Why I’m Not A Girl’s Girl

That’s the idea, anyway. It’s supposed to be a feminist badge of honor. If you ask me, it’s just creepy. Cliques based around immutable characteristics can go one of two directions: insufferably woke or bordering on supremacy. Neither camp attracts normal people with actual personalities or interesting things to say.

However, I must grant that the girl’s girl wasn’t created in a vacuum. She was a response to the intrasexually competitive “cool girl” archetype of the early 2000s who took pride in being not like the other girls. Like most movements built in opposition to what came before them, though, the correction overshot the mark. What began as solidarity as an antidote to toxic intrasexual rivalry, turned, over time, into a conformist hivemind—one which demands blind allegiance to the group.

Millennial Internalized Misogyny

Women who came of age in the early 2000s and 2010s grew up in a culture that was allergic to femininity. It wasn’t cool to be girly. “Girly” connoted being silly, vapid, or even mean. Countless women learned to distance themselves from anything that seemed too traditionally feminine. Early waves of feminism unwittingly encouraged this by fighting for women’s rights in a world that prized masculinity.

Feminists, then, saw it necessary to make the case for women’s equal rights, dignity, and respect contingent on the idea that we were fundamentally no different than men. Not all at once, but with each wave’s addenda, it effectively made it so, within a few generations. It’s true enough that men and women are more alike than they are different. We’re not different species, after all, even if some of us are from Venus and others from Mars. But the insistence on erasing any difference spearheaded a movement that required women to reject their womanliness to prove their competence.

There’s historically been an association between women who comported themselves in a distinctly feminine manner and those who saw a woman’s role as limited to the confines of the home. Likewise, there was an association between the pantsuit-clad broad with the chopped haircut, and the “serious woman,” a woman who had the intellect, disagreeability, and ambition to compete in a man's world. The stereotypes became enmeshed with the archetypes of femininity and masculinity altogether.

The dignity of womanhood, presented through femininity, was degraded.

In the process, the dignity of womanhood, presented through femininity, was degraded. Young girls, still forming their identities and becoming interested in attracting the attention of their male peers, began to distance themselves from womanliness. That included feminine presentation, interests, and psychology. It also included women as people. They boasted how little they cared about all things frilly and pink, or that they engaged in stereotypically masculine interests. How they only got along with guys because “girls are just too much drama.”

In reality, this performance didn’t actually liberate women from anything it sought to, like sexual objectification or rigid gender roles. Cool girls still had to be hot and feminine enough in all the conventional ways of facial and bodily attractiveness. They just got to pretend that wearing pink made you a frivolous woman, whereas being a “sexy nerd”  or “gamer girl” was, for some reason, vastly more empowering.

When Men Created Culture

To be fair, this was hardly women’s original idea. I’d argue it’s more like a mimetic virus that's been passed down from art to its consumers and then to the broader culture. The early 2000s were, among many things, a time when men still dominated most industries and were the cultural gatekeepers of entertainment. That’s not to say that it was unfair. It’s safe to say that DEI policies created to correct for this imbalance have ruined just about everything.

However, I think it’s fair to say that a byproduct of men dominating senior positions in most industries, notably in the arts, was the effect of capturing a distinctly male ethos, by way of the writing, direction, and casting. Our very relationship to these stories was filtered through the dominant cultural lens of the time. It was noticeably wanting of an actual woman’s insight.

We saw tropes like the manic pixie dream girl, a term coined by AV Club critic Nathan Rabin in 2007 to describe "a fantasy figure who exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” He described it “as an archetype that tapped into a particular male fantasy of being saved from depression and ennui by a fantasy woman who sweeps in like a glittery breeze to save you from yourself, then disappears once her work is done.”

The key words here are “male fantasy.” These characters were archetypes cooked up entirely in the imaginations of men, usually daydreaming about an aspirational figure that didn’t actually exist, or who could exist but in ways he was manifestly uninterested in. She exists solely to help the protagonist find happiness without having any personal goals or romantic needs of her own. 

The implausibility of it all, that this beautiful, quirky, magnetically mysterious, charming girl is interested in some painfully unremarkable, not even attractive guy, is what makes it a trope. It’s a half-baked character archetype lacking any real personhood or development. It requires an insulting level of suspension of disbelief. The writing is bad because there’s no theory of mind for the girl of supposed flesh and blood before us. No interiority to speak of.

Women internalized the archetypes they saw on screen, which communicated to them that the ideal woman is low maintenance, non-threatening to men, and different from other women.

If you stabbed her, would she bleed, or would she spontaneously combust into a puff of fairy dust? The answer to that question, I do not know. She probably doesn’t either, because she isn’t real. She is the idealized fantasy of a love interest formed in the early stages of a crush. She is the woman with BPD in the idealization phase. She is the dead wife giggling with reckless abandon in a solemn montage of her greatest highlight reels. She is all sugar without the crash. An unrealistic window into someone who is all fun and no work, with no story of her own.

