This is Not About Brat
This is about brats. CW: eating disorders. Take care of yourself if you're sensitive about this stuff.
In primary school I walked the 200 metres across the crest of a Newcastle suburb called The Hill (which was, funnily enough, just a hill) each Friday to that suburb’s astroturfed tennis courts for my girls’ group lesson.
We were a small but tight-knit group of nerdy, athletic girls. We spent our dreamy (in hindsight), sunny (always and forever) Newy Fridays stacking pyramids of tennis balls onto our racquets only for them to cascade dramatically off them again when our wrists wobbled with the weight, ker-chunking $2 coins into the dusty 90s vending machine in the clubhouse to guzzle cans of Kirks Lemonade, and digging for little tubers we called ‘yam-yams’ on the grassy slope behind the courts.
I was essentially genderless at this time in my life—a goofy gap-toothed kid with a bowl cut and perennially rockin’ a pair of these both at school and, unfortunately, in my own time on weekends. Ribbons, frills, earrings, shopping, toe rings, lip gloss and other early 2000s proto-femme accoutrements made my 10 year old spine shiver with disgust. I didn’t have the time or desire to care about such things. I cared about the stuff that really mattered—like contemplating when I could next go to Video Ezy, begging my parents to let me do gymnastics and swim squad and soccer, and cramming my brain with useful details about bugs, dinosaurs and Garfield from borrowed library books.
Enter Cassie. Cassie joined our motley crew of tennis jellybeans in the middle of term, but she already knew some of the girls because she went to the same Catholic primary school. A tall (for Year 4) baby giraffe of a girl, Cassie was in the red house at school, and I knew this because she wore her coloured sports polo to every tennis lesson. She wore matching red ribbons in her permanently pigtailed hair, even though it wasn’t even the Athletics Carnival—she just wore them for the sake of ‘matching’, for the sake of adding a touch of je ne sais quoi to her practical school sports look, or potentially because this is how her mother dressed her. The thing that immediately intrigued me about Cassie, however, is that she carried two to three Bratz dolls in her school duffel bag at all times, and introduced them to the group of us, detailing their personalities, brushing their plastic hair with her fine willowy fingers between tennis exercises, as if the dolls were her friends, as if they were attending the lesson also.
One spring Friday when the salt from the nearby ocean hung thick and misty in the air, Cassie handed me a doll named Yasmin. I stared at her with morbid curiosity from under the brim of my school bucket hat. Yasmin’s lips sparkled with a dark red glitter gloss, and her eyes were huge and knowing, like she saw through me, or she saw me but didn’t care. She wore a cropped coquettish cardigan and mini skirt, but what fascinated me most were her feet. Her ankles were slim and matchstick-like, but her shoes… her shoes were… enormous. Stomping and chunky, yet glossy and fabulous at the same time. What… was this feeling?
Cassie plucked Yasmin back from me and proceeded to pull her shoes—her feet—from her tiny ankles, showing the group how one could swap shoes from Bratz to Bratz (Brat to Brat?), if they so desired. We all took turns in feverish ritual. The feet unplugged and replugged with a satisfying resistance. Cassie was right—the shoes did change the girls’ personalities. They did have a passion for fashion.
Unlike the prim pink perfection of Barbie, Bratz dolls disrupted the childhoods of 2000s tweens everywhere. Controversial, vicious, fashionable, subversive, and eerily anticipatory of Kardashian-ised smooth-face-and-body toxic ideals of the now, Bratz dolls were the femme Bart Simpson of early-internet parental moral panic. In theory, to own one would make you the cuntiest girl in your grade. In reality, you were still the knock-kneed chick trying to make the dolls sit balanced against your sports bag so they could ‘watch’ you practise your Friday arvo volleys.
We have all been inundated with the word brat over the past few months. I played the beginning of the album over the speakers as I was walking some second-year drama students through an exercise, and more than half of them eyeballed each other and screamed in unison “Brat Summer!” in the middle of Australian July, which imbued me with a deep sadness about late capitalism’s pervasive borderlessness. I know the Apple dance and I don’t have TikTok. I try and quash the wisened gatekeepy feeling of “yeah but I loved Charli before all you stupid teenagers did so now I can’t listen to her :’((((”—but then, maybe I should be bratty and feel my feelings about that.
