Beware the Cool Girls
Iused to try to be the Cool Girl. You know, that girl who started sentences with, ‘‘I just get on better with men, I don’t know why but women don’t just like me much . . .’’ I’d spend a lot of time pretending to love poker, a lot more time trying to like sports, and even more time trying to love obscure bands whose names sounded like various types of flavoured dip. (‘‘Duuuuude, the new Hummus stuff is well sick, bro.’’)
I’d say things like, ‘‘Oh I can’t be friends with women, they’re just too bitchy/emotional/crazy’’. And I’d drink Jack Daniels on the rocks as though it didn’t taste like the contents of a nuclear reactor.
Now I’m not the only one who’ll have passed their teens doing this. You may have even been one yourself once. It’s a well-established phenomenon. Author Gillian Flynn sums it up perfectly in
Gone 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 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.’’
On a surface level, the role is all about adhering to all of the superficial hot-tomboy aesthetic. And on a deeper level it’s pretty much about agreeing with what the guy you’re talking to is saying. The Cool Girl girlfriend is, as Flynn says, ‘‘the girl who likes every f...ing thing [her boyfriend] likes and doesn’t ever complain’’.
I used to be one primarily because it’s the script young women get fed for the role of ‘‘ideal woman a man wants to get with’’. And, to be honest, it made me popular.
It was lonely being my teenage self: an intelligent, articulate, Left-wing, argumentative teenage weirdo. It was much, much easier and nicer to be the Cool Girl.
You enjoy a constant stream of men telling you how cool and shagable you are. (Since I gave up playing that part, those compliments have been replaced by, ‘‘you’re just so intimidating’’ or ‘‘you must hate men, eh?’’)
I stopped playing it, though, because quite frankly I didn’t have the time to waste on erasing my own personality and replacing it with an exhausting, sexist, unattainable alternative. Plus I realised women are actually rad.
But two Cool Girls have made headlines in the past few weeks and it’s impressed upon me the absolute, very real danger the Cool Girl poses to us.
There’s Lauren Southern, the 23-year-old bubbly blonde whose hobbies include hanging out with white supremacists and attacking everything from feminism to Islam to Black Lives Matter. And Sydney Watson, that brooding brunette, enjoys ranting about how #metoo has ruined the workplace and organising Melbourne’s Men’s Rights march last week.
They’re textbook, if at the extreme end, Cool Girls. They’re gorgeous, skinny white girls who’re happy to agree with men over how victimised they’ve been in life by evil feminists.
Admittedly I don’t know if they’d say this out loud. It takes a lot of real-life interaction with real, nice women, and often a dash of feminist literature, to make you see what you’re subconsciously doing.
But we still made these Cool Girls. And they still know subconsciously that the way to get on in this world is to be that girl, and pander to wounded men’s feelings of oppression.
They’re textbook ... Cool Girls: gorgeous, skinny white girls who’re happy to agree with men over how victimised they’ve been in life by evil feminists.
The worst part is that they tell men to blame feminists (or really any woman pushing for greater equality) for their problems. And that is where heinous, violent, lifethreatening movements like incels spring up from, with their ‘‘it’s women’s fault I can’t get laid and nothing to do with my unattractive, pathetic and cruel ideas about humanity’’.
The scary part is that there’s nothing so terrifying as an extremist movement headed by an attractive blonde young woman. We are always more tolerant of attractive people with extreme views.
Just look at Marion Marechal-Le Pen. Aggrieved men love women like her and Southern because here’s a woman who ‘‘understands them’’
and they’re shagable!
And it’s even more appealing to insecure, isolated, frustrated men who feel that they’ll never get with an attractive woman. Here’s Lauren Southern, the kind, understanding sex goddess of meninists.
Who better to indoctrinate them with extremism?