It's So Confusing Sometimes To Be A Girl
The BRAT essay to end all BRAT essays, one year later
I am changing careers: from history professor to music (& arts) journalist. But that doesn’t mean I have to, or should, write nearly three-thousand words about BRAT.
Yet last summer, holed up in a cabin in the woods in Southwest Virginia with nothing but pen and paper, I did just that.
BRAT may be one of the most important musical statements of the 2020s. It must be. Because no other pop album has captivated my entire psyche for months on end like it did last year.
So, in an ode to BRAT summer—those not-halcyon days of 2024—here’s the essay.
In April, after reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, I decided I had to get offline.
That same month, I was accosted at a Pride event in my small city by several people I did not know, yet they knew me. They knew about my troubles at work, my depression and anxiety, my relationship status. Later that day, my girlfriend was approached by someone that she did not know. “Hey, I know you from somewhere,” the stranger said. “Oh, wait… You’re Samantha’s girlfriend!”
There’s this version of me out there. She’s roaming. She looks and acts and talks just like me. Digital Samantha.
I want to kill her.
This Samantha—my online self—is part of what Klein refers to as the “Mirror World.” It’s the online universe of deliberate misinformation and digital manipulations of images and sounds that we have all grown accustomed to. Klein warns that there’s a danger of losing ourselves out there. It’s not our physical bodies we might lose, but that version of us that everyone knows—the ‘me’ that is perceived, the ‘me’ that everyone thinks that we are.
In Doppelganger, Klein confronts the slipperiness of losing control over her own name and resume. She is persistently mistaken as that “other Naomi”: the right-wing conspiracy theorist and feminist firebrand Naomi Wolf. There is a similar tension present in another artifact of our time: Charli xcx’s album BRAT. Charli, like Klein, finds herself slipping into and out of resemblance with an online version of herself.
Is Charli a celebrity party girl, the gossip of lower Manhattan? Or is she just a messy poser who “snagged her tights out on the lawn chair?”
Welcome to Charli’s “Mirror World.”
While “BRAT Girl Summer” may seem like yet simply another moment of online performance—lime green backgrounds with fuzzy black texts; “bad tattoos on never-tanned skin”; things that are seen rather than done—the deeper work ofBRAT as in Doppleganger is in revealing a hall of mirrors from which we cannot escape. We are, like Charli and her friends, “chronically online,” and there is no self wholly apart from our digital avatars. Or is there?
BRAT begins with a clear evocation of the mirror in the “360” life of a perpetually online girl in the digital panopticon. Charli sings of how womanhood, for her and her friends, is this never-ending tug-of-war between the agential self and the “mirror” self: “When you’re in the mirror do you like what you see? When you’re in the mirror you’re just looking at me.” The “me” here is not Charli, but rather whoever the “it girl” of the moment is. When we post a photo of ourselves online, we’d like to believe that this is a true mirror of our reality, but Charli suggests that the self (as in the ‘selfie’) is just a performance of self using a specific digital vocabulary. We don’t make “duck faces” because we want to look that way; we do so because that’s how people look online.
The “it girl” grew out of early Hollywood films and the motion picture industry. Clara Bow, star of the film It (1927), is one of its first manifestations. In the twenty-first century, with the rise of social media and internet celebrity, “it girls” started popping up in odd places. From Paris Hilton to Hawk-Tuah, scores of young women have become “famous for being famous.” In “360,” Charli references “it girl” of the moment Julia Fox, singing “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia.” But for young women today, the “it girl” need not be Julia; it can be anyone who is online and well-known.
Indeed, the Mirror World of BRAT is not so much about celebrity worship, but rather about the broad insecurities of womanhood for all of us. We are out here constantly referencing ourselves against a digital avatar, whether it is Julia, or a friend’s hot pics out on vacation, or even our own former hot pics (which somehow we cannot re-create). As we strive to capture “it,” what “it” is is always in flux. So we present this striving self to the world online, and people think that that’s us. Hence why “it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.”
Gender plays a key role in BRAT’s articulation of this Mirror World. This is an album about women relating to other women—online and in real life (IRL). In “360,” Charli sings about the shifting sands of belonging to a specific manifestation of an Insta-worthy womanhood. Like Judith Butler, she reveals (and perhaps revels in) the performative nature of how a girl might behave, dress, or even think. It’s a hyperpop anthem of recognition that the categories of it-womanhood shift so fast these days that it’s nearly impossible to keep up.
And on “I might say something stupid,” she reveals that she can’t keep up. In this song she’s trying to perform a kind of cool, detached womanhood, yet she fears being ostracized over any small slip-up. She also wonders if she’s even enjoying the exhausting act of trying.
