The 'Cool Girl' Burden

Neoliberalism and new femininities: The intensification of beauty standards for women in the digital age

- Abhiruchi Ranjan

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... Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.

THE quoted excerpt from the movie Gone Girl reflects the conflicting notions of what men find attractive in women. The 'cool girl' aesthetic burdens women with embodying both feminine and masculine traits to best accommodate the needs and demands of men. Women are touted as 'cool' when their conformity to socially determined practices of the feminine are not tied with the expectation of receiving the equivalent from men.

In complying with the diligence of the feminine performance, women should acquire a stance of low expectations and normalise under-performance of men in their socially given gender roles. Women invested in the lowered expectations of physical, emotional and financial labour from men are rewarded with social affirmatives such as financially independent, sexually adventurous and emotionally non-dramatic-in other words 'cool'.

The conventional notions of the feminine viewed as biologically received traits in women, have been critiqued by what is known as the second wave of feminism. Feminists posit that gender and its social performance in femininity are not biologically derived, but socially constructed and regulated. This consciousness was to be the source of their women's liberation from the structures of patriarchy.