I attended a girl’s convent school from grades 2 to 5, and it was around then that Avril Lavigne’s most iconic song, Sk8er Boi, was released. My nine-year-old friends and I lapped it up with a religious fervor that only Catholic schoolgirls understand. One day, I remember turning to the desk beside me in class, and two girls had the lyrics written down on a sheet of paper.
I asked for a peek to get the words right and quickly made notes to my version. A bunch of copies were floating around on handwritten sheets of paper all over our class. I heard the song on the radio in malls, in the car, and on TV. Sometimes a few of us sang it choir style during recess.
“We are in love, haven’t you heard? How we rock each other’s woheyyaruyylllddd”
(read: world)
Sk8er Boi wasn’t just a song, it was a punk rock prophecy that coincided perfectly with the rising tide of anti-girly-girl sentiment that swept the 2000s. This song sketched out the blueprint for all aspiring cool girls aiming to land their very own, rebellious, guitar-playing, bad-boy.
Here’s the blueprint
- The Sk8er boi doesn’t like girls that do ballet (gotcha, no tutu)
- Her friends can’t be stuck up (What happened to the Spice Girls saying, ‘You gotta get with my friends?!’ I like that energy a lot more)
- She has to like his baggy clothes (I can do this)
- She must support his music/skateboarding (?) career no matter what
- Her ‘pretty face’ must under no circumstances contribute to heightened self-esteem that sends her ‘head up in space’
- She has to see the man that boy could be, because only he is allowed to take people at face value, duhh. She must have psychic powers that enable her to look past his underwhelming exterior to his untapped ‘rocking-out-MTV’ potential.
This description became the MO of practically every girl I knew in the 2000s. Today we have a savvy label for it: The Pick Me Girl. I ran a quick Instagram poll a few days ago, asking my kind followers if they’d heard of the term ‘Pick Me.’ Out of the 150+ responses, only about 40 percent had heard of it.
What is a pick-me girl?
The phrase comes from the chaotic realm of internet culture. It’s used to describe certain set behaviors, and not a person in particular. (Side note: While pick-me has the word ‘girl’ attached to it, there is pick-me boy behavior too.)
A pick-me girl is someone who seeks attention and validation from men, often by distancing herself from what are seen as typical female interests and behaviors. Pick-me girls put other women down and tend to highlight how they are ‘not like other girls’ in an attempt to seem more appealing.
The early 2000s saw the rise of numerous pop culture narratives that fostered the pick-me girl stereotype, promoting it as a successful approach to land a guy. In fact, such behavior was usually employed as a plot device to create ‘quirky’ and ‘different’ female characters.
Gilmore Girls’ Rory was an intellectual. She’d rather read books than go to parties. In Taylor Swift’s song ‘You Belong With Me,’ she basically spells out pick-me girl behavior. Here’s a glance at the first verse.
These examples focus on the insidious message that girls got picked by their dream guy because they were ‘not like other girls’. Their glow up was not based on fitting into the glass slipper of femininity, but rather on stepping out of it.
Pick-me culture turned all things girly into a frilly, shallow accessory; a trait to be shrugged off in order to be seen as desirable. For the ‘tomboys’ reading this, I’m not coming for you. What differentiates pick-me behavior from just having non-girly interests is the desired outcome. Pick me behavior seeks the validation of the male gaze at the expense of other women.
I was a pick-me girl too
I navigated the wild corridors of highschool and college during the pick-me pandemic (is it too soon to say the p word?) And like most impressionable teen girls, I was in the process of building the person I wanted to be. My personality was a messy combination of the values I had, the expectations I encountered, and the media I consumed.
The problem was that I didn’t think anything about me was right – not my face, not my body, not the clothes I wore, not the things I said or liked. And if you were a girl with your heart set on being liked by a boy, you were given no other template for winning his affection apart from pick-me propaganda.
It was the one-size-fits-all game plan we were handed. Be the cool girl. Be different from other girls. Be quirky and clumsy. Choose guy friends and spare yourself the drama. Wear sweatpants instead of skirts. Order a burger on a date.
I found myself desperate to hide any girly traits I had like they were some disease. In spite of the fact that I always found more meaningful friendships among other girls, I chased down ‘drama-free’ guy friends instead. (another side note: there was SO MUCH MORE DRAMA)
I loved wearing makeup, but I’d do it in secret, and cringe at any girl that wore even an ounce more makeup than I did. I wasn’t good at sports but I pretended to take an interest in watching football, I even had a favorite premier league team for a bit.
I loved mainstream pop music but decided to experiment with a metal phase because I so desperately needed to be ‘not like other girls’. Finally, I embraced the emo girl aesthetic because it was my get-out-of-girly-free card, and I played it for years.
Looking back, I can’t say I consciously aimed to belittle other girls in my efforts to be noticed. But it sucks to admit that I most certainly dismissed potential friends simply because they dared to be unabashedly girly. In my longing to be ‘not like other girls’, I ended up alienating myself from the very sisterhood I could have flourished in.
