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The emergence of embracing your femininity resulted from the recent hate on the pick-me attitude.
The term pick-me may seem like its a term that dates back decades but its actual origin remains unknown, it only gained popularity in March 2016 on black Twitter with the hashtag #TweetLikeaPickMe which as its name indicates is a trend of mocking stereotypical phrases pick-me use to prove they are “wifey material”. To sum up, being a pick me is acting “like a boy” or like the “perfect” woman and catering one's personality and interest to appeal to men. She will reject anything pink and girly in favour of sports, junk food and being “rowdy” or boast about cooking and cleaning skills. Pretty much every woman has come across a pick-me girl whether it be in real life or in media. But what once was regarded as just being one of the boys and hating on other women because they are “too much drama” is now agreed to be blatantly misogynistic and consciously or not promoting views that women’s interests are below what men might deem respectable. It is all a result of internalised sexism which usually happens in early teens if not earlier when girls start becoming hyper-aware that their actions and choices are being intricately dissected by their peers and that whatever they do the boys in their life will have an opinion on it, good or bad, and most of the time will not hesitate to make that opinion known. To better understand misogyny the book Down Girl by Kate Manne is a skilful exposé of how society as a whole uses misogyny as a tool used to enforce women’s roles and oppress the ones who dare defy the norm that they should strive to fit into.
They are as many types of pick me as they are types of boys. If she hangs out with sports lover she’ll wear the jersey of her allegedly favourite player, watch all the games and take part in them as well. If she hangs out with music nerds she’ll be a walking Wikipedia of everything regarding the genre to be able to be always right when she’s inevitably quizzed by her pseudo friends and if she hangs out with skater she’ll reject everything that might show she’s a girl, know all the tricks name and only wear specific brands with busted vans on her feet while demeaning other women. A sub-genre of pick-me are the ones that are mostly seeking validation by being the perfect wife, their end game is to be seen as marriable because they act as a caretaker for the men around them, wearing modest clothing and basically mothering boys into falling for her.
Recently there has been more and more talk around the pick me phenomenon with videos like “The “I’m Not Like Most Girls” Phenomenon” by Kurtis Conner which gained 11 million views on Youtube and the hashtag pickmegirl on Tiktok which has amassed 1.2 Billion views as of November 6 2022 and even more with variations of said hashtag. The general consensus is that being a pick me is wrong but what one might ask is does it stems from insecurity and fear of being a potential target of fellow boy’s mockery or just a deep need for validation from peers ? I would guess that it’s a mix of both because while it might conscious it all boils down to being liked by a specific gender group. Being a pick-me is harmful to oneself because in the end you isolate yourself from other women and spend all your time being exposed to men’s expectations and constant critics of women and let's not forget hyper-sexualisation of them. Hearing about all of those things is probably going to make the pick-me insecure even though she reassures herself with her position as one of the boys because they wouldn’t talk about her that way right ? because most of the time they don’t even acknowledge her as a woman. Although the issue still thrives, thanks to the constant conversation around the topic many women who where once pick me managed to break free from the internalised misogyny and realise how the way they were acting was doing more damage than anything else. Constantly praising oneself for being quote-on-quote different from other women when there is nothing shameful about just being yourself is entirely toxic, because while condemning women for doing certain things you are also forbidding yourself from liking and doing those things.
a quote from Margaret Atwood that nicely resonates with the whole pick me thing:
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Instead of desperately trying to conform to those male fantasies it can be speculated that the pick-me attempts to escape it by escaping femininity as a whole. In a way, if she’s doing everything that goes against the fantasies you can’t bash her effort. If she’s not trying to cater by being a woman and instead being a man, then she is allowed to shame those girls who try to fit those standards or choose a middle ground by being themselves.
As a result, we now see more and more women talking about embracing their femininity in their late teens or early twenties because they spent so much time and energy pretending they weren’t into the very things they made fun of. On social media there is an apparent emergence of the hyper-feminine girly girl “aesthetic” with lots of pink, bows and glitter, this goes hand in hand with the “coquette aesthetic” which is just a variation of the girly girl with a heavy influence of Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola instead of Regina George from Mean Girl or Elle Woods from Legally Blond. These girls play right into the very stereotype they tried so hard to detach themselves from and own it. Also, one might say that girly girls are the equivalent of alpha males in the sense that they both take gender stereotypes and make them an entire persona, taking it the furthest possible. In that sense per example, Youtuber TheWizardLiz is to woman what Andrew Tate is to men. As much as turning the table is a good thing the main point is to be respectful to one another.
In the end, being a woman is hard especially nowadays with the ever so changing micro trend and the urge to completely conform one's identity to a certain “aesthetic” in order to feel fully complete and in a way worthy of branding oneself as that specific aesthetic. Who knows maybe in the next month someone will claim that being a girly girl is being anti-feminist for x reasons and then life will go on to a new set of expectations and moral values. Just like how not so long ago sex work was promoted as being feminist and is now corrected to being truthfully dangerous and harmful to one's future especially if you are not prepared to face lifelong consequences. Because let's not forget that digital footprint is a thing and that the OnlyFan you make at freshly 18 might still be accessible when your family or employer researches you for fun (or not) on the internet.
Sources:
Rosida, I., et al. (2022). The manifestation of internalized sexism in the Pick Me Girl trend on TikTok. Alphabet, 05(01), 8-19. doi: 10.21776/ub.alphabet .2022.05.01.02
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