the cool girl in --

I found a passage in Bad Feminist, from another book she’s critiquing. The book is Gone Girl, and I think they made a movie out of it recently (I’m not really in touch with pop culture, can’t you tell). Anyway, I found it particularly poignant:

“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 that 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… Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they are fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.”

It brought me back to my dating days. Days when I would create masks and wear them on a date; pretending to be a woman I thought would make a man like me, because I sure as hell did not like myself, and I was afraid to reveal would I really was. I wanted to hide forever. It worked, for the most part. I had many suitors. Many suitors whom I had fooled into believing that I was this person that they really wanted. I did not want them.

Of course, there was that one time that I was exposed, but we all know how that ended up.

I am not implying that all women that like the above things are fake. No, there are plenty of women who enjoy some, or even many, of these “manly” things.

I know that women often feel like they have to be “the cool girlfriend” to impress their boyfriends. I know that many of us don’t always say how we feel or tell the whole truth because he want to remain “the cool girlfriend” and cool girlfriends don’t think they have valid emotions or thoughts. Cool girlfriends feel like they need to remain in a constant regulatory emotional state, and if they are not, they don’t want to ruin the facade, so they keep it inside.

I’ve seen this too many times. I’ve done this too many times.

In dating we feel so much pressure to be perfect. I wonder if men feel this pressure. Somehow, I don’t think they do. I think many men have set expectations in their brains that the “cool girlfriend” is a standard. An impossible standard that they desire. So many of us are eager to play the part, but.. it’s unfulfilling. It’s unhealthy. It needs broken, it needs changed.

We need to expect better things.

Last updated March 05, 2015