If you’re someone who likes to read and frequents places both online and IRL where other people who like to read tend to congregate, the phrase “Hot Girls Read” has probably been on your radar at some point in the last couple of decades. It’s existed at least since the late 2000s. I’ve seen it on many products, in many different presentations — pink-glitter bubble letters on a sticker, loopy black cursive on a tote bag, industrial embroidery on a hat. “Hot Girls Read” isn’t a catchphrase from a movie or show. The designation “Hot Girl” does, however, have a widely acknowledged point of origin. Megan Thee Stallion made it a thing with her 2019 hit “Hot Girl Summer,” and in the wake of the song’s ubiquity, the cultural vernacular was inundated with activities or concepts rizzed up with the addition of “Hot Girl”: “Hot Girl Brunch,” “Hot Girl Yoga,” “Hot Girls Compost,” “Hot Girls Stay Hydrated,” “Hot Girls for Cuomo.”
A growing number of self-described creatives wield legal protections, legitimate and non, as a cudgel against others.
As people began riffing on and iterating it (“Hot Girls Summer is Out. Rot Girl Winter is In,” “Hot Girls Have IBS”), “Hot Girls Read” went from tongue-in-cheek to earnestly empowering; not unlike “Nevertheless, She Persisted” and “Nasty Woman” did. Searching the phrase on Etsy today yields thousands of products bearing the phrase, from T-shirts to window decals to letter-bead bracelets. (The even more specific “Hot Girls Read Books” is presumably for those who don’t want to be mistaken for reading tea leaves or reading the room or reading someone to filth.) So when Allie Rose Co., a small online business selling reading-related products like Kindle covers and bookmarks, announced in a June 2026 Instagram post that it had acquired the trademark for “Hot Girls Read,” it wasn’t well received by the sprawling online community that self-describes as “bookish.”
This was in part because of the wording shop owner Allie Mitrovich used to make the announcement: “Hot Girls Read™ is officially ours. 3ish years ago, after I started reading more consistently and finally started to love to read, I put HGR on some bookmarks and crews and the rest is freaking history.” An Instagram story had the real kicker: “I’ve seen HGR on lots of items from other business’ [sic] that follow me, so if that is you, please remove those listings from ur site as soon as possible! With love!” This was shockingly unbookish behavior made worse by flabbergasting audacity. The condemnation was unanimous, and the backlash was immediate. Hours after Mitrovich’s Instagram post went up, romantasy author Michele Khalil filed an official challenge to the trademark. Within a matter of days, Allie Rose Co. surrendered it.
It used to be that you had to be household-name famous to make your name a trademark, as Kylie Jenner found out a while back when she discovered Kylie Minogue had beat her to it by 40 years. Matthew McConaughey trademarked his taffylike delivery of “Alright alright alright.” Former NFL star Tim Tebow registered the trademark for “Tebowing,” the knee-down, head-bowed, fist-clenched posture he took when he prayed on the field. Guy Fieri secured the trademark for “Flavortown” for his lines of sauces and cookware. Paris Hilton, at the height of her notoriety, managed to trademark her catchphrase “That’s Hot” in categories including clothing, electronic devices and alcohol. Being a household name is no guarantee of a trademark, however: LeBron James found this out when he was unable to trademark “Taco Tuesday.”
What makes an influencer decide to trademark a phrase that people recognize as belonging to the internet? Plenty of members of bookish communities attribute it to plain old greed, but there’s also something more: influencer brain.
That has changed in the time since online influencers have had IRL power. Had Mitrovich been a more seasoned member of the bookish community, she might have heard the cautionary tale of Faleena Hopkins, an author of a series of self-published romances with “Cocky” in thetitle. Hopkins registered the trademark in 2018 and began contacting authors who had also used the descriptor — and the list was long, because the cocky, arrogant hero is a romance trope. A number of authors retitled their books after receiving takedown notices. But when Hopkins began petitioning Amazon to stop selling any other titles that contain the word, she crossed a line.
Both the Authors Guild and Romance Writers of America mounted legal challenges to Hopkins, arguing that “cocky” could not be associated with a single author. As Kayleigh Donaldson wrote at the time, “[Hopkins’] work is derivative of a popular romance trope, and works within the same parameters that many in the industry do, but she is positioning herself as wholly unique and everyone else in her path as copycats that she has a right to demand changes from.” But Hopkins didn’t have the name recognition to justify trademarking “Cocky.”
