It is common for the months of June to August, summertime in steady heat and oak smelling evenings, wistful nights and grass pressing our feet — to be characterized in a certain way, depending on the year, the social landscape, the historical ramifications.
Summer of 2020 was COVID, we were locked inside making sourdough, whipping coffee, and taking walks to feel a sense of normalcy, feel air on our skin. Summer 2022 was hot, record breaking, and the first normal summer since the pandemic still marred with shootings and unrest. And now, there is Summer 2023 forever known as, only, Girlhood Summer.
There were many factors that painted summer 2023 with a specific saturated pink hue, bathing it in a rather luminous sense and feeling.
There was the Eras Tour and Taylor Swift, her first tour in five years arriving on the scene with a fervor unseen before. Suddenly grown women were pre-teens again, belting Enchanted from car windows. Girls made friendship bracelets and traded them at shows, handed them out to security guards, lined their arms up to their elbows.
And then there was Barbie, the doll we played with when we were young, sinking her in makeshift pools in the summer, running her around our neighborhoods. She was back and better than ever in Greta Gerwig’s film — a movie that captured what it means to be a woman in this world, and suddenly we were all old, but also young. Women, but also girls.
And everything in between.
I saw Barbie the day it came out. I was there at Taylor’s last Eras Tour performance, in a stadium filled with girls dressed in pink and purple. I spent the summer with my younger sister and one of my best friends, even unemployed and growing irate with the world, Girlhood Summer seeped in.
It choked me up when I thought of it. That for years a certain dream for summer had been missing and we didn’t know what it was. Then suddenly girls are unabashedly girls again, with pink clothes and heartbreak music and friendship bracelets. Suddenly, those beautiful things aren’t so bad.
Maybe we created Girlhood summer because we needed it. Roe v Wade has been overturned for a year, we’re entering an election cycle featuring a former president that has mocked women and women’s rights. Our reproductive health is being called into question, our freedoms are being challenged.
Maybe for a summer we needed to remember the good things. The little things that reminded us what it was like to run down the street without shoes, to be young and so unafraid. To smile and wear pink lipstick and not think twice.
There is a scene in the Barbie movie, where Barbie roller skates by the beach and grows uncomfortable when she realizes men are staring at her, watching her. It is a kind of skin crawling feeling that all women can recognize and we did, sitting in dark theaters. We know.
Girlhood Summer was born out of a collective understanding amongst women. Things are not good, maybe they never have been, but there were moments when they were. There were moments when we were happy and we felt this inexplicable joy that could not be touched by the stares of men. We remembered what it was like to be girls.
So, we revived those little girls inside us, we brought them back. Because we needed to.
I hope we might not forget the particular joy that was found in Girlhood Summer, the hopeful healing that might have happened, after a year of being beaten down. I hope when summer 2024 roles around, we might revive it again. Because there might not always be a want for Girlhood Summer, but there is always a little girl in need.
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