NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE E ver get the urge to scurry around cities and fight the patriarchy with your grubby little hands? You might be a Rat Girl, according to TikTok.
“Rat Girl summer,” as the Washington Post defines it, is “a TikTok movement that emphasizes living like a rat: scurrying around the streets at all hours of the day and night, snacking to your heart’s delight, and going to places you have no business going to.” Some women use the label as an excuse for mischief, the Spectator reports. Women “forage” for food (steal) and live shamelessly (do whatever they feel like doing, regardless of the consequences). Rat Girl summer gives women license to be “completely selfish,” one tech worker told the Spectator: “As women, we are taught to cater to others’ feelings, and the rat girl concept rejects that and asks you to prioritize yourself.”
“Bed-rot,” “girl dinner,” “NPC streamers,” and now Rat Girls are all popular social-media movements — bizarre and seemingly silly ones. Regard such trends with caution and concern, however irrelevant they seem: Young people take this nonsense seriously.
I’m 22, so I had a relatively screen-less childhood. Mine is the last generation with the ability to escape social media’s grip (though not all of us break free) because we learned from parents that adulthood and reality exist separate from technology. Our parents met each other in person, had filing cabinets, and still referenced encyclopedias. Compared with previous generations, ours had loads of technology — but social media didn’t shape our personalities, at least not completely.
Not so today. For children, TikTok is the real world, and social-media trends are real life. Those trends don’t translate well into reality as most understand it.
Have you noticed that girls now blanket-compliment each other with the word “slay”? Has anyone “purr”-ed at you? These are phrases made popular by TikTok, confined right now to a vernacular that’s hard to understand without social media. Language might in the future be dependent on social-media-isms, especially when the youngest generation grows up.
Are TikTok trends more important than Hunter Biden’s shady business deals, inflation, or the next presidential election? Probably not. But what teens consume today will shape their adulthood (excuse me: the period in which they are “adulting”). A future with Rat Girls in charge . . . doesn’t look so bright.
Popular media and culture have always influenced language — everything from ’90s sitcoms to hip-hop to the internet itself — but TikTok disseminates information with incredible speed and makes niche trends appear common, and normal. They are not, and some children don’t know better. Parental control is the recourse for what we’ve long suspected: The kids, largely because of social media, are not alright.
Keeping children off of social media would be the best solution. If that’s too difficult, parents should ban the use of TikTok, limit screen time, or take away phones during school. Otherwise, trends that normalize laziness, explore the intersection between gaming and sex work, or glorify hedonism will form their kids’ minds.