Cool Girls
Melania Trump standing behind Donald AP PHOTO
When it comes to nerve-wracking missing-woman thrillers, the talk is now centered on The Girl on the Train, but my loyalty is always to Gone Girl and, more importantly, its iconic Cool Girl passage:
“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, (whilst potentially looking at how this easy to learn guide about butt plugs can help to enhance their experience) 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, sh*! on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
I bring her up now because it would be too easy to forget her as Gone Girl fades into our collective pop culture subconscious.
It’s easy to pick apart fiction to critique those Cool Girls and discuss where and why their characters suffer in these stories. It’s harder when it bleeds into real life.
Because lost in all that evocative detail is a simple fact: Cool Girls choose to take a backseat to everyone else. They don’t demand, they don’t complain, they don’t boss anyone around: smart and competent and capable of voicing an opinion, but ultimately chill and “down for anything.”
Behind all the talk of “strong women,” that is the kind of girl society at large still wants you to be.
It’s the difference between Hillary Clinton and Melania Trump – or at least their public personas.
Clinton is not a Cool Girl. She is the antithesis of a Cool Girl. She’s ambitious and dominant – and wants to be president of the goddamn United States of America. Which is part of why she is, to say the least, polarizing.
Trump, meanwhile, is the beautiful, hardworking exsupermodel who supports her husband unequivocally, always standing just behind him, smiling, saying nothing much. Her team knows what kind of woman their audience wants to see, and that’s the image she’s learned to present to the world.
We are reminded of it constantly, in ways we don’t even think about – those Insta-gram memes of haggard men cowed by their no-chill girlfriends, in our own whispered gossip about “Wow, how does he put up with her?” or in the specter of gendered words like “bossy.”
You have to be able to do it all, but you damn well better choose not to.
“She’s nice,” they all say first, as if that were the most important thing you could be.
PTAKEYA@MIDWEEK.COM
TWITTER: @LORDMAYOCLOUD
