why do you want to be the hottest girl in the grocery store?

being hot is not meant to be pleasurable

‘It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me.’

– Charli XCX, ‘Von Dutch’ 

‘Publicity does not manufacture the dream. All that it does is to propose to each one of us that we are not yet enviable – yet could be.’ 

– John Berger, Ways of Seeing 

I care about being hot. 

It feels self-indulgent to admit this, stripped of ironic distance or a catchy backing track. I should create a meme about it, or write a pop song about it, or make a purchase about it. “I have to be the hottest girl at the grocery store,” “Look hot when I’m bumping that,” or “hot girl stomach problems” are all acceptable formulations of this desire, ones we swallow greedily as we scroll through our algorithms. Post-Ozempic, post-irony, post-Victoria’s Secret, post-body positivity, we’ve generated a whole new way to talk about vanity and self-perception and desirability. Just don’t be too earnest about it. 

Like Charli XCX’s music video for ‘365’, in which she gathers fourteen of her (hot) friends to “fulfil the prophecy of finding a new internet hot girl,” the way we talk about hotness now is both entirely silly and entirely serious. But I’m not sure, exactly, what the joke is. Rachel Sennott is doing her most self-aware, gum-chewing, annoying-girl voice when she says that line, but if it’s meant to be self-aware, then what is it aware of? 

Julia Fox, Charli XCX, and Rachel Sennott on the set of the 360 music video

What makes “hot” different from beautiful, or cute, or even sexy? The literary critic Sianne Ngai has argued that “consumer aesthetics” like “cute” (rather than “beautiful”, which belongs to high art) give us a historically concrete way to think about “capitalism’s most socially binding processes: production, circulation, and consumption”. “Hot” exists in opposition to Ngai’s definition of “cute”, where “smallness, compactness, softness,” results in the cute object seeming “helpless, pitiful, and even despondent”. Hotness incites touch, but it does not invite it. You might be drawn to fire, but the heat keeps you at bay. Cute objects are “subordinate”; hot girls are threatening. Cute “invokes the desire to protect”, hot invokes the alluring two-faced heat of jealous possession – do I wanna be her or be on her? 

Hotness is power, in the sense that we’ve been taught that to be desired is to be powerful. 

Paris Hilton

Culturally, ‘hot’ has long had this ironic, detached twang to it – I’m thinking about Paris Hilton’s drawled response to literally anything and everything: “That’s hot.” This irony is important because it provides us with distance from the very thing we desire – desirability itself. It is embarrassing to admit that you want people to like you, to covet you, to be jealous of you. Charli, again: “When you’re in the mirror, do you like what you see? / When you’re in the mirror, you’re just looking at me.” Sabrina Carpenter: “You’ll just have to taste me / When he’s kissing you.” Bragging in pop music is nothing new, and has long-borrowed from the attitudes and stylings of female rappers in hyping themselves up, often with less interesting results. But notice the way desire is formulated here, not as the desire for love or even sex, but for something much harder, colder, fundamentally capitalist in structure: your hotness is working to manufacture envy. In Ways of Seeing, the art critic John Berger wrote that “personal social envy” had become a “common and widespread emotion,” one in which “the state of being envied is what constitutes glamour”. Berger did not know that an entirely new industry based on glamorous social envy would emerge thirty years after he wrote Ways of Seeing. We call it influencing, but Berger would have recognised it for what it was: 

“Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others.”

Hotness is fundamentally about the way other people see you, not about how you feel. It is necessarily socially constructed, built from the pillars of whiteness and thinness. It is heavily gendered and heavily surveilled. And because we are not talking about direct subjective experience, because to be “hot” is about how you are perceived, we need distance to be hot. As Berger writes, “being envied is a solitary form of reassurance,” one which “depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.” The only way to be hot is to seem like you don’t care. That’s where irony comes in. That’s where memes are born.

And that’s where hotness gets lonely. 

Hotness is thriving more than ever, because we’re more ironic and more lonely than ever. Thanks to Ozempic, you’re allowed to want to be skinny again (rather than “healthy,” which just meant skinny with a pilates subscription). The Victoria’s Secret show is back. Body positivity choked to death on its own mantras. Woke is dead.  Gen Z don’t have sex and don’t go dancing, but they’ll still buy “hot girl books” and “hot girl vitamins”.  This is all a convenient media narrative, but it also speaks to a weird, worrying place we’ve reached in culture. We’re laser-focused on being the hottest girl in the grocery store, but why? What’s the end-goal?

A tweet following Lana del Rey’s Coachella 2024 set

The other week, I said something to someone that I knew sounded trite. What I said was: “Being skinny is not the most important thing you can be.” She literally rolled her eyes. I get it: the words smack of the body positivity movement, carrying with them the heavy sticky fragrance of meaningless aphorisms and t-shirt feminism. I wanted to scream: yes, but it’s still TRUE! When I was fourteen and in the throes of an eating disorder, it was the realisation that I was trading thinness for happiness that finally pushed me into recovery. What I perceived as “hotness” came at a price: people complimented my body, but what about the dinners I skipped, the birthday cakes I declined, the drunken laughter over a slice of pizza late at night? 

