How the indie-sleaze revival, hyper-pop and jersey club are leading the reclamation of femininity both inside and outside the club.
There are a few certain facts in life: 1) Nothing good happens after 3am 2) Shrek 2 is the best sequel of all time 3) Pineapple may or may not belong on pizza, either way it's a boring topic and we should all move on and 4) The head cheerleader is a bitch and the dorky but cool, tomboyish girl in the background deserves the hottie.
All of these are resoundingly and without question true. Or at least when it comes to number 4, that’s all any movie, TV show or book has ever led us to believe.
Personally, I blame Jane Austen. If she hadn’t made Elizabeth Bennett so magnetic and alluring with her wit, sarcasm and general disdain for the serpentine intricacies of dating life then maybe we, as a culture, wouldn’t be so obsessed with the lowkey, effortless, yet still super hot baddie. And don’t even get me started on Alcott, she didn’t do much for the cause either. In creating a character so widely beloved as Jo March, I personally condemn her as responsible for the atrocities committed against the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.
Now let me pause for a second. What does Pride and Prejudice and Little Women have to do with our beloved y2k icons I hear you ask? And why do I feel so personally involved in the situation? Well, in order for me to elaborate, we’re going to have to go back a bit. 24 years, 3 months, 1 week and 7 days to be exact.
For the real fans reading, yes you’re right. That does take us back to my birthday, thanks so much for noticing.
The year was 2000, Smooth by Santana featuring Rob Thomas was topping the charts (can’t think of a better walk out song tbh) and I was being a coy little diva by sitting on my umbilical cord (I always did love a dramatic entrance). Alas, once that was all sorted, eventually I was free to go home and embark upon the journey of growing up in the early 2000s.
When we think of y2k today, we think of low-waisted pants, great pop music and thin eyebrows. Now while all of this is true, for the average kid in suburban Melbourne, it mainly meant filling school holidays with shitloads of TV and dealing with all the wild and wonderful consequences that came with unfiltered access to The Simpsons and Family Guy.
I was a massive TV kid who grew up with 3 older brothers and no female cousins that lived within 1,800 kilometres of me. Therefore, I didn’t have any older divas in my life to show me that being a girl was fun. Disastrously, I had to learn how to be a twenty-first Century girl from early 2000s pop culture. My mum tried her best but there’s only so much social conditioning that one woman can try to unravel.
In effect, as a child, my understanding of what it meant to be a young woman was shaped by the villainous portrayals of the bitchy head cheerleaders and blonde ‘bimbos’ that projected into my living room each night. A never-ending carousel of ‘Staceys’ and ‘Tiffanys’ haunted me and clouded my judgement of what it meant to be an overtly feminine person. With no positive representation of female friendship that wasn’t shaped by a mutual hatred of the ‘popular girl’, I gradually but effectively distanced myself from anything feminine.
The mind doesn’t have to stretch far to conjure up examples of what I’m getting at. Mean Girls, She’s the Man, The Princess Diaries, She’s All That and 10 Things I Hate About You are just some of the movies that come to mind. All of these films uphold the stereotype of a bitchy, ditzy, blonde airhead who acts as the villain and punchline for the peculiar, endearing, main character whose central appeal revolves around their refreshing and decidedly un-feminine disposition. If you’re still struggling to see what I’m getting at, just listen to the lyrics of You Belong With Me and it will all make sense.
As I entered tweendom and started to grow pubes, I slowly started to participate in mainstream girliness, a process that brought me so much shame that I have a vivid memory of begging my mum not to tell my brothers that I liked Justin Bieber. For some reason, the horror of being associated with anything feminine was a legitimate cause for distress, so much so that my teen years saw me undergo the pick-me rite of passage wherein I cherished the title bestowed upon me and basked in the glory of being described as ‘one of the boys’.
Growing up in a world that lacks positive representation of what embracing femininity could look like does little for those of us who don’t have a natural predisposition to girliness. And it wasn’t just the narratives of movies and TV that shaped this contempt for ‘girly girls’, it was also the public images of real life women that fuelled the fire.
In 2024, we look back at mugshots of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and think: icon. However, the surrounding commentary at the time was far less gracious. In the 2000s, the trainwreckification of many major female celebrities acted as a warning to young girls: if you harness your femininity in a way that serves you rather than the patriarchy, there will be consequences.
The fates of people like Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears, Megan Fox, Pamela Anderson and basically every other famous hottie ever, all culminate in one resounding message for the little girls watching at home: once you become a sex object, it takes years of work to be seen as anything else. I mean seriously, Audrey Hepburn was part of the Dutch Resistance during WWII and history remembers her as pretty. Makes sense.
But let’s get back to me. As many women in the public eye got increasingly ‘crazy’ (enter stage right: Miley Cyrus) and media channels churned out more content that subscribed to the ‘evil hottie/quirky tragic’ complex (enter stage left: Love, Rosie), 2014(ish) saw me really solidify the ‘not like other girls’ forcefield that I had built around myself.
