Women are Opting Out of Being a Girl’s Girl, & It’s Because They are Exhausted.

Arguably, this current era has gifted us many shitty things: rising gas prices, a dying planet, Elon Musk, AI cheating fruit soap operas (actually, I love this one), and giving these men access to tables and microphones.

However, one of its more splendid gifts, is that women now possess a multitude of words and language for the act of choosing ourselves.

We clearly name our discomforts, set our boundaries, and dutifully protect our peace; we decenter men, refuse their manipulation, decline to compete in their games, and leave their red flags untouched in the mud, where we first encountered them.

The promise of sisterhood carries significant weight, made consequential and heavy through the din of history, time, and culture.

Structures of oppression, privilege, and power have often forced women to carry dual roles of emotional anchor and community architect, slipping into caregiving and kin-keeping with seeming ease.

This is even more apparent for women from marginalized communities: despite patriarchal conditions that castigate us as aggressors —unworthy of even the most basic “protections” promised for women under patriarchy — we have still managed to create pockets of safety for one another.

Many of us believe we practice woman-centered ideology (e.g., being a “Girl’s Girl”) — we are kind, caring, compassionate, and even self-sacrificial within our important femme relationships.

For women less familiar to us, we extend empathy, grace, and rote understanding because we speak an unspoken, yet ostensible common tongue: well after all, I’m a woman too.

We are “Girl’s Girls”, pledging ourselves to the scout’s honor and oath of femme solidarity required by the secret order of sisterhood.

At least, that is what we say. The scientist-practitioner in me already knows that merely reciting the principles of a theory out loud, does not make them real in practice.

That fine, easily-ignored gap between what we say and what we practice is reflected precisely in what Anne Helen Petersen has coined as “feminist exhaustion”, where feminism is whittled down into a vague cultural identity, rather than practiced as a living sociopolitical commitment.

Naturally, women have become exhausted trying to build and sustain feminist lives inside institutions, systems, and relationships with people who never actually became feminist.

And that is precisely why the collapse and betrayal of sisterhood is often so disappointing, so striking, and (frankly) so sexy, provocative, and almost taboo as a phenomenon.

Because speaking the language of freedom and switching up your politics does not automatically banish imposed patriarchal demands from one’s choices, interpretations, behaviors, or emotional responses to other women.

In simple terms, it’s these damn phones and these damn men in them.

Well, actually, it’s not quite that simple.

We are not talking about the natural progression of life, in which women find partners of any gender and/or build a chosen family, and reorganize their priorities accordingly.

Commitment to important close relationships —whether romantic, platonic, familial— is a universal, and deeply human quality, and I’d judge the hell out of anyone who refused to prioritize the people they claim to love.

But we are talking about a phenomenon we have all witnessed, lived through, heard of, or maybe even selfishly produced in our femme lives.

The friend that goes cold when you tell her you don’t like how her boyfriend treats her. A mother-in-law whose jaw stiffens, and claws unfurl the moment her daughter-in-law lays her frustrations with the son at the family’s feet.

The grandmothers, aunts, and mothers who admonish the female cousin for even asking why cousin Jody —with eight baby mamas and no job nor vasectomy in sight— is always stealing twenty dollars from Big Mama’s purse.

That moment when preserving a relationship with a man—a boyfriend, brother, son, male platonic friend, co-worker—requires abandoning the truth, common sense, safety, accountability, and humanity that we know we can so graciously and freely give.

In a world where we believe women and support their rights (and wrongs), everybody is a “Girl’s Girl” until it costs her something.

The man.

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The Patriarchal Bargain & The Cost of Being “Chosen”.

Before we can understand why some women abandon decades of “protect women” and their finely-tuned moral scruples over men, we have to understand exactly what is being promised in return. What being chosen is believed to offer to us.

You see, Patriarchy —like many other systems of power and oppression— is not convincing on its own. Few people would knowingly agree to an existence of subservience, powerlessness, and domination simply because someone asked nicely.

Thus, it is imperative to make a lifetime of subjugation as seductive as possible by promising an exclusive few perks that rival an AMEX Centurion card.

Within Patriarchy, women receive countless messages about the benefits of proximity to men, with the conditions required to preserve that proximity sold to us through our closest relationships.

Patriarchy does not just encourage women to love men, and vice versa: it has taught women that selection —especially of the romantic variety— is proof that they have achieved something, and signifies something admirable about themselves.

A woman may genuinely love her partner, while also (unconsciously) depending on the story told by patriarchy, in which romantic partnership with a man verifies several purported truths about her: that she is desirable, legitimate, mature, safe from loneliness, and distinct from the women who remain unchosen.

Of course, the innate desire for love and connection is not shallow nor some indicator of moral bankruptcy. It is universally human to desire connection— humans possess a fundamental motivation to form and maintain meaningful interpersonal connections, and our brains have evolved to process, present, and seek out complex social behaviors (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Van Overwalle, 2009).

So, no, it is not wrong for any person to desire being loved, witnessed, and accompanied through life; it’s fundamentally written into our neurobiology and psychosocial dynamics.

Thus, it is not inherently man-centered for any woman attracted to men to seek romantic relationships with them. And as a woman who plans on continuing her livelaughlove journey, I find that conclusion to be quite a reductionist take, smelling very much of a basic ‘I-googled-half-read-bell-hooks’ air.

The real trouble begins when the relationship is burdened with the task of being evidence. Not necessarily personal evidence of a life well lived, but rather external, social certification. The presence of a man and the accompanying romantic relationship no longer signifies simplistic love and affection; it presumes that a woman is now worthy.

The relationship itself, no matter how healthy or admirable it actually is, becomes evidence that she is: desirable, worthy of commitment, emotionally stable, and safe from the stigma of loneliness and rejection often stereotyped to women who remain single.

Ultimately, being “chosen” serves as a true social defense, allowing women to become distinguishable from those other women and ‘marked safe’ from the humiliation often assigned to women who remain alone.

These symbolic winnings offered to partnered women are usually accompanied by external, tangible rewards, rooted in historical and traditional contexts when women had limited independent socioeconomic power.

Proximity to men, especially in romantic connections, can offer women access to material resources, social networks, family legitimacy, economic stability, and a greater presumption of innocence or credibility.

And that is the seduction of the patriarchal bargain, a term coined by sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti in her landmark 1988 essay to describe strategies women develop to maximize their security and improve their life options within concrete patriarchal constraints, without necessarily escaping or dismantling the system that produced those constraints.

Put a little less academically, women do not receive equal or even equitable power alongside men. Instead, patriarchy only leases power to some women, subcontracting conditional access to protection, legitimacy, and status through their alignment with men.

And patriarchy (ever the adaptable little bugger) does not abandon a bargain simply because women have gained more freedom; it adjusts the currency. As women gain greater socioeconomic independence, material provision can be joined by newer forms of payment: desirability, legitimacy, status, belonging, protection, and the social prestige of being “chosen.”

Contemporary scholarship and criticism have even illustrated how the patriarchal bargain can survive inside modern forms of womanhood: through interviews with Kenyan schoolgirls, sociologist Sanyu Mojola (2015) examined how older patriarchal arrangements of male provision intertwine with expectations of modern womanhood. More recently, writer Moira Donegan (2025) similarly describes how women may seek social status and belonging within systems that simultaneously demean and subordinate them.

