Can we say goodbye to the "cool girl" now?

A necessary end to a very unnecessary era

Ah, the “cool girl.” The girl that strikes the impossible balance between masculine and feminine energies. She is both witty and cute, sporty and delicate, easy-going and ambitious. She orders a pizza with the boys but maintains her size two waistline and drinks a beer while wearing a body-con dress. She wears little to no make-up and has flawless skin. She laughs at all the jokes, even the ones that make fun of women, because she’s just that chill.

All at once, she is the epitome of the male-gaze and everything a heterosexual man could ever desire. The trope has been popularized in media ad-nauseum (and outright explored in the novel Gone Girl) and its sociocultural implications have just begun to be researched (check out this article to learn more.)

While the trope is neither new nor novel, it is one that I have only recently begun to explore in my own life. My conscious introduction to the “cool girl” started during my second trimester of pregnancy as I began to explore my relationship to the maiden and mother archetypes. It became quite apparent through journaling, honest conversations, and long walks that I had spent my entire existence up until that point idealizing the maiden and criticizing the mother.

The maiden is independent, pure, free, beautiful, young, and wholly unburdened by life. Sounds a lot like the cool girl, eh? It felt like through my process of matrescence, the transition from maiden to mother that brings about a transformation comparable to that of adolescence, I was letting go of this cool girl aesthetic and trading it in for…mom vibes? The trade seemed wholly unfair.

I had lived my entire life up until that point being the cool girl. Unknowingly, but nonetheless true. I am a feminist, of the intersectional variety, and yet had never realized how much my go with the flow attitude and tendency toward being the “whatever works for me” girl was really just my adherence to the patriarchy. I had close girlfriends but was always part of a larger group of guy friends, I spent my weekends hiking and snowboarding, followed up my outdoor activity with a big burger (never a salad), and could debate politics with the best of them.

Something I was uncomfortable doing? Being the girl that was a bit high maintenance. Being the girl that directly communicated to a friend when something hurt my feelings. Being the girl that said I dream of having a family but am terrified of what that means for my identity.

I can recall the first time a brink in my cool girl armor made itself known. Early on in my partnership, I decided it would be a good idea for my partner to teach me to surf. As a life-long surfer himself with a patient attitude, I knew he would be an excellent person to learn from. What I did not anticipate was my own perfectionism showing up and derailing every surf lesson the second I “failed.”

My partner insisted that I was “good, no great, for a beginner.” What my brain heard? For a beginner. I didn’t want to be great for a bloody beginner, I just wanted to be great. Period. I wanted to catch every wave I paddled for, to ride the wave at least ten yards in the direction of my choosing, to paddle out myself, and catch the wave without an ounce of help.

For the surfers out there, this probably sounds like a pipe dream. Or at least for me it was. My natural athleticism was no match for the power of the ocean and with each wipeout, my enthusiasm and excitement for surfing was being, quite literally, wiped out. It seems ironic as I write this that surfing was the first time I became aware of the cool girl fallacy because what is cooler, what is chiller, than a surfer girl?

Alas, it was not my destiny to be the cool surfer girl of my dreams. Each lesson ended wit me in near tears, angry at myself and taking it out on my partner. I was unhappy and he was going to know about it, regardless of whether or not it was his fault or not.

Chill surfer girl? Not for me. Unhinged surfer demon is more like it.

The tales of our surfing adventures eventually became funny for my partner and I and one evening, we were regaling a table of twenty-somethings the humerus details of our surf lesson adventures. One such twenty-something, a tall, lithe, blonde and white surfer boy, listened to the stories and at the end turned to my partner and said, “Bro, I went out with Kayla and Mariah the other day to teach them how to surf and they were so chill. They were taken out by like three waves and just laughed about it. It was rad.”

Cue dagger to my cool girl heart.

The cool, chill girl would of course not react in such a manner. She would keep her anger to herself, in the rare instance she even feels such emotional responses, and would soldier on with the best of them. She would laugh at the potential for danger, she would shrug at her poor performance, and she would crack a joke for everyone else’s benefit after her fifth wipeout.

The cool girl serves a hetero-patriarchal society because she asks nothing of anyone. She keeps her mouth shut and her smile wide; emotions are not emoted and complaints are not filed. As a self-identified cool girl in recovery, I can say that the cool girl trope is outdated and highly overrated.

The be in the feminine, or lunar, energy is to feel. Intensely. It is to experience the full range of emotion, from elation to enragement and everything in between. It is to express such emotion, safely, and to transform ourselves and others in the process. Mother Nature is the OG example of such power. She has the potential to create life, to initiate death, and apologizes for none of it.

There is something to be learned from the full expression of the feminine. For every body. There is something to be benefitted from assigning power to emotion, rather than weakness; from seeing speaking up and out as the beginnings of change, rather than something to be ignored.

The cool girl aesthetic is dead and gone. And in her place, let the real and raw version of self come to be known.