"I'm Not Like Other Girls"

this video is brought to you by movie try movie free for 30 days at movie.com slash serozha that's mu bi comm slash sarah's add for a whole month of great cinema for free have you ever noticed how to some people the worst thing you can be is like other girls whether it's comparisons to rotten apples being called derogatory terms based on one's clothing and hair or having assumptions made about your character and intelligence because of how you dress there's a significant backlash largely by young women against other women who look or dress in traditionally feminine ways or primarily enjoy popular TV and music this often takes the form of phrases like I'm not like other girls comics comparing an archetypical antagonist embodying femininity and conformity to our usually alternative protagonists and videos on social media of the sizing how special and unusual it is to be a girl who isn't girly almost as soon as this phenomenon began to take hold the backlash against it exploded there exist entire internet groups exclusively designed to make fun of women who claim they're not like other girls or n logs for short what if such groups are slashed not like the other girls on reddit has a little under half a million subscribers where Facebook groups calling women who act this way pygmies reach around 20,000 it's also been discussed a couple times on YouTube with creators like Tiffany Ferg and Curtis Palmer offering their own analysis as to why it's bad and why it's common in particular a lot of this backlash tends to come from women who are classified as other girls no one enjoys feeling like they're being shamed for enjoying parties and pop music and many people feel as though n logs are simply pitting women against one another 1 Odyssey think piece by writer Kelsi Dylan called the phrase I'm not like other girls sexist citing the idea that it imposes an artificial binary on women which fuels the notion that women should be shamed for choosing to look or dress in a certain way this phenomenon is a particularly interesting one to examine largely because a lot of us have been on both sides of the nlog trend at different points in our lives many girls have it some gone through this phase of hating this archetypical idea of other girls and issuing anything feminine and getting over this hatred is often considered a signifier of having grown up on the other hand even though many of us used to be and locks to a certain degree I find there's a pretty tangible lack of empathy towards them and a lack of cohesive agreed upon reasons as to why this phenomenon is so popular in the first place I mean we're not seeing a mass occurrence of teenage boys claiming there's something wrong with other guys and actively striving to be as little like other guys as possible arguably the closest thing to this is the Chad versus virgin meme which it's popular usage is typically making fun of this dichotomy instead of really reinforcing it the people who do take it seriously tend to belong to a very specific subculture of red pillars and in cells and there doesn't seem to be a mass phenomenon across a huge number of young boys in the same way the nlog phenomenon exists for young girls so what's up with that why is this such a specific and gendered phenomenon and are the people claiming they're not like other girls deserving of widespread hatred and mockery or do they have a point well let's look a little deeper no to n lobs are exactly the same as there are multitudinous ways to be not like other girls one might highlight her preference for the darker things in life her outdoor zena's her distaste for makeup and health food or her enjoyment of creativity in reading it's difficult to group women who are not like other girls into any one specific social category although some people have certainly tried rather the common thread tying all of these posts and comments together isn't really any unique identity that the n log has the central focus of these posts isn't really on what they are but what they are not so what we really shouldn't be asking is who are the N logs its who are the other girls indeed while what n logs are tends to vary by subculture the universal image of what she isn't tends to be pretty consistent that's the other girl and regardless of whether you're a hunter who loves camo and mud an alternative girl who loves Billy Eilish and chokers or a girl who would rather read Harry Potter than go to a club these posts seek to define you in opposition to the other girl the idea of the other girl isn't particularly new and it hasn't significantly evolved over time besides some slight aesthetic changes as to what it means to be popular we see the other girl in all kinds of popular media she's typically blond thin popular beautiful dressed in expensive and revealing clothing primarily enjoys mainstream movies and music and is often implied to be sexually active with negative connotations attached to that activity take this passage from literary classic my immortal which provides a key representation of the quintessential other girl we all went outside the great Hal and looked in from a widow a [ __ ] prep called a Brittany from Gryffindor was standing next to us she was wearing a pink Minnie and a Hilary Duff t-shirt so we put up our middle fingers at her the other girl is also represented as an archetype in a good number of movies and TV shows typically as antagonists if you grew up in the 90s and early 2000s you typically find your self hating Cecilia from aquamarine Regina from Mean Girls from she's all that or Amanda from Addams Family Values they're bad because they're mean and rich but also because they're popular vapid and fundamentally shallow are people that are multifaceted protagonists who are often valued for their wit and lack of conformity to cultural norms when these representations translate