Does Charli think that the hall of mirrors is worth it? In “365,” the album’s closer, she answers hedonistically. She seems to throw her hands up in the air and give in to just living this fantasy of the online avatar self. She gives in to the “360” online panopticon life. More parties, more drugs, more performance. Note that this is the only time—at the very end of the album—that she even refers to herself as a “brat.”
But what makes BRAT more than just a synth-pop commentary on the confusions of performing womanhood in a rapidly-changing hybrid online/IRL world is that throughout the album, she also sings with sincere longing, nostalgia, curiosity, and wonder about that “real life.” And not just real life, but a real womanhood. Not realness as is in the performances of passing, but as a way of embodying womanhood and relating to other women offline. That there may be a way to be a girl that needs not be hyper-perceived, even if there are yet always other “mirrors” reflecting back our gender in the so-called real world.
The dream of a nostalgic return to a proto-online era—if not completely pre-online—is clear on the track “Rewind.” Here Charli seeks escape from the 360/365 life for a time when young women like herself could be messy yet comparatively invisible. Her lyrics begin with remembering a time when there wasn’t always a mirror pressed up against her face. She wasn’t obsessed with her face shape, or as worried about her body weight. People could and did still view her, judge her, sexualize her in real life—as young women almost ubiquitously experience—but there weren’t thousands of digital avatars of herself floating around online.
It is notable on “Rewind” how even in her own bedroom, offline (well, maybe on AIM or MySpace), away from the prying panopticon, we get a sense that she is still concerned about how she relates to other women—of course. In the online Mirror World we stack our avatars up against one another; we are never thin enough, never pretty enough, never wearing the right fit. The real-life version of this still involves a lot of sizing up, but in the context of authentically-messy relationships.
This is most evident in “Girl, so confusing,” in which Charli admits that there’s this toxic online version of a relationship she has with another female musician, and she wonders if there’s a way to overcome that narrative. In the song’s remix, she invites this woman—the musician Lorde—to join her in duet. They sing out their mutual anxieties around relating to the other person. They say, hey, I actually admire you and like you a lot, but I am also intimidated by you. Maybe there’s a way for us to be friends?
Female friendships are “so confusing sometimes.” The feminist writer and scholar Brittney Cooper explores this theme in her book Eloquent Rage. Twenty-first-century Black Feminism, she writes, hinges on women loving—really loving—other women. This is no 1970s-era lesbian manifesto; she doesn’t mean fucking each other, although that’s perfectly lovely if you want to. She means “riding for” each other, as Lorde puts it on the remix. But to ride for another woman, Cooper suggests, is always “queer” in as much as it invites a certain level of vulnerable intimacy into a relationship, a closeness that can feel particularly scary or precarious between two women. When Charli sings to Lorde that “people say we’re in like” this hints at those murky waters between friendship and something more. This is a sapphic song in as much as it’s about two women being really vulnerable with one another, which Cooper argues is a necessary foundation for twenty-first feminism, and that Charli sees as a necessary corrective to the way women relate to one another online through their overwrought avatars.
Female friendships are equally confusing (and tear-inducing) on “So I,” Charli’s tribute to her late friend, the hyperpop composer and pioneer SOPHIE. Conservatives like to argue that twenty-first-century womanhood is under siege by, of all people, trans women. So it’s notable on an album about the ambiguities of womanhood and friendship, that Charli sings about the relationship between a cis woman and a trans woman.
In “So I,” SOPHIE invites Charli to spend time together, to be friends—not just as professional colleagues. As with Lorde, though—or with Taylor Swift, on the awkward banger “Sympathy is a Knife”—Charli is intimidated and overwhelmed by the idea of real friendship with another woman. She rebuffs SOPHIE, telling her that she’s too busy to hang. Maybe another time. Then, “after Christmas” in early 2021, she receives a phone call informing her that SOPHIE has fallen to her death.
Overwhelmed with grief and guilt, “So I” interpolates both the sonic palette and lyrical form of SOPHIE’s own song “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli interprets a sort of posthumous permission from SOPHIE for her to cry: “And I cry. And I cry. So I cry.” She was able to break out of the hall of mirrors with Lorde, and actually achieve real connection, but with SOPHIE it is all too late.
Beyond female friendship, Charli is also interested in learning more about the roles of womanhood within the bounds of kinship. This theme first appears in “Everything is romantic,” Charli’s warp-speed tribute to life in Southern Italy where, amid commentary on seemingly superficial qualities of “it girl” travels, she throws in this arresting line: “four generations make up the family.”
This concern with reproduction returns on BRAT’s stunning penultimate track “I think about it all the time.” Here Charli recounts a visit to Stockholm to see another musician friend who has just had a baby. Upon meeting her child for the first time, Charli is less interested in the newborn than in a subtle change that she perceives in her friend, the mother.
