When rapper Megan Thee Stallion released her album Fever, complete with cover art that said, “She’s thee hot girl and she’s bringing thee heat,” the term “Hot Girl Summer” was born. According to Megan Thee Stallion, Hot Girl Summer is all about authenticity, confidence, and fun. Hot Girl Summer encourages its participants to live their truth and be unapologetically themselves — a message that isn’t inherently gender-specific.

But the more popular the phrase has become, the more definitions it has adopted. In addition to embracing yourself, Hot Girl Summer has come to emphasize embracing your body and chasing your own happiness. Most of the time when “Hot Girl Summer” is referenced on TikTok, sexuality is also discussed. For many women, the kind of growth Hot Girl Summer promotes means embracing your sexuality, something that has long been taboo for women.

Though the root message is not necessarily gender-specific, it has come to represent something that is. Though anyone can be shamed for their sexual desire, female-identifying persons have historically dealt with this more than their male counterparts. So Hot Girl Summer is also about smashing the patriarchy.

What often seems to happen with women-driven movements has also happened with this one. Some men seem to take offense that they aren’t immediately included in a cultural phenomenon and create a male-specific countermovement. I witnessed this for the first time when “meninism” gained traction in social media in the 2010s. Meninism was a satirical movement that argued that feminism was hurting men. I remember being on social media when I was in middle school and seeing the posts this so-called sarcastic account made, posts like, “What is the difference between a gun and a feminist? A gun has just one trigger” and, “Misogynist (noun): someone who wins an argument against a feminist.” The crux of meninism was to devalue and mock the feminist movement. Although hot girl summer does not have the same political drive as the feminist movement, it’s still a movement about empowering women. So men had to come up with an alternative.

Men are more than welcome to participate in Hot Girl Summer by living an authentic and confident summer. But to take something that is meant to empower women, a group that has so often been disempowered, and make a male-concentrated version, shows that these men are missing the point. Women are using Hot Girl Summer to help them embrace things that are historically difficult for women to embrace such as body positivity and sexual desire. When men, who have not encountered the same degree of stigmatization around these topics, create a countermovement that mocks the women’s movement, they are devaluing and overlooking the reason women started this movement in the first place: to empower themselves.

By Lindsey Staub

Junior at UC Berkeley, studying English and history. Lover of sweet lattes, sheepdogs, and the color pink.