women to Embrace Its Most Chaotic Self

2022-08-12T10:29:08.350Z


A new fashion advocates not obsessing over appearances, not responding to messages right away, staying up late and waking up late. We take a look at this new internet personality and why Gen Z women feel the need to change their identity every season


“I have no interest in being #EsaChica.

The summer of the wild girl is here.

I'm not going to wake up at 5 am to drink a multivitamin juice and be super organized.

I'm going to be on internet forums until 4 am, I'm going to have Diet Coke for breakfast, I'm going to eat a plate of pasta as a

snack

, I'm going to spend 3 weeks without responding to messages and then, one day, respond with twelve pages of text".

This statement of intent is signed by TikTok user @horrible.glitter and perfectly sums up the spirit of summer times that Gen Z women have decided to embrace this season:

Feral Girl Summer .

or Wild Summer Girl.

Chaotic, free, ready for anything.

Party, alcohol, festivals, sex.

Out routines.

The personality of Summer Wild Girl invites you to talk in bars with unknown people, not to be too obsessed with appearance, not to respond to messages out of obligation and to live more carefree without thinking about what others think.

The Feral Girl Summer

trend

is a response to the expectations of perfection to which many women are subjected, to have life perfectly planned and organized and to be in a constant process of optimization.

As the journalist Jia Tolentino points out in her collection of essays

False Mirror: Reflections on self-deception

(Today's Topics, 2019) in a chapter entitled, precisely,

Never stop optimizing

: “The ideal woman has always been a generic concept”, she writes, later reflecting on what would be the concept of the ideal woman today, “it seems to come from Instagram, which is like saying that she is a normal and ordinary woman reproducing the lessons learned From the market.

The process requires maximum obedience on the part of the woman in question, but also genuine enthusiasm.”

According to Tolentino, she is someone who seeks constant improvement because it is never considered enough: she must look good, look younger than she is, be attractive, and achieve this result through diets,

detox

shakes , creams and beauty treatments, exercise and of course

journaling

or meditation because, in 2022, the body and the mind are just as important.

That woman Tolentino describes is #EsaChica, or

#ThatGirl

, which TikTok user @horrible.glitter was writing about.

#ThatGirl

or

#EsaChica also became a trend on TikTok in early June 2022: one of the videos that best explains this philosophy of life has almost a million views and is starred by a user named Kaylie Stewart, a wellness and lifestyle guru and star on the Generation Z social network, with 709,600 followers and 16.5 million likes.

In the video, she explains her daily routine: “How to become #ThatGirl in 2022 ″, she headlines Stewart, dressed in an elegant sports outfit and toasting the camera with a green juice.

"Get up before 8 am," she advises her.

“Thirty minutes without looking at the phone in the morning,” she continues as we watch a video in which she makes herself a coffee and writes her thoughts in a journal.

“Exercise 4 or 5 times a week”,

she explains as we watch a video of her training.

“Follow a healthy diet”, we read while seeing juices and low-calorie dishes.

"Do the weekly shopping," she writes as she shows off a basket full of vegetables.

Like this, there are videos on TikTok under the

hashtag #ThatGirl

that reaches more than four million reproductions in which many users invite others to become

#EsaChica

: that is, someone who exercises, who writes in their diary, who does a good beauty routine and who follows a diet based, fundamentally, on juices and salads before starting the working day.

“The search for optimization

It is something intrinsic to social networks because it provides the person who uploads that content with a story, ”explains Janira Planes, a journalist specializing in technology, memes, to EL PAÍS.

and internet culture.

“The classic TikTok that succeeds has an initial hook to get our attention, a development and an end.

That idea taken to the macro creates a whole narrative arc that allows the person who makes the videos to connect with the person who is watching them”.

Planes takes as an example a profile of the #EsaChica type: a woman who begins to count the small changes she is making in her life with the aim of feeling better, from getting up early to meditate or exercise, taking more time to prepare meals or start a daily.

“In the same way that you follow a series to find out what happens with the characters, you get hooked on the evolution of those profiles on TikTok,” explains Planes.

Videos that can also serve as motivation to initiate changes in the lives of those who are watching.

As they explained in a

Fortune

article analyzing the

#ThatGirl trend,

these standards of productivity and perfection that videos promote distort ideals of success and might even harm some people's ability to do certain things: "While many people may find this content useful, self-improvement is presented as an ongoing quest that requires constant devotion.

There will be many people who feel that these videos put pressure on them to conform to unrealistic standards.”

Some of them are the ones that have adhered to the

Feral Girl Summer

philosophy : against organization, chaos.

Faced with routine, organizational anarchy.

in front of a

look

always perfect, put on an old sweatshirt and some short jeans.

In front of the detox

smoothie

, vodka.

And versus getting up early, anything that can keep a person up late at night, whether it's reading Twitter threads or dancing at a disco.

The funny thing is that every season (and, in the world of networks, the concept of season can be reduced to weeks or days), women on the internet seem to change into a new personality:

#ThatGirl

and

Feral Girl Summer

must be added the

Hot Girl Summer

of 2019 (a concept that came out of a Megan Thee Stallion song, similar to the wild girl, but more focused on women feeling confident with their bodies, sexy and attractive), the

Side Character Summer

o Secondary Summer Character (a trend created by TikTok user @lolaokola, who invited us to experience summer as an adorable and funny secondary character from a novel or movie, without the conflicts of the protagonists and without seeking personal growth ) and even the

Healing Girl Summer

or Curing Summer (a proposal that was defined by turning off noise and toxicity, focusing on oneself and seeking emotional healing either through self-help books, walks on the beach or therapy) .

“These trends arise mainly on TikTok,” explains Janira Planes, “and in a very polarized way because they generate a strong feeling of community: you enter TikTok and immediately you have to position yourself, if you are

#ThatGirl

, videos of your interest will appear”.

That is, videos about morning routines, home or work table organization or healthy food recipes.

"Or you're going to be on the other side, on the wild girls side, and you're going to see those kinds of videos that make you comment 'yes I am' or tag your friends with whom you share that archetype."

As Planes explains, Generation Z is more predisposed to identify with a type of attitude or be included within a specific definition: “In the end, it offers them a certain sense of control in a world in which they have no control over anything” .

The TikTok algorithm will ensure that these young people find similar profiles that give them a common meaning and narrative.

Perhaps the wild girl is one of the trends that allows more freedom and less confinement: it does not demand anything in particular or, as TikTok user @yourhypegirlsmag explained, it is really nothing: “Wild means normal.

That is the irony.

Because social media has created this illusion of constant perfection that makes the rest of us look crazy.

No, we are not crazy.

I am so tired of looking at pictures of perfect girls and trying to look like them.”

The Summer of the Wild Girl is therefore a plea for authenticity and normality.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-08-12

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-03T05:11:14.619Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.