Is Unhinged the New Effortless
BY PHOEBE WATT
In love, life and looking hot, the line between messy and iconic is as blurry as our Facetuned selfies.
16 MAY - 2024
A forensic dive into ‘Cool Girl’ culture, the effortless-to-unhinged pipeline, and whether French women are the ’pick-mes’ of the beauty world.
I have never wanted to be famous. Successful, sure. Respected in my field, absolutely. Rich? With this exquisite taste and these therapy bills? Yes, Daddy.
I know, however, that fame would make a basket case out of me. And in fact, the only time I ever allow myself to indulge in the fame fantasy is when I get to the back page of a Vanity Fair and consider what, should Radhika Jones ever reach out, would be my most scintillating responses to the monthly Proust Questionnaire.
One of the most famous personality quizzes in the world, the Proust Questionnaire was a parlour game popularised by French literary savant Marcel Proust, who believed that an individual’s true nature lied in his or her answers to such questions as ‘What is your idea of perfect happiness?’ (hectic tan lines), ‘What is the quality you most like in a man/woman?’ (if that man/woman is my boss, lack of object permanence), and ‘On what occasion do you lie?’ (when I’m sexting in a grubby dressing gown, eating two-minute noodles and watching The Crown).
Elsewhere, Proust asks, ‘What is your motto?’ Here I defer to whichever Olsen twin once said:
“If your hairstyle needs more than five bobby pins, you’re trying too hard”.
Trying too hard is, in this instance, analogous to putting too much effort into one’s appearance.
In the beauty world, ‘effortlessness’ is synonymous with the almost unbearable chic of French supermuses and their nepo-children: Jane Birkin and Lou Doillon; Carine Roitfeld and Julia Restoin-Roitfeld; Vanessa Paradis and Lily-Rose Depp.
More than fodder for your bangs and balayage Pinterest boards, French women throughout history have pioneered such a casual indifference towards looking-like-you-care, that a disheveled ensemble can be described as ‘undone’ and we will oui all over ourselves to copy it.
Alors! A non-sequitur. Remember the ‘Cool Girl’ speech in Gone Girl? Long paragraph short, Amy drinks beer and eats pizza and watches sports and talks freely about sex, which makes her cool, and so Ben Affleck wants to fuck her. This doesn’t end well for him, but I digress.
Gone Girl’s cool girl narrative (incidentally, the mid-noughties Goodreads version of French Women Don’t Get Fat) moves the concept of effortlessness out of the beauty realm and into the wider culture. This is to say, it takes Mary-Kate’s (it was so Mary-Kate’s!) bobby pin theory, and applies it to how women engage with the world, and especially how heterosexual women engage with heterosexual men.
A central tenet of Cool Girl culture is appealing to men by deriding other women for being ‘high maintenance’. This follows the assumption that men don’t want to hear about diets or gossip. They don’t want to see fake tan on their sheets, or hair extensions drying over the side of the bath. They don’t want you to be late for dinner because you were busy taking pictures of your outfit, and your work drama and your hurt feelings are very boring, so it’s best to have none of both, and just do some shots! Woo! Yum.
I’ve gone from the girlfriend whose birthday you could bail on and I’d apologise to you, to a five-foot nightmare in Loewe heels.
In modern online parlance, we’d call this girl the ‘pick-me’, and by ‘we’ I mean high-mainty women who enjoy a great many trappings of femininity, and whose feminism doesn’t render them impervious to patriarchal standards of beauty. Side-note, want to know who has the most restrictive diet of all? The snake of feminist discourse, which dines exclusively on its own tail.
“But what does this have to do with being unhinged on dating apps!” cry the eleven or so ladies whose eyeballs I’ve lassood over from my Instagram stories on this premise alone.
Culture has told us for generations that we have to be effortless, aloof, and unavailable – think He’s Just Not That Into You and before that, The Rules, the seminal self-help book for single women that since 1995 has been fear-mongering us into never calling or texting him first, never sharing more than a kiss on the first date, and basically never demonstrating a shred of personality or passion, lest he view us as merely a good-time girl and not marriage material.
Not that I'm much of a rules follower anyway (“low-compliance”, according to one former employer), but all of this amounts to trying extremely hard to appear as though we are not trying hard at all. I would call bullshit on this behaviour even if I hadn’t dabbled in Rules-adjacent gameplaying, which I have, and I’m a still-single woman in my 30s. The Rules just don’t apply.
So. Over the past few months, I have thrown out the rule book and gone from the sub-five bobby pin girlfriend whose birthday you could bail on and I’d apologise to you, to a five-foot nightmare in Loewe heels, who recently replied “No worries babe!” to a guy that was respectfully requesting a bit of ‘them time’ to deal with work/health/divorce-related stress, only to bombard them with over 40 texts in three days, including two separate voice notes of me singing the same Jewel song – once overtop of the original album version, and then a second time unaccompanied and a capella in the car. Very cool. Very never heard from them again.
Was it wrong of me to violate a clearly communicated and more-than reasonable boundary? Yes. Did I feel real remorse for adding to this person’s stress at a difficult time? Yes. Did I also find the whole thing pretty iconic on my part, and giddily post the gory details online to the unanimous delight of at least eleven of my female followers? Also yes.
And here is why. Women are still being told that ‘dishevelled’ makeup is sexy. Women are still being told that ‘undone’ hair is chic. It categorically is, by the way. But that doesn’t make it okay for the men on the dating scene – you know, the ones with all the ‘crazy’ exes – to expect a French Girl in the sheets, and a Cool Girl in the streets.
Any millennial woman who was raised in the asylum of Olsen twin Tumblr and How to be Parisian and Rosamund Pike slitting that guy’s throat as he cums is bound to be a little bit batshit crazy.
Maybe, it’s time for a new motto. I propose: “It’s not over until you’re blocked.”
RELATED STORIES
GIVEAWAY
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to Chatty Chum's mailing list to receive the latest in beauty and lifestyle news, giveaways and the launch of our Editor's Collection boxes.