cool girl essay

GEORJIA ASHLEIGH CROSS

• Georjia Ashleigh
• Jun 26, 2020

THE COOL GIRL: An analysis on the Cool Girl trope throughout cinema.

“Men always use that - don’t they? - as their defining compliment. ‘She’s a cool girl’.” - Amy Dunne, Gone Girl.

She’s not like other girls, she’s a cool girl. In her 2012 bestseller Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn gave this trope a name and proceeded to savagely tear it to pieces. If we look at cool girls onscreen - and at celebrities who often play this persona for the public - we can identify the specific elements that make up this character’s DNA: she’s one of the guys, she has a passion for cars, or sports, or other masculine activities. The cool girl reflects the male protagonist’s interests: Gone Girl stating, “She likes what he likes. If he likes girls gone wild, she’s a mall babe who talks football and endures buffalo wings at Hooters.” She’s fun-loving, raunchy, and uninhibited. She likes junk food and beer. This bro-y temperament is packaged in an effortlessly hot female form, she’s easygoing and never gets angry. Most saliently, the Cool Girl isn’t a real girl, she’s a myth created by men, perpetuated by women pretending to be her. So here’s my take on what the Cool Girl represents in our culture and how she evolved in the years since Gone Girl called her out.

The problem with the Cool Girl fiction is that it’s a male fantasy. The woman not only has to look exactly as the guy wants her to - she also has to be exactly as he wants her to be on the inside. Gone Girl investigates the toxic fallout of women feeling they have to perform this fantasy. Significantly, the movie’s iconic “cool girl” monologue plays out over a montage of Amy orchestrating her plot to frame Nick for her disappearance. So it’s implying that all the years of impersonating the cool girl are what made Amy into this sociopath. She’s determined to destroy the guy she spent so much time pretending for and now resents as a result: “I wax-stripped my pussy raw. I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies. I ate cold pizza and remained a size two.” From this, we can see that the “cool girl” act has a time limit. The smoke-and-mirrors can’t endure through a real long-term relationship - as it requires a lifetime of suppressing your authentic self. Jezebel’s Tracy Moore argues that being the cool girl is a phase many women go through in young adulthood, but according to Gone Girl when the Cool Girl gets tired of faking it and decides to express her individuality, her man will just ditch her for a newer model of the trope. The movie doesn’t suggest Nick is the only one to blame for this behaviour, though - he’s never had to learn how to accommodate a woman with her own mind in his life. With all this play-acting, the couple never got the chance to really know each other.

Flynn took inspiration for her commentary from the 1998 romcom There’s Something About Mary . She explained that the character Mary “looks like Cameron Diaz but she’s also a doctor, and she also loves hamburgers, and she starts out playing golf in the morning. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a cool girl!’ And then I thought, oh right, she’s been invented by guys.”. The whole premise of the film is how wild Mary drives every man she meets - and that makes sense when you consider this woman is simply a bundle of male fantasies with a pretty face. The Cool Girl was around in our culture for a long time before Flynn gave her a name. Countless shows and movies throughout the decades have used a cool girl to be the guy’s dream - look at Donna in That 70s Show , a beautiful spin on one of the guys. In 2005, How I Met Your Mother opened with Ted falling head over heels with Robin - the perfect girl who only wants something casual. In 2004, Lost ’s Kate played by Evangeline Lily embodied the beautiful tomboy who unintentionally enchanted the two most handsome males on the Island. 2007’s Transformers gave us one of the most perfect examples of the trope with Megan Fox’s Michaela. This easy, timeless pairing of hot girl and hot car might also remind us of Cindy Crawford’s iconic 1992 Pepsi commercial which began with her driving up in a sick ride to a dusty gas station. Starting in 2010 in the MCU, Black Widow became beloved in a male-heavy space by looking like Scarlett Johansson while being truly “one of the guys”. She offers a supportive presence in the other Avenger’s lives without outshining them. Even in a movie as self-aware as Deadpool, the love interest Vanessa is really just the Cool Girl trope to a T.

In most onscreen depictions, female viewers aren’t really supposed to identify with the Mary - our audience surrogate is the male protagonist, and we view this woman through his gaze. So, far from being empowering to women, this character (who attracts every man for miles without trying to, who eats whatever she wants and stays effortlessly thin) sets a new impossible standard. To this day, numerous celebrities project this persona in public. The actual cool girl may be a phantom but she comes to life because women watch the Mary’s onscreen and try and emulate her. The Cool Girl in real life as Gone Girl puts it, “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”. The irony of the cool gas that a big part of her act is not caring, not trying, not needing the man. But performing the Cool Girl persona is an extremely demanding effort. Of course, it’s important to note that men don’t have a monologs on enjoying foods or sports - many women are genuinely passionate about male activities, and this doesn’t have to be some kind of calculated act. A number of women who come off as cool girl can be positive role models. Obviously, it’s great to see women show off their sassy wit, or embracing a goofy, unpolished, no filter approach. But ultimately, none of these things matter unless the girl is supremely beautiful because the cool girl’s true defining quality is, in Flynn’s words, that she’s “above all hot.”. We can see this dynamic illustrated in Miss Congeniality , FBI agent Gracie starts out with all of the Cool Girl qualities but this just makes her the butt of the jokes and insults from her male coworkers. It’s only after her makeover - when she’s revealed to be gorgeous - that her quirky, masculine characteristics are received as charming. So, without this prerequisite of hotness, being a badass or a tomboy would not be viewed as cool at all.

Narratives onscreen use the cool girl to put down another type of woman who’s more uptight, classically feminine, or who cares too much. Black Swan ’s fun, sensual Lily makes repressed good girl Nina feel her lifetime of diligent work as a ballerina counts for nothing with Vincent Cassel’s character saying “Watch the way she moves. Imprecise but effortless. She’s not faking it.” In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, impulsive, free-spirited Rachel - also played by cool girl, Mila Kunis - is framed as an obvious step-up from cold and fame-obsessed Sarah. In How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Andie drives a guy away for her magazine article by pretending to be the uncool girl - an ultra-feminine, hyper-sensitive, needy woman. But the irony is that Andie still can’t help making him fall for her because she actually is a bonafide cool girl who loves the Knicks and doesn’t watch what she eats. The movie makes a grotesque joke out of Andie’s fake girly behaviour (which she models after the unlucky-in-love Michelle character) but it never questions why men should be so automatically put off by a women who’s not effortlessly detached and undemanding.

We also saw this dynamic at play in the cultural response to the 2013 Oscars. After the ceremony, Best Supporting Actress winner, Anne Hathaway was much maligned for her perky earnestness, while Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence was the belle of the ball after tripping up the stairs and being characteristically unedited. Yet, while Hathaway’s persona may have struck some viewers as performative, both these women were playing a part on Oscar night. So there’s an inherent misogyny in setting up the cool girl as somehow superior to “another” kind of woman. Lauding her for being “not like other girls” elevates stereotypically male qualities over female ones. As Anne Helen Petersen writes, “They’re basically dudes masquerading in beautiful women’s bodies reaping the privileges of both.” This is played up in Amy Schumer’s A Chick Who Can Hang , where the men’s enthusiasm for cool girls is really part of their repressed homoerotic desire.

The cool girl may appear superficially edgy, but she’s only cool so long as she’s comforting - not challenging - to men. In the Family Guy episode Mr and Mrs Stewie , Stewie meets her female alter-ago and falls madly in love. But, his infatuation wears off as he realises she’s more evil than he is, joking that “Strong women always turn out to be nightmares, like Joan of Arc.”. This captures the idea that the cool girl is only desirable as long as she stays on her guy’s level and doesn’t surpass him either in aptitude or passion. She can’t be too intense about anything. On Friends , Ross is drawn to his new girlfriend Bonnie because she is so liberated and cool, but when she expresses her alternative spirit in a way that doesn’t turn him on, Ross is horrified and immediately loses interest. Petersen describes how 60s and 70s cool girl, Jane Fonda, experienced an intense backlash when she started getting too serious about activism and protesting the Vietnam War. While Black Widow is humble enough for Avengers fan, Captain Marvel was trolled for emphasising that it’s female lead was stronger than all the other heroes, and she very much knew it. Movements like #GamerGate prove that women who bring too “female” a perspective to pursuits like tech or gaming are emphatically discouraged. In light of the way our culture eviscerates uncool girls, it’s easy to see why it’s so tempting for women to put on the Cool Girl persona, even a little bit.

But this doesn’t actually get them very far. In Bridesmaids , Annie adopts this part to to make herself more attractive to Ted even saying “I’m not like other girls, I’m not like ‘Be my boyfriend!’. Unless you were like, ‘Yeah!’, then I’d go ‘Maybe?’.” But the act just leaves her feeling disempowered. Most significantly, while being the cool girl may help you get by in the short-term, it gets in the way of the long game of putting women, in general, on equal footing with men. As Sarah Ditum puts it, “ The Cool Girl doesn’t even suggest there’s anything wrong with the man-woman hierarchy as it stands. All the Cool Girl demands is that she be seen as an exception.” One of the most startling lines in Flynn’s Gone Girl monologue is: “Go ahead, shit on me. I don’t mind, I’m the cool girl.” This highlights the complete passivity of this type and a requirement of this persona is never getting angry which means she never tries to change anything. Flynn’s critique led to a backlash that made the “stock” cool girl appear a little too obviously contrived, after J-Law was criticised for behaviour that came across as a running shtick she eventually seemed to mature out of this act.

Yet, the demise of this blatant version of the trope doesn’t mean we should declare the death of the cool girl - she’s just evolving, being updated for a new era. Numerous celebrities on social media show the “cool girl” settling down into married life, as they play the “cool wife” through fun exchanges or pranks with their famous significant others. Bad Moms , another examples starring Mila Kunis, presents a “cool mom” type who is super-hot, even when she’s supposed to be a mess and relatable because she speaks out about how hard it is to be a mom and drinks a lot. Naturally, she’s juxtaposed with a too-poised, anti-cool mom we’re supposed to look down on for her obsessive quest for perfection. Overall though, the persona appears to be changing for the better. More recent iterations of the Cool Girl largely departs from her traditionally passive and submissive roots. Today’s cool girls freely speak their minds about things that matter, perhaps what’s most promising is that many of today’s examples seem to be performing coolness to appeal to women, as well as men. But the total liberation of the cool girl will only come when she stops trying to get by in a man’s world, and start working towards a world where women are free to be whoever they want to be and this is considered cool.

#coolgirl #essay #analysis #cinema #television

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The decade of the Cool Girl

Gone girl’s searing, satirical monologue about male fantasies of womanhood has found a new life online. but have we forgotten its original meaning.

Girl dinner. Hot girl summer. Hot girl walk. Girlboss. Girlfailure . Lucky girl syndrome. Delulu girls. Lover girls. Manic pixie dream girls. That girl. We live in a girl universe, where everything, from food to work, from success to failure, from love to hate, has become something to be done by “the girlies”. If you trace this girlification of the world back, it leads us, a decade previous, to one central figure: The Cool Girl.