Even when those benefits are only symbolic or have internal value to a woman’s self-esteem, they remain powerful. In effect, the woman in the relationship has not simply found someone she loves; she has been granted a position of social preference and rank amongst women.

But every subcontract has conditions, and every bargain has fine print.

The reward is not freedom, independence, power, privilege, nor even recognition of humanity. The actual reward is being recognized as the kind of woman that male-dominated society considers worthy of reward and a wee bit of power over other women.

Ultimately it is quite simple: male partnership functions as social certification, granting the chosen woman conditional status, legitimacy, and protection across multiple social, economic, political, and cultural systems.

Obviously, when those benefits depend on the relationship remaining intact, preserving the man and what he represents becomes indistinguishable from preserving herself, her social position, and her internalized value system.

When the Bargain Becomes the Blueprint: A Peek into the Male-Centered Mind .

As we established, multiple social functions come with maintaining close relationships and proximity to men. In particular, patriarchy has undoubtedly prioritized and rewarded romantic relationships with a man above all.

Sure, being romantically partnered (and having dual income in this terribly expensive world) comes with many perks, like the ability to finally spend someone else’s money, a shoulder to cry on, someone asking if you’re gonna eat the last bite when you totally were, and someone to accompany you in people-watching and judging the pedestrians.

However, there is a clear social prestige offered to women romantically partnered with men, and the (romantic) relationship becomes a social shorthand for all the prestigious benefits listed above in the previous section.

And maintaining the prestige — the status, legitimacy, protection, and more — absolutely hinges on preserving the relationship.

And preservation is not simply about maintaining structures of love, honesty, and care. It is also about preserving the social position and status that the relationship is believed to confer.

The man in the relationship is no longer simply a partner or other half; he becomes the load-bearing structure supporting everything the presence of a relationship alleges about her.

Because if a patriarchal bargain is the reward system for proximity to men, then male-centered thinking becomes the moral and logical interpretive machinery that does mental gymnastics to rationalize and support it.

That is the exact moment when the bargain becomes the blueprint for the thought process, actions, and emotional system that will protect the proximity and access to that particular relationship.

Once a woman’s proximity to a man is understood as a source of prestige, anything that threatens the proximity can no longer register as neutral information.

It has to become a threat to her: her judgment, her social position, and the meaning she has attached to being “chosen”.

Preserving herself and her access, proximity —and ultimately, the relationship — becomes about preserving him: sustaining his virtuousness, comfort, desirability, and continued availability can therefore begin to feel indistinguishable from preserving herself.

These thought processes of the patriarchal bargain are the foundations of male-centered thinking: every moment, occasion, conflict, or triumph is first evaluated according to whether it will preserve or threaten a woman’s access to the man and the benefits attached to him.

Male-centered thinking rests on two foundational assumptions. First, everything must be interpreted according to whether it maintains or threatens access to the man and the patriarchal bargain he represents. Second, every other woman’s behavior must be interpreted as an attempt to gain, recover, preserve, or disrupt access to that same bargain.

Principle One: Preserve the Man, Preserve the Bargain

The first foundation of male-centered thinking has simple rules, like fight club: soothe the man, save all forms of access and relationships, keep the hierarchy, and preserve the bargain.

Under the patriarchal bargain, proximity to men is hierarchical, where access to male attention, approval, resources, protection, professional power, and social networks may all carry value and legitimacy. And this proximity can be flavored in multiple kinds of relationships: familial, platonic friendships, career and employer dynamics, and of course, romantic relationships.

Of course, the bargain has adjusted over time, yet the goalpost naturally shifted with it. The structure of the patriarchal bargain has accommodated new, inevitable sociopolitical changes — such as women gaining greater autonomy over whether, when, and whom they interface and/or partner with.

In our modern era, where marriage is no longer the only route to security, and all genders emphasize choice, compatibility, and seemingly endless options, romantic relationships take on a new context.

Commitment to a romantic relationship becomes evidence of a daring feat, rather than a simple act: a man had the freedom to choose from an unlimited buffet of women, and he chose her.

Therefore, romance symbolizes less of a willing choice to love, and more that a woman has leaped through all the hoops to be chosen. It is not simply having romantic access to men that carries value — a man voluntarily (and extra points if exclusively) prioritizing, committing to, and publicly claiming a woman represents the pinnacle of that access.

In other words, the prestige is no longer contained in the idea of “Well, I have a husband”, especially in a world where marriage was almost a requirement. Now, it can be presented as a bragging point of:

In this framework, Romantic commitment from a man subsequently becomes the crème de la crème of legitimate proximity and access to a man, and the subsequent social benefits are available to a woman at one of the highest levels.

And, naturally, that perceived value fundamentally changes the stakes. The kind of relationship that is socially perceived as taking the most effort to achieve becomes the most valuable and consequential prize to keep.

Thus, when social benefits flow through a relationship with a man, every piece of information surrounding this relationship becomes consequential and must be evaluated according to this question:

“Does this information strengthen her access and proximity to the man . . . or threaten it?”

And that question is the principle, contained as a male-centered thought process: the man is the epicenter of the ecosystem, and a woman must interpret her position, credibility, and access to the benefits of the patriarchal bargain through her relationship to him.

Consequently, all information is filtered through his (and by proxy, the relationship’s) place at the center. Synthesizing the information as true, fair, or even morally consequential becomes an inconvenient secondary consideration, often put on hold to answer a more pressing question:

Would accepting this reality preserve or destabilize my access and relationship with him?

For some my man-my man-my man types, this question is quite pertinent when reality contradicts or complicates what being “chosen” is supposed to signify.

Under the inherent rules of the patriarchal bargain, the man is understood as the epicenter to which everything gravitates, and the surrounding ecosystem is organized according to who sits closest to the center target.

Bullseye. That space is reserved for the woman with the most legitimate access to him and thus the preferred position — usually the wife, girlfriend, fiancée, or otherwise “chosen” woman. Her proximity grants her a certain presumption of legitimacy.

All other women are then interpreted according to their threat level to that position. At the safest end sit his family, supportive friends, and the allies: women whose presence affirms the relationship or (at minimum) doesn’t challenge it.

Further out are the women whose relationship to him is neutral, independent, or simply less useful to maintaining the arrangement, and require more examination to understand.

And then there are the perceived threats: women whose opinions, boundaries, history, relationship choices, or mere refusal to affirm the preferred narrative inevitably produce friction with the bargain.

Suddenly, there is a Tyler Perry villain typecast role waiting for her to fulfill: the rejected woman, the meddling friend, the difficult ex, the jealous woman, and finally, the threat.

This hierarchy is not necessarily organized around truthfulness, character, or even actual emotional closeness. Instead, it organizes around relational usefulness to the bargain with yet another guiding question:

Does this woman threaten my access and proximity to this man, or does she remain irrelevant or even affirm and support it?

Even actions — that ostensibly fulfill the rules of sisterhood— can become suspicious the moment they threaten the rules of the bargain.