to other cultural contexts like this meme about celebrating Eid the aesthetic of the other girl changes slightly but the central idea that she's popular and beautiful while you're an authentic human persists not all comics and posts that seek to distinguish between other girls and real girls actively include negative value judgments towards the other girl although most do some mostly served to highlight the protagonists awkwardness compared to the flawless beauty of the other girl even here though the comics seem to impart a level of authenticity upon their protagonists that isn't awarded to the rest of society while they're generically pretty our protagonists are real relatable humans and this lack of authenticity is a really common threat of criticism against other girls take this image here where all of the girls are dressed the exact same are more interested in makeup and reviewing clothing than intellectual pursuits and don't seem to be capable of any individual rational thought conversely our protagonist prefers to read and wear modest clothing she's a fully fledged human who is actually capable of thinking for herself an error in a society that values conformity unlike other girls who are mindless drones she's a real authentic human keep in mind these comics and posts aren't just about people positioning themselves in opposition to one attractive vapid woman this woman is an archetype who's supposed to represent virtually all of female society besides our protagonist their insipid and unoriginal I'm unique I'm not like them unsurprisingly enough the idea that this archetypical other girl even exists at all has come under fire like sure she has blonde hair and likes parties and makeup and Taylor Swift but why does that also somehow mean she's a bad person or incapable of deep rational thought indeed this concept tends to rely on a lot of false binaries when distinguishing between the protagonist and other girls you can either be an independent human who likes reading and hoodies or of that the other girl let's lipstick and miniskirts the idea that you can be both is never really something brought up or addressed thus the implication is that our protagonist is the only woman capable of deep thought and empathy indeed this other girl isn't a real human being she's a straw man embodying everything the author hates about society so the other girl generally represents mainstream society's idealized image of what an attractive desirable person looks like that's then applied to other women in general there's also this portrayal of these women as very vapid and unintelligent people as opposed to our multifaceted and intelligent protagonists but once again why does this cultural phenomenon seem to almost exclusively exist within women it's not like there are no cultural ideas of what an acceptable attractive man looks like but broadly speaking we're not seeing men who prefer listening to black bear over partying to Drake feel the need to excessively draw comics implying other guys are dumb and shallow and that they're the only multifaceted guys in the world so why is that well let's look at the first argument basically it's misogyny hey girls what if the other girl is good actually what if the main reason n logs don't like other girls is because society is fundamentally misogynistic this is the thesis of a lot of arguments discussing n logs including that of a very good video by youtuber Tiffany Ferg on the issue basically she argues that were taught from a very young age to hate all things typically associated with women nail-polish pink clothing and anything else traditionally feminine and derided as stupid or unimportant consequently we associate those negative descriptors with women who prefer traditionally feminine things as well which is why we have such a hard time believing that women can be both intelligent and feminine and why Elle Woods is the greatest film protagonist of all time for using her knowledge of hair perms to catch a murderer growing up in a society that often makes fun of women for girliness might lead us to believe the women are lesser which we might apply both to ourselves and to other women this is typically called internalized misogyny which is a controversial term but I'm going to use it here anyway because I'm feeling bold according to this approach our dislike for other women is reinforced in a few ways one of these is popular media we are from a young age inundated with young female protagonists who are typically notable for being the standout in a group of other girls it's all over especially in coming-of-age movies a female protagonist and possibly a couple of her friends are intelligent and empathetic people whereas every other girl in the story is the stereotype of an other girl with little to no capacity for inner depths through her own positive characteristics which are portrayed as more or less unique to her she manages to overcome her circumstances show up all the other girls and occasionally find romance with the advent of feminist lingo increasingly finding its way into our collective consciousness there are a lot more movies nowadays that actively try to disrupt this and present the other girl as someone with a lot of inner depth but for most of us who still didn't grow up on this type of movie we were still socialized by the other stuff you're not like other girls has been a compliment from men in romance movies and books for ages and in universe it's typically considered to be a very high compliment however froakie not like other girls I have never seen a woman in a movie respond to that with okay well what's wrong with other girls why do you think so poorly my entire gender that being as little like a girl as possible as a high compliment just once I want to see that but alas internalized misogyny when you see and absorb these messages from a young age it's easy