Every generation seems to invent a new woman to hate. Today, it’s the “not like other girls” girl, but before that, the hate was towards those exact “other girls.” It was a distaste and undermining of the average girl because she was too dramatic or girly, or her interests were embarrassing. So, instead rose the girl who was “one of the boys” and preferred male friends because female friendships were too much drama, didn’t care about her looks and made sure to define that she was nothing like the terrifying collective known as the “other girl.”
Eventually, the internet caught on. “Not like other girls” became an insult of its own. Then came “pick-me.” The cultural correction was the “girl’s girl”: love women, support women, stop treating femininity like an embarrassment.
While this shift — I would argue — is slight progress towards the right direction, the core reality of why the girl who rejects all things feminine, still exists and is very relevant in not only culture but our social fabric and is ultimately cultivated in every single one of us, regardless of sex or gender. Men, women and everyone in between are taught through the social conventions to reject feminine traits and rejoice in masculinity.
Even though I have yet to watch or read Gone Girl, the opening monologue stays in my head rent-free as Gillian Flynn gave one version of the “not like the other girls” girl a name: the “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 […] 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 […] 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.”
The problem with the “not like other girls” girl is never really the girl. It is that she lives in a culture that gave her very good reasons not to want to be associated with girls. She is “low maintenance” rather than demanding, rational rather than emotional, independent rather than needy. She likes the things boys like and rolls her eyes at whatever “girls” supposedly like. Whether any individual woman embodies this caricature is beside the point. The joke only works because we already understand which side of the comparison is supposed to be embarrassing.
This hierarchy extends far beyond dating but rather is a trickle-down effect from the grander issue of our social fabric that can be identified most clearly in dating.
Psychologists commonly describe gender stereotypes through two clusters of characteristics: agency and communion. Agency includes qualities such as independence, assertiveness and achievement; communion includes care, warmth, cooperation and interpersonal sensitivity. Alice Eagly’s 2019 meta-analysis of gender stereotypes spanning from 1946 to 2018 found that “women’s relative advantage in communion increased over time, but men’s relative advantage in agency showed no change.”
Neither category is inherently better than the other. A functioning person — never mind a functioning society — needs both. Yet our institutions have not historically treated them equally.
Take leadership. The meta-analysis found that stereotypes of leaders remained substantially masculine: leaders were more strongly associated with men and with agentic rather than communal characteristics. Alice Eagly and Steven Karau’s social role theory explains how associating agentic characteristics with leadership, and men -with agentic characteristics disadvantages women as the communal traits expected of women conflict with the traits expected of leaders, and so women who adopt stereotypically “leader-like” behaviour can then violate expectations of femininity.
In other words, women were admitted into leadership without leadership necessarily ceasing to be imagined through masculine terms, which also fails to recognize the value of communal attributes in leadership. So, not only does it restrict women’s chances of attaining leadership roles as she is preconceived to hold less agentic characteristics than men, but it also restricts everyone from developing and valuing communal traits.
This is where the “Cool Girl” stops being a dating trope and starts looking like a miniature model of something much larger. Patriarchy does not only exclude women from positions of social value, but it also helps determine what counts as socially valuable in the first place.
A 2019 research paper by April Bailey, Marianne LaFrance and John Dovidio discusses how this androcentrism — the tendency to position men, male experiences and male priorities as the supposedly gender-neutral standard, while women remain specifically “gendered” — impacts our social cognition.
Ambition is praised and attributed to the success of a person, being a boss is an achievement and emotional suppression is disguised as a symbol of strength. Meanwhile, caregiving is “women’s work,” emotional attentiveness is a personality trait, domestic labour is chores, maintaining relationships is just something good partners, mothers, daughters and friends are expected to do and emotional expression is a symbol of weakness and hysteria. And so, women moving toward historically masculine roles is understood as moving up, while men moving toward historically feminine roles is rarely seen and if seen is typically perceived as regression.
That asymmetry is difficult to explain if the only problem was that men and women had been arbitrarily assigned different roles. It makes much more sense if the roles themselves were ranked.
Labour-market research makes that ranking harder to dismiss as merely cultural perception. Sociologists have documented a persistent “devaluation” effect around feminized occupations. A 2016 study of Britain, Germany and Switzerland found that movement into increasingly female-dominated occupations was associated with reduced earnings even after accounting for individual characteristics. More recently, a 2025 American Sociological Review study examining more than a century of language found that occupations lost cultural prestige and perceived potency as they became more strongly stereotyped as female.
This is where the popular story we tell about gender equality becomes incomplete. Women absolutely need the right to vote, work, own property, lead institutions, earn their own money and live independently of men. But equality is easily reduced to a particular formula: anything a man can do, a woman can do too. That framework asks whether women can participate equally in the things society already decided mattered. It does not necessarily ask how those judgments were made.
Feminist theorist Nancy Fraser argues that important strands of second-wave feminism did not originally seek merely to turn women into equal wage-earners. They also challenged the systematic devaluation of caregiving and other unwaged labour. Yet the economic order that followed proved remarkably capable of embracing the first demand, women entering paid work, without fully embracing the second.
The male breadwinner did not disappear so much as become the model for everybody.
A woman can now be independent, career-oriented, competitive and professionally ambitious. That is liberation insofar as she genuinely chooses it. But if those remain the qualities through which society primarily recognizes achievement, women have been given access to a masculine-coded hierarchy rather than freed from the hierarchy itself.
The argument is not that women should return to stereotypical gender roles, it is that escaping them should never have been the price of liberation, valuing them and understanding their role and necessity in society and thus requiring men and women to share the burden, as they do with the labour force.
The goal should never have been replacing femininity with masculinity, nor reversing the hierarchy and declaring care superior to ambition or vulnerability superior to strength. The health of an individual and society as a whole necessitates both agency and communion, and thus both traits should be valued as such.
The goal shouldn’t be to prove women can be just as good as men, but rather to stop defining “good” around whatever had historically belonged to the male experience.