Black is my religion
By the time I was in college, my pick-me performance was already starting to unravel a bit. I’d show up to class at 8 am with lipstick on and painted nails. I was starting to find interests of my own, aside from the ones that I used to win the admiration of others. I finally found myself a really good set of girl friends.
But I wasn’t fully done with my emo-girl phase so I used to channel my misunderstood feelings into graffiti masterpieces on the back pages of my notebook. My notes were full of melancholic song lyrics, sad-girl catchphrases, and other general douchebaggery.
The masterpiece at the center of the page would usually be the phrase ‘Black is my religion’. (I have no explanation that I can recall for this. Please don’t ask.)
One day, my friend spotted this solemn declaration and out of nowhere, burst into a fit of laughter. At the time, the humor was lost on me. But to her, there I was, the embodiment of a pop princess, clinging to whatever pick-me camouflage I could, desperate to convince myself that this persona was in fact, me.
‘Black is my religion’ soon evolved into an inside joke among us. Like an overshared meme, it became part of a sense of humor that was uniquely ours. A decade later at my wedding, one of those friends was in charge of baking my wedding cake, and she artistically turned it into a cake-version of a time capsule. Hidden under the fondant was a panorama of memories from our shared past.
And sure enough, there it was, in bold, defiant letters: ‘Black is my religion’.
My gothic mantra finally got the spotlight it deserved.
We brand stuff really quick
I could say plenty about the harmful ways that pick-me behavior has shaped most people my age. It doesn’t take much searching to find a guy who thinks that girls talking about makeup means they’re vapid. And you’ve probably met women, conditioned by years of competition, that feel like they need to demonstrate some form of one-upmanship in order to stand out and be appreciated.
I’m not mad at any of these people. I was those people. They’re simply acting in accordance with the script that was handed to them. Fortunately, we’ve made significant strides in dismantling these dodgy narratives to create more balanced, realistic expectations of women today.
TikTok and Instagram have come in like a wrecking ball to call out these behaviors. But a part of me can’t help feeling like we’re overcorrecting a little bit. It took us two decades to realize that pick-me culture was problematic. We only found a term for it in 2016! But we’re so much better at branding things and people today.
The internet is brimming with labels that have condensed the wide spectrum of human behavior into bite-sized buzzwords. A walk around the block is now a hot girl walk. A person who hits the gym before work and takes vitamins is now that girl. Setting boundaries is now the villain era.
It’s great that we’re able to label (heehee) and question behaviors that undermine solidarity among women, but now the pick-me label has evolved (or should I say devolved) into a catch-all tag for any woman who dares to venture into traditionally masculine territories.
I’m scared that we’ll eventually be strengthening stereotypes instead of shattering them. It’s a classic case of moving the goalposts (wow did she make a sports reference?) Women are encouraged to be individualistic, but when they do so in a way that’s not widely accepted, they’re called pick-me’s.
It creates an environment where it is easier to label than than it is understand and accept; and people are quicker to judge than listen. I don’t want this generation of teens to deal with the same crap we did. I really hope they don’t have to. They need to find new crap to deal with.
In the process of writing this, I’ve been combing through all of teenage Sonia’s preferences, trying to figure out which ones were authentically hers and which ones she put on to impress others. The music I listened to, the clothes I wore, the friends I chose, the hobbies I pursued – once you start the process, it’s kinda hard to make sense of yourself.
So much of who you are is shaped by your environment and social conditioning. That’s why I love the commentary on it, as banal as it might seem sometimes. Your innate preferences and the ones cultivated by culture combine like milk and coffee, once mixed, it’s impossible to separate them.
I won’t know if I genuinely loved reading, or just got into it because I idolized the bookish on-screen girls portrayed in contrast to the other ‘party girls’. I’ll probably never know if black truly was my religion.
The only thing we know for sure is this.
The Sk8er Boi finally picked his girl
We don’t know much about her from the song, even though she wrote and sang it. Why?
Because the song Sk8er Boi isn’t a love song for the girl he eventually picked. It isn’t a tribute to the baggy-clothed Sk8er Boi either. Nope. It’s a passive-aggressive jingle dedicated to the girl who had the audacity to reject him. AND GUESS WHATTTT.
That girl finally set the record straight and told us her side of the story 18 years later!!!!! I could not make this up even if I wanted to.
After waiting that long, you’d best believe she tackles this with all the saltiness you could possibly imagine. Here’s my favorite screenshot:
For my fellow millennials, it’ll probably take some of us a while to unlearn these pick-me ideas and accept that people are a mixed bag of interests, preferences, and personalities. Plus, people are allowed to keep changing and evolving.
We are not the sum of the pop culture that shaped us. We sure as hell don’t exist to be picked by someone. I’m also learning that I don’t need to brand myself so rigidly. I’m a Mum now, and I rock that identity pretty hard. But I can be a girly-girl that doesn’t order a salad and chooses a steak. I can love my sneakers and not own a single pair of heels, but also wear winged-eyeliner.
I can like beer sometimes and fruity cocktails at other times. (Last side note: there are truly more important problems in the world for us to focus on.) Even with all these mixed interests, I’m not a living, breathing paradox. I’m just a girl.
Can I make it any more obvious?
Unfinished Conversations 
Leave a comment