And because maintaining access is the priority, a partnered woman may begin accommodating and arranging reality around the relationship’s survival.

Of course, healthy relationships require support. Partners should encourage one another, offer grace, protect one another from needless humiliation, and occasionally reassure each other that neither is the most irritating person alive.

But preservation under the patriarchal bargain requires much more than ordinary support: a woman may soften his behavior, protect his image, excuse what would otherwise offend her values, or alter her connection to other women.

These accommodations are not necessarily random acts of devotion — they are methods of preserving the arrangement.

“But, I’m just protecting our relationship,” those women may say. Yet, the normal expectation to draw boundaries and protect a partnership can become the moral guise for evaluating every conflict, truth, and moral choice.

The question is no longer whether his behavior is acceptable, or “Is this true?”

It becomes what a woman is willing to make acceptable so she can continue choosing him and being his choice.

Principle Two: Every Woman Must Be Seeking the Same Reward

And once a woman understands male proximity as the center of her own ecosystem, so begins the assumption that every other woman is also either trying to preserve, gain, or reclaim access to the man — or disrupt yours.

This brings us to the second foundation of male-centered thinking: every woman must be seeking the same reward of male proximity and access.

In other words: “If I’m doing it for that man, then so are them other heauxs!”

Very follow-the-leader ass mentality, it seems, but on closer examination, it’s much simpler: projection. If access to a man is understood as a prestigious reward to one woman, then of course, every other woman must be seeking the same kind of prize.

In the unconscious framework of the male-centered woman, women are not afforded the independence to have motives that do not center men. Instead, every goddamn decision must somehow stem from desiring a man, competing for him, being rejected by him, or otherwise acting in response to him.

Consequently, male-centered thinking does not ask a woman to describe her own motivations; instead, it assigns her a motive according to a presumed universal relationship to male access.

In the mind of a male-centered woman, there’s absolutely no fucking way that another woman may act from community, concern, anger, self-protection, or plain ol’ disinterest.

Nope, there must be a man lurking beneath those decisions.

And it works: the framework plays jury, judge, and executioner, and decides what a woman’s actions “really meant” before she gets to explain herself.

For example, you can date a man for months, discover he has been lying his ass off (why is it always after they’ve spoken with your parents?), and eventually find your way out of the damn Matrix (and why does this shit always happen around the holidays?).

You can privately warn the women you eventually discover had, unbeknownst to one another, been in the picture at the same time as you — because the moral code of Sisterhood dictates that they deserve to know exactly what you learned — only to watch the entire sequence rewritten into a convenient fiction of romantic failure: she wanted to be chosen, she wasn’t, and everything afterward must be jealousy and obsession.

Notice how much fact, context, chronology, agency, and benefit of the doubt — all things the sisterhood supposedly hinges on — have to disappear for that interpretation to even work? Now, I love a good thriller novel as much as the next woman, but if the plot only works once the facts disappear, perhaps we should stop calling it the truth.

Once the narrative is assigned, it becomes a complete theory of the woman, and every past, present, and future action gets swallowed by it. At some point, this is no longer an interpretation of a woman’s behavior; it becomes a deliberate replacement of her reality with one that better preserves the man, the relationship, and the preferred narrative surrounding both.

And you, too, have probably seen this phenomenon in your own life: a woman’s actions slowly stripped of context, until the only plausible explanation remaining is one that neatly places a man back at the center.

A single friend questions the relationship? She’s just jealous because she doesn’t have one. A married friend disagrees? She thinks her own relationship is better than mine. An ex speaks critically about him? She wants him back. A woman rejects his advances? She’s playing hard to get.

A woman refuses to compete for him? She must know she can’t win. A woman cuts contact entirely? She just secretly wants his attention. Even a woman’s indifference can surely be rewritten as performative, secretly indicative of interest or a bitter wound.

Yes — every road still leads back to the man.

And somehow, a woman’s actual explanation becomes almost irrelevant, because the motive has already been assigned to her.

Once being “chosen” is established as a valuable position, and the man naturally becomes the prize, women are then presumed to abide by the same covenant surrounding him: desire him, compete for him, prioritize him, and protect whatever access to him you can secure.

Under that logic, a woman cannot simply possess information, have an ethical objection, defend herself, dislike a man, eject him, or decide she wants absolutely nothing to do with him.

Her behavior still has to be translated into the language of the competition: jealous, bitter, yearning, rejected, threatening, emotionally invested.

Her motives are never allowed to belong solely to her.

They must always lead back to a man.

When Accountability Migrates

Once preserving male access becomes the organizing priority, accountability has to be distributed in whatever way causes the least damage to the bargain.

And herein lies one of the more convenient outcomes of male-centered thinking: when fully confronting the man’s behavior threatens the relationship itself, responsibility has an uncanny tendency to migrate elsewhere, usually onto a woman.

After all, if preserving the man preserves the relationship, and every other woman is presumed to be operating from the same framework . . .

. . . Then, the path of least resistance becomes rather obvious: fully assigning responsibility to him threatens the bargain, while redistributing it towards her does not.

Principle One makes holding the man fully accountable costly; Principle Two has already supplied another woman with a suspicious motive. Together, they make her the perfect receptacle for whatever responsibility would otherwise destabilize the arrangement.

This migration casts a woman as responsible for anticipating his behavior and simultaneously preventing it, interpreting it correctly, responding to it appropriately, and finally absorbing the consequences once they occur.

Somehow, male-centered thinking posits that the agency and actions of men become something women are expected to manage both prospectively and retrospectively.

Male agency begins to operate like some uncontrollable natural disaster that leaves women in the role of National Weather Service employees: apparently supposed to forecast the disaster, prepare for its inevitability, and somehow clean up after it too.

While this does not always require declaring the man innocent, the much more efficient move lies in the “but.”

Sure, he was wrong, but . . .

Sure, he behaved poorly, but why did she respond like that? Sure, he lied, but why didn’t she figure it out sooner? Sure, he mistreated her, but why did her family get involved?

Sure, he created the problem, but look at all the problems this woman created afterward.

His bad-boy behavior remains technically acknowledged and earns him a little swat on the nose, while the greater moral weight quietly migrates elsewhere.

And suddenly, the woman’s response becomes more consequential than the behavior she was actually responding to.

Male-centered thinking doesn’t promise a man the convenience of having his wrongdoing completely erased. Instead, he takes a few lashings before responsibility is distributed in a way that makes preserving him, the relationship, and the patriarchal bargain easier.

Male-centered thinking does not necessarily ask who caused the harm. It asks which woman can absorb the blame without costing the man anything.

His choices get to be context, while hers become evidence of character.

For Black Women, the Bargain Carries Higher Stakes .

Patriarchy has been quite industrious over the generations — finding ways to convince women across culture, class, color and creed that proximity to men can provide access to whatever womanhood alone cannot.

Black women did not invent the patriarchal bargain, nor are we uniquely susceptible to male-centered thinking.

But for Black women (and most women from marginalized communities), the bargain comes with an additional layer of cruelty — where many of the protections supposedly promised to women under patriarchy have never been reliably extended to us.