If the girlified, infantilised universe had a monarch it would be the Cool Girl. In the summer of 2013, as Gillian Flynn prepared to release her bestselling novel Gone Girl  in paperback, the Cool Girl was already everywhere. Her figure, created in a speech the Machiavellian murderer Amy Dunne gives in the middle of the book, had already become the takeaway from Flynn’s novel, and had already captivated and divided her readers. “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl,” Flynn writes. “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.” 

It wasn’t long before the Cool Girl speech developed a fandom all of its own, separate from the book itself. Cool Girl is ruining our reality , said one critic. Cool Girl defined the decade. Cool Girl, like a piece of biting satire hidden amongst the pages of a crime drama, “gave name to a smothering, invisible force”. It was both a monster manifesto and a rallying feminist cry. It even inspired a song . Even now, just over 10 years on from the initial release of Gone Girl , which sold 20 million copies, spent 112 weeks on the  New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a movie (Rosamund Pike, who played Amy, was nominated for an Oscar, while Ben Affleck, who plays Nick, cost the production millions by shutting down filming for days at a time because he refused to wear the hat of a baseball team he didn’t like) it is the Cool Girl that remains the indisputable cultural legacy of the Gone Girl  machine. 

And Gone Girl  really did become a machine. Not just in sales, but as a literary and publishing trope in its own right. The so-called “ Gone Girl effect”, a predecessor to the publishing world’s current obsession with “sad girl lit” , led to a deluge of stories told by unreliable female narrators, taking Amy Dunne as their starting pistol. From its initial hardback publication in June 2012 through to June 2022, a cool 680 books were published with the name “girl” in the title. There was The Girl on The Train, A Girl Like That, The Girl With All The Gifts , Final Girls,  and even simply The Girls (Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series preceded Flynn, but didn’t lead to the same influx of lit girl titles). The genre became so oversaturated that it eventually led to parody; Netflix’s The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window  came out last year. The thing that unites all these titles, bar the fact the eponymous girls have not reached literary womanhood, is the unreliable female narrator. They become the formative texts of those searching out “the notion of the ‘unlikable female character’” .  

The mega success of the Gone Girl Industrial Complex means it’s inevitable that some of the original intention of not just the book but this particular speech will be lost in popular translation. Flynn’s “Cool Girl” monologue was initially divisive; critics argued over whether it was misandrist or misogynistic . The full quote, which rarely appears online, is as critical of women pandering to the male “cool girl” fantasy as it is to men for propagating it. Cool Girl, in her original iteration, was an exploration of pretending to be someone you’re not, which is as much a theme of the book as gender or power or sex or anything else. “The whole point is that these are two people pretending to be other people, better people, versions of the dream guy and dream girl, but each one couldn’t keep it up, so they destroy each other,” said Flynn of her creation. Little wonder that after initially oscillating between calling Amy a misandrist and a misogynist, critics usually settled upon: both.

Amy Dunne, in her Cool Girl diatribe, is railing against women who see themselves through the lens of men. You can draw a through line to the cool girl through John Berger, or Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride,  published a decade before. “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,” Atwood writes. “Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” Amy Dunne—and by extension all women, in Flynn’s universe—is the cool girl and the nightmare, both the Madwoman in the Attic and the perfect bride , the angel and the monster.  

Or at least, she was. Just over a decade on, Cool Girl has taken on a life of her own, divorced from both the original context of the novel (and the film) and from Flynn herself. The monologue has found new life on TikTok, where the hashtag “cool girl” currently stands at 2.7bn views and Amy Dunne has become one of the patron saints of female rage. This makes sense. “I certainly think that the acknowledgment of female anger as a viable emotion, as something that should be dealt with and acknowledged and appreciated and women feeling that way was one of the reasons that so many people connected to Gone Girl, ” Flynn said herself of the book’s legacy.  

Gone Girl has been rediscovered, or perhaps reclaimed, by Gen Z-ers who see more relatability than annoyance in the girlification of the universe. Her figure sits adjacent to the rise of the self-referential, aesthete nihilism of femcel ideology . Taking inspiration from the incel movement, but seeing themselves as apart from it, online femcels celebrate many of the character traits that made Amy Dunne—and the deluge of other awful female protagonists that came after —who she was.  

If that feels like a wilful misreading of Gone Girl’s original intention, then at least it’s not as frustrating as how young men metabolised Amy and how they understood her Cool Girl speech. I spent most of my twenties hanging out with these kinds of men, the kind of men you could imagine regurgitating Nick Dunne’s line in the novel: “Women are fucking crazy. No qualifier: Not some women, not many women. Women are crazy.” Sadly, the wild popularity of the unhinged female victimhood publishing craze didn’t just impact female readers, it contributed to a belief in young men that this was simply what all women were really like. “I know so  many girls like that”, a boy once told me at a party when Gone Girl  came up in conversation. “Just crazy, you know. We’ve all met a girl like that.” “What?” I asked. “A murderer?”  

The endurance of Cool Girl’s continued cultural capital should be a testament to Flynn’s writing and how well she articulated the performance of femininity under the patriarchy, albeit through the conduit of a “narcissistic psychopath” character like Amy Dunne. But instead it has become twisted away from its own original, satirical meaning. It’s championed in earnest by the incredibly online girls of TikTok just as it was by the incredibly online girls of Tumblr who preceded them. And it’s taken as an admission of guilt by every man who didn’t read the book, and maybe didn’t even watch the film, but has definitely met a girl they think is as unhinged as Amy Dunne. 

Although its legacy is muddied, it’s admittedly not all bad. The Cool Girl speech did help legitimise the idea of female anger, which is now celebrated by TikTok. But at the same time, it opened the door for our girlified universe, where every woman is crazy; every woman is really just a girl; every woman is hiding something. 

Gone Girl: What the"Cool Girl" Dialogue Really Means

In Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike is a beautiful wife who feels fed up playing the role of “Cool Girl.”

If you haven’t read or seen Gone Girl yet, this isn’t going to spoil anything for you (but you must get yourself to the theater!). There’s nothing subtle or hidden about the premise of the film/book: Nick and Amy Dunne are a beautiful young couple recently relocated to a sleepy Missouri town from New York City. On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing and the prime suspect, of course, is her hunky husband Nick. Amy, however, may not be what she seems, either. In one particular passage that has been called a veritable cultural critique, Amy writes vitriolically:

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, coworkers, 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.

By now, everyone who writes (online, at least) has opined hotly about this “issue.” (Because ebola, global warming, terrorist threats, or even just existential angst…are all secondary to the question of allure .) On one hand we have writers who believe (yes believe!) that the cool girl doesn’t exist . Then there are those who claim to be cool girls themselves, and advocate for the authenticity of their cool-girlness. (“Just because a cool girl likes the things a straight male likes and looks good while doing it, doesn’t mean she doesn’t truly enjoy being that way or acts thusly just to attract the male gaze.”)

From personal experience, I can’t attest to the existence of actual Cool Girls in real life, though they probably do exist, like all sorts of people that I don’t encounter must. I suppose the said Cool Girl may have a genuine propensity for acting like a straight male (beer pong, carefree attitude, love of casual sex) or take on those interests strategically. (The difference between having an innate interest and one developed for other motives seems rather semantic, but). But the real question is why we bother labeling women into these archetypes, that barely make sense most of the time (I mean really, if no one can agree on whether they even exist).  And the damage is greater than just the empty feeling you get after reading a nonsensical blog post and thinking, “Did I just really click on that? Because of Jennifer Lawrence’s photo at the top? Then why did I spend 2 minutes scrolling through it?”

First, this dialogue propagates the idea that if these women are “cool,” then the rest of the women are “uncool.” Then there is the fact that whether or not the Cool Girls are being “authentic,” we are still defining them by the male gaze. They’re “cool” because the guys call them that, not because people in general  (i.e. men and women) call them that. Finally, their main defining trait is that they are evidently irresistible to men. Can’t we all just agree now that in the 21st century, women don’t have to be defined by their relationship to men? All the Cool Girl discussions are really just an expansion on articles like, “10 Makeup Looks Guys Actually Like,” “What He Really Thinks About Your Style,” and “How to Be the Best Sex He’s Ever Had.”

What I’m really wondering about with the advent of the Cool Girl is the effect on young girls and adolescents, who might grow up believing that this Jennifer Lawrence/ Mila Kunis hybrid is a real ideal with which they must identify. Fed on a steady diet of Cool Girl triumphalist blog posts, they may well aspire to a certain idea of womanhood without understanding or exploring who they are. And most crucially, it’s concerning that these young girls will believe they won’t be lovable if they’re “difficult” or “complicated,” and try to neutralize whatever they are with a beery infusion of Cool Girl ethos.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never been called a “cool girl” by anyone, and that doesn’t bother me in the least. I embrace all aspects of my femininity, whether it’s enjoying cooking, dressing up, or just “caring about things” in general. When I’m sad I do things like light candles and hop into a bath. I have burst into flames because I wanted to put my hair up and wear red lipstick, and my boyfriend would have been happier with my hair loose and face bare (possibly the very definition of “unCool Girl”). When dinner plans change, I freak out. (None of my girl friends are cool with this, not just me). And I’m vegan. But I’ve never for a moment thought about changing myself to suit other people, especially the members of the opposite sex (on a matter of principle). It doesn’t worry me that these traits would turn anyone off. And isn’t that nonchalance and self-possession the very idea of “Cool”?

Are you a Cool Girl? How do you feel about this Cool Girl craze? (Or Gone Girl, book or movie. I loved it!)

Related: 9 Things to Feel Okay About Your Love Life

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Photo: Entertainment Weekly

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The 'Cool Girl' Trope: Real Life Fantasy, Screenwriting Nightmare

The "cool girl" is a trope we've seen overused, subverted, and lampooned. let's do a deep dive together. .

Sometimes when you're writing a new screenplay or pilot, you want to develop a character you think takes on the normal tropes or stereotypes. But sometimes that trope subversion is actually the new trope. 

Yeah, I know, it's a brain twister. But stick with me. 

Today I want to talk about cool girls. 

No, I'm not talking about your mother. 

I'm talking about the character who pops off the page and can attract all sorts of actors, depending on the role's execution. 

Check out this video from The Take and let's talk after the jump! 

A Deep Dive Into the 'Cool Girl' Trope

Okay, you've watched the video. Let's dive into what it means for your screenplay and pilots. 

What is the cool girl? 

The cool girl is one of the guys. She's the direct mirror to the male protagonists' likes and dislikes within the world. She's fun, raunchy, profane, and effortlessly hot. The most important aspect of a cool girl is that "she's not like other girls."

She also will have almost no arc outside of what happens to her love interest. 

Let's dig deeper. 

Where did the cool girl idea come from?  

The cool girl is a myth perpetuated by mostly male writers. It was called out and deconstructed by Gillian Flynn in her book and subsequent movie, Gone Girl . 

In this monologue, we hear everything that makes up the male fantasy of this kind of character trope. 

Flynn got the idea of the cool girl from watching the movie, There's Something About Mary . In the film, Cameron Diaz's character plays golf, eats fast food, loves beer, and her actions lead a number of men to fall in love with her. 

She's portrayed as the perfect woman. Laid back, interested in dweeby, out of shape guys as much as jocks, and never stresses. 

