Stories From a Recovering “Other Girl”

Graphic by claire evans

Anyone who was once a little girl is all-too-familiar with the double standard of femininity. A young woman is supposed to be pretty and poised. She has to love pink, only play with Barbies, and turn up her little nose at anything with dirt. But the same standards that are meant to separate girls also hold them captive with their implications. Even toddlers pick up on this gendered hierarchy; they see that femininity is viewed as lesser than masculinity, and they internalize it. So the kids give up on their princess dresses and replace them with sports and books, proudly proclaiming that they’re “different.” I can’t judge–after all, I did the exact same thing. 

I’d always walked the delicate balance of being feminine versus being girly. As a little kid, I loved Cinderella with all my heart–I’d watch it on loop, nonstop, starry-eyed as my mother groaned in the background. Cinderella was my inspiration and my role model, but at the same time, I never wanted to be too much like her. On a surface level, we weren’t similar at all; Cinderella’s romantic outlook and love for magical dresses did not translate into my more lowkey personal style, and her simplistic attitude was unlike anything I wanted to emulate. I told myself that I’d grown out of that hyperfeminine, pastel pink phase. After all, I was in elementary school now. This was academia. There was no time to waste on Barbie dolls and glittery makeup.

Few phrases make me cringe more than when I hear someone describe themselves as “not like other girls.” But to be fair, I used to say so myself whenever I’d play tag during recess, read horror books in the school library, or insist that my once-beloved princesses were dumb. The funny thing is, even then, all of us self-proclaimed “other girls” were just like everyone else. Half the grade played tag at recess, no matter their gender. R. L. Stine wasn’t the high literary fiction I thought it was (and besides, everyone knew that I checked out the Rainbow Magic series in the mornings.) And my rejection of my beloved princesses was only surface level–any kid who claims they didn’t love Frozen or sang the Tangled soundtrack nonstop is lying. Because we felt our femininity was inferior, we “other girls” rejected aspects of ourselves to try and portray ourselves as different from the social standards. 

Cut to middle school, where everybody is trying to find themselves. While athletic boys became jocks, the girls who played sports were dubbed tomboys and try-hards. A boy reading during class was an intellectual on the path to success, but the girl next to him was embarrassingly nerdy and would never get a date. If a boy gave a girl candy on Valentine’s Day, he was a ladies’ man. But if a girl so much as smiled at a boy, she was scolded for being so boy-crazy. And while gender roles persisted, so did new trends–ones that made my friends and I listen to “edgy” music (news flash, twelve-year-old me! The 1975 actually wasn’t singing about you!) and claim we were “quirky” and “alternative.” Even then, we were just like every other middle school sucked into the phenomenon of being on Tumblr (or, more accurately, looking at Tumblr posts on Pinterest). As I looked around my maturing classmates, something shifted in my mind. For the first time, I realized the truth: we “other girls” were, at our core, still girls. And as girls, nothing we enjoyed could possibly demonstrate our strength. 

Things became more clear in high school. A girl who would have been “boy-crazy” a few years ago was now a slut and a bitch. But a girl who wasn’t interested in men was boring, a bitch in her own way. In fact, everyone was a bitch. If you had alternative tastes or hobbies, you must be faking interests for male validation, but if you loved Caramel Macchiatos and Taylor Swift, then you were dumb and basic. It didn’t matter that boys never had to name three songs or change their shorts to pants–we already knew all about that double standard. However, as I started to doubt the effectiveness of the “other girl” mindset, some learned even further about it. “Girls are too much drama,” claimed a classmate in freshman year. She then proceeded to gossip about everyone in the period to the uninterested boy next to her. “She’s such a pick-me,” we all thought, scorning her for her blatant desperation. But really, could we blame her? She was playing up how different she was in order to get male validation, but was that any different from us trying to set ourselves apart from her, or from the very “girly girls” she scorned? At that moment, something finally clicked in my mind. That “other girl” was, once again, just like the rest of us. She was just desperately fighting to be liked, recognized, and relevant.

I’m not sure if I’ve matured or regressed since that moment. Half my closet is pink or red, Taylor Swift is my top Spotify artist, and I collect flowers to press into my cute phone case. I giggle with my friends and rewatch chick-flicks, then write cohesive essays and maintain my near-perfect grades. I volunteer and I paint and I bake bad cookies because I’ve finally recognized that I am exactly like other girls, but that doesn’t make me any less of a person. 

I wonder, sometimes, if we’ll ever break out of our collective internalized misogyny. Honestly, I doubt we’ll ever fully escape it–in a culture where masculinity is so heavily praised and femininity is so innately “weak,” that mindset is hardwired into us. It’s a part of our culture, and new waves of feminism and anti-pick-me attitudes can’t change that quite yet. Maybe in the distant future, we’ll let little girls play however they want instead of gendering their behavior. We’ll celebrate our similarities while recognizing our differences and focus on building each other up instead of tearing all women down. I want a generation of girls to watch Cinderella and admire her relentless perseverance and kindness instead of cringing at her fairytale romance. I want all of us “other girls” to unite, to understand, and to become the brilliant women we were born to become.