Edwyna Estime was wearing a heavy, shapeless graduation
gown. It was the color of charcoal, and it reached all the way down to her
ankles. And yet she had never felt hotter.
اضافة اعلان
As she crossed the stage to accept her diploma, she heard the cheers from
friends and family members. She was graduating from law school — and that, to
her, was extremely hot.
“That was a three-year process,” said Estime, 26, who earned her degree
this spring from the Shepard Broad College of Law at Nova Southeastern
University in Davie, Florida. “Three years of waking up and not feeling hot for
me to get to that one day where I’m like, ‘Wow, this is hot.’
“This is what’s hot for me right now,” she added.
Estime is one of many who are expanding the definition of hotness, taking
it beyond its former association with old notions of attractiveness. These
days, being hot no longer pertains only to your physical appearance, but
includes how you move through the world and how you see yourself.
Many of those pushing for a broader understanding of the term are also
pushing back against the idea that you need to wait for confirmation from
someone else before feeling justified in calling yourself hot. To them, hotness
is a self-declaration, and that’s that. Hotness is no longer just in the eye of
the beholder. It is a mood. It is a vibe.
Emily Sundberg, a 28-year-old editor and filmmaker in
Brooklyn, was eating
spaghetti when she had a realization: She was being hot.
There was nothing glamorous about it. It was just a solo weeknight dinner
at the kitchen counter, and Sundberg was wearing workout clothes and glasses.
But she felt moved to make a video of herself as she twirled the pasta strands
onto a fork and succeeded in getting most of them all the way into her mouth.
As she chewed, with
Kanye West’s “Jail” blaring in the background, she stared
into the lens with a blank expression.
Sundberg then posted the seven-second video to
Instagram Stories. Within
moments, comments began flooding into her DMs. Her selfie video had “activated
some desire in my ‘reply guys,’” she said, using the term for people who
provide unsolicited commentary on social media posts. “U snapped,” one wrote.
“Marry me,” said another.
“You don’t have to ask for permission to be hot online,” Sundberg said.
Since May, women have been commemorating their graduation days by filling
their social media timelines with photos of themselves in caps and gowns, along
with captions alluding to their own hotness. “Real hot girls major in STEM,”
read the mortarboard of one graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
David Ko, an interior designer in Los Angeles, has a growing list of
fairly banal phenomena that he defines as hot. They include tan lines, going on
vacation, sugar-free candy, iced coffee, texting right back, and trucker hats.
“There’s a campiness to it,” Ko, 30, said.
That ironic tone comes through loud and clear on social media. Since 2020,
TikTok users have been posting videos of themselves doing activities that they
deem hot to a snippet of Megan Thee Stallion’s feminist anthem “Girls in the
Hood.” The videos begin with a snippet of audio taken from a Coach commercial
in which Megan Thee Stallion explains that she cannot talk right now because
she is busy being hot. The activities shown in the videos include tapping on a
laptop, doing homework on a Saturday night, and cleaning crevices of student
housing with sponges and brushes.
Nylon has reported on tinned fish as a “hot girl food,” and Vice noted the
rise of the so-called “hot girl walk,” a phenomenon started by
TikTok influencer Mia Lind that encourages young women to go on 6.4km walks while
remaining focused on self-affirming thoughts in three areas: what they are
grateful for, their goals in life, and how they plan to accomplish them, and
how hot they are. “You may not think of any boys or any boy drama,” Lind said
in the video that laid out the ground rules.
In an interview, she said that she wanted to “un-gatekeep” the feeling of
being hot with her hot girl walk, taking it away from male-gaze arbiters who
treat daily life like some kind of beauty pageant.
You may not think of any boys or any boy drama,
“Being hot is really accessible, more accessible than previously thought,”
said Lind, who credited Megan Thee Stallion as an inspiration for the walk. “I
think there’s a really big reclamation of the term hot.”
The hot girl walk has maintained its popularity since Lind posted her
explanation video, which has accrued nearly three million views since, more than a
year ago; the #hotgirlwalk hashtag has racked up more than 280 million views.
“The hot girl walk is a mindset,” said Lind, 23. “One of the main pillars
of the hot girl walk is trying to build confidence. It’s an exercise in
confronting that negative self-talk and feeling a sense of hotness.”
Ashlee Bennett, a psychotherapist in Melbourne, Australia, and the author
of “The Art of Body Acceptance,” also sees the new usage of the word as a move
toward self-empowerment.
“It’s a form of rebellion and a way to reclaim the narrative, especially
from the damage done by fashion magazines of the ’90s and ’00s,” Bennett said
in an email. “I think social media, even though it can have its downsides, has
actually helped us broaden the concept of ‘what’s hot.’”
Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, a researcher at the
University of Oregon
specializing in linguistics and Black studies, said that many words and phrases
that become common in online discourse, including “hot,” “on fleek,” and
“kiki,” are rooted in BIPOC and other minority communities. Over time, they
become co-opted and come to be seen as elements of “TikTok speak,” she said, a
phenomenon she referred to as “semantic bleaching”.
She credited Megan Thee Stallion as a source of the memes promoting
self-affirming messages for young women and girls, citing her 2020 song “Body.”
“We saw Meg come out with ‘Body’ during quarantine,” Weissler said, “and
she said, ‘It’s going to be a hot girl summer. We’re going to be happy. We’re
going to be confident women.’ A lot of our language change comes from women; it
comes from Black people and also from people of color.”
For Estime, the recent law school graduate, the next hot occasion will
come when she passes the bar exam.
“When
I get those results in September,” she said, “that’ll be the hottest moment for
me.”
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