“I have no interest in being #EsaChica. Wild Girl Summer is here. I’m not going to get up at 5am to drink a multivitamin and be super organized. I will be on internet forums until 4am, I will have Diet Coke for breakfast, I will eat a plate of pasta as a snack, I will not reply to messages for 3 weeks and then, one day, I will reply with twelve pages of text”. This Letter of intent is signed by TikTok user @horrible.glitter and perfectly sums up the summertime spirit that Gen Z women have chosen this season: Feral Girl Summer or Wild Girl Summer Messy, free, ready for anything. Party, alcohol, festivals, sex, out routines, Summer Wild Girl’s personality invites you to socialize in bars with strangers, not to be too obsessed with looks, not to respond to news out of a sense of duty, and to live more carefree without thinking about what other people think.
The Feral Girl Summer trend is an answer to the perfection expectation of many women, to have their lives perfectly planned and organized and to be in a constant optimization process. As journalist Jia Tolentino notes in her collection of essays False Mirror: Reflections on self-deception (Today’s Topics, 2019), in a chapter precisely titled Never stop optimize: “The ideal woman has always been a general concept,” she writes, while later reflecting on what the concept of the ideal woman would be today, “it seems to have come from Instagram, which is like saying she’s an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons learned from the market. The process requires the utmost obedience from the woman involved, but also genuine enthusiasm.” According to Tolentino, she is someone who is constantly striving for improvement because this is never given enough consideration: she needs to look good, appear 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 body and mind are just as important. This woman describing Tolentino is #EsaChica or #ThatGirl, which TikTok user @horrible.glitter wrote about.
#ThatGirl or #EsaChica also became trending on TikTok in early June 2022: one of the videos that best explains this philosophy of life has almost a million views and is stared by a user named Kaylie Stewart, a wellness and fitness guru in 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”, headlines Stewart in an elegant sports outfit and toasts the camera with a green juice. “Get up before 8 a.m.,” he advises. “Thirty minutes in the morning without looking at the phone,” he continues as we watch a video of him making coffee and writing his thoughts in a journal. “Work out four or five times a week,” she explains as we watch a video of her workout. “Follow a healthy diet,” we read while viewing juices and low-calorie meals. “Do the weekly shopping,” she writes while showing a basket full of vegetables. Like this one, there are videos on TikTok under the hashtag #ThatGirl that reach more than four million views, in which many users invite others to become #ThatGirl: that is, someone who works out, who writes in their diary, who makes a good beauty Following a diet based mainly on juices and salads routinely and before the start of the working day.
“The search for optimization is something inherent in social networks because it provides a story to the person uploading that content,” Janira Planes, a journalist specializing in technologies, memes and internet culture, explains to EL PAÍS. “The classic TikTok that thrives has a first catch to grab our attention, an evolution, and an end. This idea translated into the macro creates a whole narrative arc that allows the person making the videos to connect with the person watching them.” As an example, Planes takes a profile of the #EsaChica type: a woman who starts counting the small changes she’s making in her life to feel better, from getting up early to meditating or exercising to spending more time preparing meals or starting one every day. “Just as you follow a series to find out what’s happening with the characters, you get hooked on developing those profiles on TikTok,” explains Planes. Videos that can also serve as motivation to initiate changes in viewers’ lives.
As they explained in a Fortune article analyzing the #ThatGirl trend, these standards of productivity and sophistication that promote videos distort ideals of success and might even affect some people’s ability to do certain things: “Although many people find this content useful, improvement is presented as a constant striving that requires constant dedication. There will be many people who feel that these videos put pressure on them to conform to unrealistic standards.” Some of these are the ones who have stuck to the Feral Girl Summer philosophy: against organization, chaos. Faced with routine organizational anarchy. In view of an always perfect look, put on an old sweatshirt and a pair of short jeans. Before the detox smoothie vodka. And as opposed to getting up early, anything that keeps a person up late, whether it’s reading Twitter threads or dancing at a disco.
The funny thing is that every season of the year (and in the world of networking, the concept of season can be reduced to weeks or days) on the internet, women seem to morph into a new personality on the internet: #ThatGirl and Feral Girl Summer have to be added to the hot Girl Summer 2019 (a concept that originated from a song by Megan Thee Stallion, similar to that of wild girl but more geared towards women who feel confident with their bodies, sexy and attractive), the Side Character Summer or Summer Secondary Character (trend created by TikTok user @lolaokola, who invited to live the summer as an adorable and funny supporting character of a novel or movie, without the protagonists’ conflicts and without any quest for personal growth) and even the Healing Girl Summer or Curing Summer (a proposition defined by shutting down the noise and toxicity, focusing on self and emotional healing sought, either through self-help books, walks on the S Laya, or therapy).
“These trends are mostly emerging on TikTok,” Janira Planes explains, “and in a very polarized way because they create a strong sense of community: you enter TikTok and immediately, if you’re #ThatGirl, you have to position videos of your interest will pop up”. The that is, videos about morning routines, home or work desk organization, or healthy food recipes.”Or you’ll be on the other side, on the wild girl side, and you’ll see these kinds of videos that make you Commenting ‘Yes, that’s me’ or tagging your friends who you share this archetype with.” As Planes explains, Generation Z is more inclined to identify with one type of attitude or fit into a certain definition become: “In the end, it offers them a certain sense of control in a world where they have no control over anything.” The TikTok algorithm ensures that these ju n people find similar profiles that give them a common meaning and narrative.
Perhaps the wild girl is one of the trends that allows for more freedom and less restriction: it doesn’t ask for anything specific, or, as TikTok user @yourhypegirlsmag explained, really is nothing: “Wild means normal. That’s the irony. Because social media has created this illusion of constant perfection that makes the rest of us look insane. No, we’re not crazy. I’m so tired of looking at pictures of perfect girls and trying to look that way.” The Summer of the Wild Girl is therefore a plea for authenticity and normalcy.