I Wish I Were… Like Other Girls
Picture this:
You’re a female high school student in the United States. You get along with people, but you’re no cheerleader, no “popular girl”. In fact, you never took off your glasses—you never had that Disney Channel glow-up. Your hair is tousled, dirty blonde, and you care little for makeup or fashion. You are very much “the girl next door”. You sit quietly in your room, longfully staring at the boy next door, watching him as his picture perfect relationship with the girl who is everything you aren’t crumbles. Because you believe that deep down, he deserves a girl that really gets him: a girl that laughs at his jokes, a girl that listens to the music he likes, a girl who isn’t blonde for a change. You believe that deep down, you’re better than who he has now, and the thought of his real girlfriend drives you crazy. And no matter how ridiculous the thought is, you believe he already loves you more. Because if you’re really that much better, what does she really have that made him want her first?
And so is the story of Taylor Swift’s famous 2008 song “You Belong with Me”. It’s been a favorite of mine for years, until recently, that is. The song was a hit since its release, with over 800 million streams on Spotify and 1.6 billion views on YouTube. It’s a karaoke song, a road trip song, a catchy song about sappy high-school love. Not to mention, the music video with Taylor Swift playing both the frumpy, relatable protagonist, and the popular mean girl is iconic.
I doubt Taylor Swift would think that more than a decade later it would now be cited by some as the “Pick-Me girl” anthem. Because in reality, the song brims with internalized misogyny. It’s about a woman bringing down another woman because she’s conventionally beautiful while Taylor is unique; because she’s dating the man everyone wants and Taylor isn’t; because “she wears short skirts” while Taylor wears “t-shirts”. And then, as a pick-me girl does, she homewrecks the girl’s relationship and kisses her crush. Her taken crush.
This is not to say that Swift is a pick-me girl. But this is to say that the pick-me girl attitude is deeply ingrained in popular culture. It has been normalized in modern media despite multiple waves of feminism and movements focused on female empowerment.
So, what exactly is a “pick-me girl”? It’s a term that many older adults tell me they don’t understand. It lives mostly online, circulating through TikTok comment sections and subtweets on X; It’s a very Gen Z term. Here’s a definition from Cosmopolitan, an American women’s magazine that almost gets it down.
But here’s another definition one of my friends said that I thought was more interesting:
“Pick me girls are jealous of the girls who get picked but don’t try hard to get picked.”
There it is. Pick me girls are inherently jealous. Taylor Swift in “You Belong with Me” was jealous of the cheerleader who was dating the boy she wanted, so she tried to prove herself by declaring all the things that made herself unique while the other girl was just a basic girl. Taylor’s character is upset—not because the other girl tries too hard to impress the guy, but because she didn’t have to try. Despite Taylor not being “like other girls”, it was still the pretty, “popular girl” who ended up being chosen. She threw all her jealousy into the song, crying because she thought she was so special and should have been picked.
But that song was released over a decade ago. So, you may ask, why are pick-me girls still relevant today? Because the pick-me mindset didn’t disappear—it just adapted. And we’re finally starting to realize that. The modern pick-me girl doesn’t necessarily say “I’m not like other girls”, but she still seeks male validation by putting down women in subtler ways. Of course, those girls still exist too, but the modern pick-me might mock traditionally feminine interests (wow, three waves of feminism for what?), calling women who enjoy makeup or fashion “basic” or “shallow” or “vanilla”. She might claim that she just “gets along better with guys” because “girls are too much drama”. She’ll constantly compare herself to others, asking guys who they like more because secretly, she isn’t satisfied with herself.
The thing is, pick-me girls have existed for centuries: think women who protested against womens’ suffrage, even Betty Friedan’s (a female author) Feminine Mystique assumed that truly feminine women would not desire work, education, political opinions. Instead, a true woman stays at home and takes care of the house and her husband. These versions of womanhood reduced female desirability to being passive and domestic, rewarding those who were compliant, quiet, and useful to men. Consequently, this dynamic created a hierarchy—where women who rejected ambition or overt femininity were seen as more “worthy”, while those who embraced their independence or traditionally feminine interests were put down. Clearly some women, like Friedan, were happy with this dynamic too. This dynamic isn’t just a relic of the past—it’s just a mindset that’s been repackaged for each generation. For young women now, today’s version plays out across social media feeds and school hallways alike. There are still ample women who believe firstly that male approval is an award and secondly that women who don’t feel this way are inferior.
I see them myself: I see pick-me girl behavior in the girl who knows she’s pretty but calls herself ugly until a boy compliments her. I see pick-me girl behavior in the “popular girl” who hung out in the boys locker room to seem cool and rolled her eyes when other girls called her out. I see pick-me girl behavior in my middle school self when I memorized Kanye West songs just to impress the boys in my class, all while mocking the girls who listened to Taylor Swift, Kanye’s sworn enemy back then. How ironic.
Thus, the conversation needs to shift. Instead of dissecting the behavior of individual pick-me girls, we should be asking: why does society continue to reward this mindset? Why does social media glorify narratives where women are pitted against each other rather than lifting each other up? Why is it still so difficult for women to exist outside of the male gaze without being scrutinized?
Nowadays, social media has also given pick-me behavior a new platform. Viral TikToks show women exaggerating their “quirky” “non-vanilla” interests (though they do go viral because people find it cringe) to appear more appealing to men and shame other women for their choices. They mock feminism, setting us back years. The message remains the same: “I’m different, and that makes me better than you.”
But at its core, it’s a reaction to the envy of those who seem effortlessly accepted. The women on TikTok aren’t hating on single women—they’re telling a man that though he may have a wife, she’ll always be the better, more interesting woman, and she’s clearly upset that he didn’t choose her. She’s upset. Maybe that’s what we’re missing when we talk about pick-me girls; we focus so much on their behavior: their incessant cringe, their need for male attention, and the way they’ll tear down any other woman they deem competition. But I think that underneath all that hate is something deeply human: envy. Not just of other girls, but of how effortlessly loved they (they other girls) can be, and how accepted they are for being who they are. Of how other girls are “picked” without having to try.
I want to believe that pick-me girls don’t act out of malice. They act out of fear that they’ll never be good enough as who they are. They act out of insecurity, believing their value depends on being chosen or validated by a man. They see other women as competition—not because they hate them, but because they want what these women have—be it their looks, their lives, or mostly, their men. And somewhere along their way of envy, they started believing that in order for them to win, the other women had to lose.
The good news is that women are pushing back. On the same platform pick-me girls post on, they scoff, call it out, and refuse to let internalized misogyny come back. And as girls like me mature out of childhood, we start to learn and recognize how foul our behavior was—how much of it came from insecurity and not necessarily malice. Because at the end of the day, pick-me behavior is not just about wanting to be chosen—it’s about the longing to be effortlessly accepted. It’s envy, dressed up as “coolness” and sarcasm. But envy doesn’t have to rot us—it’s not wrong to want love or approval. What’s dangerous is believing that the only way to get those things is by being chosen by someone else. No woman’s worth lies in a man’s choice, and when we finally realize this, we’ll realize we were never really enemies; we’re all just girls trying to be enough.