Cool, calm, and collected. An easy-going fun time. Doesn’t wear makeup and keeps it “bare-faced” (in men’s definition meaning: wearing mascara, concealer with slight blush on the cheeks, and tinted lip gloss). She is funny and witty, but never crass and obnoxious. She is everything you want her to be with a single snap of your finger and never complains. She is a fantasy all rolled up into one in the form of a shapeshifting beauty. This is cool girl.
The cool girl trope became highly popularized by Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”, however, remnants of the cool girl trope have been scattered in male-dominated literature and media long before then. The cool girl trope can be defined as a woman who transforms herself and adapts her personality in order to seem more desirable and approachable to men. The cool girl is supposed to be “like one of the guys” and is the rejection of “traditional female behavior” of being too emotional, too angry, too clingy, and too much of a chore for a man to handle.
However, being known as a cool girl can be exhausting. Cool girls are meant to exist solely as a romanticized and idealized version of women for the benefit of a male’s preference, which can feel suffocating. When you actually have a problem, an opinion or a strong stance on an issue, you are no longer seen as the cool girl, you are seen as just any other girl. Feeling obligated to not express true feelings and showcase your true personality because you have set an expectation for yourself, can be damaging.
I’m sure almost all women have fallen under the cool girl trope, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. However, women are not one-dimensional and have personalities outside of being parallel to that of a man. Your status of being a “cool girl” should not be dependent on how others think about you or how others want you to act, it is about how you think of yourself.
Cool girls lie on a spectrum with multiple variations of what being cool means. Some cool girls enjoy watching ESPN every Sunday morning, some cool girls will put on a full face of makeup just because they feel like it, some cool girls will become Congresswomen, some cool girls frankly don’t care for your opinion and some cool girls embody all of these traits. Women are ever-changing and expansive and cannot be tied down to one category.