Under patriarchy, the idea of traditional femininity has promised women the default right of being viewed as delicate, vulnerable, innocent, desirable — and thus, in dire need of male protection.

Yet, Black womanhood has been propagated as conflicting with these ideals, where we are posited as the antithesis of traditional womanhood and femininity.

Paradoxically, we are stronger than we look, more combative and aggressive than our behavior suggests, unwanted, and always guilty of whatever accusation is lodged, and therefore automatically denied the protection.

Yet, Patriarchy is a greedy sunnabitch, and won’t leave you out in the cold if you are willing to pay. There is a Faustian nature embedded in the Patriarchal bargain that can be seductive for Black women.

Especially for those yearning for the feminine promise of being soft without suspicion, vulnerable without punishment, desirable without qualification, and protected without first having to prove that you deserve it.

And this is the part of the bargain that gets sexy and titillating, real rated R. If Black womanhood alone has not reliably granted access to those privileges, proximity to a man (via the Patriarchal Bargain) can appear to offer them secondhand.

Suddenly, being “chosen” operates against an entire cultural indictment of alleged undesirability, dehumanization, and hilariously wrong satire and caricature.

The woman who daringly faces off against misogynoir to acquire degrees, wealth, friendships, hobbies, and more . . . is still treated as though the absence of somebody’s son is the one glaring deficiency in an otherwise complete life.

Under these conditions, romantic commitment can begin to function as a particularly powerful kind of social certification. He chooses you, and suddenly the choice itself is evidence: I am desirable. I am feminine. I am worthy of commitment. I am the kind of woman someone protects, prioritizes, and stays for.

Obviously, this does not apply to everyone — not every partnered Black woman is consciously using her relationship as some rebuttal to misogynistic barriers. Black women are allowed to fall in love; we deserve companionship, sex, intimacy, forehead kisses, splitting expensive dinners, and having someone clean up after wash day.

In fact, author bell hooks’ broader body of work treats love as a potentially transformative and liberatory practice; one could argue that Black women choosing to love (whether platonic or romantic) is a revolutionary act. And for many Black women, the first kind of love we often experience is deeply familial, stemming from the other Black women in our lives.

Black communities have often been deeply matrifocal, with women being the primary face of loving caregivers, kin-keepers, organizers, emotional anchors, and more. When the world denies us protection under patriarchal systems, sisterhood has absolutely become the de facto system for protection. Within sisterhood, we find a space to dispense the love and care to be soft, vulnerable, loved, and cared for.

Thus, one could argue that sisterhood, and sisterly love, have been the organizing principle for Black women for quite some time. And that’s exactly what makes the betrayal cut sooooo fucking deep.

However, like all systems, conscious decisions and active participation are not needed for the patriarchal bargain to override matrifocality, prioritize romantic relationships, and do the rest of its work.

It already does the work of making romantic relationships carry enough symbolic value that losing the perceived value of a relationship could have more meaning than the actual loss of the relationship.

What happens when the relationship becomes a symbolic shield against longstanding accusations of undesirability and unlovability? I’d imagine that the pressure to preserve that relationship can carry the additional burden of proving that these accusations are not true.

And for Black women, there is a fucked up contradiction waiting for us, where we have been intentionally left out of sociocultural systems of protection, and have created alternative systems — that still get eschewed in favor of the former system that we have been left out of.

The stakes are high, and not because romance has to compete with sisterhood for our time, loyalty, and effort (we can do boffem).

But rather, the patriarchal bargain convinces us that the protections available through romantic selection are superior; more legitimate, more valuable, and more desirable than the protections we have already built for ourselves.

And once we associate being “chosen” for romantic partnership as the gateway for legitimacy, protection, desirability, and just getting to be — the maintenance and potential loss of said romance start to carry more weight.

Maintaining the relationship means maintaining personal evidence of desirability and worthiness, and displaying that you are an exemption to the incel wet dream of a lonely single woman “with only her degrees to keep her warm.”

I don’t know about y’all, but my degrees are not arguing about submission and tradition and fatherlessness with their mother’s maiden name.

Although we shouldn’t give a fuck about dust bunny babble, the intended insult only works because we recognize the accusation underneath — and have decided that the patriarchal bargain is the way to avoid it.

Despite Black women building systems of care and protection in response to our exclusion from traditional patriarchal protections, we are offered a pittance: conditional access back into the very structure that left us out.

And one too many of us can get seduced and take a bite out of the apple.

Even worse, the price of maintaining that access often requires withdrawing from other women — removing the same grace, credibility, and protection that our systems of sisterhood were created to provide.

Sadly, many a sister will unfairly trade in the community and protection we built with one another, to select the protection Patriarchy promises through a man.

As I said, patriarchy is —after all — a greedy lil’ bitch. It may let you in from the cold of your degrees, and give you three hots, a cot and open a pickle jar for you.

But you’re gonna have to keep paying for it.

Everybody Is a “Girl’s Girl” Until It Costs Her Something .

Now, none of what I wrote requires us to take on the belief that every woman with a man is some enemy of womanhood.

Nor does it require us to suspend the belief that women can be dishonest, manipulative, selfish, cruel, competitive, deeply misguided, or just plain fucking wrong.

Although I like to joke about supporting women’s rights and wrongs, the more humanistic perspective is that women are owed the same rights as any other to be complex human beings.

We are not made morally infallible by virtue of gender, and sisterhood cannot require pretending otherwise.

But determining who is and who isn’t a “Girl’s Girl” is not really the argument. Nor is being deemed a “Girl’s Girl” an ultimate badge of being a part of a woman-centered solidarity.

Rather, the argument is that woman-centered values cannot only be present when they are convenient.

You see, it’s quite easy to believe women, preach accountability, protect our most vulnerable, and pledge allegiance to the sisterhood . . . when it doesn’t threaten things we desperately want to keep.

The real test is when those alleged values conflict with the things the patriarchal bargain asks us to prioritize: access to the man, the relationship, and the status, legitimacy, protection, and meaning we have attached to being “chosen.”

When believing another woman threatens the preferred narrative of your relationship.

When holding a man fully accountable risks destabilizing the relationship you intend to keep.

When extending another woman grace requires surrendering the idea that she must be jealous, bitter, competitive, or after your position.

When the act of protecting principles threatens the protections that the relationship is purported to provide.

Woman-centered politics is more than an identity we rattle off in a list. Sisterhood does not mean automatic allegiance to all women, nor does it make us CIA sleeper agents for another woman just because we both use she/her/hers pronouns.

Yet, sisterhood should require that we resist assigning credibility, grace, innocence, and basic humanity solely according to which woman is closest to the alleged prize man.

It should leave room to recognize that loving someone should never require us to reorganize truth, accountability, and another woman’s humanity around preserving the relationship.

Because being a “Girl’s Girl” cannot be reduced to saying the right buzzwords (hell, I hate the fact I used ‘male-centered’ so much), performing the right political gestures, attending a Girl Boss dinner, or even automatically siding with a woman.

It’s about whether our actual values can survive the exact moment it becomes inconvenient.

Any woman can be a “Girl’s Girl” when sisterhood costs her nothing but her time and participation.

The test is when it costs her something.

The man.

