From brats to tradwives: why do we keep putting women into subcultures?

Are you “brat”? Do you have what it takes to be “brat”? Do you even know what “brat” is? You have likely seen these questions dozens of times over the last two months, since the release of Charli XCX’s album of the same name.

In that time, the album has transcended its music, becoming a viral, global, neon-green trend, inescapable online. Brat is now a certain type of woman – a way of being.

The singer has said brat is like “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes”, adding that the associated aesthetics are a “pack of cigs, a BIC lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”. It is a girl “who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of, like, parties through it”.

The brat trend has been defined by its uniqueness: a supposed ­antidote to mainstream popular ­culture, which is seen as manicured, monotonous and heavily curated. One fan told the New York Times that the trend is specifically for a kind of woman who “doesn’t conform to expectations”. But is that really the case? The last three years have seen a boom in female subcategorisations online which look a lot like brat: popular with women under 40, each new trend generating millions of videos (and billions of views) on social media.

We’ve had tradwives; mob wives; coquettes; girl ­everything – hot, feral, dinner, math, vanilla, clean, lazy, lucky, delulu . They thrive on social media but don’t just exist online. They inform fashion, hairstyles and hobbies, as well as marketing and advertising campaigns – even presidential ones. Last month, memes describing US presidential candidate Kamala Harris as “brat” were everywhere, culminating in Charli XCX herself tweeting: “kamala IS brat”.

These trends typically pitch themselves as a dramatic departure from (and sometimes a response to) whatever came last – feral girls rebelling against clean ones; mob wives responding to trads – a ­remedy to the prior online subculture constraining women just weeks before.

Take a step back, and you find most of these trends are indistinguishable from one another, a highly conscious ­performance, whether explicitly curated or pretending to be carefree (even the professed messiness of brat is self-conscious and ­intentional). Rather than something new or spontaneous, these pseudo-original fads are exactly what we’ve come to expect online. Most of these trends, most of the time, are mindlessly ­parroted without much thought or seriousness. Many are harmless – brat, for example, is largely tongue-in-cheek, where those “being brat” are jokingly playing along with the trend (and often just enjoying Charli XCX’s album).

The rise of “feral girl summer” in 2022, equally, was more of a meme than a sincere suggestion for a new, unhinged way of living. It’s also no coincidence that these trends have appeared at a rapid pace post-Covid, when the world feels both chaotically diffuse and depressingly ­monocultural. The people who champion them say they are an escape from the real world; even a coping mechanism to deal with socioeconomic uncertainty.

While adults have to deal with a broken housing market, the cost of living and dismal prospects for the future, girls get to be silly. Tradwives get to stay home and bake. Coquettes get to wear pink bows and look pretty.

But the ubiquity of these micro-trends nods to and disseminates something much more damaging: an increasingly popular, regressive image of women that encourages a shallow, traditional view of femininity. Some are explicitly conservative, like tradwives who promote a return to heteronormative gender roles, where women are homemakers and mothers while men go to work. The enduring “clean girl” aesthetic valorises restrictive diets and narrow views for how women should present themselves, typically aligning with a conservative lifestyle.

But even if not expressly anti-feminist, these trends almost always promote an idea of womanhood synonymous with frailty and helplessness, adhering to the male gaze. No equivalent relentless trend cycle exists for men. Many revive the trope that all women want is to live a life of leisure, bought for them through marrying rich , with popular posts claiming that women are not performing hyper-femininity to conform to the patriarchy but instead as fourth-wave feminists, “refusing to accept society’s devaluation of anything feminine as inferior”.

Unlike the conservative subcultures that outwardly endorse female submission, this misogynistic view of women is carefully repackaged as complexly feminist, where empowered women are craftily fooling men into doing the work for them.

Self-infantilisation underpins almost all these trends, with women painting themselves as characteristically incapable of doing basic tasks, using the patronising refrain “I’m just a girl!” to ­perpetuate the idea that women can’t drive , lift weights or even do their jobs effectively (videos like these are everywhere and generate millions of views).

In fact, it’s ­difficult to go online and not encounter ­women’s personal achievements being ­portrayed through a cloyingly ­childish lens. A viral tweet responding to a video of Simone Biles , 27, celebrating the US women’s ­gymnastics team winning gold last week described the scene as an emblem of “girlhood”.

The overriding claim to excuse this language is that these trends are somehow subversive – you’re not performing for the male gaze, fitting long-standing stereotypes around thinness and sex appeal, but actually conforming to these beauty standards in a secretly feminist way. But it’s hard to see how the broader takeaway isn’t a generation of women being cast as weak and vapid, a myth perpetuated by the flawed belief that this illogical messaging will somehow override the dominant aesthetics – which ultimately promote adherence to traditional femininity. It leaves us with reactionary feminism branded as revolutionary, where a bleakly sexist image of womanhood is shakily spun as empowerment.

The backdrop for these trends is a real crisis for women’s rights and safety. Everywhere, there is a growing backlash to gender equality, manifesting in the popularity of misogynistic alpha-influencers and a general move away from feminism among younger generations. In the US, abortion access is being egregiously rolled back; in the UK, a woman is killed every three days by a man . The attack on a girls’ dance class in Southport only makes that grim reality starker.

Related: Brat summer: is the long era of clean living finally over?

There is an alarming, desperate need for women to be seen, not just individually but on a mass scale, as worthy of respect. The idea that women’s desires and autonomy are undervalued in our culture is more than justified. But while these trends are not to blame for this deep-seated, violent misogyny, we do greater harm by telling ourselves that they are somehow helping.

We can safely assume that, in a few weeks’ time, brat will be out and something similar but different will appear in its place. Some may insist the new trend will be the one to deliver us from patriarchy’s constrictions. We can maybe hope that, like brat, it’s just a few weeks of benign, ironic fun.

But we deserve better than an online ecosystem which constantly dresses up a reductive view of womanhood and sells it back to us as salvation from it. We owe it to ourselves to resist trends that tell us these superficial categories are key to understanding who we are and what we are capable of.