At some point or another, we’ve likely come across someone who identifies as female and maintains she is “not like most girls.”
We see parodies of this well-worn sentiment on the Internet and in our real lives. Guys joke, “I’m not like most girls—I’m a boy.” Twitter has seen several thousands of the unoriginal, “‘I’m not like most girls’ –Most girls” or some variation of that joke.
Though we joke about it, some women still assert themselves as unlike the rest for a host of unspecified reasons.
But I’d like to know what’s wrong with other girls? I’m a heterosexual male, so I’m into women. Are most girls harboring a secret I need to know about before embarking on a relationship with one? Is there something about them I don’t realize is a problem? What’s wrong with them?
When we search “not like most girls” on Twitter, we learn that most girls love pumpkin spice lattes, cute texts and MTV. They are unoriginal, irrational and impatient.
Well, I like pumpkin spice lattes. I enjoy cute texts. Though MTV has lost some credibility in the past decade, I don’t think it appeals exclusively to females—nor do I see an interest in it as problematic.
Few people in the world are truly original. No human is fully rational and only monks are remarkably patient.
But most girls are also boy crazy. In one of my classes the other day, someone asked something along the lines of, “Why are girls so obsessed with love and finding a partner?”
For a while, and still today by some sects, women were thought as pursuing higher education solely to find a husband—the MRS degree, people joke. Women, according to this line of thinking, are free to get an education in whichever field they deem interesting, but once they find a man, they settle down into a domestic lifestyle and let the man be the breadwinner.
If a woman wants to do this, that’s fine. It’s the expectation that all women should that isn’t.
The idea is that women, more than men, buy into the Hollywood ideology of romance. Ostensibly, they spend the early parts of their lives waiting for the perfect man to rescue them after some sort of love at first sight type of ordeal.
We refer to this theory of romance as “Eros love.” About 34 percent of people in the United States conceptualize romantic love in this way. But the shock comes when we learn that men, not women, are the ones who are more often obsessed with the idea of a man rescuing a woman.
A woman asserting herself as unlike the rest implies that most girls are of a single type of femininity—a type that is pretty much untrue or more applicable to human nature than to womanhood.
This type of thinking is extremely harmful. It perpetuates the notion that women are static, single-dimensional characters in a world of men. When a well-rounded woman comes along, which is pretty often, men take her as more of a concept than a person, something to be tamed or something to bang, rather than someone to be respected and treated as an equal.
It does an enormous disservice for a woman to assume other women are unlike her. It perpetuates stereotypes about females and has heterosexual men setting their standards unreasonably high for their romantic endeavors.