This lead Flynn to think of her as "such a cool girl" and was the launch for the idea. 

But the "cool girl" ideas has been in film and television since its inception. 

The cool girl in movies and TV 

As you're reading, I'm sure your mind immediately is jumping to different portrayals of this kind of character. 

TV shows like How I Met Your Mother thrive off this kind of writing and casting. They both have female characters played by incredibly hot actresses that just want to hang with the guys, smoke cigars, and drink scotch. 

Or what about That 70's Show  where Donna's a tomboy and loves to wrestle? 

In feature films, you don't have to dig deep to bring the cool girls to the front of the line. 

These women are usually stripped of their femininity outside of pure looks, which gets to point of emphasis across clearly. They have to be attractive. 

Olivia Wilde's character in Drinking Buddies is a brewmaster who just wants to hang. 

Sloane, from Ferris Beuller , was all about fulfilling Ferris' fantasies about his big day off. She was along for the wild ride. 

Or what about the character of Rachel, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall ? Her entire plotline is that she can just cut loose and hang, which is what our lead needs in a girl so he can be the one who shines...

The cool girl deconstructed 

The male point of view in writing within the history of the industry has been discussed a lot. We know that with equality comes a new point of view, and as we embrace that we'll get better film and TV. 

That being said, there is a long history of this trope from even the early days of Hollywood. 

Movies like  Bringing Up Baby  showed women fulfilling the male fantasy, in an almost manic pixie dream girl sort of way. 

This is not to say women don't enjoy beer, or golf, or sports...plenty of entertainment goes out of its way to frame this correctly...but when those same women are only defined by how hot they are at the end of it, like Megan Fox's character in  Transformers,  you have a problem. 

Aside from the sexism at the center, it's also terrible storytelling. 

Cool girls are often so thinly written that they are unrelatable to anyone watching or force insane fantasies upon viewers that set an impossible standard by which we judge people in real life. 

If your audience cannot identify with the people on the screen you'll have lost them right away. 

The same goes for the development executives reading and considering your projects. 

How do we destroy this trope? 

We need characters with individuality. 

The more you focus on the development and arcs of the characters at the center, the less they'll feel like stale archetypes with no part of reality. 

Also, if you're writing a romantic comedy or drama, think about this question: 

What if your characters had to accommodate one another? 

What if both people at the center of the story had to fundamentally work on themselves or just reason with the other person to have a healthy dynamic?  

I think those kinds of questions could put you on the road to success and help you avoid any of the pitfalls mentioned earlier. As a male screenwriter, I also seek the advice and notes of people outside my purview. Get a few women to read your work if you're nervous! 

If you don't know any women, that's a real problem! 

We all want better film and television on the air. If we want to make the cool girl a gone girl, we need to write and produce knowing this trope exists and do our best to avoid it. 

Let me know what you think in the comments! 

What's next? Do a deep dive into genre ! 

Film and TV genres affect who watches your work, how it's classified, and even how it's reviewed. So how do you decide what you're writing? And which genres to mash-up? The secret is in the tropes.  

Click to learn! 

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We stopped by their booth to check out what they had in store to show off at NAB 2024 . Check out the interviews below.

The Tifffen Company at NAB Show 2024—Smartphone Filters

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No Film School's coverage of NAB 2024 is brought to you by Blackmagic Design .

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Breaking Down Media Tropes: The Problematic ‘Cool Girl’

We all know the “Cool Girl.” Some of us have even tried to be her. She seems to get everything, but her existence is a conundrum. She doesn’t care about what she eats but wears a size 2. She doesn’t worry about wearing makeup, but always looks amazing. She has somehow escaped every insecurity that plagues women on and off the screen. So how does she exist? Because the Cool Girl is a male fantasy. The best example of the Cool Girl analysis is the 2012 novel and 2014 film “Gone Girl.”

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl,” Amy Dunne says. “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.”

The Cool Girl is an established character type who likes everything her male counterpart does and agrees with everything he says. She is effortlessly thin, beautiful and, most importantly, “she’s not like other girls.” These women can be seen in several films, including Cameron Diaz’s character in “There’s Something About Mary,” Megan Fox’s character in “Transformers,” Sloane from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Mila Kunis in “Black Swan,” Charlize Theron’s character in “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” Robin Scherbatsky from “How I Met Your Mother,” Mila Kunis’s character in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and even Katy Perry in her song “One of the Boys,” just to name a few.

The Cool Girl first became popular with 1920s flapper and actress Clara Bow. She flirted with famous actors such as young John Wayne. She drank, danced and drove cars with boys in the film “Dancing Mothers.” With the movie “It” she became a worldwide star and the original Cool Girl.  This beautiful, talented actress cared little for the Hollywood spotlight. As a child she played with boys and avoided typically feminine activities. “I always played with the boys. I never had any use for girls and their games. I never had a doll in all my life,” Bow said. “But I was a good runner, I could beat most of the boys and I could pitch.”

Despite the lack of makeup, fancy clothes or other beauty products, Bow was an instant success in Hollywood. Her stunning face was submitted to a magazine and led to her career. She was all of Hollywood’s, and all of men’s, “ideal women.” Bow’s character drank and smoked. In her film “It,” a line of women were interviewed, but she was the only one described as having “it.” A song was created for Bow and her character, singing, “She’s got it, and plenty of it, brother. I never saw another have so much of such and such.”

While the Cool Girl often exists as a character trope, her image can also be seen in many modern actresses. Think Jennifer Lawrence’s interviews discussing her ability to eat steak, McDonalds and anything else all while maintaining perfect skin and a small waist. Or Katy Perry insisting she is the better choice over other girls. “I saw a spider and didn’t scream. ‘Cause I can belch the alphabet — just double dog dare me. And I chose guitar over ballet. And I tape these suckers down ‘cause they just get in my way.”

The Cool Girl can also be seen in TV shows such as “Gilmore Girls.” Main characters Lorelai and Rory eat enough food to weigh 400 pounds. “We are going to be so sick. It’s amazing that we still function,” Rory says as she and Lorelai fill up on sweets. It is amazing that they can function and, without any exercise or dieting, remain incredibly slim on diets of takeout pizza, coffee and candy. The problem with the Cool Girl isn’t her humor, her love of food, drink or other male-associated traits such as sports and wrestling. If all women with such traits were accepted, regardless of size or appearance, the world would be a better place. However, in the case of the Cool Girl, stereotypically male traits are only attractive in women when they are, well, attractive.

As writer Anne Helen Peterson said, a defining trait of the Cool Girl is her aloofness and effortless beauty. “Be chill and don’t be a downer, act like a dude but look like a supermodel,” she says. Take Cameron Diaz’s character in “There’s Something About Mary.” She is slim, blonde, bright and effortlessly beautiful with a wide smile and an easygoing personality. She admires her love interest’s slobby clothes, describing him as “a little different.”

Mary, a doctor, plays golf every morning and loves hamburgers and beer. “I want a guy who can play 36 holes of golf, and still have enough energy to take Warren and me to a baseball game, and eat sausages, and beer, not lite beer, but BEER.” She adores her co-star Ben Stiller. She finds him quirky and admits, “I know he’s a little different, but that’s what I like about him. He dresses like a complete dork, he chews with his mouth open, he hardly ever says the right thing.”

Megan Fox’s character is the best example of the inherent sexualization of the Cool Girl. Writers often ignore the Cool Girl and their character arcs outside of their male counterpart. This can be seen as the general treatment of this character type, but especially in films like “Jennifer’s Body” and “Transformers.”  Her character, Mikaela, wears a short skirt, boots and a tank top. She begrudgingly accepts that she “has to” sit in the male protagonist’s lap when they are in a car with only one seat belt. One of their first exchanges in the movie is when Shia LaBeouf’s character stammers, “I was wondering if I could ride you home. I mean, give you a ride home.”

The Cool Girl is another trope that ignores women’s autonomy. This creates extreme discomfort in the women watching and playing these female characters. The sexualization of Megan Fox’s character is what led to her leaving the “Transformers” films. Despite co-stars noticing Fox’s intense discomfort, the sexualization continued until Fox felt that she had no other choice but to quit her job. “Megan developed this Spice Girl strength, this woman-empowerment [stuff] that made her feel awkward about her involvement with Michael, who some people think is a very lascivious filmmaker, the way he films women,” LaBeouf said. “Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality. It’s summer. It’s Michael’s style. And I think [Fox] never got comfortable with it.”

Prior to the #MeToo movement, women in the media were not taken as seriously. The insults and rumors spread about Fox being difficult to work with encouraged everyone to dismiss her experiences. “I feel like I was sort of out and in front of the #MeToo movement before the #MeToo movement happened, I was speaking out and saying, ‘Hey, these things are happening to me and they’re not OK,’ … And everyone was like, ‘Oh well, f**k you. We don’t care, you deserve it.’ Because everybody talked about how you looked or how you dressed or the jokes you made.”

Megan Fox is held to the hot, understanding Cool Girl always. Because if there is one thing a Cool Girl is not, it’s defiant. “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.”

The Cool Girl is a great example of why the phrase “you’re not like other girls” is met with disdain. Because beneath the backhanded compliment is an insult toward an entire gender. “Not being like other girls” doesn’t mean being unique; in fact it can be very easy to be a Cool Girl willing to dismiss her emotions and have a beautiful face and body.

Writer Abby Rosmarin admits being the Cool Girl destroyed her life. “I used to love saying I was ‘not like other girls,’ she said. I considered myself the ‘perfect girlfriend,’ not because I was caring or empathetic, but because I swore I’d never get upset, never show signs of neediness, and certainly never say the L word first, even if the love I felt was slowly consuming me alive.” Like the Nice Guy, the Cool Girl is often written as the more appealing alternative to a regular girl.

In “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” Rachel, played by Mila Kunis, is the appealing love interest due to her easygoing personality. When the male protagonist, Jason, offers to buy Rachel’s drink she says, “You don’t have to dote on me. I’m not that type of girl.” Rachel is the Cool Girl. She is the opposite of the needy, emotional Sarah Marshall who Jason is trying to escape. This can also be seen in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” when Andie must make a guy dump her for her job.

To do this she pretends to be “the bad girlfriend.” Basically, everything we know guys hate,” Andie says. “I’ll be clingy, needy…” Her friend recommends also being touchy-feely and even calling him to say everything she’s had to eat.” An emotional girlfriend looking for support is “crazy.” This movie is a comedy and it is an exaggeration of these traits, but men’s distaste for emotions and commitment is accepted without question. Like Andie’s friend, Michelle, asks, “What’s wrong with that?”

On and off the camera, the Cool Girl, and the writers of her movie, dismisses the idea of a man needing to respect and protect a woman’s boundaries and desires. In “Black Swan” Mila Kunis’ character is used to demean ballerina Nina, Natalie Portman, and her emotions. Where Nina is anxious and hardworking, Odile drinks and has tattoos, all while maintaining a perfect image in the eyes of their male instructor. “Watch the way she moves,” he tells Nina. “Imprecise, but effortless. She’s not faking it.” The choreographer, Thomas, insists he only wants Nina to be more relaxed, insisting he “thinks she has potential,” even as he gives her the leading role.