But you see, at the time, the entertainment industry was populated by mostly male writers, directors, casting agents, and producers who gatekept which actresses made it. They controlled who the stars were, what the movies were about, how they were shot, and how they were written. This inevitably led to tropes that failed to capture the full female experience, but women do this to men, too. It’s a fundamental failure of cross-sex mind-reading.

Women as constructed through men’s creative direction tended to have some unfortunate tendencies that erased women’s nuances and often reduced them to sexual objects, cliches, and fantasies that served male egos. That sort of art and messaging permeating the culture made women downright contemptuous of the “male gaze,” a term coined by film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1973 to describe media created from a perspective that assumes the viewer is male, framing women on screen as objects of male desire.

Women internalized the archetypes they saw on screen, which communicated to them that the ideal woman is low maintenance, non-threatening to men, and different from other women. In turn, women learned to perform the social ritual of establishing that they are “not like the other girls” by engaging in performative distancing from womankind and conventional femininity for social points. This made her the alluring, mysterious woman who stood out to men. For a time.

This was before women, whose collective identity politics were in their infancy outside of niche academic feminist circles, began clocking the phenomenon as a neurosis arising from a desperate desire to be “picked” by men. The “pick-me” in early 2000s culture was rewarded, but today, she is punished. The hypervigilance surrounding this accusation leads to many false accusations, ushering in yet another reversal of the original problem. Where before women entertained a faux persona as a performance to appeal to men, modern culture, which seems to grow more homosocial by the year, sees women contorting themselves to appeal to other women.

Birth of the Girl’s Girl: Reclamation of Femininity & Sisterhood

What do we do when we realize we’ve failed to recognize the wholeness of a person and instead chalk them up to an insufficient caricature or ogled them voyeuristically while denying them agency? Do we take pause and recognize the nuances in individual interests and temperament? God no, we swing hard the other way, baby! Overcompensation is the name of the game.

If a “pick-me girl” is a male-centered woman who feels alienated from womankind because she sees other women as direct competition, the girl’s girl is her cultural correction. Pick-mes put other women down for male attention and frame themselves in opposition to women as a collective. It’s all well and good for women to come to recognize this as unhealthy, immature behavior and to be put off by it. I understand why women are suspicious of those who seem to represent this type of intrasexual competition and started openly calling it out. 

That’s how we got the pick-me antagonist: the girl’s girl. She isn’t scared of her own reflection. She doesn’t see women as her natural enemies but as her fellow sisters. She doesn’t see femininity as inferior because it’s frilly or soft. She doesn’t see male attention as the highest good, allowing her to become a more self-actualized person who’s less quick to peacock in front of men at the expense of other women.

If a “pick-me girl” is a male-centered woman who feels alienated from womankind because she sees other women as direct competition, the girl’s girl is her cultural correction.

They are, as Shaeden Berry writes in Refinery29, “happily admitting that they are, contrary to what we've been told to avoid, just like other girls.” This has become a common refrain among self-described girl’s girls on TikTok: “I love being just like other girls.” Where the pick-me is flattered by a man’s compliment that she’s “not like the others,” the girl’s girl is insulted, likely registering it as a red flag.

Why should a woman’s alienation from other women make her more valuable? Why would sharing traits and interests with other women make her less attractive? These are the questions that run through the girl’s girl’s mind, and they’re not unreasonable. You can appreciate someone’s individuality without telling her she’s special only because she isn’t like most other women—the implication being that most women are shallow, silly, or interchangeable. However, the girl’s girl isn’t all sainthood, feminism, and girl power. There’s an essence of surveillance, cult-like loyalty tests, purity spiraling, and tribalism to it all. 

Social and political commentator Tara Mooknee points out how using a negative definition to explain what a girl’s girl is poses some problems, “not only a lack of clarity, but the use of negative framing—here's what she wouldn't do—focuses on those who aren't girls girls and their alleged discretions.” The discourse starts to revolve around who fails to be a girl’s girl rather than what it means to be one. “Your mind is then looking for the red flags more than the definitive traits themselves. So, you're more likely to be focused on policing those who fail to be girl’s girls than embracing and emulating those who are.”

Womanhood as Surveillance

That brings us to the girl’s girl content ecosystem: a specific type of content created for a specific audience, usually on TikTok, that often feels infantilizing and gynocentric. I can understand the incentive to view yourself as part of the collective of womankind, to embrace other women in a spirit of camaraderie, but it’s been taken to some uncomfy, dare I say entitled, extremes. 

Self-proclaimed girl’s girls generate an ever-expanding list of social faux pas that exclude you from their exclusive girl’s girl club. It usually comes down to some predetermined wrongthink they use as a vibe check to see whether you’re trustworthy or pick-me coded. These may include not liking Taylor Swift, being polite to men, or “gatekeeping” products you use or clothing you wear, even if you genuinely don't know where you got something or have no interest in disclosing it for whatever reason. This might sound like a rather silly transgression but it's one of the biggest perceived infringements on women’s implied right to level the playing field.