The album, though, like those dolls all those tennis lessons ago, has indeed disrupted feminine archetypes, and this is what is interesting to me. Being a brat resists the tired but unfortunately persistent angel-whore binary, in a way that is in my opinion equally useful as it is obviously commercially viable in the 21st century. Being a brat is to be an Eve, or perhaps a Lilith. Being a brat is to fail and succeed at the same time. Being a brat is to be knotty, mean, ambitious, multitudinous and contradictory. And (problematically) in order to be visible and marketable: hot. This ugly crier rolls her eyes into the back of her head.
All this brat summer—I mean, winter—my ears have been pricked to hear an organic ‘brat’ utterance in the wild. By ‘organic’ I mean using the word brat without meaning the album.
A dear friend of mine has been a longtime user of the word to describe women and femmes with whom she has a deep and caring, but complicated and oftentimes dramatic relationship. I relish when this friend drops the word deftly into conversation. We discuss these people over wines. My friend rolls a cigarette and extolls to me the life and times of these friends, or friends of friends. I drink up the details.
One of these friends-of-friends that my friend describes as a straight up brat is a sex DJ. A sex DJ? There is a community on OnlyFans, I have learned, and honestly, go the fuck off. We scroll through the sex DJ’s Instagram. She wears fluffy boots and a flossy faux leather thong. She works the regional circuit, mostly. Apparently she was a nightmare at school, but now… now she’s a successful sex DJ. I can’t stop thinking about the sex DJ. I am in awe of the sex DJ. This person, this brat, is powerful, her cup overfloweth with life and presence and I assume a whole lot of filthy remixes of popular house music. I am scared of the sex DJ. I am not the sex DJ.
Another friend of my friend is the definition of a human Bratz doll, and I say that with the utmost admiration. This is the kind of gal who wears latex, shockingly hot and matte red-lipped at all times, speaks effortlessly in The Nanny-isms and takes MDMA when she goes to the theatre so she can feel things more acutely. She is the bright spot in every room—you cannot look away.
She is not always a brat. Rather, she is bratty, especially with boyfriends. She’s bratty, my friend says as she finishes the last of her wine, because she has always had a habit of picking fights with the men in her life, and her current partner became sick of her incendiary stoking of him. He pointed out her habit and suddenly this friend’s bratty behaviour was thrust in stark contrast, much to her embarrassment. Suddenly she had to assess her association of stable male relationships with the need to quarrel and attack—spoiler alert: it’s because of shitty male role models! With the help of her friends, my friend tells me, she’s beginning to unpick this particular state of brattiness.
We talk about our own bratdom. I think I am many things, mostly to my own delight and others’ bemused disdain, but rarely do I think: “Oh yeah—I am being a total brat right now.” I can be stubborn, incredibly annoying, egotistical, grumpy, outgoing, manically party-hungry, but I generally think a brat I was not meant to be. Except for one time.
I was 17. Deep in the throes of my high school anorexia (eating disorders and disordered eating—unfortunately very brat, as Charli attests on the album). Resisting family dinner was a daily Everest and by this time in my cute little teenaged illness my parents had cottoned on to just about every trick in the ano book to avoid putting nutrients successfully through my digestive system. I don’t remember a lot from this particular dinner, but I remember being backed into a corner as I negotiated with my parents about how much I had to eat before leaving the table (and immediately purge). My Dad put his foot down—he didn’t shout but I could sense he was infuriated with my obstinance and demanded I eat everything on the plate in front of me.
Cue: beyond bratty teen tantrum. The word that comes to mind is railed. I railed. Hoarse and screaming, red-in-the-face crying and blaming and “I fucking hate you”s before I slammed the door of my bedroom shut and collapsed onto my bed.
