“Men always say that as the defining compliment, donâ€™t they? Sheâ€™s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like sheâ€™s hosting the worldâ€™s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. 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 donâ€™t mind, Iâ€™m the Cool Girl.Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe theyâ€™re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men â€“ friends, coworkers, strangers â€“ giddy over these awful pretender women, and Iâ€™d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men whoâ€™d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. Iâ€™d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesnâ€™t really love chili dogs that much â€“ no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: Theyâ€™re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, theyâ€™re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if youâ€™re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesnâ€™t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version â€“ maybe heâ€™s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe heâ€™s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesnâ€™t ever complain. (How do you know youâ€™re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: â€œI like strong women.â€� If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because â€œI like strong womenâ€� is code for â€œI hate strong women.â€�)”
Gillian Flynn,
what-men-really-want