Women who did not fit the Cool Girl type are made to feel insecure and uncomfortable until they stop protesting male advances or voicing their emotions. This can be seen when Thomas touches Nina, kissing her, playing with her hair and encouraging her to go home and masturbate. Nina is bulimic, anxious and abused by her family. Thomas insists that if Nina refuses her emotions, maintains her body type and maintains perfection all while being relaxed, she will be everything Odile is. She will be the Cool Girl.

Modern media receives stronger critique of such tropes. But for writers who wish to end this trope once and for all, there are other solutions. Destroy the idea that being a women is “effortless.” Being in a relationship requires input from both people. A good girlfriend is not an emotionless sex machine; she is a person. Being in good shape is difficult too. It requires attention, exercise and diet. The actresses playing these women are on strict regimens.

Instead of critiquing women who care, we need to raise up women who work. The women who speak their minds should not be shushed or made to be inconvenient. The Cool Girl is a girl who boys like. A woman is not a girl, and she is not a commodity. Women get angry, they cry, they have emotions like anyone else and we need to celebrate this. We must celebrate women who persevere, not because of a man’s motivation or desires, but because women are strong, emotional creatures like anyone else. There is nothing cool about faking perfection. The coolest thing a woman can be is genuine, her biggest defender and her loudest cheerleader. She has standards and dreams of her own. She is a human being, and because of that she cannot be perfect.

• "How I Met Your Mother"
• #MeToo Movement
• Cameron Diaz
• Media Tropes
• Robin Scherbatsky
• Shia LaBeouf
• Transformers

Rose Younglove, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Cool Girls Only: The Modern Male Fantasy

Cool Girls Only: The Modern Male Fantasy Final Paper

Introduction to “The Cool Girl”:

The “Cool Girl” archetype was initially identified by Gillian Flynn in her 2012 novel Gone Girl. [1] In the novel, protagonist Amy fakes her own disappearance and leaves a trail of clues ultimately intended to implicate her husband in the crime. Amy diatribes about the impossibility of the Cool Girl after she reveals her plot to the reader over halfway through the book:

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, coworkers, 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.[2]

In short, the Cool Girl in Gone Girl is a woman who acts like a man and looks like a supermodel. [3]She does not have the emotional depth or insecurities that complicate women to men, deeming her an ideal female construction for the prevailing “bro-culture” of the modern age. After Gone Girl’s David Fincher film adaptation in 2014, the Cool Girl received mass media attention as a revelation of a contemporary female archetype that had gone nameless. Amy’s frustration with the pressure to be a “Cool Girl” resonated with many viewers, and the film’s brilliant rendition of the written monologue sparked widespread debate about the Cool Girl’s presence in modern day film, literature, and more.

Essential to the Cool Girl’s success is her authenticity. In the article “Jennifer Lawrence And The History Of Cool Girls”, journalist Anne Helen Petersen refers to the allure of Cool Girls and what prevent us from—at least initially—hating them: “She’s never polished; she’s always fucking up.” [1]Peterson’s article points out that the Cool Girl is not an entirely new archetype. Indeed, according to Peterson, each era of cinema has had its own “Cool Girls” who woo male audiences and push the boundaries of femininity. Often, these celebrities have faded from the spotlight when they cross the line of acceptable “Cool Girl” behavior and do something which deems them undesirable. [2]But there is something about the modern-day Cool Girl which makes her decidedly different from her predecessors. For one, an increasingly informal society has changed male culture, creating a new form of male behavior referred to as “bro culture.” [3]The 2012 article, “A Quick and Dirty Tour of Misogynistic Bro Culture,” reflects that “popular culture, especially cultural products aimed at young men, teaches men to be womanizers.” [4]Specifically, the article cites that the pervasiveness of pornography caused by the internet largely contributes to bro-culture, and allows men easy access to porn at an early age. As a result, many men grow up accustomed to the idea of women as sex objects or the subject of fantasy. [5]Other impacts of technology, such as sports networks like ESPN and TV shows like Entourage, which facilitate male gatherings and make “bros” an on-screen staple, legitimize the bro behavior. For the Cool Girl, bro-culture presents a new set of criteria which she must meet to be deemed “Cool”. Cool Girls of the modern day must eat like the boys, watch sports like the boys, and be game for the gross and harassing behavior that bros are likely to inflict on her from time to time.

This paper aims to dissect on-screen representations of the Cool Girl and examine how the persona has, due to wild popularity, transitioned from fictional characters to real-world celebrities. Moreover, I intend to explore how the Cool Girl fantasy has sparked a real-world expectation among young men who grew up watching the Cool Girl on-screen. These analyses will ultimately conclude with a projection of the Cool Girl’s future. Ultimately, I want to show that, while the Cool Girl may be marketable, her effortless Cool and Hot persona relies on a sense of authenticity and effortlessness that leashes her to the will of the patriarchy.

The Cool Girl’s Romantic Comedy Rebirth:

Though, as Peterson points out in her article, [1]the Cool Girl archetype is nothing new, the modern day Cool Girl is in many ways a byproduct of late 90s and early 2000s romantic comedies. Romantic comedies serve as a natural fit for Cool Girl characters, since these women are the ideal objects of male desire and it is easy for men to trip over themselves in attempts to woo the ethereal Cool Girl. Three movies which present modern Cool Girls are:

There’s Something About Mary (1998)

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days  (2003)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

The Cool Girl Manifested in Celebrity:

Except from an Interview With Mila KunisCool Girls have a unique duality on and off screen. Due to their likeable status on-screen, some Cool Girl actresses and performers have assumed the role in their off-screen personas as well. Many of these women are extremely well-liked, and seen as the authentic “relatable girl” celebrities that Hollywood has long been lacking. While Cool Girls may appear to be universally likable, response to celebrities who emulate the archetype suggest that being a Cool Girl is more of a balancing act than a recipe for success.

On the other hand, Cool Girls, namely Jennifer Lawrence, have received immense scrutiny for their “Coolness”, with some fans calling it contrived. Some blogs tear these actresses apart.

The Cult of the Cool Girl

While the celebrity and fictional Cool Girls are not necessarily harmful in and of themselves, they seem to cultivate a male obsession that promotes unrealistic standards and misogyny. Take, for example, the popular blog Total Frat Move . [1]

Total Frat Move , or TFM, appeals to young college men in fraternities, providing weekly fraternity stories and “TFM Babes of the Day” through both their website and Instagram. TFM has largely embraced the Cool Girl as a female standard. In short, women who act the part of the Cool Girl are accepted and praised by the blog, while those who are too needy or unwilling to throw back a beer are admonished.

Other male-media sites send similar messages. The extremely popular website and media company Barstool Sports, for instance, has a selection of eight, nearly all-white, thin and conventionally attractive girls permitted to write for the website. These women are the Cool Girls—between their looks and willingness to write articles on sports, they are the idealized women of the modern-day bro. Their section, titled “Barstool Chicks”, includes bits such as the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, which corroborates their sexualization by male readers and staff members. One Barstool Chicks article , titled “Sean ‘McBae’ Continues To Win On And Off The Field” talks about the “smokeshow” girlfriend of an NFL coach, linking revealing photos from her Instagram and saying that the coach has everything, including “an absolute rocket to go home to every night.” [1]In these instances, the Cool Girl is complicit in the objectification of other women, and contributes happily to a misogynistic male culture.

Annotated  bibliography:

• The first source to examine is the infamous Cool Girl monologue in the 2014 Gone Girl film adaptation, directed by David Fincher. In the clip, we understand Amy’s plot to fake her disappearance, drive away, and begin a new life for herself through a series of cut shots. She begins the monologue as she is driving, then as she is transforming herself from the perfect, skinny, well-manicured “Cool Girl” to what she perceives as the total opposite. She dyes her hair a mousy brown, wears shapeless clothing, buys drug store hair products, and eats junk food for herself, not to please those around her. All the while, Amy’s voice plays in the background, as the script deviates slightly from Flynn’s original writing to heighten Amy’s scorned woman narrative and delve deeper into her archetype’s role in her failed marriage.
• In this article, journalist Anne Helen Peterson responds to the Cool Girl archetype presented in Gone Girl. She begins the piece with an examination of who many consider the ultimate real-life Cool Girl, Jennifer Lawrence. Peterson writes: “Lawrence performs Cool Girlness with such skill, such seamlessness, that it doesn’t seem like a performance at all. I’m not suggesting that Lawrence is intentionally inauthentic, scheming, or manipulative: Rather, like all the Cool Girls you know, she’s subconsciously figured out what makes people like her, and she’s using it.” Peterson claims that the Cool Girl is a manifestation of all personality traits deemed ideal by the patriarchy, and thus that many Cool Girls use the persona as a means of self-promotion rather than genuine authenticity. It is in itself, an archetype characterized by manufactured authenticity. Peterson goes on to note a few Cool Girls who will be mentioned in this paper, specifically Mila Kunis, Olivia Munn, and Olivia Wilde, before diving into a historical analysis of past Cool Girls. She cites Clara Bow, Carole Lombard, and Jane Fonda as three of Lawrence’s predecessors.
• This article analyzes Chrissy Tiegan as an additional example of the Cool Girl archetype, claiming that Tiegan ticks all boxes that Flynn defined in her initial analysis.
• A list of characters who are thought to comply with the “Cool Girl” archetype and an analysis of how well they actually fit the description.
• Lord writes a scathing article attacking Jennifer Lawrence for her persona, and “revealing” that her feigned “masculine” and “bro-y” personality quirks are actually just masking her underlying “rude” personality. The article claims that Lawrence is manufactured and attacks her in numerous aspects, finding clips where she tries to play off what the author considers “mean” behavior as something “chill” and “relatable”. Lord’s article is self-defeating, as she rips Lawrence apart with such lacking empathy that you can not help but feel bad that Lawrence suffers so much criticism for attempting to achieve success in a male-dominated industry.
• Rothfield posits that changing male ideals have resulted in a new type of sexism, one which rejects the ultra-femininity of previous eras and declares the “Cool Girl” as the ideal female. Rothfield roots the “Cool Girl” of Gone Girl in the longstanding Femme Fatale archetype of film noir. Amy intends to harm her husband as a means of punishing him for inflicting his ideals onto her personality, forcing her to live a sham existence in order to make him happy.
• Osborne argues that Amy can be viewed as a “feminist anti-hero that rejects (yet also ambivalently overconforms to) the postfeminist simulation: ‘cool girl.’” Osborne argues that Amy’s rejection of her former Cool Girl persona is in part a way to bolster her belief that unconditional love is impossible. In her monologue, Osborne contends, Amy effectively disassembles the manufactured aspects of her personality that were intended to please her husband and prevent him from viewing her as opposing or imperfect in any way.
• VanLeuvan takes her analysis of Amy’s monologue a step further, analyzing the specifics of the scene and declaring the cinematic sequence as a visual demonstration of Amy’s liberation from the pressures women feel to please men.
• Orman’s piece focuses less on Amy’s Cool Girl status, and more on her role as a post-feminist heroine for the reader, one who deploys every trick in the book to gain sympathy from the public and then rips away her narrative as a sympathetic female victim to explore her own agency and intention in her actions. The piece demonstrates an important way that women may feel resistant to the Cool Girl and may give some insight as to why the public has begun to sour on the archetype. No one expresses the public’s frustration more than the Cool Girl herself, and this linkage is key to understanding how and why we must break down this archetype as a patriarchal construction.

