Currents

Every generation asks themselves the question “Who am I?” But in an era of limitless self-expression, saturated attention economies, digital loneliness, and a hunger to rediscover authenticity, this question becomes fraught, especially for young women, who face intense pressures around feminine self-image. “Who am I?” becomes a tug of war between standing out as a unique individual and being accepted as an authentic member of the “in” crowd.

From the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, the “I’m not like other girls” trope dominated popular culture. I remember a period in middle school when I wanted to wear nail polish and makeup but refrained for fear it would seem embarrassingly vain. I recall a friend hiding her love for Taylor Swift’s music to avoid being labeled “basic.” An unholy interaction between the mainstreaming of feminist challenges to traditional gender roles and the persistent misogynistic belittling of femininity spread this trope everywhere. In recent years, however, femininity and the “other girls” came roaring back. But how did we go from alt girls and she-warriors to the summer of “brat” and Barbie feminism?

To understand the archetypes of today, we must revisit the ones they replaced: the three main versions of girls who insisted they are “not like other girls.”

The Three Archetypes of the "Other Girl"

First, there’s the Cool Girl. She’s tomboyish, low-maintenance, and “one of the boys” (read: not annoying), all while remaining effortlessly attractive. Think of Megan Fox's character Michaela in Transformers (2007), who’s as beloved for fixing cars as she is for looking gorgeous while doing it. Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, who appeared in eight Marvel films between 2010 and 2021, and who supports the other Avengers without overshadowing them, is another example.

Then there’s the Strong Woman, a feminist-tinted version of the Cool Girl. She’s cool and sexy but she also never cries and can beat up men twice her size. Think of Charlize Theron's Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), a sharpshooting powerhouse who can also handle an 18-wheel war rig charging through the desert.

Finally, there’s the Bookish Introvert, whose personality can be summed up as “I’m better because I read.” She’s a smart introvert who clumsily stands in for the author, and is often pitted against vapid and catty female rivals. The Bookish Introvert was so popular among teenage girls that she frequently popped up in media that itself was widely ridiculed for being too basic and petty. Taylor Swift’s 2009 music video for “You Belong with Me” plays on this trope, contrasting Swift’s glasses-wearing protagonist with a dolled-up, “basic” rival (also played by Swift). Even Twilight’s Bella Swan, played by Kristen Stewart, stands out as the clumsy, intellectual outsider juxtaposed against her more fashionable and supposedly boring classmates.

These archetypes dominated media and teenage minds in the early 2000s and 2010s, shaping a generation of women eager to prove they could outdo men and look breezily cool doing it. “I do not wear makeup or heels,” such a woman proclaimed, “because I do not buy into patriarchal beauty standards, plus it would be impractical attire for a fistfight, and besides, men prefer the natural look.” So stunning. So brave.

Yet, the "Cool Girl" was always a paradox, as Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne (played by Rosamund Pike) points out in her now-famous monologue from Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel and its 2014 film adaptation. Amy’s scathing tirade about the impossible expectations of being both hot and low-maintenance captured a collective frustration: a woman who "plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, 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 two." Despite Amy Dunne (spoiler) being a psychopathic murderer, this angry rant was celebrated as an iconic manifestation of righteous female anger by young women sick of having to be both beautiful and one of the boys, ambitious but also non-threatening.

Men, at least inexperienced young men, were briefly very lucky, as never before had there been so many depictions of their dream girl: a chick with the body of a 10 and the mind of one of their bros — because normal hoes are both too complicated and too boring, too alien and too basic. But what goes up must eventually come back down.

The Rise and Fall of the Girl Boss

By the mid-2010s, the “I’m not like other girls” trope was falling out of fashion, coinciding with the rise of Girl Boss feminism. The Cool Girl was the first iteration to become unfashionable, perhaps because it is the hardest to couch within a feminist veneer, but the Strong Woman and Bookish Introvert soon followed suit — or rather, pantsuit.

The downfall of the “not like other girls” in the mid-2010s coincided with the crescendo of “lean in” Girl Boss feminism. In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which focuses on how women can succeed in corporate environments, rode the New York Times best-seller list for over a year and sold more than four million copies. In 2014, Sophia Amoruso, former CEO of the fast fashion retailer Nasty Gal, released her memoir entitled #Girlboss. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign featured the motto #ImWithHer. That same year, Carly Fiorina, former chief executive of the tech company Hewlett-Packard and the first woman to lead a Fortune Top-20 company, ran for the Republican presidential nomination. The Girl Boss wears pantsuits, high heels, and red lipstick. She is confident, ambitious, and no-nonsense. Though less obviously masculine, the Girl Boss is closest to the Strong Woman iteration of “I’m Not Like Other Girls.” Unlike the Bookish Introvert, she does not compete with other women but aligns herself with them, and unlike the Cool Girl, she stands up to men and their bullshit.

I find outward markers of femininity combined with unapologetic ambition refreshing, and as such, I understand the appeal of the Girl Boss. She resonates with women who aspire to be both independent and sexy; both bold and glamorous. However, underlying the archetype often lies a presumption that the highest callings and virtues are traditionally masculine ones: that mothers who prioritize work-life balance over climbing the corporate ladder are mistaken, and that being a homemaker and mother is less worthy than being a CEO. These are the implicit assumptions that lead feminists, especially those popular in the 2010s, to treat the gender wage gap — which is mostly due to mothers choosing to spend more time with their children and wisely prioritizing work-life balance over mimicking many men’s penchant for sacrificing everything for their companies — as an urgent problem in need of a solution.