Mooknee notes a concerning amount of girl’s girl discourse bizarrely revolves around consumerism and a histrionic level of transparency. They want women they run into on the street to give them an itemized list of every product, every clothing item, complete with links, prices, and hell, maybe even a free sample. This starts to feel like a normalization of boundary violations, enforced by a loose gang of women who want to flatten differences in outcome, whether that’s having the cute outfit, the makeup technique, or even swapping cosmetic doctors. 

Innocuous quirks like simply not liking what other girls like, not even for male attention or to make other women feel bad, get interpreted as “red flags.” You realize pretty quickly this isn’t about solidarity at all. It’s a facade used to police women’s behavior and individual differences under the guise of “benevolence” and “sticking together.”

It’s a facade used to police women’s behavior and individual differences under the guise of “benevolence” and “sticking together.”

These spaces pride themselves on decentering men to an extent that resembles repression. It’s not healthy for most women, and it honestly feels like a weird cult tactic meant to force loyalty to the group. Charles Manson may have told his followers to leave their family, friends, and jobs to follow him, but the girl’s girl cult asks women to abandon all forms of male validations and relationships to pledge allegiance to girlhood. If you think about it for a moment, it’s incredibly unnatural. Sure, women can overidentify with male attention at their peril, but that doesn’t make it inherently worthless or pathological. 

The “male gaze,” once upon a time, was a film theory term, not a catch-all for “men happen to like this, therefore it’s bad." Trying to erase that impulse—appealing to men, you know, the evolutionary driving force behind heterosexuality itself—entirely and pretend it’s something to purge rather than to integrate it in a healthy, balanced way is not empowerment. 

Men and women are not natural enemies. We are yin and yang. But women are also not all natural sisters, either. The insistence that total strangers owe each other some kind of automatic allegiance, like we’ve all taken a blood oath by default, has the same creepy homosocial cult energy as men in the manosphere who consider themselves part of a “brotherhood” and seem to prize, at all times, the peering eyes of their “bros” above “hoes.”

In Defense of Opting Out of Sisterhood

Gynocentrism is “a worldview that prioritizes female perspectives, values, and needs, often deeming them superior in certain contexts.” This is where I get really uncomfy. Suddenly, it’s not just that women have some shared gendered experience in common, not limited to the complexities of female friendship, coming of age in a body that is inherently subject to higher risk of sexualization and assault, or that historically there were laws that governed what freedoms we did or did not have based on this shared experience of womanhood. 

It starts to shift from that to something more sinister, like something out of the Apple TV sci-fi series Pluribus, which follows a seemingly benevolent alien race forcing everyone to join their hivemind against their will under the guise that we’ll all sing Kumbaya and hold hands. That it’s for our own good. But the goalposts keep shifting, the purity tests keep broadening, and the skepticism of other women grows exponentially. It feels like just another weapon of choice to police women’s behavior and erase their individual differences. 

I often see young feminists throwing around “wow, you are NOT a girl’s girl” as a go-to pejorative when they dislike a hot take I’ve posted on or an argument I’ve made, treated as an affront to a kind of sacred feminist cow. It’s typically weaponized in response to a perfectly valid, albeit heterodox, point that falls outside mainstream liberal feminist thought. However, it’s used just as often over apolitical differences of opinion involving women. 

They intend to induce in you a grave sense of shame and deviance, as if you’ve committed some unjustifiable harm that’s set back women’s rights 100 years, by literally making up a sexist interpretation of your opinion and instantly believing that’s what you meant. This opinion could be about an artist’s music or an actress’s performance, or you could even just be uncontroversially stating a lifestyle preference. 

The goalposts keep shifting, the purity tests keep broadening, and the skepticism of other women grows exponentially.

The layers of hypervigilance and paranoia when it comes to scouting “male-centered women” and casting them out have driven so many women mad that they work themselves up in a fit of hysteria over frivolous arguments on X to purify the feminist movement and prime young women to be good, obedient allies with no proclivities toward heresy against their own gender. All the while, they’re unwittingly causing young women to fall out of favor with the entire enterprise of protecting women’s interests for the sheer reason that a healthy adult woman with a fully developed prefrontal cortex cannot help but feel naturally repulsed by authoritarian control.

Because, as the brilliant writers of Andor put it, “Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction,” whereas “tyranny requires constant effort.” Freedom of thought functions in much the same way. People can intuit social masks, performance, and plausible deniability. They recognize when the usual suspects, who extend no such grace or understanding to others, cue the constant rallying cries for “sisterhood” and “solidarity” because this language obscures the real desire: social control and conformity enforced by peer pressure.

Where the girl’s girl claims to stand with her sisters, it presents quite an unsophisticated and performative form of allyship that has more to do with individual women’s desire to flatten another girl’s hotness by ascertaining who her cosmetic surgeon is or where she got her jeans from. 

When a girl steps out of line, though, by committing the sin of heresy by being conservative or siding with a man in a conflict (even if he’s literally in the right), or you criticize one of their sacred cow celebrities who act as a stand-in for all things women’s empowerment, you’ll see just how flimsy the philosophical foundations of the girl’s girl truly are, as she sends the vipers on you, to bring you down a peg—that if you’re not silenced, you’re too afraid to dissent. But at least you got the number to Kylie Jenner’s lip injector.