Gabrielle #18 – Brat Summer

The art of topping from the bottom.

A part of Charli XCX’s viral marketing campaign has involved counselling straight men who are asking how they, as straight men, can have a ‘brat summer.’ Firstly: I don’t believe this is a genuine line of enquiry, but that’s fine. We’re all having a laugh on the internet, aren’t we. Everything is [thumping hard techno beat] advertising. But, more to the point: they’re already having one. They’ve been having a brat summer, winter, spring, life…

If you don’t know about bratting, there’s not much to explain. It’s a sex thing, obviously: a BDSM dynamic where the “brat” deliberately acts up to create problems and the “tamer” (I hate these terms so much jesus christ) doles out punishments and rewards as they see fit. Needless to say this has, in recent years, become extremely prevalent. It overlaps with daddy / mommy trends because there’s often a dd/lg element involved (you can Google that one yourself, I refuse to spell it out on My Newsletter). The fundamental appeal of e-girls – arguably the only true sex symbols of the internet age – relies on their ability to make you feel both annoyed and horny at the same time, which is the essence of bratting. Hypermasculine people and self-infantalising people typically gravitate towards each other but react like oil and water, so it’s a way of settling the difference there too.

It doesn’t always have to do with any of those things, though. It can just be a laugh. It’s a rare banter-based kink, which is something I can get behind. You give someone shit, find their buttons and press them, enter into a silly little dance where one person pretends they don’t want to lose the fight they started and the other pretends they don’t like being provoked. Sometimes it’s a time and place thing. Sometimes it’s fully integrated into a relationship or lifestyle (spend enough time on the /BratLife subreddit and you’ll find examples of brats, say, taping a harmonica to the underside of their man’s truck so it whistles when he drives and he can’t figure out why). In any case it’s a struggle that gives power to and undermines all parties simultaneously. There are more masochistic people who would disagree with that, and they would also argue that anything that feels good isn’t a “real punishment,” but whatever. This is how I see it: when it’s not dd/lg related, it’s a game of wits over physicality. The brat exercises authority by defying it until they get their arse handed to them, the dom (another foul word) acquires it by finding ways to get them under control. Joker Vs Batman for people who say “cummies.”

I’m now about to go hog wild theorising why bratting is having a moment in the zeitgeist, tangential to an inescapable album of the same name. So let me preface what’s to come by saying: most writing about sex and relationships is bad because it’s done by people who over intellectualise things from a distance rather than live them. You can smell these people a fucking mile off because they spend all day online issuing armchair doomer analysis like “women in their prime are GARDENING because choking porn has destroyed men’s capacity for conversation!” (the North American way), or write memoir-style books about how casual sex is exploitative (the Oxbridge way). Believe me when I say I would not be giving this one second of brain space if it wasn’t something I’ve noticed happening in the streets. But brat summer is real, it is upon us, and it’s not just about wearing a strappy white top and getting a hoisin duck wrap meal deal from Boots. With that said, the most realistic answer as to why is also the most obvious: everyone wants to win.

That is a massively overlooked motivation in conversations about sex and dating generally. Or, if not overlooked, then wilfully ignored because it is both obvious and humiliating to admit. Everyone wants to feel desirable. Everyone wants to be the big dawg. At the very least, everyone wants to feel good about themselves. This is the strongest force and the biggest source of conflict within the heterosexual sexual marketplace in the 2020s, because we get that validation from very different places. 

Every woman I know is pathologically horny and, on balance, women derive their greatest sense of value from interpersonal relationships. Every man I know is pathologically horny but not to the extent that it becomes their primary focus (unless they’re depressed) because, on balance, men derive their greatest sense of value from their own goal setting. Work. Smashing a V6 on the climbing wall. Collecting every single sandwich receipt from Wawa until they get all the numbers from 0 to 999. Things of that nature. I’m generalising, obviously, but if you boil it down enough it is often as simple as that. No one has enough time to have it all, so we focus on the things most important to us. As a result we get half-truth discourses like “the sexual revolution has failed” and “men don’t actually like sex,” when in reality most of us are just trying to stand on solid ground. For all sorts of reasons, women – myself included – are more likely to plant our roots in people (or planets), rather than activities. It does not feel epic to lose a fight for a man’s attention to Football Manager, but each to their own. Serenity now!

This disconnect is responsible for a great many of our disappointments. So the game we end up playing, as we circle one another, is that men act aloof (even when they claim to be lonely) and women go to increasingly great lengths to become their top priority. To work a guy up so badly it overrides their reasoning and makes them do something they don’t actually want to do. Like Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, this is how we win. Reader, nobody wins… But in a bratting context, that is exactly what the brat gets to believe is happening, and the dom (I’m going to kill myself) gets to pretend isn’t.

In June, Feeld added “brat” and “brat tamer” to their list of tags. This was apparently prompted by a “47% increase in brat-related terms” in people’s bios already, which might have been more believable had they not done it one week after Brat, the album, was released. Nevertheless, it really seems to have unlocked something for straight blokes because now it’s fucking everywhere. Wherever you go there are men, desperately seeking brats. They aren’t weirdo men either, by the way. I do think that’s worth stressing. They’re overwhelmingly normal. Into brunch. Go on holiday with their parents. “Completed it mate” caption on a photo of a trig point. They all want a little nightmare who will give them a bit of lip in a controlled environment.

And is it any wonder? Bratting is fun because it levels the playing field. It lets everyone win at their own game. It lets women be smart-mouthed and manipulative and it lets men be controlling and punitive. And then it lets you both cave without having to cop to it. No winners, no losers. Only a cycle of power that goes around and around, feeding the irresistible fantasy that anyone has control over anything at all. A brief but mutually beneficial respite from the endless gender wars.

Brat encompasses many of the same tensions. It’s a combative album from an artist who has often been perceived as intimidating, rude, a “mean girl.” Instead of writing these assumptions off as A Result Of The Patriarchy, Charli steps into them. Pushes them to conceptual heights. From the compressed font to the Get Your Own Back gunge shade of green, everything about the presentation is deliberately irritating. Every song is about feelings that are ugly on women: jealousy, insecurity, narcissism, anger, the drive to succeed. It’s also about the fork in the road that emerges in your early 30s where half your social circle starts having babies and the other half remains suspended in a Millennial Railcard heyday of getting the bag in and talking about it constantly. It’s “oh yeah? make me” writ large. Thematically it’s an alienating album to me personally but it does capture something in the ether, which is that we’re all topping from the bottom, anyway. Why not elevate it into an art form?

PSA for subscribers: Sorry I’ve been a little quiet lately. Looming book deadline, etc. I’ll be more active in the coming weeks. Thanks for bearing with me.