I’m not sure if you’re on my side of TikTok, but apparently phrases like “Hot Girls Read” and “Hot Girl Walk” are trademarked now.
And honestly? What the actual hell.
Maybe I’m just being grumpy, but it feels ridiculous to me that common internet phrases are being locked down and treated like proprietary intellectual property.
The thing that gets me is that neither of these creators invented the concept of being a “hot girl.” In modern pop culture, that phrase is practically synonymous with Meg Thee Stallion. She built an entire movement around being a Hot Girl. She’s arguably the Hot Girl. Yet you don’t see her firing off cease-and-desist letters every time someone captions a selfie “hot girl summer” or uses the phrase in a TikTok.
Because that’s what culture does. People take phrases, remix them, adapt them, and make them part of everyday language.
What’s especially strange is that most people didn’t even know these phrases were trademarked in the first place.
The average podcaster, blogger, book club organizer, or Spotify playlist creator isn’t sitting there running trademark searches before they name something. They’re using phrases that have become part of the internet’s shared vocabulary. Then suddenly they’re finding out these words are protected because they’re being asked to take something down.
And that’s where things start to feel weird.
Particularly with Hot Girl Walk, which seems to be at the center of a lot of the legal enforcement conversations. Maybe there’s a legal justification for it. I’m not a trademark lawyer. But as a regular person looking in from the outside, it’s hard not to wonder why a Spotify playlist needs to disappear. Why does a podcast need to be renamed or removed?
I thought we were all supposed to be in the women-supporting-women era.
Instead, it sometimes feels like women building communities around books, wellness, fitness, and self-improvement are being treated as legal problems because they happened to use a phrase that’s become incredibly common online.
And maybe that’s what bothers me most.
A strong brand isn’t just a phrase. It’s the person behind it. It’s the community, the content, the personality, and the trust you’ve built with your audience. If your entire brand can be threatened because someone else used three words that have become part of the cultural vocabulary, then maybe the phrase wasn’t the brand in the first place.
People trademarking popular sentences will never stop being weird to me.
Maybe that’s why I was relieved when courts rejected attempts to lock down phrases like “Rise and Shine” after a viral Kylie Jenner moment. Especially because that clip didn’t go viral because people were inspired by it—it went viral because the internet collectively thought it was funny.
The same goes for Donald Trump’s attempt to trademark “You’re Fired.” That’s a phrase people had been saying long before reality television existed. Some expressions are so embedded in everyday speech that trying to claim ownership over them just feels absurd.
I understand trademarks exist for a reason. Nobody wants someone else impersonating their business or confusing customers. Protecting a unique company name makes sense. Protecting a logo makes sense. Protecting a product line makes sense.
But trying to claim ownership over phrases that have already entered the public conversation feels different.
The cynical part of me wonders if the endgame isn’t actually building a lasting brand at all. Sometimes it feels like the real business model is creating a trademark and then aggressively enforcing it against anyone who accidentally wanders into the same territory.
Maybe I’m missing something.
Or maybe we’ve reached the point where every catchy phrase on social media gets trademarked until we’re all afraid to name a podcast, a playlist, a book club, or a walking group without first consulting an intellectual property attorney.
Either way, it’s weird.