to be tacitly taught that girls on the whole are bad and that not being like them is desirable it's thus unsurprising that some women react to this lesson by trying very hard to distance themselves from other women when the TV and movie representation of other girls is generally as shallow and unlikable people while our female protagonists are often portrayed as unique in their depth and intelligence it makes sense that a lot of young girls are going to start to believe that they are the only girl out there with intelligence and depth this would also serve to explain why this is a phase a lot of women grow out of as they get older while we never fully stop being susceptible to media messages once our worldview become shaped a lot more by the people we interact with and by what coming-of-age movies tell us other women are like we can gain a much more accurate and fair understanding of how our peers actually work the fact that romance tends to factor into a lot of this media is also particularly interesting generally speaking when love is involved in this kind of media our protagonists tend to be praised by men for their lack of traditional femininity which some might argue can kind of teach us to hate on femininity and other women for male approval and the idea that n logs are primarily seeking to distinguish themselves from other women so that men will like them or see them as cool is a really prevalent one I already talked a bit about groups on Facebook and reddit designed to make fun of analogs but what's also notable about this that many of these groups specifically allude to the fact that n logs are primarily seeking out approval from men we have Facebook groups like imagine being such a pick me ass [ __ ] who primarily criticized in their words women who degrade humiliate and shame other women in an attempt to get picked get picked tends to mean being romantically desired by a man although this can also broadly mean wanting to be seen as cool or one of the guys by men there are also groups with names like your shipment of male approval is on its way which are common to invoke in response to women to writing other women once again the implication is that n logs are doing so explicitly to have men approve of them I think overall this is the most popular perception as to where the N log phenomenon comes from and it's definitely the one that gets talked about the most part of that I think comes from the fact that there is some truth to it we do grow up with media representations of girls who are extremely shallow feminine and unintelligent being people who we should mock and while it's not like films that celebrate women in all their forms don't exist it's still a prevalent enough problem that it definitely has shaped a lot of our perceptions of what women were like when we were younger however I'm not entirely convinced that the primary reason the nlog phenomenon exists is because women with internalized misogyny are trying to get picked by men to be honest and no offense to the guys in my audience but to me this feels like it's further reinforcing the idea that no matter how a woman acts she's doing it to impress a man I mean when we have prominent cultural figures asserting that the only reason a woman would wear makeup or high heels at works to attract men while we simultaneously have people claiming the only reason the woman would aggressively reject makeup in high heels is to attract men it kind of makes you wonder whether people think we have any agency at all and the idea that just because a woman is doing something shitty it's because she wants a man to approve of her just furthers the notion that men are the central factors in all of the decisions we make while this might be why some women choose to vocally distance themselves from other girls I don't think this is broadly true I have a horrible confession to make to you guys from when I was 14 to maybe 15 and a half I considered myself an anti-feminist I pulled away from it about a year before gamergate happened because I realized that a lot of what I was getting outraged about was carefully designed to make me angry and didn't represent the bulk of what feminism actually was I only followed anti social justice warriors most of whom claimed to be leftists who just thought social justice warriors were making all of us look ridiculous so the only representations of feminism I ever saw were the worst of this movement carefully curated by those people I would see turfs who claimed all trans women were evil colonizers people claiming hair conditioners were sexist and people saying they straight-up didn't care about men's problems and only wanted supremacy now in retrospect obviously much of what I saw was either made up or taken out of context and of the stuff that was true it turns out you can hate Terps while still believing in the tenets of intersectional feminism but at the time this is what I thought feminism was and when I did venture into tags like anti feminist women and I would see a lot of posts essentially claiming that any woman who didn't call herself a feminist was only doing so to make men like her and at the time that pissed me off so much like you want to further the idea that women have autonomy but you're saying women can't form independent beliefs without trying to impress a man who's the real sexist here now obviously in retrospect I was the real sexist year but the idea that women's primary motivations for what they do have to send her around trying to impress guys is still kind of a shitty one which at least in my experience wasn't true and being told that was why I had my beliefs was one of the reasons I didn't realize sooner that I was being a massive dingus so why else might women end up being n logs and is the idea of the quintessential n log just as flawed of the idea of the quintessential other girl well it's complicated