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 two, 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. — gillian flynn
i’m the cool girl, i thought to myself, dutifully conceding another argument on pornography. ‘it’s the world’s oldest profession,’ he said, and i smiled, trying not to launch into another angry bout of statistics that had me branded undateable at my middle school. i’m the cool girl, i thought to myself, still reeling from an inappropriate joke. i said: you need to eat, and he said: you’re one to talk, and the day before, i had explained my history with eating disorders to him. i’m the cool girl, i thought to myself on the bike ride home, skin crawling from an entirely too public act of affection. i was raised on the internet. i spent days trawling the disney website for princess trivia, then read analyses of the reductive roles women played in fairytales. i became a fervent reader of andrea dworkin as a teenager, encouraged friends to break up with their homophobic boyfriends, and accepted my attraction to women before i learned what ‘bisexual’ meant. this is not an argument for my having a progressive, enlightened mindset, nor an advertisement for unsupervised internet access (far from it), but rather an explanation of the kind of person i figured myself to be. in my mind’s eye, i was an inflexible feminist with no patience for the misogynistic behaviour i just described. but i was (and still am) someone growing up in a culture of strict heteronormativity and enforced gender roles. despite my best intentions, i wanted to be the cool girl and cool girl i became.
here is my experience as the cool girl. the cool girl has a cultivated culture of obsessions with men. she devotes herself to these fancies with commitment best reproduced in monks or people in long-term relationships. the appearance, demeanour, and personality of the boys she pretends affection for is irrelevant to the way she feels for them. she watches bite-size, reproducible love stories, and sets herself the task of living them. the cool girl is a writer. she spins elaborate tidal waves of feeling from uncomfortable encounters and punishes herself for not living up to her description. the cool girl has been taken in by constructions of what love is supposed to be. she thinks that if she escalates her relationships physically, if she goes through the steps faster, if she talks about how much she wants it as much as she can—maybe then she will want it. the cool girl does not want men to be cruel to her. no girl wants men to be cruel to her. the cool girl, at least this one, wants men to stay away from her. what she will do is cave in to their demands, compromise her sense of security, do anything to live up to the presumption of happiness everyone keeps claiming to see. the cool girl eats hot dogs and hamburgers and is a size two because they come back up when she’s alone. the cool girl doesn’t contradict her man. the cool girl is smart, confident, and vivacious on her own, but becomes arm candy for him. she has interests, but he never seems to bother listening. the cool girl substitutes her sense of self for the cultural expectation of her.
in the film adaptation of gone girl, amy dunne says: when i met nick dunne i knew he wanted cool girl. and for him, i'll admit: i was willing to try. it’s easy to be cool girl. it isn’t supposed to come out as the contradictory discomfort outlined in the previous paragraph. part of being the perfect, down-to-earth woman is that it can never seem like you’re trying. even when you know you are, powerful images in the world around you can give the opposite impression. losing your virginity hurts. your mother gave up mit to marry your father. your friend mentions offhand that she’s avoiding her boyfriend. and nearly every book, movie, and television show you’ve seen since you were five years old drills it into your head: you will marry a man, and you will love it no matter how much it hurts. i no longer question why it took me so long to realise i was a lesbian. i only wonder that i got there at all. we are inundating young girls, even those who are heterosexual and bisexual and may end up happily married to men, with the idea that ending up with a man is the only acceptable option. beyond that, we are telling them that it is natural to fight this, to dislike it, to try to get out—but that they will end up in the place they spent their lives running from. of course this is a reduction, a clear-cut simplification of pervasive and insidious misogynist messages. what i bring this up to convey here is that despite assuming i was attracted to men, i struggled to separate the realisation that i wasn't from the cultural implication that disgust, fear, and reticence were natural parts of dating as a woman.
it was hard for me to come to terms with being a lesbian. i used the label briefly at times before accepting it as a part of who i am. i believed in a heterosexual view of homosexual self-acceptance, where you educate yourself and do some reflection before settling on a single term of identification that you will use for the rest of your life. i also tried to find this state of acceptance while i was very young, latching onto a sexual identity without understanding attraction. this is not an argument to dissuade kids from learning about the lgbt+ community at a young age. the cultural insistence that i like men did more to harm my sense of self than identifying as asexual in middle school ever did. rather, i am saying that fixating on a certain identity to find community for yourself when that community is based in sexual and romantic attraction can be damaging when you are twelve years old. growing up, i then felt the need to ‘prove’ my attraction to men. i insisted that i had crushes on a wide variety of boys, loudly proclaimed my interest in sex acts perceived as degrading to women, and forced myself through the motions of dating a man for four months before listening to something i had always been aware of, even on a subconscious level. i am not attracted to men. my efforts at proving otherwise have only underscored the truth of this. i’m not sure how long i could have gone avoiding this reckoning, but i’m glad i don’t have to find out. it can be a horribly isolating thing to live distant from yourself, playing out a projection in the hope that you won’t uncover the truth. admitting to myself that i don’t like men—never have, never will, have the painful former relationship to prove it—has been the single most freeing realisation of my life.
i wanted to be the cool girl. i wanted to live out a male fantasy that i perceived as keeping me safe from unwanted sexual attention while cementing my place as a well-liked, intelligent, and socially conscious woman. in short, i wanted to perpetuate a delusion that was more about solidifying my internal and social persona rather than pursue relationships i was interested in and found fulfilling. the weeks since i came out as a lesbian and broke off my relationship with my former boyfriend have healed this insistence on falsity faster than i would have thought possible. it is incredible how much warmer, brighter, and more joyful my attraction to women is. unlike the feelings i associated with men (fear, disgust, and a great deal of pain), i’ve come to realise that crushes are supposed to make you excited. in october, when i insisted i had a crush on the male friend i ended up dating, one of the girls i knew told me that she loved the crushing stage of relationships. i couldn’t understand what she meant—my crush made me fearful of the ‘feeling’ passing or progressing, while appearing to require significant maintenance (read: repeating typical anecdotes that could be read as flirtation until the excitement of others produced a similar reaction in me). now it’s clearer: the beginning of love is meant to bring you joy. other factors, such as the feasibility of the crush and the possibility of a relationship, shouldn’t cause nausea like they did when i said i liked boys. it’s different. it’s free. accepting my lesbianism feels like peace.
i’m not the cool girl anymore. good for me.
yes!! good for you!! it‘s incredible how similar our development was, down to identifying as ace in middle school (actually, that seems to be a reoccuring motive in lesbianism, along with forced crushes and being a cool girl..) i‘m still not sure what to think tbh - but i do love seeing others thrive!!! this made me feel less alone. thanks🫂 wishing you all the best!!!🧡