An Ode to Tween Girl Summer
Letting my inner horse girl free 🐎
Apologies for missing last week’s article! I had every intention of using my train home from Osheaga to gush about the magic of summer music festivals.
I fell asleep instead. A rare rebellion for a girl who never - not once - forgot her homework.
August has me wilding…
2023 has been dubbed Tween Girl Summer. It’s a season of glitter, #Barbiecore, and legendary pop tours.
My TikTok timeline is largely a collection of Eras Tour bracelet DIYs, Glee clips, and increasingly niche ACOTAR memes (iykyk). In Montréal, I wore parachute pants and squealed when Nelly Furtado made a guest appearance. I feel like I’m living in a nostalgic highlight reel.
But Tween Girl Summer is so much more.
Women are discovering universal experiences and “cannon events” en masse. In the past month, I’ve learned that we scavenge girl dinners, justify purchases with girl math, and have all been long-term long-distance low-commitment casual girlfriends.
The theatre-wide guffaw when Ken played guitar at Barbie awoke a wave of shared female experiences. We’ve been rolling our eyes at douchebags in private when we could have been rolling them together.
This August, we’re collectively shrieking, “Meet me behind the mall” with a ferocity only mustered by girls who’ve been ditched outside of an American Eagle.
Which, it turns out, we all were.
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While we waited for the next act at the festival, my friend asked: “Can you name the smelly kid from your elementary school?”
The group instantly replied in a chorus of first and last names. We identified kids from different years, different school boards, and different provinces.
Everyone remembers the smelly kid.
I’ve since been reflecting on other ubiquitous moments of tweendom. For example:
Horse girls
That one friend who simply could not make it through a sleepover
Being asked if you were a virgin before knowing what that word meant
Someone getting stung by a wasp at recess
Pretending to accidentally start a conversation with a boy you liked on MSN
The thrill and shame of buying your first bra
A kid with an older brother explaining what “69” means
Frantically counting change in line at a Starbucks cash register
The memories are visceral because they’re coated in awkwardness. As a tween, I was simultaneously the most confident and insecure I’ve ever been.
I remember being horrified that my school uniform fit me differently than everyone else. I was convinced my thighs were the largest, grossest thighs that had ever existed.
At the same time, I cut my hair into a pixie cut, fully believing I would look like an America’s Next Top Model contestant.
I stopped my chronic pain treatments because I thought the cupping bruises were humiliating. Being uncomfortable was less important than fitting in - a truth further demonstrated by my commitment to ballet flats.
In peak tweendom, I doubled down into a Twilight obsession. I attended the midnight book releases, made fan shirts on Zazzle (not joking), and picked fights with classmates who said they were #TeamJacob.
The Jonas Brothers, however, were the lamest band I’d ever heard.
Despite the obvious contradictions, I was convinced that the coolest thing I could have was a strong opinion. I - unlike my mainstream classmates - had convictions. I had taste.
In reality, I was just as lost as everyone else in 8th grade. We existed as nebulous, smelly creatures that latched onto whatever we thought made us cool.
Of course, “cool” was defined by committee. More aggravatingly, it was always a moving target.
Whenever I found something I liked, I brought it to my best friend for approval. Is it weird to still use Club Penguin? Am I allowed to have a crush on this boy? What is our opinion on Girlicious? Peta or Gale?
Once - and only once - the interest was sanctioned, we’d dive head-first into obsession. No one will ever understand fandom like tween girls.
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I sometimes see the same patterns in adulthood.
We suss out each other’s reactions to each new scandal before overcommitting. The future of COVID variants is forever uncertain. Being a fan has become risky business (not even Lizzo is safe). Close friends are nervous to ask each other if they want children.
“It’s 2023,” they say. “I didn’t want to accidentally offend you.”
Not to mention that I have suddenly and inexplicably aged. Millennials became old the second Gen Z coined “cheugy” on TikTok, and I’m once again on uncertain ground with slang and trends.
The vibes are ✨insecure✨.
It’s not just me picking up on the tween energy (tweenergy?). Elizabeth Segran writes for Fast Company:
This is our first summer since the pandemic was officially declared over. For many of us, this moment is one of excitement about the future, twinged with anxiety. This ambivalence is a hallmark of the tween years, experts say, and is a kind of metaphor for the psychological state we find ourselves in now.
My life feels like 13-going-on-30. I, too, wake up confused at how I ended up sharing a bed, mortgage, and grocery list with an adult man. Wasn’t I just begging my mom to drive me to the movies?
The last few years apart have extrapolated the aging process. Like Jenna Rink, we all aged behind closed doors.
No wonder we want to slow down and soak in the glitter this summer. No wonder everything now feels like an event.
You aren’t just going to The Eras Tour or Barbie. You’re buying the outfits, making the bracelets, learning the chants, and inviting your friends. At least that's what all the cool kids are doing.
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As an adult, I have the resources to make my tween fantasies a reality. I can - without insecurity - own every lame obsession, fashion trend, and awkward phase I went through. And now I get to do it with boobs.
What is Osheaga but my tween dream? A 3-day sleepover with revealing clothing, crazy makeup, junk food, and glowsticks!?
What is #Barbiecore but a chance to do over the outfits of our girlhood?
What is girl dinner but a reprisal of mall food lunches?
What is standing outside of The Eras Tour but a reinvention of the most popular tween behaviour of all: loitering?
The only difference is that we’ve shed the embarrassment. We no longer need the approval of other 12-year-olds to enjoy something. We can indulge without shame.
And we do.
The kids obsessed with mermaids, horses, and Nick Jonas had something right all along. They always knew that everyone was equally cringe. They were made fun of, but they’ve lived their Tween Girl Summer since the beginning.
It’s the age-old adage: Either die cool or live long enough to see yourself become the horse girl.