The era of the Feral girl summer has begun

No more dragging yourself out of bed at dawn every day to meditate, work out and get ready like Cassie in Euphoria to go to the coolest party of the year, drink healthy vegetable smoothies, look fresh and groomed like you just got out of a spa. The era of the "that girl", mainly dominated by blond and thin girls with high aesthetic standards, with nice and clean flats and not even the shadow of any problem or discomfort, is over to give way to the "feral girl summer". The quiet, cool, patient, hard-working, highly organized person who works to the point of exhaustion to give a picture of inner peace and has very straight hair is no longer as attractive as she once was. As we celebrate Girls' 10th anniversary, the stars of the HBO series become the imperfectly perfect embodiment of a wild, messy, ramshackle girl, more busy living than looking flawless, healthy, cool or clean. But what is a feral girl really? Although the #feral hastag on TikTok has reached 5.1M views, the concept is not based on a precise aesthetic, a list of books to consult or a beauty and lifestyle routine to follow. It is more of a state of mind, a way of being, a latent part of each of us just waiting to be released. For the world of TikTok, being feral has to do with being unashamedly yourself, uninhibited, behaving anarchically according to the mood of the moment without worrying about what others or society expects of us.

A feral girl goes to bed with make-up on, wakes up with smudged mascara and drinks Coke for breakfast, wastes no time taking selfies and if she does they are always blurry, always walks around barefoot, eats handfuls of raw pasta as a snack, doesn't reply to texts for weeks and, when she does, writes a 12-page text as @horrible.glitter also explains: "I have absolutely no interest in being "that girl". I will never wake up at 5 a.m. to drink green juices and be hyper organized. I will instead be in 4 a.m. Reddit holes, Diet Coke first thing in the morning, fistfuls of raw pasta as a snack, three weeks of no response followed by an unhinged 12-page rant".  The feral girl has no boundaries, she's sexy, fun, wildly free to paraphrase Lorde who according to VICE coined the term "feral girl summer" in 2019 when posting an ad for the launch of her album Solar Power she wrote: "There's someone I want you to meet. Her feet are always bare. She is sexy, playful, feral and free." For Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, the literal definition of feral is "of, relating to, or suggestive of a wild beast" or "not domesticated or cultivated", a set of adjectives normally used for animals, but on TikTok it has more to do with maximalism, hedonism and a lifestyle that is more grunge than clean.  The icons of reference? The friends from Girls, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag, Lucille Bluth, Michaela Coel in Chewing Gum, the girls described in Raven Leilani and Sally Rooney's books, "the way Adam Driver makes us feel deep inside", Olivia Coleman and Miriam Margolyes.

The feral girl, especially at the weekend, can have an even wilder drift and become "a feral club rat who dances until 7am on weekends, but, despite being tired, still manages to be a functional adult during the week." She was first described in March by @rajyaatluri with a video documenting her various "ratactivities", a rather mundane list that includes things like watching a mid-2000s romantic comedy or opting for maximalist clothing, but over time has morphed into a description of a mean version of Emily Mariko, a chick who stays out all night clubbing, swaps gloss with strangers, has a perpetually broken mobile phone screen and follows a diet of vodka and lime and cigarettes. 24-year-old Mollie Fraser explains it well: "Being a feral club rat means you love going out and having a good time and not giving a shit what people think of you. You’re out to let loose. You’re not standing in the corner on your phone judging people, you’re just getting out there, throwing your ass, and going feral."

If we put together the rise of "goblin mode", dissociative feminists, indie sleaze, the "Fleabag era" or "villain era", it seems increasingly clear that society is embracing a more imperfect, chaotic mood, far removed from that of matcha tea addicts and Dyson Airwraps. 

"The ideal woman has always been conceptually overworked, an inorganic thing engineered to look natural. Figuring out how to get better at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project. It’s one that’s increasingly a trap, escalating in public-facing perpetuity."

She wrote, examining the scam of female self-improvement and predicting the end of that girl, back in 2019 in Jia Tolentino's 2019 essay Always Be Optimizing, from her book Trick Mirror. It seems that in recent times even Gen Z is less and less interested in hiding their true nature in the pursuit of an ideal of wellness, goodness and success that is always out of reach. So being messy or feral becomes a more real, almost revolutionary alternative, as Olivia Yallop, an expert on digital culture and author of Break the Internet: In Pursuit of Influence, explains:

"The feral club rat mindset is interesting to me because it’s anti-intellectual, anti-productivity culture, anti-self-optimisation. It’s about wasting time and being wasted. There’s something a bit transgressive about being intentionally "messy" on social media. You’re subverting the expectation to construct an idealised and professional image of yourself online. Feral club rats embrace and reclaim trashiness – they are anti-curated and anti-good taste." 

Giving up is experienced as something liberating "because the pressure to achieve perfection for no other reason than to say you did it has become so overwhelming, so boring, that pushback is inevitable". The answer to breathing again after lockdown, clean girl and that girl is to let our wild side loose, stop wanting to look perfect and cool all the time and start a Feral Girl Summer?