ON RAGE: THE COOL GIRL
Dear Readers,
As Stevie previewed in our last post, we called an audible and are publishing our thoughts separately this month. I spent the better part of February fighting a mystery flu (maybe covid?), and March has been a whirlwind of travel. Through it all, the themes and takeaways from the books in our Winter’s Rage ovester have simmered steadily, and y’all, I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS. What follows are some of those thoughts, specifically a meditation on the Cool Girl persona (something that was especially salient in both Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz and Monsters: A Fans Dilemma by Claire Dederer). There will be much more to come from Stevie and me on the Winter’s Rage ovester generally, as well as our specific thoughts on Monsters (our last read of the ovester). For now, I’ll leave you with a few heated thoughts from yours truly…
xx,
Cassie (& Stevie)
from CASSIE:
“What would the world look like if girls were taught they were volcanoes, whose eruptions were a thing of beauty, a power to behold, a force not to be trifled with?”
― Mona Eltahawy, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls
Throughout this Winter’s Rage ovester, I have returned, again and again, to the idea of the “chill/cool girl” and what that means in context of female rage. We are only just getting to know each other on this Substack, Dear Reader, but if my first set of musings is any indication, I LOVE a good definition. In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer references a monologue—Amy Dunne’s rant on the “cool girl” in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl—which gives us a crassly poignant definition of the Cool Girl:
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. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)
I have only been dubbed “chill” once in my life, and even then, it was only quasi-truthful. I learned how to ski as a 24-year-old adult in Taos, NM, by taking lessons from a 60-year-old long-haired, self-proclaimed hippy. I don’t remember his name but I do remember the way he skied backward down a green while telling me “Cassieeee, heyyyyy, man, you look so chill!” Proverbial thumbs up—the dude abides. I’ve been such a non-chill girl that this one instance is seared into memory. I should mention for the sake of accuracy that I was decidedly NOT chill. Maybe Hippy-Backwards-Skiing-Man didn’t clock my white knuckles grasping my poles.
I have never been (and never will be) considered a Cool Girl, but like most women, I dipped my toe in the Cool Girl pool a few times for guys I dated in my 20s. Those times were never long-lasting—my stamina as a Cool Girl was mediocre at best. I left those handful of relationships with too much working knowledge of “socially awkward men” (re: problematic men like Quentin Tarantino and Kurt Vonnegut), and a healthy skepticism of any artist (male or otherwise) whose audience demographic lacked healthy diversity. If I’m being honest, I have never wanted to be chill or “cool” by men’s standards, but it wasn’t until my 30s that I was able to articulate what I actually wanted—. to be cool by women’s standards: stylish, in-the-know, loud, bold, colorful, and funny. I wanted to be liked for that version of me. This seems so obvious now.
My father’s best friend has called me a “force of nature” since my first attitude-filled side-eye as a toddler (of course I was a precocious child!). My whole family never misses a chance to remind me of this moniker, like I could forget being compared to a destructive weather event for over three decades. My ex-mother-in-law called me a “hurricane.” I’ve been shushed in libraries, classrooms, and speakeasies. I’ve had friends and romantic partners tell me how “much” I am. And, more times than I can actually count, I’ve had bosses, coworkers, and colleagues tell me I should “calm down” or “chill out” when I would explain a position, argument, or strategy.
Until I turned 30, I internally rolled my eyes at the descriptor—Force of Nature. It’s not that I have endeavored to be the Cool Girl. Even my childhood friends would have described me at the time as VERY CHALANT—not with that exact terminology, of course, but allow me to borrow from a favorite recent meme (which says “fuck being nonchalant. I love being a chalant bitch. I have never been chill not once in my life, even when I am asleep I am clenching my teeth”).
I am a millennial woman, and it seems that I am not alone in my experience–my fellow millennials and generations of women before us felt this too (in much more of an overt way). We have been aggressively conditioned to make ourselves smaller and more palatable to society. Some of us are great at cosplaying this version. But none of us are immune to the cracks in the Cool Girl façade. In fact, as I age, I see that in my friendships, I am attracted the most to women who say “fuck the façade” and give the proverbial finger to men’s standards. Said another way: I am drawn to a “girl’s girl” and don’t have much patience anymore for the “guy’s girl.” To me, the Cool Girl and “a guy’s girl” are synonymous.
Nothing portrays this better than that one scene in Barbie. If you’ve seen the film, you know the scene: the Kens strumming their guitars to their Barbies singing perfectly pitched, yet numbingly mundane versions of Matchbox 20’s Push. I laughed to tears, as did every woman within a five-seat radius of me in the movie theater. I laughed not just because it was funny funny (it was), but also because it was DARK FUNNY. The darkness of the comedy was the very foundation of the joke: The Cool Girl (re: The Guy’s Girl) smiles and seems interested in hearing the same chord progression over and over. We’ve all been there with various men in our past, neutrally smiling and nodding through the Tarentino films, the Vonnegut novels, and the alt-indie band sets.
