There’s a quote from Lena Dunham’s Girls that I often think about whenever I open any form of social media. In the third season of the show, there is an episode titled “Beach House” in which the four main characters go on a trip to detox, rebuild their relationship with each other, and show the world they can still have fun together as a group. One of my favorite characters, Shoshanna Shapiro, responds to being called “unstimulating” with the dialogue, “What, are we in, like, a f**king Jane Austen novel? What, do I want to be like you? Like, mentally ill and miserable?” Stay with me.
In the past three years, there have been countless iterations of the concept of not being like other girls. It’s similar to conversations we had back in elementary school when girls and boys became aware of their differences and how our little hearts started to beat a little faster when we saw someone we liked. I am not like other girls because I do not like pink. I am not like other girls because I play soccer, have five brothers, hate makeup, and the list truly does go on. I am not like other girls. And in true TikTok fashion, this conversation has been repackaged to look romantically enticing with a pretty bow in forms of “girl pretty vs. boy pretty,” “I listen to Lana Del Rey in this way not that way,” “pretty girl humor vs. popular girl humor,” and so on. Doesn’t it all get so tiring, constantly competing with your fellow women over what we supposedly decentered?
So I ask the question Shoshanna asked Hannah, “…do I want to be like you? Like mentally ill and miserable?” Maybe I’m still clinging onto the original definition of a girl’s girl or I just love womanhood so much, but I refuse to view any attribute of being a woman as less than. I am not afraid of being too girly or too masculine or too anything because I am no longer ashamed of being a girl. I love pink, I love wearing dresses, and I love makeup and painting my nails. To TikTok users, I’m a basic girl. But, what would the alternative to that be? Force myself to align my interests to that of a man and force myself into interests that are not my own? The pick-me archetype is evolving and I’m afraid it’s taken a form that many of us are failing to recognize but instead embracing with open arms. Let women have fun! If having fun means wearing the Lorax costume for Halloween, allow her that. If having fun means not wearing a Biblically accurate Disney princess costume but instead wearing an uber short skirt and an Amazon corset, allow her that. As a matter of fact, this Halloween, I was dressed in my interpretation of Madonna’s Like a Virgin in a tutu and $30 corset as an act of protest.
This is a drastic oversimplification of an oppressive ideology, I understand this, but sometimes, ideas as utterly ridiculous as this deserve unstimulating responses. One is not any more or less of a girl depending on her interests and personal styles, whether she plays video games or paints or listens to punk rock or does ballet. Gender is a social construct but a woman and her interests aligning with that of the old world view of what a woman is should not be a crime either. As Madonna has sung, “… you think being a girl is degrading.” and we should not. Embrace the other forms of womanhood, no matter how basic or unstimulating. Or what? Do you want to be miserable?