"Feral Girl Summer” Is Apparently The Sequel To “Hot Girl Summer,” And It’s Just As Chaotic As It Sounds
Last year, the term “hot girl summer” was coined. The first time most people heard this phrase was from a Meghan Thee Stallion song of the same name in 2019. The idea of “hot girl summer” is that you look your very best and have the time of your life. 2022 has adjusted this goal slightly.
TikTok has become the place to find and understand cultural trends that are either booming or on the cusp of exploding, such as the coastal grandma aesthetic that has become wildly popular. As we all dive headfirst into summer, TikTok is now telling us that all the cool girls have traded “hot girl summer” for something called “feral girl summer.”
“Feral Girl Summer” Is Apparently the Sequel to “Hot Girl Summer”
When you think about the word feral, you probably think about a wild animal that simply can’t control itself and may even wreak havoc on the people or environment surrounding them. That’s pretty close to the image of a woman partaking in “feral girl summer.” According to TikTokers, the whole idea of “feral girl summer” is to go absolutely wild and not care at all about treating your body well—in the name of good fun, of course.
“I have absolutely no interest in being ‘that girl,’” one TikToker wrote. “A feral girl spring/summer is upon us. I will never wake up at 5am to drink green juices and be hyper organized. I will instead be in 4am reddit holes, diet coke first thing in the morning, fistfulls of raw pasta as snack, 3 weeks of no response followed by an unhinged 12 page rant.”
Well, that’s descriptive. Another influencer described “feral girl summer”as viewing your body as “a temple on the weekdays, and a watering hole for vodka sodas on the weekends.”
When it’s “feral girl summer,” it’s totally normal and acceptable to stay out all night drinking and eating pizza with your friends, watch the sun come up, and then stay in bed until the late afternoon munching on snacks and refusing to wash the makeup off your face. This is an online sensation that sounds pretty nauseating to be honest, but it seems that there are plenty of young women who are excited to live out their very best version of “feral girl summer.”
On the Today show, Rebel Wilson joked about her discovery of “feral girl summer.” When Savannah Guthrie asked Wilson about whether she would repeat “hot girl summer,” she responded, “I heard this thing called feral girl summer. Feral is an Australian thing. It’s when you don’t care.”
Guthrie mentioned that the word feral means wild animal in the U.S. Wilson admitted that it’s pretty much the same thing over in Australia too. She laughed that her priority this summer is to just have fun and enjoy herself, especially because she’s got two new movies coming out over the summer.
This new TikTok trend may be funny on the surface, but it signals a decline in self-respect and a dismissal of the values in striving for growth and health. Women have been empowered to treat their body any way they want and show no self-respect, yet turn around and demand that they be treated as queens. It just doesn’t add up, and we’ll probably see a whole lot of unhappy, unhealthy women by the time fall rolls around.