How “Hot Girl Summer” Became Everyone’s Favorite Meme Overnight

Last night, I sent a tongue emoji to a woman I’m seeing, abandoning my standard “smiley” and “eyes” for something slightly more direct. Maybe I was communicating that way because I was up drinking cold brew writing this piece and my penchant for slow-burn flirtation had come undone. Or maybe it’s because it’s a Hot Girl Summer.

Like a game of strip poker, Hot Girl Summer has unfolded slowly and then — wow — all at once. A term coined by 24-year-old Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion, “It’s just basically about women — and men — just being unapologetically them, just having a good-ass time, hyping up your friends, doing you, not giving a damn about what nobody got to say about it. You definitely have to be a person that can be the life of the party and, y’know, just a bad bitch,” as she explained to the Root in June.

The idea is everywhere in pop culture now. People post selfies wearing their flyest outfits, share stories of triumphing over various obstacles, upload dispatches from vacations, Snapchat from nice restaurants or while chilling at home. And as they’re wont to do, brands have capitalized, co-opting Hot Girl Summer as a way to sell Wendy’s lemonade, PacSun, and Maybelline. But despite its exploitation by thirsty corporations, Hot Girl Summer is still a rare oasis on the internet, a meme that doesn’t turn sour after the inevitable snowballing of crowdsourced material. It’s a counterpoint to the Area 51 challenge, the other meme of the summer: You don’t have to go anywhere, nor put yourself in harm’s way, nor ponder extraterrestrial life to have a Hot Girl Summer. You focus on your earthbound self and what it means to live your best life, in your own skin. It’s taken off so much that Meg is in the process of trademarking the phrase.

So why has the phrase become so popular? Summer’s only a month old, and so far it’s yielded mostly trash: detainment camps, mysterious deaths in the Dominican Republic, power cuts, flooding in New York and New Orleans, and the president’s racist, xenophobic tweets. Amid all this, Hot Girl Summer is as much a reprieve as its namesake season used to be.