If the unrealistic archetype for womanhood in the 2010s was the “cool girl” from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, her younger sister in the 2020s is the “girl’s girl.”
The girl’s girl is the opposite of the cool girl; she’s gracious and confident and unthreatened by other women. She has a sense of abundance when it comes to opportunities, money, and attention, and she supports other women on their missions of actualization, too. She is in every outward sense a reflection of how deeply the basic principles of feminism have saturated mainstream culture in the last decade, but the girl’s girl is not as progressive as she seems. For one thing, she does not, and cannot, actually exist except as an unrealistic standard against which to judge actual women. Her blithe and seamless success leaves little room for the complicating factors that come with being human; more than anything, this fantasy exposes the weaknesses of building a feminism on something as vague as “women supporting women.”
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