It’s not clear what this change is. She sings of the new parents, “they’re exactly the same, but they’re different now,” and that the mother, surprisingly, is still wearing the “same old clothes she wore before.” Charli notes, perhaps in her clearest summary of this feeling, that was has changed is that her friends now know something that she doesn’t. The mother is dressed the same, acting the same, talking the same, but she has experienced something new and profound.
Reflecting on this, at the end of the song, Charli apparently turns to her fiancé and wonders, “Should I stop my birth control? Because my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all.” We hear her proceed to hum the melody of the song, like she’s continuing a pensive walk along the streets of the Swedish capital, pondering her own existential question: “How does it feel to be a girl?”
“I think about it all the time” is no essentialist peon to reproductive womanhood. The fact is, Charli hasn’t figured it all out. Not at all. When the song ends, “365” begins, and we see her back in the club, back to the “freedom” that she is afraid of losing.
But even though she’s wearing the same clothes and acting the same way as when the album started, Charli, like the mother, has changed. She has questioned the distortions of the online Mirror World; she has felt a sense of alienation around the performance of popularity; she has grieved for friends lost and relationships sundered, and she’s putting in the effort to develop real friendships with other women; she has questioned her own desires for love and kinship.
BRAT is obviously not a full-throated denunciation of online life. But rather, in the spirit of predecessors like Radiohead’s OK Computer, it represents a documentation of the alientation that we often feel with online life, even though we keep participating in it. BRAT is also, like Doppleganger, an alarm call awakening us to the work we need to do offline—cultivating healthy relationships with ourselves (and our bodies) and our friends. These relationships—love; friendship; motherhood—might offer an antidote to the online 360/365 life, but they’re also as hard as hell to actualize.
Like Charli xcx, I am also a millennial. (Spencer Kornhaber, in the Atlantic, playfully described Charli as “a cosmopolitan highly online Millennial with tons of gay fans.”) I often tell my students that while Gen Z-ers might be so-called digital natives, we, the Millennials, were social media’s pioneers. By the time Facebook came to my college campus (back when it was only accessible at certain universities), I was a senior about to graduate. I had made it through all of high school and college without a cellphone. (I had a long-distance calling card for use on land lines.) I had no online presence. There was no digital Samantha, my evil-twin avatar. There was just me, a confused and deeply-closeted twenty-year old.
Millennials learned to build things with code. I learned Basic, then HTML. I made my own video games; built websites from scratch; programmed online music to make blips and beats like on Bjork’s Vespertine or on Kid A. It’s why I so admire Charli’s complex hyperpop: its cascading synths and glitchy rhythms. This is music that harkens back to the turn of the century, back to that historical crux when Web 1.0 became 2.0 and we all became “prosumers”—simultaneous producers and consumers of digital content. This is when we got caught up in the web—in the Mirror World—and couldn’t ever get out again.
I don’t think of this as a historical wrong turn, and yet twenty years on we find ourselves thoroughly ensconced in a hybridized life. It is not hard to look around at our current moment and see the manifestations of Klein’s and Charli’s Mirror World. We have a presidential election that will hinge on misinformation, the distortions of artificial intelligence, and the spreading of outright lies. And we have young women—teenage girls—caught in an epidemic of self-loathing, a surge in sadness and anxiety that experts have linked to social media usage. Klein suggests that in the 2020s all of our digital avatars have become “brands.” Whether on dating apps or on Instagram, we are commodifying and marketing ourselves to each other. It is the ultimate triumph of capitalism over the personal. Our selves have become digital currency.
I tried to get off of Instagram, but I failed. I turned off notifications and I buried the app deep inside my phone. But I did not delete it altogether. I reasoned with myself: won’t I want to post about this BRAT essay when it comes out?
But the answer cannot be simply to unplug. In his Atlantic piece, Kornhaber describes BRAT as needling the “tensions inherent in modern feminism’s simultaneous encouragement of careerism and sisterly solidarity.” Yet more than that, BRAT also strikes at the tensions between online engagement and IRL connections. We can do both, and perhaps we need both.
I think of BRAT Feminism as a guidebook for young womanhood in an age when the digital has become a permanent part of what it means to be a girl. BRAT calls on us to celebrate the joys of music (bumping those “Club Classics”), fashion, and beauty because women deserve these things. We deserve joy and self-indulgence; we deserve to be bratty when we want to be; we deserve to have wild and messy times out with our friends. We deserve bread and roses. All these things are the vanguard of a post-patriarchal (post-shame, post-guilt) world.
But BRAT also reminds us to “press rewind”—to find the exit sign in this hall of mirrors. Turn off notifications. Delete the app. Call your damn friends. Visit them. Make time for one another. Be vulnerable with each other. Be intimate. Have those hard conversations. Women in partnership with other women can change the world, one messy friendship at a time.
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