Using ‘Not Like Other Girls’ to Reinforce Gender Stereotypes

How ‘not like other girls’ went from a backhanded compliment from fictional boys to an overt insult from real women… and what we can do to end this

Jul 28, 2024

The phrase “you’re not like other girls” started as a way for male love interests to tell the heroine that she is superior to the common girl. Then, in the 2010s, it turned into “I’m not like other girls,” and became a way for less stereotypically feminine girls to rationalize their ostracization by telling themselves they were superior to the common girls. Today, it’s become, “she thinks she’s not like other girls,” which is used to denigrate girls and women who fall outside stereotypically feminine behavior.

I want to look at why and how we got here, and how we can move forward with a little less misogyny.

I didn’t choose the “not like other girls” life. It chose me.

Believe me, young Lils wanted to be like other girls. I devoted countless hours of my childhood to trying to speak the way other girls spoke, sit they way they sat, and dress the way they dressed. But none of that effort seemed to get me a single step closer to my goal.

In my Christian fundamentalist homeschool group, there were no tomboys or dork girls, so I didn’t know much about alternatives to the girly-girl lifestyle (or, more accurately, the prairie-girl lifestyle). But when the rare Nicktoon or non-offensive teen movie showed a girl who was noticeably different—someone who was loud, never wore dresses, and spent a lot of time playing sports—I always felt drawn to her. I felt a little less weird when those characters were on the screen.

So imagine my disappointment to hear that that’s nothing more than a sign of my internalized misogyny.

The “not like other girls” phenomenon in a nutshell

Before I can get into my experience with the “phenomenon,” I think I should make sure we’re on the same page about what it is. So first, let’s talk about the short-term cultural collective memory of “not like other girls.”

Lauren Stamps, in the article, “The Phrase ‘I’m Not Like Other Girls’ is Rooted in Internalized Misogyny,” explains it this way:

If you’ve been on the internet for long enough, you’ve probably seen one or two “I’m not like other girls” around the internet, most likely either as a comic or a text post. The girls who post this phrase pride themselves on their “individuality” the most, and while this isn’t an inherently bad thing, it comes with an extra layer of internalized misogyny by putting down the “other girls.” These “other girls” are usually portrayed as feminine, positive, concerned about their appearance, and sexually active. The poster is usually portrayed as a “tomboy” who places little value in their appearance, reads books, and dislikes stereotypically feminine things.1

I think that’s pretty accurate. So why do the not-like-other-girls girls want to put down the like-other-girls girls? Elio Wilder breaks down the misogynistic impulses that would lead someone to believe herself to be unlike her peers in their article, “Why you should skip the “I’m not like other girls” phase.” They write:

The logic is fairly simple. You notice femininity is viewed negatively and this leads to you being treated as inferior. So in order to escape this treatment, you distance yourself from feminine stereotypes and archetypes. You rise above the inferior feminine “other girls”. You’re not like them. You’re cooler than them.2

This may be true for some or many people, and the concept is far from new. Attempting to distance oneself from one’s own marginalized group is a relatively common response to marginalization. And for girls, this does often start in childhood when they realize that being a girl is generally seen as being inferior. Back in 1992, author of Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence Bonnie Burstow wrote:

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”3

So the impulse as a girl to separate oneself from femininity and female-ness is certainly real. I’m sure this lead many young girls to either abandon or hide their love of traditionally feminine things and insist they were not typical girls; they were better.

That just wasn’t true for me.

This is because a longer, more substantial and more complex history exists. Yes, more complex even than internalized misogyny (which is by no means simple, no matter how straightforward the apparent logic of it may be).

The belief that one is “not like other girls” doesn’t just stem from a single source. It’s nuanced and multi-faceted, so simply labeling it as “internalized misogyny” closes the book on this issue too quickly.

Who started this?

I’ve seen web writers and YouTubers put the start (or the height) of “not like other girls” phenomenon in the 2010s, which seems like starting a story in the middle. Because while this trend may have peaked in the 2010s with comics shared online, that’s certainly not where it started. And it seems like a suspiciously incomplete history to leave out the origins. This started many, many decades ago, and it didn’t start with snobby, stuck-up, toxic, misogynistic girls setting themselves apart.