All photos sourced from Pinterest — (c) to respective artists

It’s Not An Invitation, It’s An Audition to Be an It Girl .

Anyone remember that initial stretch of time on Threads where every woman you know was posting about finding other women to hang out with? Not unusual in itself, given how big and isolating a new city can be.

Yet, somehow, every request included the same suspiciously WASP-y conglomerate of activities: “Where are all the girls who want to play tennis, pilates, pickleball, golfing, spa dates,” and more.

Then, some of the requests got very intellectual: “Where are the women interested in insert obscure field of natural science here,” or “Where are the local girls who actually want to read books and discuss sociopolitical themes?”

Interesting, sensing a pattern here, I quipped in my head, right before immediately calling them “Nerds!” with all the bravado of a mean girl in an ’80s movie — because I, too, am a raging nerd.

Now, I am a natural hater (a woman with excellent pattern recognition) who regularly enjoys hating (clocking obvious patterns) and lauds the fine art of hating (becoming the most vindicated woman in America when I find out that I was right).

I identified that trait years ago, and apparently, so has my algorithm.

But to be clear, I am not above any of the aforementioned shit. I love books, I love beautifully adorned restaurants with terrible food and terrible-er service, I love putting on a cute sporty set from TJ Maxx, and missing the tennis ball on every swing. And, yes, I will happily yell about some sociopolitical themes over an overpriced cocktail, and do it all again the next week.

Living in health-conscious Los Angeles as a 30-something-year-old, I simply yearn for the good ol’ days of hookah smoke blowing over mimosa n^o. 11 of bottomless mimosas. Or saying, “We needed this,” after canceling out a girls’ wellness hike with a 450-calorie matcha latte. When did we, as a society, get too good for that as a girl hobby?

Still, despite recognizing that the girls need community and the art of getting a damn hobby, something about the tone of these posts made my brows shoot up. However, I swallowed my initial skepticism, leaned into curiosity as I opened some of these threads and actually read through the replies.

Chile.

After multiple references of only desiring to be around the girls who are actually intelligent and cultured, and actually interested in something more meaningful than the apparently morally bankrupt act of boozy brunch —

I had to put on an episode of Baddies and watch that long chin projecting through my 5K UHD TV like the dead girl in The Ring.

That kind of foolishness is exactly what I needed to recalibrate from the laughable cosplay of bougie intellectualism and sanctimonious virtue-signaling in the replies.

Now, I do not judge women for looking into building genuine community: Women should build sustainable communities, rife with other women who share their interests, values, and curiosities, and preferred methods for dilly-dallying on a weekend.

However, the problem isn’t women seeking curated community; the problem was that some of these posts did not feel like genuine invitations to connect —

— But, more like virtue-signaling for something else. These requests felt less like bids for connection, and more like casting calls.

And in this case, I was right.

Cue my Most Vindicated Woman in America face.

The question is no longer one of companionship and exploration of new hobbies, in which we’re asking “Who wants to explore this hobby with me?”

The question is rather “Where are the women who are impressive enough to be seen doing these impressive things with me?”

And that difference matters because the activities are no longer just fun activities designed to expand your horizons and produce some giggles.

Rather, the chosen activities of the woman seeking community, are the credentials and proof that she is intelligent, cultured, disciplined, affluent, interesting, and, most importantly, one of those girls.

An audition assumes there is a role to play, a certain image to embody, and an audience that gets to decide whether you’ve performed it convincingly. That is what makes these bids less of an invitation and more an audition.

The performance of what you do, read, know, and opine about all becomes your resume for an immediate ascension to this generation’s uppermost echelon of womanhood: the It Girl^™.

The It Girl is not merely a woman who happens to have delicate, “womanly” pursuits and hobbies. She is an identifiable persona, with recognizable interests, aesthetics, opinions, and social cues. You know the role when you see it, and apparently, so do the thousands of women trying to find one another online.

These particular posts covertly ooze and drip with a desire to actively shape a semi-visible hierarchy, where being seen and perceived takes precedence over mastery and being.

The subtext of these posts is basically: where are the girls who are actually smart and actually cultured and actually interesting? Where are the women with sufficiently unique, esoteric, and high-caliber intellectual hobbies?

Who possesses the right combination of taste, beauty, intellect, discipline, and cultural capital to be admitted into the clique community?

The end result is a collection of stylish communities organized around the optics of intelligence, taste, class, and cultural capital, rather than a genuine desire to learn, build, do, and appreciate the new, or hone and sharpen the old.

Honestly, the role is seductive for a reason. It gives the opportunity to become “that girl” via stepping into a community of interesting women, or at least soak up the communal sauce to becoming one step closer to being her.

You know her: that girl, Ms. HBIC — the one we have all been promised.

The one who exists on the other side of becoming sufficiently interesting.

Every Generation Gives Us a New HBIC to Become .

Every day, we are blessed to see women who appear beautiful, cultured, wealthy, talented, well-traveled, and completely enchanted by their own lives.

What woman wouldn’t want that brand of infectious and presumed joie de vivre for herself? I can admit that I sure the hell do.

But the It Girl is not merely a lifestyle we are invited to admire. Increasingly, she is a standard against which all women are simultaneously measured and promised; thus the It Girl is both the measuring stick and the prize.

If we (as women) become polished, accomplished, beautiful, and interesting enough, then we might finally experience the ease and delight that supposedly come with being her.

But perhaps the more pertinent question is, why are we all so eager to land the role?

Why does every generation seem to produce its own carefully constructed version of the woman we should want to become?

Yes, the finer details of wardrobe, beauty aesthetics, hobbies, politics, aspirations, and acceptable displays of femininity may shift alongside the current sociocultural and political climate.

But the process remains quite familiar: the culture writes a new character, declares her the embodiment of modern womanhood, and women rush to Spirit Halloween store to get the costume and learn the necessary lines.

And no, the phenomenon is not due to some lazy, misogynist belief that women are inherently shallow, gullible, or desperate for attention.

But rather, these archetypes promise us something real: status, belonging, safety, desirability, admiration, and the possibility of finally feeling as though we have mastered this generation’s iteration of womanhood.

Every generation has its iteration of the woman who supposedly figured it all out: the perfect Suzy Homemaker, the Superwoman, the Girl Boss, the Cool Girl, and now, the It Girl.

Each new iteration is sold as the representation of novel progress, where she is freer, smarter, more modern, and more self-actualized than the woman who came before her. Yet, how much of that character is truly new?

And what does it say about our culture that no matter how much the ideal changes, women are still expected to shape-shift quickly enough to embody it?

Of course, an audition only makes sense if there is already a role to play. And the role of the It Girl didn’t just emerge from thin air, nor is she a new concept.

She is a recognizable archetype that has repeatedly emerged across literature, media, and real life, changing just enough to reflect the values of whatever culture is observing her.

Simply, the It Girl is assembled from a familiar collection of traits, aesthetics, interests, and social cues that reflect whatever values exist within a community, culture, and sphere of influence for women.

She is beautiful, knowledgeable, polished, culturally fluent, socially effortless, and interesting enough to remain vaguely mysterious.

