Gillian Flynn explained it best in her book and book-to-movie adaptation Gone Girl:
“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and an*l sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, sh*t on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
So why have we become so devoted to becoming this version of ourselves that isn’t even us? If you have ANY kind of social media you’ve seen this attitude present one way or another. The “other girls vs me” tweets, memes, Facebook posts, are a constant occurrence. What is so wrong with being like “other girls”? Liking makeup and doing you hair and liking certain styles over others should not make you superior or inferior to other girls. You should like what you like and not feel like you have to separate yourself from other women.
Every girls hardest decision vs. mine pic.twitter.com/OfXIHxq44T
— kriskanela (@kriskanela) April 28, 2017
What heaven looks like to other girls .Vs. me pic.twitter.com/Kkc9T7n0lV
— Shi•lee (@town_shi) April 26, 2017
The truth is that this is not even something that we do for ourselves, we do it to compete against other women for the attention of men and it is quite ridiculous when you consider the fact that men are not trying this hard to be “different” for the attention of women. All the tweets and memes and whatnot only hurt feminism and I can guarantee that pretending to be someone you’re not in order to please someone else will not make you happy and will most definitely never allow for relationships to truly prosper. Be who you really are, like what you like, but do it without bashing the interests of other women. Liking chips (really?) does not make you some kind of supernatural creature, we all enjoy chips. Liking cosmetics and nails does not mean anything, it just means you like getting your nails done. We should be able to live in a space where we can do what we do and be who we are without the need to compete.
There has always been competitiveness between women over men, the kind you do not see between men over women.
How and why have we allowed ourselves to become the Cool Girl? While a healthy amount of competition is human nature in all of us, it does not make space for trying this hard to be different. With a couple of keywords you can find endless articles on “how to get a guy to like you” all of them telling you to be this Cool Girl we have been conditioned to become in order to please. They tell you to be cool and to find out what he likes and to pretend to be interested in it. We’ve seen this depicted time and time again on movies and tv shows. Guy has a girlfriend, usually the pretty popular one with nice hair and her nails always done. But no, the one who is deep and the one that understands him is the outsider who likes to read and hates makeup. He always says that she’s “different”, whatever that means. Movies like Mean Girls, She’s All That, and Cinderella (live action) all show this kind of attitude.
Women need to stop this toxic mentality that being into something “quirky” makes them better than other women. Men need to stop reassuring them that this idea is okay by posting on the internet about how they “need a girl like that” and trash talking women that enjoy wearing makeup. Let girls be themselves and stop the stereotypes that being into “feminine” things makes them basic and unintelligent because that is far from true. We need to use feminism to lift one another up instead of tearing each other down because of likes and interests. Life is already full of obstacles for us just by being women, if we make it impossible for other women to live their lives the way that the want we are just as bad, if not worse, than those obstacles.