I graduated high school in the early 2000s, so I wasn’t really paying attention to the “not like other girl” comics that were online in the 2010s. Instead, I remember that line being said by the male love interest to the female lead. Tropes.com points out that it’s usually said by the “ladykiller in love.”4 When describing rom-com tropes, Morgan Hausback of The University News writes, “However, one of the most important romantic comedy trope elements lies in the female lead: the manic pixie dream girl, or the characteristic found in the woman that leads the man to inevitably confess, ‘But you’re not like other girls!’”5

So why are so many discussions of this phrase focused on the women and girls who supposedly embody it instead of the ones saying it? I ask because—online comics made by women and girls notwithstanding—I’m skeptical about how often the quirky and/or non-feminine women and girls are the ones actually making this claim.

Lack of lack of self-love, or lack of social acceptance?

So we have a fairly decent understanding of how we got to the 2010s comics and online posts made by girls insisting they were superior to their supposedly shallow, typical peers. Boys and men in media intended it as a compliment to their love interests, then girls who felt like they didn’t fit in took that phrase for themselves. But now we recognize that putting other girls down for behaving in stereotypically feminine ways is pretty misogynistic.

Isn’t it good, then, that we call those girls out? That we let them know that they’re hurting feminism and that they need to change their ways?

Well… again, I think that over-simplifies the issue and as a result fails to address the entire problem. The article, “A Look Into the Not Like Other Girls Phenomenon,” by Gen Z: We Are The Future shows how this simplistic view and subsequently vague call-to-action don’t accomplish much.

They write:

Now, many know that the “I’m not like other girls” movement carries hints of internalized yet normalized misogyny. When girls claim that they “are not like other girls”, it suggests that this “other” type of girls are shallow, one-dimensional, and fake with no other interests besides fashion or beauty. The “not like other girls” mindset is something that can only be let go of once people acknowledge the stereotypes held against other women, even if it is subconscious.6

I agree; the mindset can only be let go of once “people” acknowledge the stereotypes held against women. People should definitely do that. What people? The article doesn’t clarify. All people? The men they mention who use the phrase as a back-handed compliment? The girls and women who accept it?

The article goes on to say:

Instead of pitting women against women, people should be accepting each girl and abolishing the idea that she has to be anything except for herself. There is no cryptic collective of “other girls” existing singularly because every girl is different in their own way.

This article seems harmless to me, if a bit insipid. The thing is, in reality, there is a collective of “other girls,” and there is a collective of “atypical girls.” I agree with the sentiment of the article in that I also wish we currently lived in a world where every girl was simply “different in their own way.” But that world is not here yet, and it sure hadn’t arrived when I was growing up.

Broad, platitude-filled articles like this don’t delve below the surface of the issue. They don’t examine anything from the perspective of the girls who are either desperately trying to fit in or searching for a group of “not like other girls” misfits they can belong to. They don’t examine the effects that these rigidly enforced stereotypes have on girls. In fact, this one doesn’t even glance at the emotional causes of creating and upholding these stereotypes.

To be fair to Gen Z: We Are The Future, I don’t think it intended to. It’s just an overview that tries to take a positive tone.

But I think these topics are worth exploring more. Because it’s not just the people clinging to the belief that there’s value in being non-feminine who are perpetuating the divide.

Attack the problem, not the victim

As I’ve written about before on this Substack, finding the goth subculture was the first thing that helped me feel like I might be like some other girls. The idea that one could embrace not being like other girls, and that it could even be something positive? That was hopeful. So was the notion that sticking out like a sore thumb could become standing out from the crowd. I didn’t like to stand out, but if it meant that there was some other, smaller crowd I could fit into, I was down with that.

Lauren Stamps briefly addresses this when she writes, “Girls who were insecure about not fitting the “feminine look” were comforted by these and quickly began to develop a complex. I know I did.” That’s fair. But I want to look at the “complex” in greater detail. I want to know why so many girls found comfort in this to the point that dunking on them became a pervasive internet trend.

One article that explores this and aligns more with my experience is “‘Not like other girls’ – gender identity, neurodivergence and internalised misogyny,” by Debbie Lemke in The Oxford Student. The opening paragraph sounded very familiar to me:

Growing up in a hetero-cis-normative, neurotypical and misogynistic society was a challenge for a young girl who simply wanted to find her place in the world, independent of societal expectations. A lot of girls reach the point in puberty where they start to question who they really are, and especially neurodivergent people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB people) notice that no matter how hard they try, they just do not seem to fit in.7

For the record, I have not been diagnosed with ASD.8 But I find that the symptoms and life experiences of autistic people, AFAB people especially, line up with my own. As I’ve written about before, I worked diligently for years to fit in, first with the girls in my public school classes and then with the girls in my homeschool group. But no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t seem to crack the code on being a girl correctly. Hence the relief and excitement when I found the more gender-ambiguous goth subculture.