She oozes money — or at least knows how to look like she does— to fund her ability to travel, exercise, keep an aesthetically pleasing home, and dilly-dally however she pleases.

Somehow the It Girl has mastered the ability to move through life with the ease of a woman who has never had to call customer service and explain herself seventeen times.

Her life doesn’t just appear fabulous; she also seems to take genuine delight in living it. And girl, who the hell wouldn’t want that? Sign me TF up, said every girl in the world.

One could argue that the desire to be an It Girl is self-motivational at best, an empowering cry to cultivate interests and embrace being the confident, bold main character in your personalized story.

In many ways, it is empowering. Women should read, we should travel, we should learn obscure shit for the sole purpose of knowing obscure shit.

Independence is sexy, and thus there is a seduction in freedom: the ability to live, love, fuck, make money and blow it, decorate, do whatever you want or do nothing. Frankly, building your life around your own desires is the trend.

Content creator and corporate baddie has accurately captured the cultural zeitgeist with a simple and effective refrain of liberation: “Hot girls have hobbies”.

And to be clear, she is right. Women should cultivate interests, pleasure, ambition, and identities that extend beyond romantic partnership.

And the girlie-pops (including myself) have never agreed more, boldly expressing this shift as the need for women to become well-rounded versions of themselves, for themselves — not no damn man.

And the It Girl does a bang-up job of appearing to embody that message.

Do you really think the It Girl is waiting around for a man to supply her with a personality, a purpose, or a social life?

She already has plans, reservations, political opinions, a skincare routine, and probably a work meeting at 12 PM, Pilates class at 6 PM, and a red-eye and passport stamp at 12 AM.

Man, move TF out the way.

The It Girl Is Performance Art .

In this current era, being witnessed and suspected of embodying the smooth smartcoolfunnysexy of the It Girl is undoubtedly lauded — and in itself, the idea of being that girl living her best life is not a bad one.

But the moment the It Girl becomes a recognizable role — composed of recognizable acts and rewarded by a recognizable audience- she becomes more than an aspirational mood board.

She becomes a performance.

The art of performance has long been indelicately stitched into the social education of women — quite often, it has been a strategy for safety, belonging, power, survival, and the careful management of how we are permitted to move through the world.

Wherever a system rewards being seen and perceived, people eventually learn how to make themselves recognizable within it. And women (particularly femme-identifying) have long understood that to be read as a woman is, at least in part, to perform one.

Now, that does not mean womanhood itself, or every expression of femininity, is some elaborate fraud. It simply means that repeated acts help certain versions of womanhood become recognizable, believable, and — most importantly— socially rewarded.

In her foundational work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler (1990) pointed out that gender identity is “tenuously…instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (p. 178). In an earlier essay, Butler (1988) further emphasizes the importance of performance in constructing one’s identity, describing it as “a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment” that both the actor and their social audience come to believe and reproduce (p. 520).

Roughly translated? We construct who we are through what we perform, and other people’s recognition helps make that performance feel real.

It becomes a rather fluid, co-dependent feedback loop, in which we perform an identity, others recognize and validate it, and that validation encourages us to repeat those acts until the performance begins to feel like an inherent truth about who we are.

The It Girl is assembled through that same interplay of performance and identity, a stylized repetition of acts: Pilates classes, meticulous skincare routines, an immaculate apartment, a niche set of hobbies, tasteful vacations, a stack of politically appropriate books in her home, understated but recognizably expensive jewelry on her wrist, highly curated photo dumps on her Instagram, and declarations of choosing herself.

Yet, the It Girl serves as a contradictory performance: she is sold as a woman living entirely for herself, yet the role only exists when an audience witnesses, recognizes, and rewards the performance.

Now, caveat — these associated acts of womanhood are not inherently fake.

Someone can sincerely enjoy Pilates, Octavia Butler, skincare, travel, interior design, and whatever obscure field of natural science that originally irritated me on Threads.

Believe it or not, sincerity and status performance can — and often do— co-exist.

The question is not whether she enjoys the activity; rather, it is a question of what the activity has come to communicate.

When does a hobby become a credential? When does curiosity become evidence of superiority? When does community become an audience? When does self-development become self-branding?

And, when does building a beautiful life become constructing a compelling case for why everyone else should consider you exceptional?

Plainly, we see the social benefits of being an It Girl — the entire world bends to her command.

Yet, just underneath the cool exterior of the It Girl is not just lucky girl syndrome or confidence, but an array of repetitive acts that can ironically reinforce patriarchal systems of desirability, hierarchy, and social capital.

And once we recognize the It Girl as a performance, the next question becomes unavoidable:

Where have we seen this character before?

The Cool Girl Is Back, and Her Branding Is Excellent .

Of course, every new HBIC that the culture gives us is rarely as new as advertised. Like every archetype preceding her, the It Girl did not emerge from thin air, and is frankly derivative.

She has an older relative, one we supposedly dragged, shamed, and exiled out of respectable womanhood years ago: the Cool Girl.

In our modern culture, the It Girl is sold as the antithesis of the Cool Girl, an archetype so immortalized in Millennial culture by the movie Gone Girl (2014), a film adaptation of the eponymous novel by Gillian Flynn.

Confession: I have actually never seen Gone Girl — Sorry, I’ve stomached enough news stories about White women disappearing throughout my lifetime.

However, the infamous “Cool Girl” monologue has lived on as both an astute observation and an almost theoretical orientation for the myriad ways that women perform.

But, I’ll let Amy Dunne, the titular missing white woman and Cool Girl extraordinaire, tell it:

Cool Girl. Men always use that, don’t they? As their defining compliment…Cool Girl is hot. Cool Girl is game. Cool girl is fun. . .

Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Essentially, the Cool Girl was hot, but effortless. Sexually available, but never needy. Interesting and vaguely smart, but not intimidating enough to overshadow a man’s intelligence.

She never demanded reassurance, commitment, accountability, or consideration — she was game for anything, offended by nothing, and (most importantly) not like those other girls.

Much like her distant cousin the It Girl, the Cool Girl was also a carefully constructed persona intended to perform for, and then capture the attention of, an object of desire.

The performance of the Cool Girl was indeed a chilling act of sewing oneself into a new skin, with a permanent smile oriented toward validation, admiration, and elevation onto a pedestal — no matter the cost.

But a performance does not always disappear simply because it becomes socially embarrassing. Sometimes, like Jurassic Park, life finds a way and evolves.

Perhaps, the Cool Girl has waltzed into her makeover montage era: she learned a new language, became fluent, donned a better costume, and finally returned with a top-notch branding and PR package.

By the time Gone Girl had embedded the Cool Girl archetype into our cultural lexicon, we were knee-deep in the gilded age of the Millennial Girl Boss era of the 2010s.

We often reflect on that era as a cringeworthy dinosaur, composed of Instagram graphics about confidently breaking glass ceilings in hot pink power suits, coffee mugs about the future being female, and mons pubis-shaped hats.

Still, that era of cringe walked so that the current zeitgeist of “de-centering men” could sprint full speed ahead and fly Delta One.

Ultimately, the Cool Girl monologue has immortalized and given women the language to identify the various emotional, spiritual, and psychological lap dances we were performing for men.

