Rat girl summer is over

Rat girl summer is a typically absurd TikTok meme that most women — indeed, most humans — born before 1990 would probably struggle to understand. But it’s a thing. And here’s what it means, according to the Washington Post: it is “a TikTok movement that emphasizes living like a rat: scurrying around the streets at all hours of the day and night, snacking to your heart’s delight, and going to places you have no business going to.” After a content creator called Lola Kolade encouraged followers to “embrace the rodent energy” in June, #ratgirlsummer has been shared over 25 million times on TikTok. 

Last Friday saw the first in-person meeting of the “mischief” of rat girls at a big Brooklyn party. Rat girls as far afield as England’s home counties were disappointed not to be able to attend. Twenty-six-year-old Liza Blackman of Bedfordshire, said the hashtag appealed to her because, in the cost of living crisis, “like rats, we are foraging for whatever food we can get our grabby little hands on.”

On the surface, then, being a rat girl seems pleasingly anarchic. Its golden rules are: spend most of your time out, with two days a week to “decay” while scrolling social accounts in bed — any more than that and you’re “rotting.” Then: be ruled by whimsy rather than embarrassment. Finally: no overthinking. Rats don’t worry about stealing a slice of pizza and scurrying across an underground track, so why should rat girls? And, as Kolade, aka “Rat Girl-in-Chief” says, being a rat girl is about “playfulness, spontaneity and living in absolute freedom from diets, workout plans, aesthetic content or any kind of external pressure.” 

But as with anything Gen Z, scratch a little deeper and the pleasingly anarchic exterior turns out to be hiding that queasy mixture of the self-regarding “wellbeing” narcissism with a performative hostility to capitalism that can only be described as woke, hypocritical and… deeply lazy.

For the rat girls are not actually attracted by the promise of scurrying and scavenging, growing fat and being as unhealthy and ugly as they like. As a twenty-three-year old Philadelphia-based tech worker put it, rat girlism is a license to be completely selfish — in the name of fighting the patriarchy. “As women, we are taught to cater to others’ feelings, and the rat girl concept rejects that and asks you to prioritize yourself.”

It’s not just patriarchy that “makes” women subjugate themselves to the needs of others: it is — of course — capitalism too. Trevor Boffone, a Houston-based academic and TikTok scholar, explained that the “rat girl summer trend is exactly about not doing something because capitalism told us to do it, and only doing things you genuinely want to.”

Rat girlism, in short, is a license to ignore, or play at ignoring, the needs or sensitivities of others in the name of a hazily righteous politics; yet another attempt to channel not “rodent energy” but a very twenty-first century, Gen Z  “you do you” energy.

#Ratgirlsummer put me in mind of another TikTok craze this summer — #lazygirls — also aimed at women who don’t want to do anything or be imposed upon. 

Lazygirls on TikTok boast about having snagged jobs that pay them well to do almost nothing. They brag about how they only have to send three or four emails a day, and how this leaves them time to go on break after break. These are not women explaining how, having freed up time on the job, they can now spend it all self-teaching physics or dress-making. For them, success is exploiting their workplaces, earning them the pleasurable sense of doing ever less, with more and more freedom to spend time exclusively on personal wellbeing and time-wasting. A typical boast, liked hundreds of thousands of times: “I get paid a bomb salary to talk to no one, take breaks whenever I want & be the office baddie.”

Together, rat girls and lazygirls begin to look like a funeral march for female ambition (to say nothing of more personal qualities like duty and discipline, which all humans should aim for).

It is extraordinary that the blockbuster Barbie movie appeared in the same universe inhabited by these Gen Z #nightmaregirls. Barbie, for all its cartoonishness, represents a world in which women care about being successful, holding supreme court positions and science degrees: in Barbieland, successful and powerful women are the norm. The whole film turns on the horribly comic realization that, in the real world beyond Barbieland, it’s men who have the power and the big jobs — and the Barbieland setup was just a beautiful and temporary dream. Unlike the Barbies, this new breed of lazy Gen Z girls would do absolutely nothing to fight back against a world of loutish Kens being in charge. They’d shrug and keep scrolling Instagram.

If girls want to be lazy or ironically imitate rats then let them. But the narcissism, the half-baked therapy speak, the even more undercooked woke political posturing, and above all the sheer indolent rudeness at the heart of both trends points not to a new era of freedom, but to a decline in women’s prospects.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.