Delulu positivity, asceticism, worsening jokes
5 Hot Girl Recession Indicators with Benedict Nguyễn
Certain books just exude cool—pick it up and you know you’re in for something original.
Enter Hot Girls with Balls, Benedict Nguyễn’s debut novel. With the verve, humor, and social commentary of Challengers, Bottoms, and Love Lies Bleeding, the novel tells the story of Six and Green, two Asian American trans women who compete in the men’s pro indoor volleyball league on rival teams while also doing “Instagraph” lives as an influencer couple.
For Nguyen, who’s a writer, creative producer, and dancer, the project was born from a personal experience: “getting asked to do a few Instagram lives in the early pandemic brought up so many strange feelings, I just had to novelize them,” she said.
“Editing the book with Alicia Kroell at Catapult helped me become even more sensitive about pacing and structure at multiple scales, and bolder about shaping drama and contrast,” she added.
In the midst of her debut, July heat waves, and things looking generally grim, we caught up on five hot girl recession indicators.
5 Hot Girl Recession Indicators
1. Asceticism in personal aesthetics
A mouthful oops! So much has already been said about the lipstick effect and hemline index. Personally, I broke a new record by somehow protecting a manicure from breakage for eight (8!) weeks before finally getting a fill-in this spring and anticipate very short hemlines for myself this summer. Since the greige minimalism and ‘girl dinner’ meme of 2023, I see hot girls everywhere innovating scrappy, DIY into personal styling. Google Trends suggests ‘abundance’ searches have been on a decline since March 2025… let’s bring back maximalism!
2. Crabs in a barrel
Nobody has a good job and tariffs and budget cuts everywhere make it seem like tearing someone else down is inescapable collateral damage to one’s own survival. Sad! TERFs throwing trans people under the bus under the auspices of liberal feminism. Charli XCX’s “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde” showed us us even famous pop stars have to sort through this tension. Scene-y parties have an extra competitive energy that flits out at random. Yikes! The fantasy of a man in finance resonated because the economy is in shambles, but us hot girls are not helpless!
3. Worsening jokes :/
It’s not offensive humor. It’s dark humor that’s a little too real, dissociative humor that sounds just a few inches too far away from reality. When someone makes a quip in such a pseudo-ironic register and pained laughter bleats through uncomfortable silence, maybe it’s time to get serious! And also, finding more cathartic reasons to laugh, whether in better-directed schadenfreude or in joy, feels so important to me, like, personally.
4. Phone usage extremism
Everyone I know is either extra on our phones (hi, my book Hot Girls with Balls is out July 1 and supposedly quite good!) or very off their phones. AI-generated trash, justified doomerism, and algorithmically incentivized violence over fact-checking, content moderation, and DEI have all made socializing on social platforms feel useless. If engagement is down, and the Arab Spring was never about some tech bro app, could another touch screen paradigm actually trend towards something better?
5. Delulu positivity
We take small respites from despair to believe with our deepest conviction in the inevitability of better ideas. Sometimes that shows up as delusions of grandeur around goofy art projects, and honestly, I believe in my friends. Sometimes, it’s new, focused momentum around collective power. It’s my determinedly hopeful tone in each of these typically morose indicators. The construction of social movements and nurturing of solidarity will require new creativity under despicable conditions, but maybe weirdo ideas can offer us something that can build. To underground scenes and productive rage and joyous gatherings and a hope that seems so ridiculous but is so real because we’ve got nothing else to lose. That’s so hot to me.
Order Hot Girls with Balls, follow Benedict on Instagram, and read more of her work here.
Reference Section
Currently reading: For my artist date last week, I went to McNally Jackson in Williamsburg and paged through a few books that have been on my radar lately—I’ve been thinking a lot about prioritizing joy and fun in the creative process, and this definitely helped me fall back into reading after a long dry spell. I flew through Perfection and am now enjoying Change, both of which are up to something original in terms of narrative distance and control.
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Heavy on the dark humor lol