“I’m not like other girls…”

We’ve all heard these phrases. “I like having guys as friends because girls are too dramatic,” “I don’t need to wear makeup to feel pretty,” and of course, the infamous “I’m not like other girls.” In my experience, I’ve heard these phrases among all types of women, including those who do and don’t identify as feminists. While these notorious phrases have mostly turned into jokes, I still see this “pick me” attitude in so many teen girls today. After taking WGSS 110, I have more of an understanding of why this phenomenon exists and the implications behind it.

Let’s dive into what “I’m not like other girls” really means. Girls use it as an attempt to separate and elevate themselves in competition with other girls, usually for male attention and praise. These comments can be directed many ways, but I typically notice them being made at the expense of girls who could be considered “basic,” meaning they follow the stereotypical and popular trends at the time.

Within the past few years, it’s become a trend to make fun of these so-called “basic” girls. Somehow, enjoying popular things such as pop music, trendy makeup, and social media trends became a reason to make fun of an entire group of girls. I mean, there was an entire trend last year that comprised of making fun of “VSCO girls” who wore scrunchies, big t-shirts, and used hydroflasks. This directly relates to this “pick me” culture because it caused girls to want to separate themselves from this image and appear “better.” There are a lot of other subgroups of girls who are targetted by these “pick me” comments, but I thought this example would be easy to illustrate.

This concept perfectly illustrates an idea we talked about in class called horizontal hostility: when a targeted group believes, acts on, and enforces the dominant system of oppression. The term horizontal hostility has been used by feminists since the 1970s to describe factionalism within the women’s rights movement. Instead of supporting each other and bonding together, teen girls especially divide into subgroups, often putting down those who aren’t like them.

This is my problem with women who identify as feminists acting like this. Separating yourself from more stereotypically “feminine” girls isn’t going to help anyone’s case. It’s internalized misogyny. Exhibiting this behavior around men is only encouraging sexist attitudes toward women and limiting the progress we’re trying to make. I think it’s important to speak on this because I don’t think a lot of women who make these comments actually realize the impact it has on others. We’re so used to being made fun of by men for everything, I understand why it would be easy to feed into that culture. I hope moving forward, we can be genuine about “girls supporting girls” no matter what our different interests are. If you listen to obscure indie music, awesome! If you listen to Ariana Grande, that’s awesome too! If you love doing glam makeup looks, great! If you prefer a more natural look, that’s also great! Women are awesome no matter what they like, period!