“I am not like other girls”
Recently I was in conversation with someone who proclaimed that I was “not like typical women.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know, you’ve better things to talk about than makeup and jewellery. Unlike other women.”
I knew this person meant to compliment me, but I was far from being happy. I was immediately reminded of another time I had received a similar ‘compliment’. I was an 18-year-old back then, and when someone had said, “you’re not like other girls,” I was elated. A decade later, why did the same remark fail to please me?
Like countless other teenagers, I had an embarrassing “I’m not like other girls” phase. I was neither into makeup nor into shopping, and I preferred reading to gossiping. Even my taste in reading was what one would call ‘refined’. I would always choose Austen and Brontë over Mills and Boon. Talking about fashion, I didn’t even know how to walk in high heels without tripping. And of course, no one could ever accuse me of being snobbish, vain or bitchy. Not like other girls, right?
When I finally grew out of this phase, I couldn’t help but cringe every time I recalled this madness. Was I so insecure that I had to put others down to feel good about myself? Upon some introspection, I concluded that this was not the case. Was it internalised misogyny? Was I so ashamed of the whole female sex that I did not want to conform to the traditional notion of womanhood? Quite the opposite. I’ve never shied away from embracing my feminine energy. Did I really believe that the entire female sex was ‘vain, snobbish and bitchy’ and I was somehow better than the rest? Not in the least. The phenomenal women I’ve had the privilege to connect with have all been intelligent, amiable and kind. Then why did I spend so long believing I was somehow different from other girls? More importantly, who and where were these ‘other girls’?
I had no answer to these questions until it dawned on me that other girls didn’t exist. ‘Other girls’ is nothing beyond a category, a stereotype created by society and propagated by pop culture. Women have often been portrayed in movies, books, and soap operas as mean, catty, and nagging. You see them wasting away their time chasing men, spending an entire morning doing makeup or splurging all of their money on clothes and cosmetics. This deprecatory representation of women in media doesn’t just stop here. It goes on to create a binary, someone who stands in opposition to this (false) notion of femininity: enter your nerd, with a book in her hand, modestly dressed, rocking a no-makeup look. ‘Not like other girls.’ Pop culture has always pitted women against women by creating these binaries. Highly impressionable adolescents consciously or subconsciously pick up these binaries.
Once I had this epiphany, all my guilt and shame about my ‘not like other girls’ phase melted away. I realised that I was opposed not to femininity, per se, but to its stereotypical markers. I had merely internalised the lies that the patriarchal society had fed me. Pop culture’s representation of women conveyed that they are one-dimensional — either this or that — and I had bought into this notion. I needed to understand that women are not supposed to fit into a box.
We are not a category. We are multi-layered, dynamic, ever-changing, and ever-growing human beings. Society might try to paint us in black and white. But, we are all the shades of grey in between and all the colours of the spectrum.
Women love makeup AND they love reading;
they love dressing up AND they are intelligent;
they love going out AND they love chilling at home.Some women like all of these, and some none. Why? Because each woman is an individual in her own right.
Understanding this gave me the freedom to explore the aspects of femininity that I had earlier rejected. While I still go without makeup most days, I love decking up for special occasions. While I couldn’t care less about my appearance when I’m lounging at home, I make sure that I look put-together when I step out of the house. Even though I still haven’t figured out how to walk in high heels without tripping, I have a few pairs of stilettos on my online shopping wish list. Most importantly, I no longer see “you’re not like other girls” as a compliment.
If you liked this story, you might also like the following stories:
“An Identity of One’s Own”
“On My Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Eight”
