If you haven't read Gone Girl, get out. Just kidding. But
seriously, it's been out for like a year and they’re making a movie about it.
At least read this one part that, I think, MADE the book:
***
That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who
was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool 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 anal 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, shit on me, I don't mind, I'm the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they're fooled
because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.
I waited patiently—years—for
the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen,
learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make
out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.
But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation
colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl.
Men believed she existed—she wasn't just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every
girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren't, then there was something
wrong with you.
***
Finished? Good.
K, I've been called cool girl by men aplenty. (Not
humblebragging, hear me out.) Each time I had been called cool girl, there was
always, always, always something that bothered me about it. I mean, it’s always
cool to be called cool, but when it came from a dude, it never felt right. I
couldn’t figure out what it was for the longest time. Until this passage. And I
knew.
The only times men called me cool was when I did what they liked, drink beer, talk comics, play playstation, eat meat off the bone, your stereotypically male things. In this context, I wasn't cool because I just was. I was cool because I was being less like a girl.
The only times men called me cool was when I did what they liked, drink beer, talk comics, play playstation, eat meat off the bone, your stereotypically male things. In this context, I wasn't cool because I just was. I was cool because I was being less like a girl.
I don’t know if I’d be called cool if I was painting on
pastel lacquer, whimpering over a boy who hadn’t texted me back last night,
downing Frülis. Because I do that too. Am I not cool then, when I'm being
"girly"?
It's silly that some silly things feel defined by gender
lines. No one would ever doubt how much a guy liked beer, or hockey, or comics.
Why would they ever doubt how much I
liked them?
I hate that girls are loved more the further away they are
from who they really are. It’s not a good message to send to girls. Or to guys
looking for girls. I can’t count the number of times a well-meaning man tried
to teach me how hockey worked so that he could mould me into a cool girl,
whether he knew it or not. Because fuck, I know how hockey works. Puck goes in
net. Point won. Pass the chips.
There are too many girls who put
too much hope into being one type of girl, convinced that being this one type
will garner male approval. That KILLS me. Unless you really, really like anal
and jamming hot dogs (that's two different things, btw), power to you. But if
you don’t care for those things, that’s just facts and nothing else. You are
not a walking checklist of men’s favourite things.
As a girl, heck as anybody, we see ourselves through other people's eyes, which keeps us boxed into tiny definitions of what we can be. Reject the cool girl trope if it makes you feel more like you, I don't know. All I know, as someone who's been spoon fed tons of fibre-rich feminism, is that a girl is just about the coolest thing to be.
As a girl, heck as anybody, we see ourselves through other people's eyes, which keeps us boxed into tiny definitions of what we can be. Reject the cool girl trope if it makes you feel more like you, I don't know. All I know, as someone who's been spoon fed tons of fibre-rich feminism, is that a girl is just about the coolest thing to be.