Lemke continues:

Today we all laugh about our cringey “I’m not like other girls” phase or judge people who still haven’t made it through. This doesn’t sit right with me. Why do we blame young teenage girls, who are growing up in a society that puts all these expectations on women, when they just want to be seen as human, not always as “other”?

I appreciate the compassionate tone Lemke uses when referring to people who haven’t made it through a harmful phase of self-image rather than blaming them for perpetuating misogyny by reacting to that misogyny in an unenlightened way. The uncomfortable reality is that placing the blame of living in a misogynistic world onto someone who is struggling under the weight of it, rather than simply confirming their real humanity, isn’t going to address or fix the problem.

What will? Changing the way we think about those who we’ve placed in the “not like other girls” category.

The shift from “I’m not like other girls” to “she’s not like other girls”

Unfortunately, the “not like other girls” phase isn’t something exclusive to the teenage years. The desire to fit in as well as the compulsion to exclude both exist in social groups far beyond high school. I find that the sentiment is still policed, even in professional environments. A while ago, a group of my co-workers were planning to see the Barbie movie together. While I don’t go to the movies often, I thought it might be a good way to develop some friendships. That was until one of the organizers announced (possibly as a joke?) that everyone had to cosplay as Barbie.

I don’t own an article of pink clothing, and I wasn’t about to buy one just to see a movie. Fortunately another woman said she didn’t have anything pink, so she wouldn’t be dressing up for the event. At first I felt relieved that someone else had said it, but I watched as the organizers and a few others descended on her in the chat, publicly doubting her and saying that everyone had something they could wear.

Ultimately it was decided that everyone would simply have to dress up as “some type of Barbie,” so pink wouldn’t necessarily be required. When the same objector said she really didn’t have any kind of costume she could wear, the conversation got even more hostile. Barbie had been everything, they said, so there was something in her closet she could wear.

The conversation in the public work chat seemed unnecessarily aggressive to me, but what went on in the private chats was worse. People started denouncing this colleague for her supposed “not like other girls” attitude. And I suddenly felt like I might as well be back in fourth grade being left out of an activity for not having the right clothes.

Obviously I had no desire to attend the event after that, even if I could have invented a “Goth Barbie” and shown up as her. The response to this person’s insistence that she didn’t have any kind of makeshift Barbie costume caught me off guard because this workplace was supposed to be LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent-friendly. It really was the last place I expected to see someone being called out for not gleefully donning the mantle of femininity.

I bring up this personal annecdote to highlight what seems to be a much larger trend: that women and girls today are far more often accused of having the “not like other girls” attitude than they deserve. To be honest, I’ve never once heard anyone in real life make that statement about herself (granted, I was educated in the 90s and early 2000s, so maybe if I’d gone to high school in recent years that would have been different). But I have heard people accuse the women who can’t or don’t act sufficiently feminine of being stuck-up and (ironically) misogynistic.

Even if some people do what the Gen Z article advises and accepts that each girl or woman is different in her own way, there are plenty of others who won’t accept that. And so the cycle of exclusion, rationalization, and misogyny continues.

You’ll be like other girls… one day

Maybe my co-worker could have avoided the backlash she got if she’d just kept quiet about her lack of appropriately girly clothing. But, of course, she shouldn’t have had to. Maybe I could have gone to the premiere and had a good time if I’d gone out and bought a pink T-shirt. But I’m 38 right now, and I have long since passed the point in my life where I try to act ‘traditionally feminine’ to get people to like me.

That’s not to say I was always that way, though.

You see, if there was one balm in the 90s, it was that adorkable girls were popping up in movies. The Princess Diaries and other examples showed girls who failed femininity, but who were still lovable. Usually they got a makeover (which somehow came with the right physicality and social skills), and they actually became just like other girls at the end. It gave me hope—false hope—that that could be me one day.

Now, for all the girls who were killing the girly thing, I can understand how seeing awkward tomboys being the stars and getting the boy and the makeover could have felt unfair. I can see where the resentment came from, especially when they were doing the ‘right’ thing by conforming, naturally or otherwise, to stereotypical female behavior and beauty standards.

But for me? It was wonderful. It meant I could be Mia Thermopolis one day. It meant that my social awkwardness might not plague me for the rest of my life. Because let’s be real: All those protagonists were like other girls… eventually. Even Disney’s Mulan ended up balancing her non-feminine parts with her feminine parts and getting an honorable marriage. These stories weren’t accepting awkward girls for who they were. They were just telling us that there was still hope that we would get better.