I was listening to my parents discuss worriedly in muffled Charlie Brown wah-wahs when a voice—the same voice in the back of my head telling me not to eat—whispered a penny drop thought to me. My inner brat. 100% mental illness. The penny drop thought was: you don’t have to move. You don’t have to say anything. You can just lie here. Forever.
And I was so exhausted from the teenage tantrum that happened approximately one minute earlier that I went along with it.
For the next hour I lay catatonic on my bed, in the chokehold of my own self-destructive obsessive thinking, as my family grew more and more distressed around me. They begged with me, admonished me, confronted me with their own prolonged silent treatment. This dragged on for so long that my mum gave up and went to bed. I was still for so long that my body no longer felt like my own. I felt totally, unequivocally empty—finally.
Late at night, my dad returned. His face was cracked and heavy as concrete. My eyes still stared vacantly up in the pressed-plaster corner of my bedroom. I could only see him out of the corner of one unmoving eye, but I could see that he had been, and still was, crying. Not like, Dad-holding-back-tears-masculinity-is-a-prison crying, but like… sobbing desperately. His voice, cracked as his face, asked me what to do. For the first time since being my dad, he said he didn’t know how to cope. The inner brat smiled inside. A tiny healthier voice wanted to cry and hug him. But in the moment, after feeling limp and empty and statuesque for hours on hours, my body chose to tear itself from the situation and run away dramatically like a soundtracked cliché in a coming-of-age flick.
I ran out of the house and promptly the mentally ill motivation wore off so I just sat on the swing in the park one block away from my house and thought some devastatingly simple and selfish teenaged thought about how this would make for a cool scene in a Radiohead music video or something (my eating disorder was desperately into Radiohead). Eventually, I saw my Dad walking across the park, hands in his pockets. He sat on the swing next to me and didn’t say anything. After a while of sitting there, side by side, I apologised. Quietly. Then we walked across the park, back home together.
And that’s what I think about when I think about me being a brat.
My friend finishes her cigarette. I get us two more glasses of expensive and just-ok orange wine. “Maybe that’s it,” I say. “Maybe being a brat is unsustainable.”
If we were all brat 365, we’d be utterly terrible. Unbearable. Friendless. Not to mention fetishised, despised, shunned, deemed unfixable. We’d all be big-lipped and plastic, our feet indiscernible from our impractical platform heels.
Brat summer—winter—is, and should be, an impossibility. And I really think that’s ok. In all its global oversaturation, to be brat, originally something thorny and jagged and explosive, has now had its corners shaved and rounded, its neon green now gently dulled and familiar. Even Charli isn’t always brat—this is just her latest mercurial state. She’s also a no. 1 angel, she is no angel, she’s a car crash but also vroom vroom, a multitud party girl and wannabe mother, and underneath it all, she’s just a talented musician with bangin’ taste.
I am not brat—you are not brat. Or at least, not all the time. Most of the time, thankfully, we are Cassie, playing joyfully with our dolls at tennis, red ribbons in our hair.
In: I saw a lady at a supermarket in Newcastle using a deep woven wicker basket to carry her groceries home in. And I thought—screw reusable Coles bags, I need to get me a beautiful op shop basket!
In: Cold swims. I’ve been Wim Hof-pilled and I know it’s a cliché but they make me feel amazing. They’re also free, promote beach visits no matter the season, and you get to say “Oh I just went for a cold swim” whenever someone asks how your day’s going.
Out: After discussing this with my closest friends on the weekend, I am spreading the good word that wet cheese is officially out. Burrata—get outta here! Straciatella—go tella your friends that it’s done. Buffalo mozz is forever for its versatility and inner structure.
My show, Blueberry Play, opened and closed last week at Civic Theatre Newcastle! It went really well. Despite the everything, I am reminded occasionally that I love the theatah.
My dear friend and fellow Boho Interactive-r Nathan Harrison is performing his show Birdsong of Tomorrow at Merrigong Theatre Company in Wollongong this week! It’s about birds and the anthropocene and grief. Go and see it!
Do you have a question, problem or musing you’d like me to interfere with? Submit it to me and I’ll have a go at being an Agony Ang in a future UC edition. The more annoying, silly or niche the better. ❀