Horny girl autumn is here to give us a second chance at living the hot girl summer fantasy
“Megan Fox, Kourtney Kardashian, Travis Barker, and Machine Gun Kelly all kissed in a bathroom,” read the latest headlines of the week. Apart from pioneering a ‘socially-distanced’ take on lip locks, also known as tongue touches, the double dates fuelled an entire era of power PDA at the 2021 MTV VMAs—replacing a rather disappointing phenomenon in the process. Enter horny girl autumn in all its lacey glory, giving us a second chance at living the hot girl summer fantasy.
What is horny girl autumn?
Think Megan Fox’s iconic see-through dress and fresh-out-of-the-shower VMA hair, coupled with raunchy embraces and graphic PDAs with your boo. Someone in their horny girl autumn is edgy, crunchy and mega horny.
According to The Tab, she—we’ll just use the pronouns she/her for clarity even though the ‘girl’ part of the term can represent any gender—will exclusively wear all black and is a sucker for people in turtlenecks and edgy rings. Her ideal sexual fantasies include fireplaces and pumpkin-spiced lattes. In fact, chances are that she’s already been camping out on HalloweenTok and pre-planning her ‘horny devil’ outfit since July. Horny girl autumn doesn’t know nor wants to know any different. She’s here for a horny time rather than a long time.
From Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian making out on a carousel and sucking each other’s thumbs as they celebrate their birthdays decked in all-black to Laura Anderson and Dane Bowers’s public PDA and even Bennifer 2.0, hot girl autumn seems to be in full swing among A-listers. Remember that one Instagram post where Megan Fox admitted to ‘christening’ the table in her Airbnb room that she shared with Machine Gun Kelly (MGK)? While her fans sarcastically wondered if she ate a whole pizza by herself and Googled ways to be an Airbnb table in their next life, Grazia dubbed Fox as the “queen of hot girl autumn” herself.
“Celeb PDA is an interesting phenomenon,” brand expert Brenda Gabriel told FEMAIL. Acknowledging a spike in the number of celebrities “engaging in PDAs and being explicit online,” Gabriel equated horny girl autumn to a new wave of feminism. “In the 90s we had the Spice Girls with ‘in your face’ girl power—when women weren’t afraid to go after what they wanted and be vocal about it,” she said, adding how Kim Kadarshian, Beyoncé and Rihanna later paved the way for women to “own their hotness” regardless of what anyone else had to say.
Horny girl autumn not only echoes this movement but is also a steamier take on its ancestor which left us all disappointed once: hot girl summer. After an entire year of on and off lockdowns, strict regulations, social anxiety and bad weather, hot girl summer promised us one single thing: a tidal wave of sex. What did we get instead? A tidal wave of COVID variants. Don’t get me wrong, “vaxxed and waxed” did happen, but not quite to a scale that we were promised.
“Horny girl autumn is like the grown-up version of hot girl summer—women having fun and not needing a man to validate them,” Gabriel said. The expert also mentioned how women have always been seen as a ‘trophy’ of their male partners and horny girl autumn seems to turn that notion on its head. “Kourtney, Megan and JLo aren’t anyone’s trophy. They’re powerful women who are sexually confident and don’t care who knows it.”
Power PDA or explicit publicity?
Let’s be honest here, the Kardashian-Fox double date at the men’s toilet of the Barclays Center, New York has been one of the top highlights of the week. This begs the question: are we really in the age of power PDA or just explicit publicity?
According to Gabriel, Kourtney Kardashian has seen her market value skyrocket with the PDA documentation of her and Barker. “If we take some of Kourtney’s recent ‘candid reportage’ snaps with Travis, we’ll note that most photos have been taken by a bystander, avoiding any unflattering poses,” the expert explained. The photo of Kadarshian on a yacht, kneeling up to the Blink-182 drummer in a passionate kiss, is a perfect example of this.
Gabriel highlighted how the Kadarshian adopted the “he rather uncomfortable” Bambi pose which is favoured by influencers while wearing a swimsuit, because of the way it flatters the body—accentuating natural curves while avoiding all sorts of folds our skin is subjected to while kneeling. “What this demonstrates is that behind every seemingly carefree PDA photo is someone charged with getting the shot right.”
In many ways, PDAs are a great way for celebrities to live on brand while staying relevant. Such emotions essentially make celebrities more accessible and their lives more desirable. Its impact on horny girl autumn, however, links back to the ‘influence’ factor within celebrity culture. “Showing off wealth is so pre-pandemic,” Gabriel said. “What else could celebs possibly sell us the dream of? Great sex!” Horny girl autumn, therefore, hinges on the fact that we no longer have to worry about becoming ‘wealthy enough’ to afford a luxurious handbag—we just need to improve our sex lives. “If there’s one thing that we’re fascinated about as a nation, it’s how much sex everyone else is getting,” Gabriel added.
The trend has, in fact, already translated into fashion—with searches for ‘lace up’ surging 308 per cent on Boohoo. The Venice Film Festival also witnessed Zendaya single-handedly carrying the entire movement on her bare shoulders. Zoe Saldana and husband Marco Perogo were also pictured kissing on the red carpet while Grazia noted how Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas were all over each other at his concert. The trend has also been trickling down into the masses with dating app data reporting a surge in the ‘kiss’ and ‘heart’ emojis in bios.
Since all of that’s out in the open, hear me out. Hot girl summer walked so horny girl autumn could speedrun in her 8-inch pumps. And if you look closely enough, the phenomenon may have just been triggered in May with the cosy three-way PDA we were bestowed upon by Rita Ora and her boyfriend Taika Waititi with Tessa Thompson. Thotum, here we come!