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Neither Mitrovich nor Hopkins fit the profile of a trademark troll — an individual who knowingly and fraudulently registers trademarks likely to be associated with legitimate businesses with the intent of using them to extort licensing fees and settlements from those entities. But they’re part of a growing number of self-described creatives who wield legal protections, legitimate and non, as a cudgel against others.
The bookish space, says Rebecca, 44, a bookseller, “isn’t perfectly aligned on everything. We don’t all like the same authors or even the same genres. I don’t think anyone expects that.” She’s been involved with a variety of online groups in reading fandoms since she was in high school, and believes much of the backlash against Allie Rose was from “people who were genuinely sad that she didn’t seem to get or care that she was undermining an internal trust in our fellow readers.” These spaces are communities, and Mitrovich had betrayed an unspoken agreement to keep them that way.
But why? What makes an influencer decide to trademark a phrase that people recognize as belonging to the internet? Plenty of members of bookish communities attribute it to plain old greed, but there’s also something more: influencer brain, a pernicious strain of main-character complex. Influencer brain drives someone on Instagram to think It’s hard to get an aesthetic selfie in a subway station because of all the passengers, and I should say so. It makes a fitness influencer fail to see why running the NYC Marathon accompanied by a camera crew on e-bikes might be a problem for other runners. And it seems to increasingly exist among a demographic of young white women in feminine spaces (books, baking, exercise, beauty marketing, etc.) who, through a combination of algorithmic siloing and late-capitalism precarity, feel that they have a claim to existing culture.
“American capitalism has become so bad that many more people have been convinced that the way out is becoming a successful influencer, aggressively monetizing stuff that used to be blog posts or hobbies, and more likely to accuse other people of plagiarism or copyright infringement.”
The trend was exemplified by the “Sad Beige Lawsuit” filed in 2024 by an Amazon influencer who charged another Amazon influencer with stealing her signature style of wearing and decorating with minimalist shades of white and beige. And though the legal dispute, the first of its kind, resulted in a withdrawal, it’s continuing to echo. Then there’s the founder of “Hot Girl Walk,” Mia Lind, who trademarked the phrase for athletic wear and fitness training and promptly began taking legal action against walking clubs and events using the phrase, Spotify playlists bearing the name, and even personal trainers. When one Indiana walking club formerly using the hot-girl designation rebranded as “Hotwalk Indy,” Lind filed for compensatory damages.
After doing some research on Lind, a trademark lawyer who spoke to me on background revealed that Lind has filed 22 separate trademark applications for various iterations of the phrase, and clearly has money to throw at the process. “If her first application gets rejected, then she can file a slightly different one, and get a different examiner, and get it through. She’s probably put about $100K into this process.” Trademarks, unlike copyrights or patents, are intellectual property that are not premised on creating value for whoever registers them; they’re about protecting consumers. “The point of a trademark is that when a consumer sees a source designator” — say, a can of Pepsi or a Pokémon — “they know they can rely on it being what it purports to be.” Since Lind trademarked Hot Girl Walk for exercise classes, says the lawyer, “You can’t go and launch a yoga class that uses those exact three words. Rightly. But the mark shouldn’t protect any of those words by themselves or in association with anything other than what that registration is for.” And yet Lind is shutting down free community walks that don’t profit from the name “Hot Girl Walk” — is she counting on the mere threat of legal action to get her way?
“American capitalism has become so bad that many more people have been convinced that the way out is becoming a successful influencer, aggressively monetizing stuff that used to be blog posts or hobbies, and more likely to accuse other people of plagiarism or copyright infringement,” says Karen Ho, a business reporter and consultant. Two decades of job-market contraction, corporate consolidation, offshoring, automation, and shareholder primacy — along with the impacts of the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic — have fundamentally transformed the job market. The obsession with founders, meanwhile, has grown steadily stronger, fusing with the belief in personal-brand-as-business-model. If you aren’t running a 24/7 empire of yourself, are you even working?
The result is that people now see shared pursuits — a weekly tennis game, a book club, a knitting circle — as potential products to claim and monetize. The activity is no longer about the people doing it, but about who can capitalize on it fastest or more successfully; the goal is not enjoyment or skill-building or creation, but about figuring out how to make money. And the more that people exist in algorithmic silos, the more likely they are to be convinced that they have a claim on things they don’t. The microfame experienced by influencers whose days are spent in algorithmic silos is fragile. Actual celebrities who have begun trademarking their names and catchphrases do so because their careers are likely to be impacted by AI facsimiles of them. “It’s not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that ‘no, this is wrong!’” as Matthew McConaughey said during a recent town hall on AI co-hosted by CNN and Variety’s Town Hall. “There’s too much money to be made.”
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