The Anti Pick-Me-Girl & the Class System Within Womanhood
With every internet trend comes an anti-trend, and with the ongoing proliferation of the term “pick-me girl”, we’ve witnessed the conception of someone I’ll call the anti-pick me. The archetype of the anti-pick me can take pride in being undesirable to men, in being hyper-feminine, in being not-feminine enough, in being a bimbo, or in being intellectual, but most importantly, she takes pride simply in not being a pick-me. At its core, of course, the anti-pick-me is but another way that women have been pitted against each other in a rat race for the approval of men.
Before we meet the anti-pick-me girl, though, we must refresh our memory on who exactly her predecessor is. I’ve gleaned over the years that the pick-me-girl:
is desperate for male validation
demeans other women
is subservient to men
doesn’t get offended by “dark humour”
doles out said “dark humour” from time to time
is defined by her internalized misogyny
These are objectively negative characteristics; the pick-me archetype, at its origin, is a real issue. The pick-me-girl is a woman who has fallen victim to the patriarchy and internalized misogyny, consumed by self-hatred and, therefore, hatred for her entire gender.
The pick-me-girl, though, seems to have evolved, past the original set of characteristics. According to my most recent research, she:
is friends with the boys
doesn’t wear makeup
is too flirty
is quirky
exerts qualities/characteristics of her male counterparts
is a girl who typically hangs out with guys because she craves validation from them often due to daddy issues (Courtesy of Urban Dictionary.)
The pick-me-girl is no longer someone we detest because she promotes bigotry as a form of humor or because she shames women—the pick-me-girl is someone we detest because she’s quirky, less traditionally feminine, and often, because she’s “desirable” to men.
Naturally, this second set of characteristics was far easier to both understand and to apply to other people and yourself, and upon their conception began the avalanche of media berating and mocking her. Girls and women panicked, confused, and worried by the pick-me’s often ambiguous and perpetually contradictory definitions―am I the pick-me that everyone hates so much? I remember back in 2017, as an anxious-thirteen-year-old during the first-wave of the term (the second, current wave beginning around 2020) I frantically googled “traits of a pick me girl”. Naturally, there was already a quiz waiting, dozens, in fact, to answer my burning question:
#1: Be honest with me now, what do you drink in the pub??
A chilled glass of wine
A big pint of beer!! Yum yum yum
I’ll have a gin
Cider x
Soft drinks normallyx
#2: If you had to get something tattooed onto your body, what would you get?
My star sign
Probably my mum’s birthday
Something wacky like a character in the Simpsons
Something deep and meaningful
A tattoo!! I’d NEVER get one
In case you haven’t figured it out, if you like pints of beer and wacky Simpsons tattoos, you’re a pick me.
Quizzes, articles, and posts of this sort proliferated. This genre of characteristics (drinking wine vs. beer, watching football, wearing makeup) are far easier criteria for a self-diagnosis of pick-me-hood than genuine introspection on one’s own internalized misogyny, and therefore became our standard method of classification.
Women (young teenage girls in particular), terrified that they were the internet’s newest antagonist, then began to antithesize these traits to ensure that they weren’t anything like those pick-me-girls, to make it clear that they were not like other girls.
And now, we’ve come full circle—the anti-pick-me is born.
The anti-pick-me takes many forms, each responding to some of the numerous, conflicting characteristics of her parent term. We have the hyperfeminine, self-proclaimed bimbo of an anti-pick-me, for example. She is a reaction to the “masculinity” of loving lagers and ESPN. She’s anything but one of the guys. We find another example in the femcel, a more niche and recent sub-type of the anti-pick-me. She takes pride in classic undesirability and she’s a feminist in an abrasive, Kat Stratford-esque way. Maybe she's a female manipulator, the male manipulator’s antithetic counterpart. And most importantly, she’s intellectually superior to both men and pick-me's, which of course, she claims drives people away in droves.
Although they may be less distinct and well-defined than those two, the many other variations of the anti-pick-me revolve around the same principle of antithesizing everything that we think the pick-me is.
The anti-pick-me though, despite marketing herself as the inverse of the pick-me is at her core, the same — they’re both just victims of the male gaze. This obsession with categorizing ourselves, and then asserting our categories’ superiority, is but another futile attempt to climb to the top of womanhood, another futile attempt to prove ourselves in the eyes of the rest of the world—that rest of the world being men.
Women are already, for all intents and purposes, a subordinate class, and in an attempt to liberate ourselves from said societal inferiority, we’re creating classes within classes. The anti-pick-me is driven as much by her internalized misogyny as the pick-me is. She is better than other women because those other women “try too hard to get picked by men”. They don’t try to get picked by men, right? Not overtly at least. But as Atwood wrote,
“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.”
It doesn’t matter what variation of girl you are, be it a pick-me, an anti-pick-me, or a bimbo or a femcel or a cool girl—these are but new editions of the same story. Tearing down pick-me-girls for being girls who put down other girls only feels like a cruel joke we’re playing on ourselves. And though I recognize the glaring issues with the ''women support women'' narrative, the core of it holds true: women cannot afford to keep creating unnecessary fractures, archetypes, and classes within womanhood.
I won’t end this in that redundant, trite way we all know so well, with that cutesy comment about how being happy with who you are and being nice to your fellow women will make this all go away!!!—that’s simply not true. Alternatively, I encourage you to try, as best as you can, to unlearn what we women have been taught our whole lives, to prove Margaret Atwood wrong, to stop taking Buzzfeed Quizzes... I’ll try along with you. And, you know, if that means watching Gone Girl four times a week until you can recite Amy’s Cool Girl monologue by heart, then so be it.