Not like other girls
Well, we are now.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about ‘women who hate women’ exploring the ✨Not Like Other Girls✨ trend, and why girls - and women - are being raised to compete with each other, rather than work together. I wrote:
The true irony of NLOG is that women are often drawn to these attitudes in order to separate themselves from the bitchiness synonymous with groups of women, and by doing so they are perpetuating the division and judgement that they are actively fighting against.
Call me Mystic Meg, because the topic of NLOG has had a resurgence in recent weeks, with influencers flipping the age-old misogyny on its head and creating content about why they are like other girls.
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I wonder if the bandying together of women is a collective response to the trauma bond of being a woman in a world where you’re more likely to…
♀️ Be murdered by someone you know
♀️ Have health limitations over your lifetime
The list goes on.
A world built for men
The reasons for these propensities are complex, but in many cases, it all comes down to the fact that men are the default. Car crash test dummies are typically based on male anatomy, for example.
If you’re a woman of colour, your odds are even less in your favour for many of these categories. Black women in the UK are 3.7 times more likely to die in childbirth or in the first year after birth. Women of colour are also more likely to face workplace harassment, and less likely to get promoted.
Laura Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women, regularly shares headlines about violence against women on her Instagram page.
We see this time and time again. The press uses passive language to focus on the victim, rather than the perpetrator. In the above example, you’ve be forgiven for thinking Barbara’s death was an accident or suicide, as the language infers this. A quick skim of the article reveals a 40-year-old man was the chief suspect in her death, who died in a lorry crash later that day.
Last month, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper MP, said that extreme misogyny will be treated as a form of extremism, with plans for a government crackdown on incel ideology. She said:
"[We will] identify any gaps in existing policy which need to be addressed to crack down on those pushing harmful and hateful beliefs and violence"
I can’t help but feel this is too little, too late. The annual Femicide Census shows that there has been no decline in femicide since its founding in 2009, with an average of 62% of murdered women killed by a current or former partner. The Census also shows that a woman has been killed by a man, on average, once every three days over a 10-year period.
Together, we are stronger
So, it’s interesting that, in a world where it’s increasingly bleak to be a woman, we’re seeing the in-fighting stop (or are we?) and a collective consciousness grow.
In some ways, I think it’s a step in the right direction that we are seeing more successful women on our screens - and, most importantly, in this context, it’s more widely accepted to admire and enjoy media created by women and respect women as artists in their own right.
We’ve got…
♀️ Women making box office-hit horror films (Coralie Fargeat, The Substance 2024)
♀️ A woman taking 13 hours off the world record for the Appalachian Trail (Tara Dower)
♀️ Women reviving the pop music genre (Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and, dare I say it, Taylor Swift.)
♀️ Women at the top of the NY Times Bestsellers’ List across Fiction, Non-Fiction, Middle Grade, and YA (as of today)
I’m not confident the in-fighting is done. Sure, it’s great to be like other girls now - but is that only if you fit into the mould? I can’t go by without mentioning that many of those things in the initial TikTok I shared are quite, well, materialistic.
These posts are often about skincare, coffee, make-up, shopping (all of which I love, by the way), and so rarely about the qualities that make women so special. I get that we, as a gender, are trying to move away from stereotypes of nurturing, motherly women, but that’s not all we have to offer.
Research shows women are:
♀️ Faster over ultramarathon distances
♀️ Better smellers and tasters
And those are just examples of studies I can find with a quick Google search.
We all know that the women in our lives are more than just facts and figures. We’re a culmination of all the women who came before us, the women who raised us, and the women who stand by us in the face of trauma, adversity, and harm.
Researching for and writing this piece has got me thinking about my own place in the womansphere. I, like many lasses who grew up on Tumblr, was proudly ‘not like other girls’ - but that couldn’t be further from the truth now. The women in my life inspire me every day, both the ones I know and those I see on screen. I listen to more music by women than ever before and read predominantly female authors.
Yes, the female experience is changing, but it can only evolve if we embrace and grow with it - acknowledging the good and the bad.
Autumnal weather has well and truly arrived in the North East, so we’ve been hiberating at our desks as work is very busy. Before the downpours started, we managed to get up to Alnwick to visit Lilidorei, the world’s biggest play structure, which is styled on a fantasy village. This is SO cool, and even our scaredy-cat daughter enjoyed exploring the site.
She even found her time in her busy day as a butterfly to pollinate some of the plants in Alnwick Garden.
Other things I’ve also enjoyed this week:
📚 The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley - Incredible and painful read by Lucia, who attended every single day of Maxwell’s trial back in 2021, and spoke directly to many of Epstein’s victims. This is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read this year.
📺 The Penguin (NowTV) - This great first episode of The Batman spin-off stars an unrecognizable Colin Farrell doing his best Robert DeNiro impression.
See you next week,
Ellen x
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💌 About this email
I’m Ellen, and I write about mental health for the chronically online. I am a freelance copywriter, strategist and web designer, and I work from home with my husband, Craig, at Content By The Sea. We have two rescue greyhounds, Potter and Harmony, and a toddler.
I started this newsletter in March 2020 and have sent over 180 emails; currently, I have over 1,200 subscribers. I write about a wide variety of topics, including diet culture, my love of running, jealousy, my life falling apart, mam guilt, and this dystopian world we all live in.
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This was such an interesting read - thanks for sharing.
Yeeesss love how you’ve developed on last year’s piece! (Also, how is that a year ago?! Yikes.)