Of course, it didn’t happen. I didn’t become more feminine. I didn’t learn to like pink. I never figured out how to be comfortable in a dress. And I never felt like myself wearing subtle, girly makeup. That was when I found alternative fashion, and started to believe that there might be something not just tolerable about being unlike other girls, but positive.

If someone had told me (and shown me) that those superficial things weren’t requisites for fitting in, I’d have been delighted. But no one did, at least not until I was well into adulthood.

Why do you notice the speck in your sister’s eye?

So how do we actually move forward? How do we really move away from the misogyny of “not like other girls” instead of continually rebranding it and redistributing the blame?

If you’ve found yourself feeling disgusted by or resentful of someone who might think she’s better than other girls, I’d ask you to pause before you pass judgment or insist that she’s reinforcing misogynistic beliefs (especially if you’re making an assumption about her thoughts or feelings). Ease up on those of us who have donated the pink clothes and dresses we never wore. Think twice before you condemn those of us who never learned how to do makeup or aren’t comfortable in high heels. Don’t assume that just because femininity feels natural to you that it’s easy for everyone, or that just because you’re giving a performance that we are, too.

The person you call out for having a “not like other girls” attitude might just be being herself, without an agenda. Not everyone who dislikes pink or dresses does so because of misogyny.

But what if you’re right, and the woman in question does see herself as better than other women? What if she has intentionally chosen to act atypical? And what if she does so to appeal to men and male authority? To answer that, I want to turn back to Elio Wilder. In the penultimate paragraph of their article, they offer this reminder:

As a brief side note, it is not feminist to mock a “pick me” either. A “pick me girl” only wants to be accepted in a world that is structured against her. Her motivation is valid but her execution fails her. As feminists, we must give others the opportunity to learn and grow. To degrade a “pick me girl” would be to exhibit the same behaviour that degrades femininity in the first place. Ultimately that person is a victim of internalised misogyny and the better thing to do is help them question where those beliefs came from.

At the end of the day, we girly failures have to embrace who we are. And, unlike the adorkable Disney teens, that means accepting that femininity isn’t going to fall over us like a gown during a makeover. Maybe that’s why it feels like a minor betrayal that it’s often women who hurl “not like other girls” at us—and not as a back-handed compliment but as an overt put-down.

I mean, at least the teenage boy characters who say that in movies are saying it with admiration. They intend it as a confidence-booster. That’s more than I can say for some of my peers.

An optimistic epilogue

While I wasn’t aware of the “I’m not like other girls” comics at the time they were most popular, I did come across them when they were at their best. And by that, I mean when artists across the internet gave a lot of the popular ones the “checkmate, boomer—we made it gay” treatment. These artists took the comics that depicted the “other girl” figure (depicting a stereotypically fashionable and beautiful girl) and the “me” figure (depicting a nerdy, unattractive, unfashionable girl) and, well, made them gay.

One of my favorites of the bunch, created by Peachy-Milk-Tea9, actually takes an image of two drinks, labeled “other girls vs me” and created the characters to match.10

This trend is sweet, inclusive and community-minded, but I especially love it because this is the kind of thing that would have warmed my bi little heart as a kid. It shows that you don’t actually have to be like other girls to be liked (or liked-liked) by other girls.

And I think that’s all most of us want.

Is there plenty of misogyny in what the Gen Z article rightly calls the back-handed compliment, “You’re not like other girls?” Absolutely. And taking that compliment and applying it to oneself to soothe one’s wounded ego after being excluded doesn’t diminish the misogyny inherent in the belief that atypical girls are somehow better. But insisting on the inferiority of weird girls and doubling down on it by claiming that they’re the problem because of their assumed toxic beliefs doesn’t fix the problem; it maintains it.

But this? This sweet gesture of showing these two apparently opposite people in a caring relationship? That essentially flips the game board, ending the battle for superiority. This does actually present the idea that each girl or woman is unique in her own way, and valuable as a part of the female/feminine experience.

This is like rewriting the ending of The Princess Diaries so that Mia (who is now like other girls) and Lilly (who is still not like other girls) get together instead of Mia and that dude who’s name I can’t remember. That’s what we all actually wanted, right?

Right?

Some of us, anyway.

I’m grateful for every artist who took one of the “I’m not like other girls” comics and showed these two apparently opposing forces as friends or lovers who could get along in spite of their different preferences and personalities. No offense to all of the established magazines posting articles about how much harm non-conforming girls are doing to feminism, but the “we made it gay” artists are the ones doing the heavy lifting needed to put this manufactured argument in the garbage where it belongs.

Lazy Goth

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