[1]Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (Broadway Books, 2014).

[3]Anne Helen Petersen, “Jennifer Lawrence And The History Of Cool Girls,” BuzzFeed, accessed November 12, 2018, https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/jennifer-lawrence-and-the-history-of-cool-girls.

[1]Petersen, “Jennifer Lawrence And The History Of Cool Girls.”

[1]Petersen.

[2]Petersen.

[3]“What We Mean When We Say ‘Bro Culture,’” accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/college/2017/06/07/what-we-mean-when-we-say-bro-culture/37432805/.

[4]“What We Mean When We Say ‘Bro Culture.’”

[5]Joan C. Chrisler et al., “A Quick and Dirty Tour of Misogynistic Bro Culture,” Sex Roles 66, no. 11 (June 1, 2012): 810–11, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-012-0123-9.

[1]“Welcome to Total Frat Move | By Grandex Media,” accessed January 15, 2019, https://totalfratmove.com/.

[1]Kayce Smith1/14/2019 12:10 PM, “Sean ‘McBae’ Continues To Win On And Off The Field,” accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.barstoolsports.com/chicks/sean-mcbae-continues-to-win-on-and-off-the-field.

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Amy's Feminist Manifesto in The Movie 'Gone Girl'

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Published: Apr 11, 2022

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Revenge of a Cool Girl

by: Agnieszka Piotrowska , May 15, 2019

The idea of a ‘nasty’ woman who challenges the masculine is not new, but in recent times it has gained a new currency and might offer a space for reflection. What does it mean to resist patriarchy in contemporary cinema and why and how might it be relevant to the culture outside the movie theatre? How can female anger be translated through female authorship into work, which gives expression to a female voice and the possibility of imagining a different future? I focused on such questions in my new theoretical work and experimented with creating an impressionistic video essay which deploys some of the ideas from my new book,  The Nasty Woman  (2019) through the use of different visual tools.

The video essay opens with a short clip from the new Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) about female power and rage. I use it as a punctuation mark in my exploration of female authorial anger against patriarchy. The essay intends to be allusive and enigmatic, from which it derives its visual poetry and emotional impact. It works through associations rather than a linear argument, yet it makes a clear point about how the neo femmes fatales created by women authors give different expression to their rage and lend different agency to their anger.

The figure of a femme fatale has been discussed extensively in the scholarly literature (see, for example, Bronfen 2004; Doane 1991; Copjec 1993) as, on the one hand, a harbinger of subversion; on the other, nothing more than a male fantasy, complying with general expectations of traditional patriarchy. As such, in film narratives, the femmes fatales needed to be punished and extinguished in the end, even if in the 1940s and 1950s, they offered an alternative to a typical female lead of the 1930s who primarily occupied domestic spaces. In a classic film noir, the femme fatale travelled away from home but was usually punished for her transgression of gender expectations.

In this video essay, I deploy the figure of Amy in Gone Girl (2014), a neo-femme fatale who literally gets away with murder. She is full of agency, be it of a negative kind, but she does not get punished. I invite the viewer to treat Amy’s character as an expression of metaphorical rage and a response to a long stream of violence against women. She is pitted against Dorothy, the abused woman from David Lynch’s classic Blue Velvet (1986), which offers an excellent counterpoint to Gone Girl. Not only is it a metaphor of the hidden and the invisible in American suburbia but it is also a cinematic text that strikes a different relationship to the gender power structures, agency and sexual violence, which it conjures up and puts on display. The video essay also uses clips from classic films of the noir genre, which provide a visual comparison to the neo-noir as well as to the classic feminist film  Jeanne Dielman (1975) made by Chantal Akerman .

I take issue with a view presented by the notable feminist psychoanalyst, Jacqueline Rose who, in her article in the London Review of Books (2015), expresses her utter dismay at Gone Girl and another work, The Girl on the Train (2016), calling them deeply misogynistic and unhelpful to the feminist cause, in particular because of the violence and duplicity in Gone Girl and the apparent shortage of intelligence in The Girl on the Train . While Rose makes some excellent points, in critical terms, there is also a different way of framing the representations of female violence.

In The Nasty Woman, I evoke the notion of ‘perverse protest’ in these films, a term which I borrow from Lori Marso (2016: 870) in connection to Simone de Beauvoir’s definition of marriage as ‘perversion.’ In her discussion of Gone Girl and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman , Marso (2016: 870) points to the surprising similarity between the two films, namely to the anger of the main female character against patriarchy. Similarly, I argue that the grotesque and unexpected female violence in both films is a metaphorical gesture of defiance against the expected complicity of a nice woman within a patriarchal system.

Jeanne Dielman is recognised as a feminist classic in stark contrast to Gone Girl , whose subversive potential might not be immediately apparent because of its genre (Hollywood psychological thriller) and its distinct authorial context (a male director). Nonetheless, the author of the novel Gone Girl , Gillian Flynn presents Amy’s position as a response to the actual and perceived violence carried out by her husband and by patriarchal society as a whole. Following Marso’s line of thinking, the video essay invites the viewer to consider the violence in Gone Girl as a ‘perverse protest’ against the violence of patriarchy, which other popular films, such as, for example, Blue Velvet , did not offer.

Since its release, Blue Velvet has attracted a substantial body of criticism by notable feminist scholars, particularly by those engaged with psychoanalysis. What is surprising is that many of them appear to defend the level of violence and sexual abuse inflicted on Dorothy, the film’s subjugated femme fatale . Barbara Creed’s well-known article, from 1988 acknowledges the film’s provenance as a typical neo-noir and advances the argument that the film constitutes a ‘send-up of Freudian themes’ (1988: 97). However, Creed does not fully recognise the violence that the film subjects the woman to or Lynch’s evident enjoyment in presenting that violence. Creed, alongside Laura Mulvey (1994), Lynne Layton (1996) and others, emphasises the rather obvious re-formulation of the Oedipal plot. She sees Dorothy as partly presented as the phallic mother because of her powerful position in the desires of the male protagonists. ‘This is why Frank screams at her not to look at him. He cannot bear to see that she ultimately holds the power’ (1988: 110). Indeed, this may be the case but Dorothy’s power is stripped away from her in the film’s ultimate resolution.

Reading these scholarly articles in 2019 after the #MeToo campaign and Harvey Weinstein’s scandal is a profoundly uncomfortable experience. First of all, the Oedipal story—which forms the mainstay of Freud’s theory and which is represented in Blue Velvet—  feels anachronistic and deeply patriarchal in the way it renders it (the theory and the film) merely irrelevant. Psychoanalysis can be employed in modern ways, emphasising the unconscious without accepting the Oedipal fable as the organising story of the western culture. It is disquieting that in these feminist texts, women scholars attempt to present Dorothy as powerful even though she is repeatedly abused. The screen fantasy in Blue Velvet appears to be precisely the opposite: the powerful phallic mother is overwhelmed and eventually castrated by the usual domestication of the femme fatale. At the end of the film, she is seen as safe, but devoid of her mysterious attractiveness, simply a single mother with a little son. However much I admire David Lynch as a filmmaker, I have no interest whatsoever in seeing Dorothy raped and humiliated on the screen in yet another re-telling of the Oedipal myth.

In the video essay I trace visual similarities in the classic noir and neo-noir films’ story worlds, including a sense of movement, often in a car but also as walking up and down the stairs, moving in lifts, running and dancing, as well as a sense of a passionate engagement and, at times, jealousy which drives the story. The notion of punishment is important too. Deeds committed against the femme fatale (actual or imagined) drive her towards taking action on her terms. Deception and entrapment are the traditional elements of film noir , and they are repeated and reformulated in neo-noir with one crucial difference: the neo-femme fatale becomes the subject and not the object, she is active, and she does not go under.

It is worth remembering that in Blue Velvet, there is another female character, Sandy, who is contrasted with Dorothy. Played by young Laura Dern, Sandy has been discussed in scholarly literature much less readily. Yet, she is the original ‘cool girl’. The term coined by Gillian Flynn through Amy in Gone Girl signifies a (young) woman who is game for anything, and who is prepared to be everything that a man wants her to be without putting any demands on him.

The video essay brings together the classic cool girls of film noir: Amy from Gone Girl (played Rosamund Pike) and Sandy from Blue Velvet . The cool girl is a good looking, charming, thin, well-educated professional who can cook a fabulous meal and is a perfect lover; one that is innocent but adventurous and also endlessly supportive and forgiving. She is an impossible patriarchal fantasy pretending to be a post-feminist success. The cool girl is also the perfect housewife in Chantal Akerman’s film. She perfectly performs all the mundane womanly tasks, including preparing meals and offering sex, until one day she snaps and is unable to comply with this absurd fantasy. It is then that she kills a man.

In this video essay, I also wanted to include Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006). Its female lead, Jackie is a femme fatale driven by a desire to carry out revenge like many classic noir heroines and Amy from Gone Girl . Unexpectedly, however, Jackie is transformed through touch and the power of a deeply satisfying sexual experience. Both Luce Irigaray and Audre Lorde (2017: 22-30) advocate considering the erotic energy as a power for transformation, reclaiming the sexual from the patriarchal, and urging women to think of it as a possible transformative feminine force. It is crucial to emphasise that in Red Road, Jackie remains in charge of the physical encounter at all times. She is always the subject and never the object, but through the erotic encounter, she sees her sexual partner as a subject too, and because of this, her rage gives way to other emotions. This is why, I argue, she chooses forgiveness and not revenge, while subverting both the domestication necessary for taming the femme fatale and the nonsensical fantasy of the cool girl. Instead, Jackie is awoken through the encounter but chooses a future on her own, against the Oedipal ideal.

Use the HD button to adjust the video’s quality.

Bronfen, Elisabeth (2004), ‘Femme Fatale—Negotiations of Tragic Desire’,  New Literary History  Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 103–16.

Creed, Barbara (1988), ‘A Journey through Blue Velvet : Film, fantasy and the female spectator’,  New Formations,   No. 6,  pp. 97-116.

Copiec, Joan (ed.) (1993),  Shades of Noir: A Reader , New York: Verso.

Cowie, Elizabeth (1993), ‘Film Noir and Women’, in Joan Copiec (ed.),  Shades of Noir: A Reader , New York: Verso, pp. 121–66.

Beauvoir de, Simone (1976 [1948]),  The Ethics of Ambiguity,  trans. Bernard Frechtman, New York: Citadel.

Beauvoir de, Simone ( 2011 [1949]),  The Second Sex,  trans. Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, New York: Vintage.

Doane, Mary Anne (1991),  Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis,  New York: Routledge.

Doane, Mary Anne (1987), ‘The Woman’s Film: Possession and Address’ in Christine Gledhill (ed.),  Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film , London: BFI, pp. 283–98.

