I’m sure most people know a woman who describes herself as 'one of the boys.' She describes herself as low maintenance and because she is low maintenance she would make the perfect girlfriend. No makeup to worry about and no girly smelling perfumes and soaps. However, girls and women use the ‘one of the boys’ trope to shame women who like and do things that are ‘feminine’ such as makeup and wearing high heels. What they really mean by 'one of the boys' is that they are using misogyny to lash out at other women instead of standing in solidarity with them.
Acting more like a man in our society has come to symbolize a part of good girlfriend material. Dating advice sites and women’s magazines such as Glamour and Women’s Health emphasize that men want to see us in jeans and a T-shirt, not in heavy makeup and high heels. In theory, this makes a women a perfect girlfriend because she does not take long to get ready and is more likely to indulge in ‘masculine’ activities such as sports.
The cliché turns insidious when being ‘one of the boys’ means eschewing feminity and shaming women who do not shun feminity. It is an example of internalized misogyny, where some women have taken misogyny that they have experienced and use it to lash out at other women. Internalized misogyny plays into the patriarchal mindset of men over women because its intention is to keep women divided by categorizing which behaviors are acceptable to men and which behaviors are not. So even if some women think they are going against patriarchy, they are re-intrenching it by allowing men to decide what is ideal in a woman.
This is not to say that this kind of shaming goes one way.
Women also shame each other for not wearing makeup and high heels as not trying hard enough to win a man. Women hating other women has to stop, especially something that is so petty. If one woman does not want to be bothered with makeup and high heels — who are we to judge? If another woman wants to wear makeup and high heels all the time — who are we to judge? We will not achieve social, economic, and political parity with men if we keep focusing on shallow ideas of how we should appear to men. It’s these kinds of attitudes that keep women from seeing each other as allies. Instead tropes such as ‘one of the boys’ teaches us that women who take care of their appearance differently are threats.
One of the core tenets of feminism is that a woman does not need a man to validate her, and pretending to be ‘one of the boys’ is another attempt to gain validation and it needs to stop. We have the freedom to choose what we look like and how we present ourselves — let’s not destroy that by valorizing one appearance over another appearance.