The battle cries to decenter men have moved this message forward, now interrogating the why and how we have turned the quest for breaking gender norms, into a penny peep-show for men.

And that sociocultural interrogation has been successful, because being labeled as begging for male approval is probably worse than being an unlocked, brand-new Kia in North Philly.

I cannot tell you one woman on Beyoncé’s internet who wants that reputation. No woman wants to be caught pretending to love shit just because her boyfriend does, or defending a mediocre man while throwing every other woman underneath the bus, or having thousands of her fellow sisters point at her and yell “Stand TF up, sis”.

(In fact, I feel like I need forty lashes for committing those acts on paper with my good typing fingers. Eeeyuckkk.)

So, naturally, we have abandoned the Cool Girl. Or, at the very least, we’ve admonished women into abandoning the language, imagery, and painfully obvious performances associated with her.

We stopped bragging about being low-maintenance, proclaiming that male friends were preferable because women were “too much drama,” and treating emotional neglect as proof of being easygoing.

We have collectively learned how to identify the performance, criticize it, and publicly shame the women who still appeared to be participating in it.

But while the Cool Girl has become an utter cultural embarrassment, the desire to be considered exceptional did not disappear with her.

It’d be delusional to pretend we all became ascetics who transcended the desire to be admired or occupy the uppermost echelon of womanhood.

As much as I hate to admit it, we have not stopped wanting to be recognized as more beautiful, more interesting, more desirable, more cultured, and more impressive.

We didn’t give up those desires; we have become embarrassed by one particular route to getting there.

The Cool Girl spun on an axis of making herself exceptional by distinguishing herself from other women in the eyes of men.

The It Girl makes herself exceptional by embodying a version of womanhood that appears richer, fuller, and more impressive than ordinary life.

The Cool Girl wanted to be chosen; the It Girl wants to appear as though she has already won at life, and could win you, your friends, and hell even your mama over.

The Cool Girl wanted to become a man’s fantasy; the It Girl wants to become everyone’s mood board.

The Cool Girl’s interests were evidence that she could please a man. The It Girl’s interests become evidence that she has mastered womanhood itself.

One performed desirability directly. The other performs an aspirational life that remains inseparable from desirability.

The performance is smoother, the vocabulary is better, and the PR is fucking excellent.

But both characters depend on the same underlying promise and principle: She is not merely just a woman. She is the woman — alpha and omega.

Thus, perhaps the Cool Girl didn’t disappear at all. Perhaps we took an old fantasy, gave her better hobbies, taught her the language of self-actualization . . .

. . .And renamed her the It Girl.

The Audience Changed. The Rubric Did Not.

So, if the Cool Girl did not disappear, but instead evolved into the It Girl, then the question undoubtedly becomes what actually changed?

The most obvious answer is the audience.

The Cool Girl was shamelessly oriented toward men (eeeeeyuck!): her entire performance was built around convincing a man that she was simply hotter, easier, more interesting, and significantly less irritating than every other woman he had ever encountered.

By contrast, the It Girl appears to perform for herself and for other women. As a slogan of wise women everywhere, the It Girl only puts on her performance shoes and only does it “for the girls”.

Everything she posts and presents is undoubtedly for the girls. Her books, her career, her Pilates classes, her tastefully decorated home, and her impossibly booked-and-busy schedule are consumed, replicated, and applauded primarily by women.

Despite our collective pushback against defining ourselves and our femme worth as a caricature of male desires (like the Cool Girl), I cannot help but ponder why the image of the It Girl is still entrenched in the paradoxical fantasy— well, like the Cool Girl.

How many times have we interrogated why the It Girl always includes the same Y/N-insert fanfiction archetype?

The It Girl is always impeccably gorgeous with a French tip, knowledgeable, and can speak on everything. Yet, her favorite hobbies are reminiscent of a 2000s almond mom — not particularly screaming cultured and worldly.

She is an empowered woman unafraid to speak her mind, yet always grateful, humble, and likable, and of course — a girl’s girl and never ever a bitch. The It Girl is confident, successful, opinionated, sexually liberated, and independent. However, she never leans into arrogance, being difficult, too slutty, too intimidating, or too independent, lest she become unreadable and undesirable to men.

Overall, the It Girl has somehow mastered the impossible task of being an extraordinary woman, without ever making anyone around her feel ordinary.

She is a magnetic object of desire for both women and men: girls wanna be her, and men love to hate her — and secretly want her, either to be dominated by her and/or covertly subjugate her (honestly, probably both).

And, at first glance, the shift in audience appears to be progressive: the Cool Girl wants and thrives on male approval, lust, and validation, whilst the It Girl receives female admiration.

From there, we can presume that a performance witnessed and validated by women is inherently woman-centered.

Right? Well, no.

A femme-centered audience does not automatically create a femme-centered paradigm, because it requires much more than simply swapping out the people watching.

A true femme-centered paradigm requires us to interrogate what we are performing fundamentally, why we value it, and whether those values actually serve women’s freedom, dignity, pleasure, safety, and collective flourishing.

And culturally, I don’t think we have fully stepped into that paradigm,

Women may now be the primary audience, yet we still watch as our standards of beauty, success, desirability, femininity, and aspirational womanhood develop within a larger patriarchal structure.

We may be looking at women through female eyes, but those eyes were not formed in some pristine feminist vacuum untouched by the male gaze.

We have inherited ideas about which women deserve attention and admiration, and who is considered beautiful, elegant, intelligent, desirable, successful, respectable, or worthy of being envied.

And those ideas were largely developed within cultures where men possessed disproportionate power to define female value.

Now, of course, the presence of a femme audience alters the gaze. Women may value qualities that men historically overlooked, where we laud another woman’s independence, emotional depth, creativity, intellect, friendships, career, or ability to construct a life that genuinely delights her.

I am not arguing that every woman admiring an It Girl is secretly sitting at home wondering whether some random man would find her desirable. That would be intellectually lazy and, frankly, ridiculous.

Some women genuinely do not give a fuck what men think.

They admire the It Girl’s confidence, freedom, intelligence, career, wardrobe, home, or apparent joie de vivre. Some simply want to raid her closet, steal her airline points, and figure out how she found an apartment with that much natural light.

The female gaze can broaden the picture and make room for forms of womanhood that are not organized exclusively around pleasing men.

However, broadening the gaze is not the same thing as escaping the structure that shaped it.

But even when no individual man is visibly present, the standards of a male-centered culture can remain in the room.

Women can reward, reproduce, and enforce patriarchal desirability. Oftentimes we do place another woman on a pedestal because she has mastered the very traits we were all taught make a woman uniquely valuable.

Even the supposedly modern It Girl remains suspiciously young, and acceptable across her physical features, body, and demeanor; she becomes a polished, financially comfortable, socially fluent, emotionally composed, and effortlessly desirable caricature.

She may have opinions now, and more hobbies, money, and freedom. But she is still expected to package all of that power in a form that remains aesthetically pleasing, socially palatable, and legible within a world organized around male desire.

So no, the performance is not fully woman-centered simply because we as women are applauding, curating, and occasionally enforcing a deeply rooted patriarchal ideal.

