A feminist case for an endless ‘brat girl’ summer.
I am sitting across from my flatmate as she recounts her week of binge drinking, and subsequent beer fear over what she may have said to her new work colleagues. “Oh well, brat summer,” she shrugs.
The term ‘brat’ has taken the internet by storm, led by Charli XCX, who clarified that ‘brat’ is “that girl who is a bit messy and loves to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes. She’s honest, blunt and a little bit volatile.”
The ‘brat’ girl is the antithesis of the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic. She’s unrestrainedly honest. She’s authentic and fun. In essence, she’s a human being that doesn’t feel the need to hide her personality or squash herself down. Which begs the question, why do women feel the need to justify their ‘bratty’ behaviour? Why is it the newest trend for women to simply be more honest and unrestrained?
When Donald Trump referred to Hilary Clinton as a “nasty woman”, he exposed a struggle women have faced for centuries. Trump wasn’t judging Clinton on her suitability for the role based on her political competencies, he was undermining her seriousness as a genuine competitor. Gendered language shows that what we value in men we chastise in women. The European Institute for Gender Equality identified numerous words almost exclusively used against women such as ‘bossy’, ‘emotional’, and ‘ditsy’, whilst The Telegraph points out that no one refers to a man as “feisty”; an authoritative female boss is referred to as ‘bitchy’ whereas a male counterpart is not.
From childhood, girls are constrained much more than boys over how they should behave, from expressing themselves to exhibiting leadership qualities. This continues well into adult life and the Harvard Business Review revealed that women often receive conflicting advice in performance reviews, being told they are “too bossy and too aggressive” but also need to be more “assertive and confident”. However, it was also found that when women were more confident in their abilities they were considered “cold and unlikeable”.
Here’s the thing, no woman needs to be told that gendered language exists. It is constantly used against us to undermine our voices or to stifle our personalities to fit societal expectations. All of us have at one point been referred to as ‘bossy’ for showing leadership, ‘a chatterbox’ for being passionate about a topic or ‘emotional’ for feeling strongly about the inequality issues we are directly affected by. Discrimination starts from a seemingly innocent “she’s quite bossy,” but can escalate quickly into a performance review in which instead of reviewing her work ethic, a woman is judged on her personality; in a positive performance review, a woman will most likely be labelled ‘compassionate’ where her male counterpart is ‘analytical’.
These societal norms are exhibited outwardly by US presidential candidate Donald Trump, who felt confident enough to remark on Clinton’s failure to conform to standards of female behaviour, instead of her attributes as a presidential candidate. These societal norms are further exemplified in a report by the Women and Equalities Committee of the House of Commons which found that misogynistic discrimination had a direct correlation in poor retention rates among female MPs and that there was “a lack of any real driver for change.” If we cannot expect stringent measures to protect women from gender discrimination at the highest level of policymaking in our country, where can we expect it?
I suppose the logical conclusion is that in order to bring about change and reclaim the words that have been traditionally used to berate and silence women, we could all afford to be a little bit more ‘brat’.