Grossman, Julie (2009),  Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-up,  New York: Palgrave.

Layton, Lynne (1994), ‘ Blue Velvet:  A Parable of Male Development’,  Screen, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 374–93.

Lorde, Audre (2017),  Your Silence will not Protect You,  Madrid: Silver Press.

Marso, Lori (2016), ‘Perverse Protests: Simone de Beauvoir on Pleasure and Danger, Resistance, and Female Violence in Film’,  Signs , Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 869–94.

Mulvey. Laura (1994), ‘Netherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus and Blue Velvet ’. Fetishism and Curiosity,  London: British Film Institute, pp. 137–54.

Piotrowska, Agnieszka (2019),  The Nasty Woman and the Neo-femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema,  London: Routledge.

Rose, Jacqueline (2015), ‘Corkscrew in the Neck’,  London Review of Books , Vol. 37, No. 17, pp 25-26.

Films & TV Series

Blue Velvet  (1986), dir. David Lynch.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina  (2018), Season 1, TV series developed by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Netflix.

Double Indemnity  (1944), dir. BillyWilder.

Gone Girl  (2014), dir. David Fincher.

Jeanne Dielman (1975) , dir. Chantal Akerman.

Mulholland Drive (2001), dir. David Lynch.

Postman Always Rings Twice, The  (1946), dir. Tay Garnett.

Red Road (2006), dir. Andrea Arnold.

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Drunk Walk Home

Her moissanite, operation trample, with what is left, who is the cool girl the evolution of coolness in a culture that thrives off impermanence..

Maggie Stoner (writer), Maggie Ung (graphics)

We’ve all seen her, in some way or another, in some time or place. The illusive walk, the ethereal mystique, the silent charm that draws you in. The internet calls her the “cool girl”, but really, it seems to be increasingly more difficult to try and pin down the qualities that make her “cool”.

CW: discussions of misogyny.

We’ve all seen her, in some way or another, in some time or place. The illusive walk, the ethereal mystique, the silent charm that draws you in. The internet calls her the “cool girl”, but really, it seems to be increasingly more difficult to try and pin down the qualities that make her “cool”.

When I sat down to write this, I rapidly recalled all the “cool girls” I could think of, but when I started listing names, I realised that these girls were completely different. They didn’t look the same, dress the same, behave the same, or lean into the same aesthetic. What is more, they were only classed as certified “cool girls” by my own standard. Yes, coolness is a construct, much like most of the terms we use to define people – but when the culture we live in is so rapidly evolving, with opinions becoming increasingly fleeting (cue micro-trends), our concept of coolness becomes blurred.

In principle, being “cool” is the ability to be calm, collected and otherwise nonchalant in times of stress – but this definition has far transcended literal meaning and is now most often used to describe an energy, aura, or level of someone’s perceived status.

Throughout my life I’ve understood and witnessed many different definitions of “cool” that have evolved just as I have, yet now when I try to explain what cool is, no single definition comes to mind. So here is the multifaceted nature of cool as I have seen it:

The schoolgirl cool girl.

My first recognition of coolness as a concept emerged from a series of ritualistic, after-school Disney Channel viewings. Hannah Montana, Lizzy McGuire and Alex Russo (of Waverly Place) epitomised the “cool girl”, and I – like many others my age – strived to embody their effortless charm. Of course, the reward for coolness at that age was playground popularity, which throughout the rest of middle and high school, progressed to a more serious and seemingly life-defining common-room popularity - which at that level, also meant invites to parties, Facebook pokes by the footy boys and an invite to all the school formals.

The “cool girls” in school – in a traditional sense – are pretty, skinny and confident. They’re friends with boys (!!!), they’re probably really good at netball, and they often exist in a realm that is perceived as slightly above everyone else. No one knows how they get to their position, but once they are there, their label sticks till graduation day.

This high-school conceptualisation of coolness still exists, unmoving between the ages of 8-18, yet once I reached university, I realised that a different definition of coolness prevailed – one that existed beyond the American cheerleader-esque “cool girls” in the ‘people my age at school’ category.

The cool girl that’s “not like the other girls”.

Sometimes intertwined with that of the school-girl cool girl, is the easy-going, fun-loving yet mysterious (and hot) “cool girl” that – often lying in the centre of the male gaze – is most definitely not like the other girls.

Although a fair few seeds of internalised misogyny were planted within the schoolgirl cool girl hierarchy, the equivocation of coolness to a closeness to masculinity, is also present in this version of the “cool girl”.

Initially popularised by Gillian Flynn in her novel Gone Girl with an iconic, self-scathing monologue by protagonist Amy, this specific “cool girl” trope has served as a platform for a myriad of discourses from 2014 up until today. As described both in the book and many analyses that followed , this “cool girl” paradoxically embodies many stereotypically masculine qualities, hobbies, and behaviours – like beer, burgers, cars and raucousness – while maintaining the highest standard of careless, feminine, conventional attractiveness. Essentially, this (relatively mythical) “cool girl” exists solely for the male gaze, with on-screen depictions existing for pleasure of the male viewer who constructs - or more so expects - this unattainable standard for women in real life.

However, as reflected in Gone Girl , the “cool girl” trope has a time limit; eventually revealing itself as a toxic amalgamation of internalised misogyny, isolation, and low self-worth. Because the goal of being a “cool girl” is to be different from other women in the hopes that your irresistible uniqueness will compel men to fall in love with you (also a symptom of main-character syndrome ), the “cool girl’s” self-worth is thus, often demarcated by their level of desirability.

What is more, the predictability of this “cool girl” trope, and the many criticisms against it, has paradoxically made it “uncool” to retain this persona. In fact, it calls into question whether the “cool girl” as defined in this way, was ever truly cool to other women, or whether it was the self-proclaimed cool factor that gave it the name. Either way, this version of the “cool girl” – most recently re-named the “pick-me girl” – has most definitely lost its allure .

Hyperreal individual cool girls

As of late, the “cool girl” has seemingly broken free of the static chains of what coolness was in high school and taken on a range of different personalities and aesthetics – on par with society’s recent fixation on uniqueness and micro-trends. 

Where Gen X and millennials used to seek out and curate interests, style (and subsequently coolness), through culture, music and art, Gen Z has access to an immediately accessible gateway to cultural coolness in social media. Although “cool girls” now begin as an authentic representation of uniqueness, personal style, and carelessness – this persona is often broadcasted to social media and thus, provides a lineage of consumers with a “cool girl” aesthetic to mimic.

However, inevitably ‘too many’ people will adopt the same “cool girl” energy, hairstyles, makeup, and outfits (more easily facilitated by fast-fashion behemoths), and thus render this fleeting micro-aesthetic no longer “cool” and at worst, “ cheugy ”.

With long-lasting uniqueness somewhat endangered in today’s climate – it has proven to be one of the paradoxically constant yet fleeting marks of the “cool girl”. Of course, the opposite of cool is ‘basic’, and though there are arguably an infinite number of ways to be unique, social media has unfortunately generated a slippery pipeline between the two, and in turn, giving people more intense motivations to find a niche.

This is further embodied in the emergence of the “weird girl aesthetic” - a style classified by essentially, wearing whatever you want. Broadly categorised by an amalgamation of  mismatched textures and patterns, the “weird girl aesthetic” is paradoxically, uniqueness aestheticised.

In an article for Vox , Safy Hallan-Farah defines this enthusiasm for uniqueness and rare aesthetics, as “hyperreal individualism”. She explains that “hyperreal individualism is where the original references [of an aesthetic] are largely illegible or incoherent, but the individual wishes to define themselves and create an identity around their own disparate tastes and styles anyway.”

Class also plays an important role, where when poorer consumers prioritise accessibility and practicality with their personal identities and style, their lack of choice is seen as authentic and thus, often “cool”. The subsequent copycatting of their style, ultimately contributes to another fleeting trend of performative coolness -  the aestheticization of poverty .

Now, with every aspiring “cool girl” trying to pin down a uniqueness that is palatable enough to be popular, but not basic enough to be copied, society is left in a tricky situation that questions if coolness itself is an accurate categorisation anymore, or rather, authenticity is what is desirable.

With our perceptions being increasingly influenced by social media, and micro-trends creating different categories of carbon-copied “fashion girlies”, coolness has arguably lost its inherent meaning. What was once a democratic perception of ethos, has become a competitive commodity, yet although she may not actually exist in our culture of comparison, the cool girl - to me - exists in the original definition: organically, and authentically, uncaring.

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The new cool girl trap: Why we traded one set of rigid rules about who's "likable" for another

Even if the rubric for "likability" has changed, women are still judged in opposition to one another, by arielle bernstein.

Miranda July opens her recent interview with Rihanna with the revelation that she had taken a good deal of time to get dressed: “I dressed very carefully for her, the way I would for a good friend, thinking hard about what she likes.”

Throughout her interview, July’s desire for connection and closeness with her interview subject is portrayed as something that is both entirely natural and also carefully cultivated, from the clothes she wears to the questions she chooses to ask and not ask. “ A Very Revealing Conversation With Rihanna ” is less a glimpse into who Rihanna is than a tender look at the vulnerability of desire, how our need to connect with someone outside of ourselves is always predicated on the hope that we ourselves will actually be seen.

The hope that others will like us strikes me as the most human of existential wants. For women, the question of likability is more fraught, as a woman’s perceived likability is often reductive and linked to very gendered stereotypes about how women can and should behave in public spaces.

A number of prominent feminists over the past several years have criticized the obsession with judging women through the lens of whether or not they are likable. In her recent acceptance speech for the Girls Write Now award , for example, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues that the narrative that girls and young women must be likable holds them back: "That you’re supposed to twist yourself into shapes and make yourself likable, that you’re supposed to kind of hold back sometimes, pull back, don’t quite say, don’t be too pushy because you have to be likable. And I say that is bullshit."

Likewise, in her 2014 essay “ Not Here to Make Friends ,” Roxane Gay contends that “likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don’t follow this code become unlikable.”

In pushing back against likability, Adichie and Gay urge girls and women to throw off the shackles of societal expectations. But while both these theorists are encouraging us to radically re-examine the way we think about women’s roles, much of the current discussion about likability is less interested in freeing women from societal judgment than it is about simply changing the factors that come into consideration when assessing a woman’s skills, talents, and whether or not you personally want to be friends with her.

In fact, if you look closely at today’s cultural landscape it’s clear that what is “likable” for women is already in the process of changing. We live in a world where pretty blond sociopaths à la "Gone Girl" have become normalized, a world where one of the most popular serial dramas centers on a group of female prisoners whose personalities are as varied and complex as the nature of their crimes. It’s impossible to argue that female likability is based on good manners when today’s fawned after starlets are anything but polite and well behaved. Stars like Amy Schumer, whose brand of raunchy, in-your-face humor, much of it with a strong feminist bent, has been heralded time and time again as this year’s “It Girl” and actresses like Jennifer Lawrence, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are lauded for being charmingly sassy and consistently speaking their minds. When J-Law speaks out against the Hollywood pay gap and says, “I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable! Fuck that,” she is both giving the middle finger to the establishment, and also performing a different kind of likability.

