To Care Or Not To Care About What Men Think?

Last Friday, upon entering a new bar in Bushwick, I found myself delighted to discover it was filled to the brim with people I considered particularly attractive. One survey of the plant-filled, wood-paneled space, and I couldn’t help but feel invigorated by the evening’s potential. I was surrounded by a rare and impressive quantity of the aesthetically blessed.

“It would be a waste not to talk to at least three people,” I told my friends. After one-and-a-half gin martinis, we considered our courage high enough to begin our work. We performed the standard two laps around the bar to the beat of Fleetwood Mac, and before we could even strategize our next move, one of us had broken off.

I looked around my shoulder to see her in the center of a group of approximately five guys. Tall ones. I miss the introduction, but quickly get pulled into conversation with a real 6’3+ footer that went something like:

“Where do you live?”

“The East Village. What about you?”

“Oh nice! Williamsburg.”

“Nice.”

“What do you do?”

“Sorry, what”

“What?

“Sorry, it’s so loud.”

“What do you do?”

And then I have to tell them I’m a copywriter, and they don’t know what that is anyway.

For me, these kinds of conversations are always doomed from the start. I approach with such aspirations that I’m never able to deviate from the traditional location, job, hometown territory into more enjoyable banter. I dwell on what to say next, hoping my questions don’t feel basic, trying my best to appear calm, casual, cool girl. But before I even get that opportunity, I hear…

“Nice to meet you. I’m going to grab another drink,” and instead of a number, I’m left with intensified social anxiety.

The rejection hits like a wave, sudden and consuming. Am I hard to talk to? Uninteresting? Why didn’t he laugh at my jokes? Maybe he doesn’t like the way I look? One insecurity after another crashing into me, pulling me deeper inside myself. It feels like I’m drowning.

There I was last Friday, drowning in a sea of hot people.

I talk to enough women about dating to know I’m not supposed to feel these things. Just be confident. You shouldn’t care what they think. For the rest of the evening, I carried on dancing and chatting, pretending not to care. Inside, I couldn’t escape the thought: Why not me?

As one of four sisters and a former all-girls school attendee, the majority of my early life experiences were shaped by women. My mom handed me and my siblings copies of Little Women like it was required reading. My high school was a place where yelling, “Does anyone have a tampon?” down the hall was perfectly acceptable.

In my early life, the distance between me and testosterone kept me blissfully unaware of what it was like to be a woman in the world. I won’t claim I didn’t know about the male gaze—I grew up on rom-coms of the J Lo variety—but I didn’t have to think about it in the first person.

I rushed a sorority freshman year of college expecting a haven away from the gender I found so intimidating, so it came as a surprise when the first three things I learned from my new sisters were:

1) The only social opportunities on campus would be run by fraternities.

2) I would need to make an effort to befriend these boys to score my invite.

3) Dress hot and act hot, so they continue to invite you back.

It wasn’t until college, where, for the first time in my life, boys were a regular presence and a powerful one.

Forgive my naïveté, but it was unnatural to reckon with patriarchal elements like the male gaze after my personality was fully baked. Instead of butter or eggs, my awareness of the male POV was slathered sloppily on top like frosting. Did I need it? No. But who wants a cake without frosting?

Getting dressed became a mental battle between what I wanted to wear and what I thought I should—the crop top and leggings always winning over pieces more closely aligned to my personal style. The feeling of discomfort in my physical presentation manifested into an overall awkward personality. I had no clue what kind of conversation an 18-year-old boy considered interesting. Not musical theater, I gathered through context clues.

I was looking at myself with my eyes second, and it felt deeply uncomfortable. Until college, all I knew about womanhood was sourced from women. All of a sudden, I couldn’t define it without a man’s perspective.

“Margot meet patriarchy. Patriarchy meet Margot,” the world screamed at me.

There’s a term for this kind of character—the one who allows their personality to take shape by their desire to be chosen: “pick-me girl.” This TikTok-dubbed archetype adopts behaviors that make themselves more palatable to men i.e. being low-maintenance, effortlessly pretty, smart, but not too smart. The pick-me girl is not like other girls.

When I first heard this term, I was met with an instant fear that I, too, was a pick-me girl. I’m certainly aware of what men want me to be. I admittedly crave their attention from time to time. There have been moments when I even altered my personality to receive it. Reader, I even pretended to like sports once.

I can’t help but think about the impression I’m making in a bar. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that this is how I’m conditioned. I’m not wearing a short skirt on a 40-degree night fully for myself. I worry I’m committing a crime against feminism for feeling this way, but I do.

What I find even more anxiety-inducing about this term is that it comes from women. Origins can be drawn to a famous Grey’s Anatomy line. “Pick me. Choose me. Love me,” Ellen Pompeo begs Patrick Dempsey. While I can’t trace the exact start of the virality on TikTok, it certainly gained traction when women creators started shaming other women for traits that seemed too tailored to the male gaze.

By contrast, “male gaze” can be traced. In 1977, British film theorist, Laura Mulvey, coined the term in an essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” describing male fantasy projected onto the female figure in cinema and popular culture.

We’ve all seen films of the likes of She’s the Man and 10 Things I Hate About You, right? They have a special place in my nostalgic heart. John Green’s novel, Looking for Alaska, had me in a chokehold. These are all classic tales of, “Girl meets boy. Girl isn’t like other girls. Girl wins boy.” And now it seems the female tropes dominating the pop-culture I loved are unfortunately a part of me.

The weaponization of “pick-me” feels especially stressful because now, I’m being told—along with everything else like fighting for a voice in my male-dominated workplace, convincing my government I have a right to my body, and worrying about making it home safely at night—I must also be fully capable of severing myself from the expectations I was conditioned to embody.

This isn’t to dismiss the root of the problem with “pick-me” girls. It’s important to acknowledge the pressure women feel to compete with one another. It just seems unfair that we’re expected to live up to another unrealistic standard, to forget all the movies and shows we watched growing up (the majority of which were created by men) and leave behind our human desire to feel desired.

Experiencing rejection in a new bar in Bushwick isn’t supposed to matter to me. Caring what men think is extremely un-cool girl. The insecurities bubbling inside me? Don’t mention them.

If this is the case, then what is the secret to wanting attention and wanting it to mean nothing to me? When rejection hits, I’m not happy about these feelings, but stop telling me I’m not supposed to feel them.