Deconstructing The Cool Girl
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” - Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bible
“Cool girl. Men always use that – don’t they? As their defining compliment. She’s a cool girl. Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun.” - Gone Girl (2014)
Deconstructing the Cool Girl
I am fairly comfortable with myself. I enjoy craft beer and shitty beer all the same. I like putting on my makeup but I also like snowboarding and chilling watching a movie with my roommates and painting a piece of furniture. I like to think I can do it all. But I get this feeling. I don’t know, every once in a while it pops into my head that everything I do is a performance, not really for anyone, but a performance for myself. Do I thrift this amazing 1980s jacket because it is comfortable? Or do I buy it because I think it’s cool – because I think I look cool in it?
I know with certainty that I am rarely thinking about what other people will think of any given action of mine, but then I will be reading a book, or I will be getting dressed, or I pick out a beer over a glass of wine and I realize I’m doing it – I am playing to the male fantasy of how a woman should–or even should not–act. The Margaret Atwood quote in the epigraph of this post revolutionized the way I understood internalized misogyny, and I hope it will help you too. How I think of it, particularly within the context of the Cool Girl is that everything you do, whether it is playing to the stereotypical version of womanhood or whether it is completely rioting against it, is a male fantasy. This is because, though everything we do can be considered vile to one man, it is the fantasy for another, and they have made that explicitly clear. There is nothing a woman can enjoy without becoming a piece of criticism or the butt of a joke. And it is exhausting. Every opinion you have, even the most minute, is up for debate or likely to be a punchline.
In Gone Girl (2014), there is a monologue about almost accepting this, playing into the male fantasy, and this isn’t a new concept, even the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was well aware that she could gamify misogyny through sex and marriage to achieve a better life. The main character, Amy, is cognizant that her husband wants a Cool Girl and she is happy to become that, it almost brings her joy. I can’t shame her, I have certainly found joy in conforming to different versions of myself that people have wanted me to be–and this is only exacerbated in a romantic context; however, I think there is room to shed these burdensome concepts of masculinity and femininity – particularly of the rejection of the male fantasy of the Cool Girl. There is no escaping this, so my proposition is to redefine the Cool Girl.
To shed the conventions of femininity entirely, of what realm in which we are relegated to reside. Are you a tomboy or a girly-girl? Find out in this quiz if you are an Autumn or a Spring!? If we can find joy beyond placing ourselves into boxes, then I think we can really get at what it means to be the Cool Girl. I believe “coolness” really is relative because it is subjective; what I find cool surely varies from what you find cool. If we can take this relative coolness and define it on our own, deconstruct it, separate it from male fantasies – as looming as that sounds, I think then we can find what the Cool Girl is.
I don’t suggest that there is a clear-cut answer to what the Cool Girl is if she is not playing to male fantasies, I’m not sure that I will ever be able to understand it. But one day, I know I will look up, and be fulfilled with myself, having never once wondered if I looked attractive while I cooked myself dinner alone in my apartment.
Strike Out,
Written by: Jane Dodge
Edited by: Hanna Bradford
Graphic by: Stu McGuire