If the “cool girl” performs a fantasy for men, the “fuck likability girl” performs a fantasy for other women: the idea of a female creature so fabulous and free that she just doesn’t care if other people like her at all. Like “no makeup” selfies and the trend of supermodels raving about how much junk food they eat, the anti-likability moment is a layered performance, one part critique of social norms, one part buying right back into them. The “fuck likability girl” is Amy Schumer proudly declaring that, “I’m probably like 160 pounds right now and I can catch a dick whenever I want,” a statement that is simultaneously a little bit brave and a little bit sad, in that it both critiques traditional beauty standards (you don’t have to be a size 2 to be beautiful!) and reaffirms them (but seriously, being appealing to men is the most important thing) all in one fell swoop.

The ritual of famous, powerful women who are lauded and well-liked — nay, worshipped by droves of fans — giving advice on how it isn’t important to be likable is a kind of performance of female empowerment that may be heartening to see, but also rings more than a little hollow. Likability isn’t static and the rules for likability also seem to vary depending on who is being judged. White women in pop culture, for example, have historically been given greater permission to build a brand by giving a middle finger to social norms, while still being seen as cheeky and likable. Miley Cyrus has made a career on her “bad girl” antics, but is quick to snipe at Nicki Minaj for not being polite and nice enough when she asserts herself. The wealthier and whiter you are, the easier it is to cast off the shackles of “respectability.”

Of course, men also have to contend with perceived likability, but a man’s perceived likability tends to reflect how we feel about him as an individual, while a woman’s likability is about ranking women against one another. Lots of men can be likable in different ways, but women are only allowed to be likable in one way (see this pointed tweet by Lindy West where she takes on that bizarre comparison of Kylie Jenner and Malala Yousafzai by declaring, “THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE GIRL. ALL GIRLS FIGHT TO THE DEATH”).

You also see this dynamic play out in Alexandra Petri’s article “ Famous quotes the way that a woman would have to say them during a meeting ,” where, in response to Lawrence's comments about not wanting to worry about likability anymore, Petri skewers the way that women often eschew bluntness, make apologies, or put the needs of others above themselves, when sharing ideas with colleagues. When this article was making the rounds on social media I noticed tons of my incredibly talented and smart female friends further beating themselves up, echoing how often they engaged in similar verbal tics and making amends not to do so again in the future. Just as the anti-vocal fry moment, like the anti sexy-baby voice moment, centered on making fun of and discrediting women for their vocal inflections, the anti-likability moment assumes that traditionally feminine approaches to sharing information and problem solving are simply not valuable.

Conversations about likability always assume that there are only two kinds of women in the world: ones who want to be liked, and ones who want something more, again putting women into incredibly narrowly defined boxes that don’t make a heck of a lot of sense, and are also dangerously reductive. The terms themselves are deliberately vague—what is likable is ultimately subjective, and as we’ve seen in the past few years social pressures for women, and everyone else, can change over time.

My biggest concern with the anti-likability moment is that it simply changes the terms by which women can be perceived as likable, rather than advocating for more radical change that I think theorists like Gay and Adichie are actually calling for. By all means, let’s encourage assertiveness and cheer for the advent of female characters who are more complicated than merely nice. But it’s just another kind of policing when we assume that female kindness is weakness, that friendliness is boring, and that expressions of vulnerability mean you are under the patriarchy’s thumb.

Toward the end of her interview with Rihanna, July says, “A soul just knows a soul” firmly, melodramatically, and it hits home, even though we know, at some level, this isn’t exactly true. Even the most organic connections are always born out of perseverance. When we want someone to like us, we consciously make choices to dress or act or speak a certain way. The trend of “anti-likability” doesn’t mitigate any of the pressures women face when striving to be seen as full people; it simply rejects one type of performance for another.

Arielle Bernstein's work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The Millions, and RogerEbert.com, among other publications. She teaches writing at American University. You can follow her on Twitter @NotoriousREL

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The curse of the cool girl novelist

Her prose is bare, her characters are depressed and alienated. This literary trend has coagulated into parody.

By Charlotte Stroud

When George Eliot wrote her merciless takedown of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” in 1856, she did not intend the genre to survive her attack. This wasn’t a mere hatchet job, where the axe takes out a few chunks from the body only for the thing to stagger on, but a complete decapitation inflicted by a sharpened machete. How vexed Eliot would be to learn that this monstrous genre has recently grown a new head.

In their 21st-century guise these novels inevitably look different, but bear the unmistakable marks of the original silly breed diagnosed by Eliot: they mistake “vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality”, they treat the less enlightened with “a patronising air of charity” and, despite their obvious mediocrity, are hailed by the critics, in the “choicest phraseology of puffery”, as “stunning”, “magnificent”, a “tour de force!”

Whereas the original silly novels were romances, the new breed come to us in the form of a genre dubbed “sad girl lit” (romances of the self, perhaps), otherwise known as millennial fiction. And in place of the original “lady” author we have the cool girl novelist.

Like the silly novels of Eliot’s day, the newest iteration has come to dominate the literary scene, indeed, it seems to be a prerequisite for publication today that young women writers are incurably downcast. Just a cursory look at Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list (judged by the godmother of cool girl novelists, Rachel Cusk) will give you an idea of the genre’s ubiquity.

In Britain alone, the depressed and alienated woman is the subject of such novels as Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts , Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms , Chloë Ashby’s Wet Paint , Natasha Brown’s Assembly , Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days and Daisy Lafarge’s Paul . In America, the terminally sad girl is the subject of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Halle Butler’s The New Me . Irish examples of the genre include Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times , Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special , and, it almost goes without saying, any novel by Sally Rooney. This is only a brief overview of a trend that has continued to lure new disciples for coming up to a decade now. Time enough for the genre to coagulate into parody.

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While the silly novels of the 19th century were “frothy” and “prosy”, their heroines inclined to “rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric”, cool girl novels are uniformly spare, and their depressed protagonists hardly speak at all. If Eliot’s silly novelists forged their prose style in rooms adorned with silk ribbon and taffeta trim, the cool girl novelists of today write from white Scandi-inspired rooms, their prose monochromatically dull.

The anti-heroine of these novels is usually a PhD student (or at least an MA), crucially distinguishing her from the common undergraduate masses. Her knowledge of intersectional theory has left her crippled by a near constant anxiety about power imbalances and inequality. She is also perpetually worried, to the point of exhaustion, nay burnout, about the plight of the individual under capitalism. Her eyes have an unmanned look about them, while her brain anxiously jumps from one devastating indictment of our society to the next. Words like ecocide and patriarchy thrum inside her skull.

Her body, she understands, having read the second-wave feminists, is chronically objectified. She has no agency (a favourite word of hers), and passively submits to whatever misfortunes assail her. The residual power she does have over her body is concentrated on the act of nail biting, which she does constantly and savagely. There is always something the matter with her tongue, her skin crawls, her stomach is tight, her eye twitches, her throat is swollen. She loses hours in the day watching the light move across her bedroom wall, taking enormous notice of her breath and the sombre shadows cast by her succulent plants.

[See also: The decline of the Literary Bloke ]

If the American novelist Henry Miller was narrating from inside the whale – a metaphor for passively accepting civilisation as it is; fatalism, in short – then these novels come to us from a sunken whale that will never again rise to the surface. Passivity is taken to its logical extreme, in that our (anti) heroines either pointlessly die, play dead, or feel dead. The contemplation of suicide is never much more than a page away, to the extent that the reader is inclined to remind the novelist of Camus’ advice: decide promptly “whether life is or is not worth living”. Henry James said that tell a dream and you lose a reader, and the same goes for tales of disassociation.

Yet the “most pitiable” type of silly novels, as Eliot observed in her essay, are the ones she calls the “oracular species – novels intended to expound the writer’s religious, philosophical, or moral theories”. Such novels are the inevitable consequence of a writer’s head being stuffed with “false notions of society baked hard” and left to “hang over a desk a few hours every day”. We might have hoped that a university education (not to mention the proliferating Master of Fine Arts programmes) would have cured writers of producing such novels, but it has only served to bake in a different set of orthodoxies.

Unlike the great writers who, Eliot opines, “thought it quite a sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are”, silly novelists are forever trying to give us a moral lesson – to force us to eat our greens. Each character is served with a side salad of left-wing evangelism, each scene accompanied by instructions on how to behave progressively, paragraphs are given over to sermons on privilege or unconscious bias. But, as the novelist Jonathan Franzen has come to realise in the latter half of his career (having served up a few bowls of broccoli), readers “don’t want a lesson, they want an experience”. We don’t go to the novel to improve our health, but for the far humbler reason that we wish to be entertained. Novels, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “are there to be devoured”. Their health benefits should be the furthest thing from our minds.

The silly novelist has no desire to entertain, she wants to do something far worthier: to impress us. It is for this reason that the cool girl novel is glutted with irrelevant references to artworks and philosophical texts, sewn in like badges on a Brownie sash to display the accomplishments of the writer. It is for this same reason that we are often presented with etymologies or paragraphs on the mating patterns of molluscs. Like the student in a class, their arm stretched so high it begins to quiver, all these novelists want is for someone to say: “Well done! Top marks! Haven’t you read a lot!”

These writers, however, also know that it’s deeply uncool to be so eager, which is why they carefully mask it with a veil of teenage angst. If Jean-Paul Sartre gave us the original novel of existential angst, the adult version, then these books are written by his decadent great-grandchildren. The exiled artist, once a revolutionary figure, has become a brand. To be an exile, these writers believe, is not only a guarantee of your artistic sensibility, but of your social status. Alienation is cool. Our (anti) heroines are never at home – not in their bodies, not in their houses and not with other people. It would, after all, be a sign of unexamined conservatism to be anything other than deeply unhappy under capitalism.

Egged on by the publishing industry – which appears to be working under the deluded notion that angst and alienation amount to the entirety of human experience – young women writers have, for too long now, been engaged in the practice of “onedownmanship”. This fallacy, which Martin Amis warned against back in the Nineties, deceives writers into thinking that “unless you’re depressed, you’re a frivolous person”. If only a handful of the writers of the aforementioned novels, some of whom are clearly very talented, would withdraw from this death spiral and chart a route upwards. This would likely involve opening some windows, going outside, meeting other (different) people and reading something besides Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath and Annie Ernaux . By such means, their novels would claw their way back towards the light, and away from the joyless mud they have all been wallowing in.

What would cure these novels at a stroke would be a huge helping of humour, not the sophisticated funnies these angsty novelists mistake for humour, but that which Clive James said is “just common sense, dancing”. We find the same call for common sense in Eliot’s essay: she calls it a knowledge of “just proportions”.

Those with common sense, who see themselves and the world in “just proportions” have “absorbed… knowledge instead of being absorbed by it”. They do not write to “confound” or to “impress” but to “delight”. They understand that the novel is not a vehicle for moral lessons, or for the display of intelligence, or for preaching, but a place where human beings can go to laugh at – which is to try to make sense of – the human condition.