Around 2020, amid the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent “racial reckoning”, the Girl Boss began to resemble the much-maligned “Karen” a little too closely. Left-wing critics accused the Girl Boss of perpetuating capitalism and whiteness. They argued that this trope overlooked the struggles of ordinary women and exacerbated societal inequalities by expecting women to “lean in” without addressing systemic barriers such as stagnant wages, inadequate childcare, and a demanding work culture. Articles and think pieces, such as Leigh Stein's “The End of the Girlboss”, marked a turning point in public perception. By 2021, the phrase “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” was widely used on social media to mock this female archetype. Today, “Girl Boss” is used almost exclusively ironically or disparagingly.

The Return of Femininity

In recent years, femininity has made a fierce comeback. It is no longer embarrassing to be a Swiftie; it is now embarrassing not to be. Fashion has followed suit — athleisure is out, coquette and sundresses are in. The first time I encountered a critique of the “I’m not like other girls” trope was in a 2016 video by Savannah Brown, a nerdy poetry YouTuber who was one of the first to name and criticize the trope. Today, hundreds of video essays and thousands of TikTok’s lambaste this female archetype, quickly reaching the point of over-saturation.

Even feminism has taken on a more feminine aesthetic. In 2020, dolled-up, self-described “bimbo feminists” started posting TikToks in Legally Blonde-inspired attire and speaking in exaggerated Valley Girl accents about their Marxism and feminism. The 2023 Barbie movie, a global phenomenon that made $337 million worldwide in its opening weekend, was not only explicitly feminine in its pink aesthetic and marketing but also in its ode to conventional womanhood. A pivotal moment in the film is an impassioned monologue by Gloria, a stand-in for the typical mother played by America Ferrera, which was widely celebrated as a feminist rallying cry. In the scene, the exhausted mother addresses the pressures modern women face and treats career success not as a feminist solution to patriarchy but as an additional societal expectation and burden. Gloria’s journey culminates in her pitching the idea of an “Ordinary Barbie” to the Mattel CEO. One of the main messages of the film is thus that feminism should advocate for all women, not just those who break traditional molds.

On the political right, the idealization of old-fashioned gender roles has made a youthful comeback. The Trad Wife movement, which came to prominence in 2020, features women advocating for a return to traditional gender roles. Influenced by nostalgia for 1950s Americana, these women post content on social media that glorifies and promotes female domesticity and submission. This movement brands itself in opposition to “lean in” feminism and as a solution to the precarity and loneliness of modernity. Related, if more apolitical, trends on social media include the Trophy Wife and Stay-At-Home Girlfriend lifestyles, where women boast about their choice not to work and provide advice on how others can also achieve a lifestyle of being pampered by their man. Similarly, the Soft Life movement, which originated within the Nigerian influencer community, encourages women to prioritize peace, relaxation, and personal well-being over career success.

Feminine, But Still Rebellious

The resurgence of femininity across the political spectrum obscures differences between often incompatible ideological projects. The right-wing backlash to the “I’m not like other girls” trope manifests as support for rigid gender roles, where so-called “cat ladies” and “soy boys” are the punching bags. By contrast, the left-ish feminist backlash celebrates both gender nonconformity, female femininity, and female messiness — after all, “Kamala is brat” — though it tends to pathologize masculinity in men.

Meanwhile, the apolitical, normie female backlash to the “I’m not like other girls” gal has elements of both. These women are mostly supportive of femininity in gay and bisexual men (so long as these bi men are in same-sex relationships and can, in their eyes, be filed away as “gay”), but less so for straight men. They are also often disparaging toward gender non-conforming women. For instance, almost any time a young woman now talks about preferring male friendships or not enjoying traditionally feminine interests or communication styles, she is accused of being a “Pick-Me”, a woman guilty of Cool Girl male pandering. While the pervasive portrayals of feminine women as catty and superficial were damaging, demonizing individual women for their “masculine” preferences or negative experiences with other women is unfair and regressive in its own right. This behavior not only treats gender non-conforming women with suspicion but makes it harder for women who are (or were) victims of female bullying to openly discuss their experiences and how it has affected them.

While the feminist backlash aims to elevate the status of femininity, the right-wing version — particularly in its more extreme Trad form — seeks to lower the status of women by confining them to it. The feminism depicted in the Barbie movie argues that caregiving roles, whether in the home or pink-collar jobs, deserve the respect and compensation historically reserved for male-dominated professions. Trads, on the other hand, advocate for a return to a time when “respectable” women were both confined to homemaking and treated as less suitable for power because of it. Ironically, the “I'm not like other girls” trope only makes sense as a reaction to the culture that Trads seek to resurrect. Indeed, in a culture that enforces rigid gender roles while belittling femininity, it is understandable that women would seek to cast themselves in opposition to typical womanhood and aspire to embody more traditionally masculine traits.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Even as neon-lit femininity washes over the culture, the impulse to rebel and stand out from the crowd still lurks in the background. Ultimately, I don’t think there is any right answer to the question “Who am I?” It is for each of us to decide. As long as femininity remains an identifiable concept, there will be those who embrace the center of the hot pink bullseye, and those who push the envelope and stake out a position on the outskirts. Nearly every societal shift carries the seeds of the next reaction and then counter-reaction. As the push and pull of gender norms, cultural mores, and generational changes continue, I won’t be surprised if the “I'm not like other girls” trope makes another comeback.

Published Sep 19, 2024