Even as I got older and the advent of boys, parties and clubbing guided me into a new era of femininity, mentally there was still something inside me that dreaded being underestimated on account of my girliness.
So what changed? What forces took me away from my internalised misogyny and into the proud woman I am today? That’s where music and sex appeal come into the picture.
We’re roughly in the 2019-2021 period of my life now and the club music around this time was very techno heavy. When I was going out in my late teens and early twenties, it seemed that in an effort to create distance from the ‘cringe’ and sleazy dance music of the 2010s, the tide had instead swayed in the complete opposite direction. Fun, flirty and euphoric songs were replaced with heavy, hypnotic and bass driven tracks. While I can get around some hard techno as much as the next person, it doesn’t exactly get you in touch with your body and your energy as much as more rhythmic styles of music do. And as fun as it is to get entranced by a set and turn your mind off for a few hours, I think we can all admit there’s nothing sexy about a bunch of 20 year olds two-stepping in a dark room.
Sex and music have always gone hand in hand and that of the early 2000s and 2010s is some of the horniest I’ve ever heard.
Much like low rise jeans, chunky belts and side parts; the trashy and playful music of the 2010s needed to take a break before we could be ready to accept it again. It’s like when you go through a breakup or a pet dies: you have to wait an appropriate amount of time before you can get a new one. And as always, there’s nothing like a global tragedy to get the world back into sexy music.
In the same way that an entire era of unserious and tongue-in-cheek music followed the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, the post-pandemic music scene erupted with a 2010s, indie-sleaze revival reinvigorated for gen-z by the new-age sounds of hyperpop.
In effect, a beautiful cultural shift began to manifest.
A generation of people who felt their youth was stripped away from them during the pandemic began to lead the renaissance of youth culture. In an effort to get back to the inner-child that almost withered away during lockdown, those of us who grew up in the 2000s brought back the good bits of our childhoods while leaving behind all the bullshit. Take the flirtiness, confidence and sex appeal of the 2000s, leave behind the outdated and reductive gender norms and voila: you have a perfect ecosystem of inclusive indulgence.
And yes of course, a big round of applause for the return of sexy club music.
While a few years ago techno reigned supreme in Australia, the years after lockdown saw a seismic shift towards the likes of Jersey club, hyper-pop, speed garage and jungle. It appears that if you’ve almost lost the most formative years of your life, all you want to do is shake some ass.
Which leads us nicely back to me.
A hop, skip, a Barbie movie and a Brat album later: outrageous and unabashed girliness is officially in, and I am SO here for it. After spending most of my life in an intense battle with internalised misogyny, who knew that all it would take to dismantle such a perspective was going out and getting freaky with the girls.
In all seriousness though, there is something to be said about the power of music and community in helping people access the core of their being. I know, because it happened to me. Music builds community, as all art does. There’s a reason why a certain crowd will dress a certain way and go to certain gigs: it's because in a world where technology isolates us from each other, music and art are some of the last things we have left that draw people together.
It sounds a bit silly, but going to gigs and festivals where everyone dances with reckless abandon to slutty and wacky music genuinely helped me get in touch with the most intimate parts of myself and helped me heal my relationship with my femininity. I’ve met PhD students in line for a drink and held back the hair of future Prime Ministers. I’ve borrowed a hair-tie from the woman who will cure cancer and waited for the toilet with someone who will bring peace to the Middle East. Each of them are a walking contradiction to the patriarchal expectations that reduce women to one-dimensional creatures, and each of them taught me that you don’t have to tone down your girliness to be ambitious and deadly.
It’s as if I’ve stumbled through a trap door and almost by accident, fallen into the woman that I was always destined to be. For years, it felt as if my ideal self was hidden somewhere out of bounds, as if I was walking in the dark sensing someone was near me but having no way of knowing if they were actually there.
It wasn’t until I let myself slip that I was able to find my feet in a whole different way.
Breaking through my limiting beliefs (particularly those around my gender) and surrounding myself with people who bring out the most weird and wonderful parts of me made me realise that I love being me and even more than that, I fucking love being a girl.
With the reelection of Donald Trump, the continuing rise of violence against women and the ever-present threats to our reproductive rights, it has never been more important for women to build community and unapologetically take up space - so why don’t we start on the dancefloor? The simple but defiant act of throwing it back to some Jersey Club without a care of who's watching nourishes the soul in a way that men will never truly understand. The more that we, as women, come into ourselves and feed our souls with art and connection, the harder it will be for others to tear us down.
This isn’t just about dancing or music or early 2000s movies. This is about pride and presence. Shame is the gateway to isolation and isolation is the precursor to control. The more shameless we become in how we celebrate our girlhood (in all the diverse and beautiful ways that can manifest) the more powerful and present we’ll be off the dancefloor as well. It might start with a good night out with the girls, but it ends with a supportive network and a big fuck you to all the systems that told us we could either be girly or taken seriously. Not both.
I may not have grown up with sisters but I’m eternally grateful to have found my own along the way. To all the divas in my life who have taken me in and shown me how fulfilling and enlightening it is to embrace my feminine energy, thank you, this one’s for you.