My first ‘cool’ girl crush was Robin Scherbatsky’s Cobie Smulders from How I Met Your Mother. Then there was Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes from the Transformers movies. And then, as there always is, was that girl I went to high school with—gorgeous hair, athletic, funny, and besties with the basketball boys. I wanted to be exactly like these girls—cool, one of the guys, and hot (without trying, of course). The inculcation into the ‘cool/chill girl’ club had begun.
The early noughts were a different time. There was far less discourse around ‘real’ women, and the ones on our screen were being written by men. Chris Evans was asking Victoria Beckham to weigh herself on live TV. She’s All That’s Laney Boggs, played by the gorgeous Rachael Leigh Cook, was a ‘prom makeover challenge’. ‘Fat’ girls were two sizes above skinny, the ‘real pretty’ girls never knew they were beautiful, the ‘good girls’ always got the guy because they saved themselves for him. India nudged its own cool-girl trope in the decade to come with Deepika Padukone’s Veronica in Cocktail. Insert the Gone Girl cool-girl monologue. We were raised on a diet of what the ‘ideal woman’ looked like, and she almost invariably had one key quality. She was ‘cool’.
“I tried so hard to channel Serena van der Woodsen’s breeziness from Gossip Girl. And it was pretty uncomfortable,” says social media manager Gunjan Sharma, 29. “The cool-girl trope was aspirational when we were growing up,” adds marketing executive Sambhavi Sudhakar, 28. “I got a lot of negative feedback for being too expressive, and I would envy the ease of these cool girls on screen. It felt like a force-fit on me, though.”
The seeds to cultivate ‘coolness’ are planted early. The cool wife doesn’t care if you’re in touch with your exes. The cool #girlboss would never raise her voice. The cool-girl buddy fist bumps your sexist jokes. And, they’re all naturally beautiful (wouldn’t dream of owning concealer, or a Dyson Airwrap), and they’re totally okay with all the behaviour that the ‘crazy’ girls get upset about.
“I was not chill about anti-feminist shit and sexist jokes. I was not chill about my boyfriend complimenting another woman or discussing another woman with me. But I hid those feelings well,” says marketing manager Vanshika Batra, 29. It goes beyond relationships. “If I have landed a tough job, I joke about being a personality hire,” says brand manager Drishti Kapadia, 28. “I recently won a work award, but I kept downplaying it and joking about how ‘I was only there for the vibes.’”
The easiest way to seem cool? Contrast it to how much cooler you are than other women. Ergo, the NLOG (Not Like Other Girls) or the ‘pick-me’—ideas that were finally crystallised into tropes. Therapist Neha Bhat believes that it comes from an inherited white idealism: “Western ideas of decency, etiquette, and tone, when translated into the modern relationships and the workplace, create this flat idea of girl and woman that translates into emotional suppression, which creates the ‘cool’ or ‘chill’ girl.” We train ourselves to shrug things off, and that sires a discomfort that we wear as second skin. Bhat believes the contrasting archetypes of ‘crazy girl’ and ‘cool girl’ both externalise responsibility. “The ‘cool girl’ wants to fit in, and the ‘crazy girl’ wants to isolate and frighten,” she says.
Sudhakar believes that this internalisation started as a child. “It was fostered by my family. Any impassioned expression—joy, sadness, anger or affection—was instantly met with ‘relax’ or ‘chill out’. If ever a male friend or colleague were to express powerful emotions, they were lauded for it.” Circumstance also ties in. “My ex’s parents didn’t approve of me,” Kapadia shares. “They thought I wasn’t good enough, and it stayed with me. Now, I act like I’m super chill about whether my current partner’s family likes me, but the truth is, I care far more than I let on. In a way, pretending not to care makes it easier to accept the possibility that they might not. It’s a defence mechanism.”
It took a while to figure out it was okay to feel hurt, belittled, jealous or undermined, and even longer to stop gaslighting myself about it
Being a chill girl is anxious business, but one we’re finally trying to exit. While pop culture hasn’t exactly valorised expressive women, it no longer villainises them, either. Think Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney Adamu on FX’s The Bear, the eponymous Fleabag played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, or the entire cast on Showtime’s YellowJackets. Hybrid media—both social and mainstream—has started enough of a dialogue to start to give women a choice about who they’d like to be.
To begin the thaw, it takes recognising that ‘cool/chill’ isn’t always a compliment, it’s conditioning. “Once I started questioning why I needed to be this way, I deepened my relationship with the women around me, and started recognising the things I was suppressing,” Batra says. “Once women can decondition extreme archetypes, they can start to find what’s central to their system—their cultural experience, their specific workplace, and their relationships,” Bhat explains. “For this, she has to tune into how she actually feels, and then help train others in her life, including men and female friends, to understand that she can’t be expected to conform to normative archetypes.”
It took a while for me to realise that every time a man called me cool or chill, he was validating how good I was at biting down how I felt. I was being encouraged to be low-maintenance, to need less, to have lower standards, to not react with anger, to not be hurt by bad behaviour. It took a while to realise that my ‘feminine’ interests mattered, and I did not need to take on ‘masculine’ ones (except ones I genuinely liked) in the hope of being ‘picked’. It took a while to figure out it was okay to feel hurt, belittled, jealous or undermined, and even longer to stop gaslighting myself about it. The road to cool girl is paved with patriarchal intentions, and the journey from there to real girl is a long one. One I’m nowhere near the end of, but I’m happy about how far I've come.