Ozempic cleaves, neatly apart, the idea that being considered “hot” is pleasurable. Patients taking Ozempic report that they are not just uninterested in eating: they’re no longer going out and staying late, no longer drinking or dancing or smoking. They do not lack the energy to do these things – they just don’t want to do them. So what are people doing with their new, thin bodies? Where are they taking them? Who are they making love to or fucking with them? What do they do with them at birthdays, at dinner parties, at holiday meals? What are they gaining from thinness, beyond envy in the guise of social acceptance? 

Skinny isn’t just back in vogue – it’s no longer a dirty word. In some ways, I think this has led to more nuanced conversations than the body positivity movement allowed, with its one strict commandment: “Love thyself!”. A lesser-discussed theme on Brat is body image: on the ‘girl so confusing’ remix, Lorde reveals that the reason she kept cancelling plans with Charli was because “For the last couple years I’ve been at war with my body / I tried to starve myself thinner / And then I gained all the weight back”.  And on ‘Rewind’, Charli admits that while she eats at “the good restaurants” now, she’s “always thinking about my weight”. Vulnerability is more human and more interesting than an Instagram post that tells you to “love your hip dips!” (I didn’t even know there was a word for this part of my body until I was told it was something to be ashamed of but also forgiven). But then again… remember this summer, when Lana del Rey appeared at Coachella, suddenly thinner, and was met with religious adulation? It was like a second-coming: the Hot Girl, she lives! I’d never made a “skinny thoughts” joke before this year, and now it’s slid deep into my vocabulary. 

I watched The Substance two weeks ago, and I’m still thinking about what a lonely movie it was. The real horror of the film is not the bleeding, leaking, oozing special effects or prosthetics, the moments so disgusting that some people at my screening started laughing for lack of a better response. What scared me was the thought that we spend all this time and money and thought on making ourselves hot, and for what? Our appearance is directly tied to how we’re treated – as Berger writes, a woman “has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.” But it’s clear that this is a hollow victory – and one in which, inevitably, your humanity lasts only as long as the collagen in your cheeks. So this is a quest that never ends, and there is no holy grail at the top. The true horror of The Substance is that desirability is not a pleasurable thing to embody, and yet we’re encouraged to spend all of our time, all of our money, all of our soul in pursuit of it. At the end of the film, I thought: but what was all that for? What did Elisabeth and Sue actually gain from hotness? 

The only pleasure in the film is that which other people (including the viewer) get from Elisabeth and Sue’s bodies. This includes Sue and Elisabeth themselves, who are captivated and held captive by Sue’s perfect hotness. In injecting herself with the Substance, Elisabeth makes horribly literal that one John Berger quote: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” In the film, a giant billboard of Sue is planted outside Elisabeth’s apartment window, which means she can’t leave the house without observing herself (as the film reminds us over and over: “YOU ARE ONE”). Berger writes that a woman’s “own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another”. The prize for being the hottest girl is your own dissolution. 

The Substance (2024)

So what is the alternative? Let’s look back, for a moment, at loneliness. Envy contrives to make everyone lonely – splitting us into the firm categories of adorer or adored. Halfway through The Substance, my friend Emily turned to me and said: “None of this would’ve happened if she had friends!”. Whenever I listen to the ‘girl so confusing’ remix, I am moved – bizarrely, almost to tears – by the exchange at the end of the song, when Lorde says “You know I ride for you Charli,” and Charli answers, “You know I ride for you too.” The original song, pre-remix, is all about envy, the way it splits you open and directs your self-hatred towards someone else, only for it to reflect back onto you in an endless mirror funhouse. I think the most corrosive emotion I have ever experienced is jealousy – the girls I compared myself to, and hated, at school; the exes of my partners; the friends whose beauty or success I took as a personal affront. But I don’t want to be in this competition! I don’t want to win anything that means someone else loses. I don’t want to be chosen. 

I’ve posited “hotness” in this essay as an entirely negative thing, an instrument of capitalism and misogyny and racism, and I think the way it’s presented to us is in no way conducive to a happy, hopeful, or pleasurable life. But one of the best discoveries of my adulthood so far is that the people you love are so, so, hot – most of all when they’re smiling at you, or their foreheads are scrunched up in concentration, or they’re laughing at their own joke. And when you realise this about other people, you begin to see it in yourself, too. I’ve never felt hotter than when I’m dancing with my friends, sweaty and free and uncoordinated.

This is hot in the sense of magnetic, hot in the sense of warmth, hot in the sense of human, hot in the sense of sweat and sunshine and embraces. When you reject distance, when you realise that envy is not the greatest emotion you can elicit in other people, when you do something with your body instead of priming it purely to be looked at, you embody that heat, too. 

💌stay tuned for part 2 – on why irony poisoning is killing your love life💌