My favorite archetype of female characters is the “cool girl” protagonist. Really, it’s amazing how she is always so different. Something stands out about this archetype because she is just so . . . different. She is not like other girls. She is spunky and does not connect well with others emotionally. Every guy who sees her automatically wants to have sex with her. Like, wow. Mind blown. The ultimate female to look up to. I feel so personally tied to her and her emotions because I too am “different.”
Unsurprisingly, this trope gets used quite often in YA Fiction. When I was in the age range of 12-16 I was a moody teenager who felt like I didn’t fit in well. But I think everyone feels like that when going through middle school, so it works for the genre.
Reading books now, however, browsing through the adult fiction section, I am surprised to still find this archetype. More often than not, it’s a male author. An old male author. Which makes me question if they have ever met a real woman in their lives. The average age of the female protagonist changes from 17 to about 30, and I don’t think I have ever met a thirty year old woman that still acts like a moody teenager.
These books can be particularly harmful to people that do not realize that they are reading an over done stereotype. One such book, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson played right into this archetype. My professor had never heard of the “cool girl” trope. He was surprised as another student and myself started listing books that also portrayed flat women. All the problems that I had with the book, the main character’s lack of an emotional spectrum, the fact that the only other major female character was automatically her enemy, the subtle racism, had all been overlooked by my professor. He hadn’t caught on to how problematic this portrayal of women was.
If adults, including adult women, are so over exposed to flat female characters in media that they don’t recognize a “cool girl” archetype when they see one, how are they supposed to distinguish fictional women from real women? This portrayal is creating unrealistic expectations for how women are supposed to act. We are supposed to be edgy but not too far out of society’s norms; we are expected to act tough in public but cry on the shoulder of any man who shows interest. And when women do not live up to these standards they are often met with violence. There are hundreds of stories of women being attacked after rejecting advances from men. Look out, don’t let the media fool you into thinking girls are easily defined tropes. Keep an eye out and be ready to speak up.