In angsty novels by cool girl novelists it is the student condition, not the human condition, which is rendered. Perhaps it’s time to finally leave the quad and graduate to adulthood, not least because, to paraphrase the poet Robert Lowell: we are tired. Everyone’s tired of your turmoil.

[See also: A TikTok publishing house is bad news for books ]

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This article appears in the 20 Sep 2023 issue of the New Statesman, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

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Activist Wawa Gatheru on Championing Black Women as Climate Leaders This Earth Day—And Beyond

By Wawa Gatheru

Earlier this year, we saw one of the greatest environmental wins of the decade—and Black women were its unsung heroes. President Biden paused all new expansions of dangerous gas export hubs in the U.S., which experts have called carbon bombs . There’s been fanfare and criticism around the decision, but few have acknowledged how Black women made it possible through community organizing and generational grit. The job won’t be done until there is a permanent halt on new expansions of dirty gas. But to get there, we have to turn toward the women who are leading on climate progress around the country.

As a Black girl who grew up in the climate movement, I’ve always been perplexed by the paradox of representation in this space. While people of color are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis, we are routinely sidelined and boxed as ‘victims’ rather than the leaders we are. This is particularly true for Black women.

Women are particularly at risk to climate impacts because enforced gender inequality makes us more susceptible to escalating environmental harms. Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people in particular, bear an even heavier burden because of the historic and continuing impacts of colonialism, racism, and inequality. And that’s why I believe these circumstances uniquely position Black women as indispensable leaders in the climate movement.

A few years ago, I came across a term that encompassed what I have always known to be true. Coined by Dr. Melanie Harris, eco-womanism is a theological approach to environmental justice that focuses on the viewpoints of Black women across the diaspora. An eco-womanist approach to climate solutions is happening in the underbelly of climate injustice in the US, the Gulf South.

I have been honored to learn from and be inspired by the Black women leading on climate in the Gulf South: leaders like Sharon Lavigne of Rise St. James , Dr. Beverly Wright of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice , Roishetta Ozane of The Vessel Project of Louisiana , and Dr. Joy and Jo Banner of The Descendants Project . I’ve heard firsthand how they launched educational campaigns, organized marches, rallies, and petitions, commissioned research, joined lawsuits, and challenged everyone from local lawmakers to the EPA—all to protect their communities. Step by step, they have fought polluters in an 85-mile stretch from New Orleans to Baton Rouge that’s home to more than 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations, earning the name ‘Cancer Alley.’

By Margaux Anbouba

By Hannah Coates

By Amel Mukhtar

The fight in Cancer Alley is for life, community, and legacy. Where there are now toxins poisoning Black families, there were once plantations enslaving their ancestors. It’s not a coincidence that two history-defining tragedies struck the same area of Louisiana—it is the same system of oppression and racial capitalism in different forms. And it’s no coincidence that the resistance to it calls on a legacy passed down for generations: solidarity, creativity, and bold leadership.

The fight is local and personal, but it’s also global and systemic. And failing to recognize Black women as climate leaders isn’t just a moral dilemma. It is a poor strategic decision for all of us to win on climate.

The same industries that poison Louisiana are also fueling the climate crisis. Last year was the hottest in history , and in 2024, we’ve already seen extreme weather events making this planet increasingly difficult to inhabit. Black and Brown communities might be ground zero for climate change, but our response to this destruction impacts everyone.

The women behind the president’s pause have proven that winning on climate is not impossible. Another world is possible and we can collectively build a better world for all. The organization I founded— Black Girl Environmentalist —puts that lesson into practice around the country. As one of the largest Black youth-led climate organizations, we are ushering the next generation of Black women and gender-expansive individuals into environmental work—cultivating their talent and creativity to protect our communities, and win the fight of our lives against the climate crisis.

As a Gen-Zer, I know how tempting it can be to feel immobilized by eco-anxiety or even climate doom. But we can’t.

We can’t afford to, nor do we have the privilege to. Every fraction of a degree matters. Instead, we must look to and join the leaders who, against all odds, continue to fight and win on climate issues across the country. The pause on dangerous gas expansions showed there is power in our collective voice. Black women have lit the way, showing that the power comes from fighting for—and with—our communities. The work isn’t done, but we’ve come too far to turn back.

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Why Your Big Sister Resents You

“Eldest daughter syndrome” assumes that birth order shapes who we are and how we interact. Does it?

By Catherine Pearson

Catherine Pearson is a younger daughter who still leans on her older sister for guidance all the time.

In a TikTok video that has been watched more than 6 million times, Kati Morton, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Santa Monica, Calif., lists signs that she says can be indicative of “eldest daughter syndrome.”

Among them: an intense feeling of familial responsibility, people-pleasing tendencies and resentment toward your siblings and parents.

On X, a viral post asks : “are u happy or are u the oldest sibling and also a girl”?

Firstborn daughters are having a moment in the spotlight , at least online, with memes and think pieces offering a sense of gratification to responsible, put-upon big sisters everywhere. But even mental health professionals like Ms. Morton — herself the youngest in her family — caution against putting too much stock in the psychology of sibling birth order, and the idea that it shapes personality or long term outcomes.

“People will say, ‘It means everything!’ Other people will say, ‘There’s no proof,’” she said, noting that eldest daughter syndrome (which isn’t an actual mental health diagnosis) may have as much to do with gender norms as it does with birth order. “Everybody’s seeking to understand themselves, and to feel understood. And this is just another page in that book.”

What the research says about birth order

The stereotypes are familiar to many of us: Firstborn children are reliable and high-achieving; middle children are sociable and rebellious (and overlooked); and youngest children are charming and manipulative.

Studies have indeed found ties between a person’s role in the family lineup and various outcomes, including educational attainment and I.Q . (though those scores are not necessarily reliable measures of intelligence ), financial risk tolerance and even participation in dangerous sports . But many studies have focused on a single point in time, cautioned Rodica Damian, a social-personality psychologist at the University of Houston. That means older siblings may have appeared more responsible or even more intelligent simply because they were more mature than their siblings, she said, adding that the sample sizes in most birth order studies have also been relatively small.

In larger analyses, the link between birth order and personality traits appears much weaker. A 2015 study looking at more than 20,000 people in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States found no link between birth order and personality characteristics — though the researchers did find evidence that older children have a slight advantage in I.Q. (So, eldest daughters, take your bragging rights where you can get them.)

Dr. Damian worked on a different large-scale study, also published in 2015 , that included more than 370,000 high schoolers in the United States. It found slight differences in personality and intelligence, but the differences were so small, she said, that they were essentially meaningless. Dr. Damian did allow that cultural practices such as property or business inheritance (which may go to the first born) might affect how birth order influences family dynamics and sibling roles.

Still, there is no convincing some siblings who insist their birth order has predestined their role in the family.

After her study published, Dr. Damian appeared on a call-in radio show. The lines flooded with listeners who were delighted to tell her how skewed her findings were.

“Somebody would say: ‘You’re wrong! I’m a firstborn and I’m more conscientious than my siblings!’ And then someone else would call in and say, ‘You’re wrong, I’m a later-born and I’m more conscientious than my siblings!” she said.

What personal experience says

Sara Stanizai, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Long Beach, Calif., runs a virtual group with weekly meet-ups, where participants reflect on how they believe their birth order has affected them and how it may be continuing to shape their romantic lives, friendships and careers.

The program was inspired by Ms. Stanizai’s experience as an eldest daughter in an Afghan-American family, where she felt “parentified” and “overly responsible” for her siblings — in part because she was older, and in part because she was a girl .

While Ms. Stanizai acknowledged that the research around birth order is mixed, she finds it useful for many of her clients to reflect on their birth order and how they believe it shaped their family life — particularly if they felt hemmed in or saddled by certain expectations.

Her therapy groups spend time reflecting on questions like: How does my family see me? How do I see myself? Can we talk about any discrepancies in our viewpoints, and how they shape family dynamics? For instance, an older sibling might point out that he or she is often the one to plan family vacations. A younger sibling might point out that he or she often feels pressured into going along with whatever the rest of the group wants.

Whether or not there is evidence that birth order determines personality traits is almost beside the point, experts acknowledged.

“I think people are just looking for meaning and self-understanding,” Ms. Stanizai said. “Horoscopes, birth order, attachment styles” are just a few examples, she said. “People are just looking for a set of code words and ways of describing their experiences.”

Catherine Pearson is a Times reporter who writes about families and relationships. More about Catherine Pearson

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Spice girls reunite at victoria beckham's star-studded 50th birthday, victoria beckham's 50th birthday spice girls reunion ... tom cruise, more attend.

Victoria Beckham 's 50th birthday party brought the flavor to Mayfair, London ... 'cause all five of the Spice Girls reunited for the milestone birthday bash!

Mel B , Melanie C , Emma Bunton and Geri Halliwell all pulled off for the stylish party to celebrate their longtime pal ... and, check out the pics. They're dressed to impress.

Of course, Posh herself was there though it seemed she shied away from the camera a bit ... focusing on her guests and hangin' firmly with 12-year-old Harper all night. She's still using crutches BTW ... after breaking her foot in a gym accident.

BTW ... all the Beckham kids made it out for their mom's bday -- with her boys Brooklyn , Romeo and Cruz pulling up as one big squad and husband David Beckham also attending.

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Tom Cruise looked dapper in a tuxedo on the big night, and Gordon Ramsey arrived with wife Tana in tow.

Among the other bold-faced names ... Guy Ritchie , Jason Statham , Victoria's Secret Angel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Marc Anthony and his new wife Nadia Ferreira , Eva Longoria, and a whole lot more.

It's a good sign the Beckhams are still throwing parties ... like we told you, investigative biographer, Tom Bower 's promising a tell-all book full of stories about David's rumored affairs -- a glossed-over topic in their Netflix doc.

Seems the Beckham clan isn't sweating the release though ... and, their longtime friends totally have their back.

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Photo Essay: Portlanders Young and Old Celebrate Earth Day With Making Earth Cool

Under the pomp and ceremony of a costume parade on a beautiful spring day lay a deep reservoir of disquiet for what the future might hold..

On Saturday, a parade of Portlanders marched from Sunnyside Environmental School through quiet inner Eastside residential blocks, celebrating Earth Day with the pageantry of handmade costumes and musical accompaniment from Portland’s own Unpresidented Brass Band.

Led by a decommissioned fire engine, the procession of approximately 200 people—most dressed as animals and plants—drew neighbors and diners out to watch the passing spectacle.

The event was organized by climate crisis-focused art collective Making Earth Cool , Portland Youth Climate Strike, Sunnyside Environmental School, and Extinction Rebellion PDX (a local chapter of the global nonviolent civil disobedience movement), among others.

At the parade Angela McIlvain, Mel Shea, and Nora Colie—wearing their respective ensembles as a globe with sunglasses "Earthy," a yellow flower "Dandy," and a pink wildflower "Clover"—emphasized the importance of this event being a multigenerational gathering and celebration. Under the pomp and ceremony of families in costumes and the communal celebration of Earth on a beautiful spring day, lies a deep reservoir of disquiet for what the future might hold.

“The youth are going to experience a lot more climate change than we have,” Shea told the  Mercury . “There is an anxiousness to it, and we hope to help people not feel alone.”

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