Cool Girls

My subject is female collusion.   It’s near impossible for any woman to live her entire life without participating in some aspect of the sexism that devalues her.

We are each of us sold on the world, sold on its structures, which are many and its strategies for “a good life” which are few.  One buys into the demands of Consensus Reality without even knowing there’s been a sale.   Rejection of what’s offered may come later but usually not the case when one is young and most vulnerable.  And besides, the cost of rejecting Consensus Reality — which is a reality dominated by male pov — risks complete banishment into pariah-land.

The novelist Gillian Flynn described one common aspect of female collusion in GONE GIRL.   It’s a scathing description of how some women agree to sell themselves out in order to attract a mate.

Here’s an excerpt:

“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.  For a long time Cool Girl offended me.  I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say:  You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.  I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bad and say:  The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much!  And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic:  They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. 

“Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl.  It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics.  There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain.  (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl?  Because he says things like:  ‘I like strong women.’  If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else.  Because ‘I like strong women’ is code for ‘I hate strong women.’)

“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 dream girl one in a million.  Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was something wrong with you.”

The problem of female collusion is huge and complex.   Mostly because it’s unremarkable, unseen, normalized, ubiquitous.  It’s impossible for any young woman not to be affected by the demands of collusion.  But it’s not impossible to start seeing it for it is:  a form of sanctioned self-abasement that goes to the very heart of how sexism continues unabated generation after generation.