The audience may be women, yet the rubric was not created by women alone.

And simply because women are now holding the scorecards does not mean we wrote the rules.

Her female audience becomes a jury; their admiration is the verdict, and their imitation is evidence that she has won.

If enough women ask where she purchased her clothes, what she does for work, what books she reads, how she maintains her body, and how she became so confident, she receives something potentially more valuable than the attention of one man.

She has been collectively certified as the woman.

The kind of woman that men are presumed to desire, and other women are expected to admire — with the quiet expectation that admiration will eventually curdle into envy.

And she, the It Girl, stands in the center, receiving both forms of validation while maintaining the appearance that she needs neither.

This is how male desirability becomes female social capital. The It Girl does not need to announce that men want her. Her desirability is treated as self-evident.

Now, that is excellent marketing and public relations.

The Rebrand Worked — We Changed the Costume, Not the Fantasy .

It’s 2026, so the paradigm has shifted, and so has the Cool Girl — women are no longer applauded for blatantly contorting themselves into emotionally undemanding fantasies built explicitly for men.

(Well, at least, not in the same painfully obvious ways).

We dragged the Cool Girl into the public square, identified her schtick, and went Boooo! Tomatoes, tomatoes, and effectively relegated her to the status of a cultural embarrassment—a real femme equivalent of Jason DeRulo.

Cringe.

Unlike the Cool Girl, the It Girl’s performance is not shamelessly oriented toward men. She does not need to publicly announce that men want her or use her latest Pilates-honed flexibility to twist herself into the most obvious caricature of male desire.

But the fantasy underneath the Cool Girl never disappeared.

Born in the same spirit as the Cool Girl, we have contorted the image of the It Girl into one that parades as the cooler-than-you, ridiculously smart, beautifully curated, and sufficiently well-hobbied woman competing to become your newest idol.

We did not stop wanting to be admired, nor did we stop wanting to be considered exceptional. We changed what exceptionalism looks like and whose admiration appears respectable enough to pursue.

The rebrand worked because the It Girl does not initially feel like another demand imposed on women.

She feels like a promise, like land promised to your hot girl ancestors three thousand years ago. For freedom, pleasure, beauty, money, community, confidence.

The It Girl offers us things many women genuinely want and deserve: a life developed beyond romantic partnership, an identity that a man does not supply, and permission to pursue pleasure, knowledge, beauty, ambition, and community for ourselves.

Above all, the cultural mythos of the It Girl promises that somewhere on the other side of becoming sufficiently polished, cultured, accomplished, and interesting, we might finally wake up completely enchanted by our own lives.

And baby, that is a damn good sales pitch.

It’s exactly why her audience studies her, applauds her, replicates her, and ultimately certifies her as the woman who has somehow figured it all out.

The woman with the beautiful home, impressive career, appropriate politics, cultivated interests, expansive social life, excellent body, emotional self-awareness, and enough filled passports to suggest that she has discovered a secret portal into a better existence.

It is also why I do not believe women are foolish, shallow, or hopelessly obsessed with being perceived simply because we are drawn to being an It Girl.

But in abandoning the Cool Girl, have we traded male validation for the admiration and swoon of other women?

And if so, has that admiration become a form of currency used to move up the invisible intragender hierarchy of cool? Have we mistaken being admired by women for being woman-centered?

And an even more disturbing realization: are we unknowingly repackaging familiar standards of beauty, desirability, class, taste, and palatability into a fourth-wave-feminism-friendly version?

Because, you see, the fantasy becomes dangerous when one particular version of that life is elevated as evidence that a woman has finally mastered womanhood.

Because then, freedom quietly becomes another assignment.

Your life cannot simply feel good; instead, it must appear full and too large and grand to fit in the frame.

Your hobbies cannot simply delight you; rather, they must serve a purpose to communicate depth, discipline, and discernment.

Your friendships cannot simply sustain you; they must become evidence that other interesting women have selected you too.

And your self-development? Yeah, no way that remains private. It must become visible enough for an audience to recognize that you have, indeed, developed a self worth admiring.

That is where the fantasy becomes familiar: when the visible performance of a full life begins to matter more than the private experience of actually living one, and covert virtue-signaling hardens into an aesthetic.

However, these musings are not to discourage women from stepping into their own eras of self-assuredness, nor are they meant to criticize the various costumes and roles women often have to don for safety, fluidity, power, and survival.

And to be painstakingly clear, even I — the author — am not standing outside of this critique beyond the velvet rope somewhere.

I’m living the pressure too, and that’s how I first noticed it.

I have the doctoral degree, get my little treatments to stay beautiful and youthful, love Pilates, and fully intend to maintain an immaculately beautiful home that looks like no one has ever left a loose charger on the counter.

I also love a fun, lit, occasionally random activity. Sometimes because it genuinely interests me, sometimes because another woman made it look like a good time.

And sometimes the distinction between personal desire, social influence, and aesthetic participation is much blurrier than any of us care to admit.

Girls like what other girls like. That is normal: determining taste is social, and desire is contagious. None of that is automatically false, shallow, or calculated.

However, I also know the pressure of feeling like I must remain accomplished, beautiful, youthful, fit, intellectually curious, socially engaged, emotionally evolved, well-traveled, interesting, and appropriately enchanted by my own life at all times.

So, no, I am not judging from outside of the performance I am describing. I am actually quite fluent in it.

And sometimes, it becomes too fucking much.

That unwavering pressure to be an It Girl is precisely why it is worth interrogating. Not because I have personally transcended the pressure like an earth-bound bodhisattva, but because I have felt it.

Because I know how quickly a genuine desire to cultivate a full life can become an unrelenting assignment to appear as though you are doing womanhood exceptionally well.

Perhaps this drawn-out post is an out loud attempt to distinguish which parts of this little life actually delight me, and which parts I have learned to perform.

Maybe then, perhaps, other women can ask themselves the same thing.

So, perhaps the question is not whether the It Girl is real or fake; maybe it’s whether we have confused aspiration with liberation.

Have we created a woman-centered culture if women are still being measured against one polished, wealthy, desirable, emotionally composed, and socially legible version of womanhood?

Have we liberated women if our newest ideal still leaves so little room for a woman to be awkward, angry, ordinary, aging, unproductive, unfashionable, uninterested in being desirable, or simply unwilling to turn her life into an exhibit?

A truly woman-centered paradigm cannot simply produce a better ideal woman. Instead, it has to loosen our attachment to the idea that there should be one ideal woman at all.

A woman should be able to build a beautiful life without turning it into a brand, enjoy a hobby without using it as a credential, find community without converting it into a hierarchy.

And above all, she should be able to become more fully herself without becoming more publicly impressive.

And perhaps that is the real distinction: the Cool Girl performed a version of womanhood that men were expected to desire, while the It Girl performs a version of womanhood that women are expected to admire.

The costume and audience may have changed; our language became more liberatory.

But the fantasy of one exceptional woman ascending above the rest remained intact.

So, no, we did not kill the Cool Girl.

We rebranded her, and did a hell of a good job creating new PR for her through our social media.

But the real work is not creating an even better woman to replace the It Girl.

Maybe the real work is actually in ending the audition.

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