I wanted to test this theory that I do have a lot of NONCHILL Girl’s Girls in my life. To that end, I posed recently to a focus group (and by “focus group” I mean my small but mighty number of Instagram followers):
If you identify as a markedly NONCHILL girl, how does the world communicate that to you? Have you been called names? Special “force of nature” type descriptors? Or, just treated differently? How does it all make you feel?
Here’s a sampling from the tidal wave of responses I received:
“Driven, forward, doesn’t take shit”
“Overly emotional”
“Bossy. Too much. A big personality. A lot of personality. A force.”
“I was called ‘curt’ on a date when I thought I was making a joke”
“I had a boss once give me negative feedback that I was too confident”
“Not easy to get on with. Keeps you on your toes. Opinionated! Prissy! Strong willed! Direct!”
“Best case—passionate or committed. Worst case—volatile or unhinged.”
“Intense. Intimidating. Hard but worth the investment. Combative.”
“Outgoing. Opinionated. Blunt. Driven. Focused. Independent. Decision maker. Forward. High Strung.”
“Why are you being so emotional?”
“You can be kinda scary.”
“I just get called dramatic a lot, which I fucking hate.”
“I mostly just get ‘loud.’”
“I have been told I’m intimidating too many times to count. And men are like ‘it’s a compliment.”
All I can really say in response is: “Girl, I can relate.” That last one is my favorite, not because I enjoy women being called “intimidating,” but because it cuts to the heart of the matter—these phrases are all presented as if they were compliments. As if we don’t know the dog whistle that is “I love strong women” but in different fonts.
You may not have enjoyed reading Gone Girl (I didn’t), and you may not even agree with Amy’s rant on the Cool Girl, but as women, we all JUST KNOW that none of these comments are true, uncomplicated compliments. They are all stained, knowingly or not, by patriarchal constructs that LOVE a strong woman until the point where she demands rights, the space a man would take, or any measure of intersectionality. Our society loves a strong white woman who is an eldest daughter planning a family BBQ. But, what of that same strong white woman dominating the publishing industry? Or, the strong black woman strategizing in the boardroom? What of the trans woman dominating her field of study? What then? Usually, those women are met with some variation of “don’t be so [hysterical/shrill/bossy/angry/emotional],” or perhaps it’s another coded adjective that, on its face, may be innocent but enrages half the population because connotation, subtext, tone, and context actually MATTER (e.g., please see bulleted list above for YOUR personal rage-inducing favorite).
It’s enraging to witness your female friends, mentors, family, and fellow humans experience such infuriating comments—complimentary or not—especially in a world that doesn’t necessarily place much value on nuance. Connotation, subtext, tone, and context are just that: nuance that girls are taught as soon as they can form words. And it’s enraging to be held to this double standard: “we love STRONG WOMEN as long as they are Cool Girls and contain themselves when it makes men feel small or uncomfortable.” I can’t dwell too long on this double standard without the desire to scream into the void: Let us be LARGE, SCARY, AND OPINIONATED. Let us be BOLD, COMBATIVE, AND BOSSY. LET US BE FUCKING CHALANT. Just let us BE.
My hope is that through these kinds of conversations, on our Substack or in our day-to-day, we eventually give more and more women and girls the permission to be Forces of Nature without thinly veiled patriarchal insults being hurled at them. We teach them, as the Mona Eltahawy suggested in the quote I shared above, that they are “volcanoes, whose eruptions were a thing of beauty, a power to behold, a force not to be trifled with.” Because at the end of the day, no man would dare ask a beautiful Force of Nature why she was so intimidating or so emotional—that would be hysterical, wouldn’t it?
my LOVE LIST:
Here are some things I’m currently swooning over (or at least affectionate toward):
Claire Vay Watkin’s essay “On Pandering.”
These two poems by Elina Katrin on How to Pray in Female.
Emma Stone’s performance in Poor Things (it’s on Hulu, go watch NOW). Holy Mary Shelley! This film is the most gorgeous, grotesque, and gothic piece of work I’ve seen in a decade. Anyone want to reread Frankenstein with me?
Kacey Musgraves new album Deeper Well. Listen if you want an elegant, earthy meditation with just enough twang.
Dramione fanfic. I’ve dipped my toe into Harry Potter fanfic, specifically for Draco/Hermione (aka “Dramione”, iykyk) and fear I will be plunging into the deep end shortly. I’m currently reading a rom-com called Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love, and it is utterly delightful. Here’s the link to download for your kindle or kindle app.
This lovely little article by Amber Tamblyn on the power of female friendships.
This cashmere wrap. I purchased this for my trip to Japan, and it was the most versatile A+ thing in my bag. These make great gifts for any person in your life and the quality is amazing, especially for the price.
This article about how a new generation of readers are driving the popularity of book clubs.