If, many years ago, someone had told me I would end up writing books about feminism, I would not have imagined myself as I am now. The person I’d have ideally pictured would have been more akin to the Cool Girl described in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: “a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping”. 

The Cool Girl “plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex”:

… and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. 

Yes, that’ll be me, I’d have thought. Gender non-conforming (“adores football”!) but not one of those angry, unsexy feminists whom nobody likes. 

Back then, I thought the fight for women’s rights would be a whole lot easier. Like many of my generation — at least, those who were not engaged with feminism on any deep level — I had certain assumptions about those who’d gone before us. Namely, second wavers had won us some useful rights (thanks!) but weren’t great at PR (too miserable) and went on about some things (pornography, motherhood, housework) far too much. I didn’t really believe anyone my age objected to feminist principles per se — not nowadays! — but that we needed to work on the marketing. 

Nobody likes a whinger, am I right? How can you expect men to support your arguments if you’re making them feel bad and left out? If feminism is denounced as man-hating, anti-sex, exclusionary, surely it’s the job of feminists to prove that it’s not. “Cool girls never get angry,” writes Flynn, “they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.” I could do that. As long as we could have our rights, too — whatever they were — what would be the problem?

There are quite a lot of problems with this, in fact. While there are some fellow Generation Xers who cling to the delusion that we can defy gender norms via “punk enthusiasm” alone, most of us have grown out of it. We have learned, often the hard way, that you cannot rise above a problem simply by not talking about it. Sure, for a while it felt daring to flaunt how untroubled we were by hardcore pornography or the reduction of “femaleness” to a vague, free-floating idea. Look at us! Not bothered at all! Didn’t that prove how different we were to our mothers — those nervous little women, with their embarrassingly conservative worries regarding male bodies and male sexuality? Unlike them, we’d smash the gender binary — by keeping our mouths firmly shut. 

With the Cool Girl, Flynn pinpointed a way in which a fake form of gender non-conformity can be used as a cover for hyper-conformity. You can tell yourself your love of dirty jokes shows the world how unfeminine you are, but if you are giving men whatever they want, never daring to displease, what’s the difference between you and a tradwife? Similarly, you can tell yourself that keeping quiet about all the things about which the unsexy, unpopular feminists complain — commercial surrogacy, breast binding, the sex trade — proves you’re one of the boys, but does it really? Because it seems to me there is nothing more passively feminine than cheering on the status quo and telling yourself this makes you radical. 

In recent years, more and more terms have been deployed — TERFs, SWERFs, Karens — with the aim of vilifying women who make complaints in two particular ways: first, by suggesting the act of complaint is one of unjustified aggression or hatred, and second, by implying that women who complain in this way are key representatives of normative femininity. It is a bizarre reversal, and one that has only worked, ironically, because the women at whom these terms are directed are committing a norm violation. They are being unfeminine, making real demands, unlike the nice, feminine ladies who keep their objections to vague grumblings about toxic masculinity and men on “the other side”. 

This pattern has been especially striking in response to women demanding redress for personal injustice, particularly physical and sexual violence. They are accused of weaponising trauma, performing victimhood and using their feminine tears in order to manipulate others. Again, something which is profoundly unfeminine and norm-violating — challenging a world that says female pain and female bodies don’t matter — is recast as normative. You don’t want to be some pathetic weeping woman, onlookers are told. That’s such an old-fashioned trope! Would a Cool Girl make this kind of fuss? 

The recent furore over Olympic women’s boxing has exposed a split: between those who still think feminism is all about appearances, and those who think what actually matters is who is hitting you in the face; between those who think defying gender norms means not looking like “an aspirational Sports Illustrated swimsuit model” (spoiler: most of us don’t) and those who think it involves setting boundaries, claiming space, saying things that might even make some male people sad. 

It is easier to be the “feminist” who makes it her job to recast the way things are as the way things have to be. Suck it up, take the punches! Keep churning out the convoluted arguments which reduce anything and everything women want to selfishness and paranoia! There’s no bravery in this, though. It is, on the contrary, what women have always done when they believe change is not possible. 

I believe it is, though. That’s why the rest of us keep complaining, no matter how uncool we have become.