Does the Cool Girl Exist?

~ Laura

I dissed “Gone Girl” immediately after I read it, but it’s one of those books that stuck with me. I like more now, than I did when I read it a year ago. The book handles all sorts of cool topics, like the modern media and relationships. It also has a brief bit about Amy Donne’s self conscious construction of becoming “The Cool Girl.” In the book, Amy says,

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, co-workers, 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.”

Does the Cool Girl exist? Is she a feminist? There have been several good articles on this topic lately.

Published by Laura

11 thoughts on “Does the Cool Girl Exist?”

  1. Sounds like a relative of the manic pixie dream girl:

    In real life, the manic pixie dream girl either

    1. grows out of it

    2. turns out to be mentally ill.

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    1. Oh, I should give a warning that that clip includes an MPDG and her male patient yelling “penis” over and over, so maybe not a good choice for certain settings.

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  2. From the invaluable Dr. Nerdlove’s “Don’t Date Geek Girls”:

    “It’s worth noting that the Geek Girl is different from a girl who is a geek.The Geek Girl is the culmination of geek fantasies. She’s the one with the Triforce tattooed on one wrist and the 1-Up mushroom on the other. She’s the one the thick-framed cat-eye glasses and the purple bobbed hair. She’s wearing a Can’t Stop The Signal tee, knee-length socks, a Hogwarts sweater (Gryffindor House, of course), a pleated mini-skirt and white Chuck Taylors with Pac-Man hand painted onto them. She’s the one toting around the Naruto-branded messenger bag with a copies of Watchmen, Blankets and Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men sticking out the top. She’s waiting in line for the midnight release for Halo 4 and Kingdom Hearts Posterior Aphasia. She’s clutzy in an endearing way, she wants you to protect her and yet she still wants to [bleep] your brains out. She’s the living personification of a checklist of desirable traits, all crammed into one person. And she only exists in geeks’ minds.

    http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2011/09/dont-date-geek-girls/all/1/

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  3. You know how the male definition of a slut is “woman who is having sex with men other than me”? Well, the female definition of “cool girl” is “woman who is having more fun than me, and her performance of herself isn’t at all like my performance or the performance I’d prefer”. Pffft. It isn’t any less sexist for a woman to use other women as a Rorschach test than it is for a man (a la the jezebel article). From the article:

    “A few in particular were considered top tier examples of the form, and they were irritating beyond comprehension, but mesmerizing to watch. They were fun. Never too serious. Beautiful. Interesting. Elusive. Allergic to feelings. Only about good times. Effortlessly sensual, but one of the guys. Foul-mouthed, but incredibly feminine.”

    Oh yeah, there’s nothing more an artist—especially a young female artist who’s already navigating the murky waters of exploitation—wants to do than share deep personal feelings with the media, because she can totally trust you. Are you kidding me? “Every once in a while, they would let the mask down just enough that you could see underneath it all there was a kind of extreme vulnerability—a need, say, for someone to swoop in and help pick up the pieces of this fragile but tough specimen” Bullshit. She’s reading what she wants to read—just like the so-called “intoxicated” dudes. Bah. “Which is probably why I don’t know a single woman in her thirties, forties or beyond who is at all like the Cool Girls I knew in my twenties or still see from a distance.” That’s because the author wasn’t ready to respect a woman in her twenties, and she wasn’t ready to see from anything but a distance, then and now.

    Who declared that broad the arbiter of authenticity?

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    1. Eh, I’m kind of addicted to the internet advice columns and it actually seems to be a frequent problem that women ask about. They want to be “the cool girlfriend” (that’s the usual phrasing I’ve seen) and are afraid that if they express their true desires or needs that they’ll lose the “cool girlfriend” status. If you’re not a cool girlfriend, you’re presumably being needy, clingy, bitchy, etc.

      So it’s not entirely an issue of some women judging other women.

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      1. Setting aside the idea that women writing to advice columns are representative of women (or even just unmarried women in relationships), and also setting aside the very real logistical quandaries about the “moar committment” that young women are supposed to want (if you need me to elaborate I can; for now I’ll just leave you with the thought that it’s not just young men who crave adventure, experiences, and dreams of their own—they just have more cultural support for it)…

        Let’s unpack that “cool girl” image. Number one with a bullet for being a so-called “cool girl”–being conventionally attractive. Fat? Homely? Disabled? Otherwise outside the lines of conventionality with a twist of quirk? Not a “cool girl”. Let’s not pretend that women aren’t just as harsh with unconventional women as men are, nor that women are any less likely to slam an attractive woman as a bimbo, apropos of nothing. Cattiness is encouraged, nay, celebrated in this culture, moreso in the media. Women policing women on every-damn-thing under the sun is real. And still sexist.

        Next is youth. Let’s not pretend that ageism isn’t a thing, either the ageism of routine disrespect for young women, or the ageism handed out to “older” women like the author, routinely bypassed in favor of younger women imagined as ingenues.

        And now we get to “authenticity”, because that’s what makes you cool as opposed to a “cool girl” (funny how that feminine modifier on the end changes the whole meaning, no? And never in a good way either). And that’s the gap to exploit, isn’t it? Can’t come down on looks if you’re relying on your own to give you a leg up. Can’t come down on age either if you’re relying on your own relative youth as a competitive factor. But authenticity? Hell, anybody can fake that and have it made, right? Attacking authenticity with the “cooler” irony has been around since before Aesop’s fox didn’t want those grapes anyway.

        You know who becomes the “cool girls”? The same “tomboys” who were having their femininity policed by the “mean girls” and their mothers. The girls who just didn’t perform to those standards, or were not even aware of them. The girls who geeked out on interests of their own, deeply and without apology. Who is expected to put away “childish things” (like music, sports, writing, art, travel, and other adventures) and stuff their talent and dreams in the attic is definitely gender-coded. (as is who gets to pick that stuff up again if they choose—won’t be any films about Walter Mitty’s sister leaving cubicle city, will there?).

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  4. The description of the Cool Girl doesn’t even sound familiar to me. Maybe I haven’t spent enough time in bars or large cities. It might be a New York kind of thing.

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  5. I find it amusing that there is all this drama around a definition of a fantasy offered by a character that punishes people if they don’t live up to her (the character’s) fantasy. I thought one reason why the author offered this definition of a fantasy character was to point up how Amy has her own unrealistic fantasies about men and women and to provide a way to examine how angry she is about having to play a role for others (while being unaware of her own demands that others play roles for her.)

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  6. If that´s a “Cool Girl” (what “Amy” says), it is pretty disgusting. Yet, I don´t think SHE really exists, or that kind of “cool girl” -from the asshole man perspective- is extremely rare. Of course, the idea is morally disgusting -a sexist idea indeed: the girlfriend of the boy as a convenient combination of a cute dead doll, some female body parts and the essence of a “true” man. “Machos” are very weird… wanting “boobed bros” as girlfriends… I say all this without going to the other side (extreme): a “cool girl” cant´be, or at least an actual cool girl can´t be an adventurous and original girl, because she is a girl and true girls are porcelain princesses. Both sides say the woman is a porcelain princess, the difference is that in one case the princess comes with brains and superior feelings; in the other one, she has relevant real life skills such as not feeling outside the bedroom and burping for fun -and the porcelain is tighter.

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