I think the idea that the main reason women might seek to distance themselves from more feminine women is internalized misogyny has some validity but I think it also goes down a bit too easy for my tastes it's easy to see a woman loudly and actively declare I'm not like you and conclude that the problem is endemic to her she's experiencing internalized misogyny she's infected with the same sickness society as a whole has and she's in the wrong for shaming us for doing what we like it's not entirely wrong but it's overly simplistic and doesn't permit any real introspection on our part for one thing I think it's worth taking a look at which women feel the need to claim they're not like other women and push themselves away from feminine things let's look back at that tweet that asserts that growing up means getting over your unnecessary hatred of pink sure some of that comes from the fact that women in movies who wear a lot of pink are portrayed as objects of our mockery but for those of us who had unlocked tendencies when we were younger try to think back and remember what your relationship with pink clothing was like as a kid for a lot of us paint clothing pink school supplies paint birthday parties and pink toys were pushed on us like nobody's business as you grow up there's a lot less active pressure to dress like a Disney Princess all the time but for a lot of young girls who grew up having long hair and paint clothes and Barbies foisted upon them with no alternative there's something powerful in rejecting that now a child saying I hate pink because pink is dumb is not necessarily going to be the most articulate about her feelings but for a lot of people that hatred of feminine things didn't explicitly come from the notion that feminine things is bad so much as the notion that feminine is what you must be of course those two things aren't mutually exclusive but I think it's fair to say there's quite a bit more pressure in society for little girls to be feminine than for little girls to not be feminine as a result it makes sense that you're going to have a lot of people react by rejecting that pressure as vocally as they're able even if they're not always the most articulate and woke about it like yeah women who aren't like other girls can be really shitty to women who like keeping their hair long or painting their nails are wearing makeup but this character that hating feminine things explicitly means that you always have internalized misogyny misses out on a big part of the picture and that's that there is a real pressure for many women to conform to society's mold of femininity of course society's mold of femininity for grown-ass women doesn't look like frills and pink and Disney Princesses which is why it's a lot easier to not vocally hate those things when you're 25 as opposed to when you're eight but there's still a pressure to look effortlessly beautiful to wear makeup just enough that people can't tell you're wearing makeup to have your hair done just right so it looks like you woke up looking perfect to be perfectly smooth while never alluding to having to dedicate any time to it lest you look high-maintenance in effect that means there exists a pressure to be the effortlessly beautiful other girl this is reinforced both systemically and on a personal level for one there's real evidence to suggest that women who wear makeup in the workplace and are perceived as attractive are paid more and treated better than women who don't do this this isn't Universal in all jobs you're probably not going to get a promotion for wearing heels on the job as a female welder but societal pressure for women not to appear overly masculine is a real thing and it absolutely hurts women who want to cut their hair or not shave their legs or go makeup free certainly a lot of that pressure comes from society on a whole being misogynistic but many women can and do reinforce those pressures on each other as well the idea that you can apply this dynamic of oppression wear less feminine women are somehow the oppressors of more feminine women doesn't really hold up that doesn't mean women are never bullied for being too feminine or too pretty if you bully someone you are a bad person but a lot of the conversations surrounding and logs are too quick to frame it automatically as less feminine women always bullying more feminine women which just doesn't reflect a lot of situations people are quick to apply the term internalized misogyny to a woman scoffing at another woman for wearing heels but the term internalized misogyny doesn't really get used to refer to women bullying other women for being lesbians or disabled or trans or not feminine enough a lot of the time when an end log says I'm not like you it's because she's been told repeatedly by her peers you're not like us and while yes the stereotype of the airheaded dumb-blonde mean other girl is just that a stereotype there absolutely do exist girls who exclude and bully other girls on the basis of how they look and how they dress and it makes sense that many people especially many young people who have been severely bullied and socially excluded from other girls are not going to have the most favorable view of being like those other girls in effect when misogyny in this context is used more for a hatred of femininity than a hatred of women that can equate being feminine with being a woman and that can really screw over women who don't conform to gender roles in a variety of ways by implying they're somehow privileged or that their desire to not be feminine as a result of the hatred of women of course that doesn't mean a girl who says all the girls in my school are so stupid and airheaded and I'm the only one who's smart and reads books is in the right that's still an exceptionally narrow view to take on other women and it still reinforces the idea that you have to choose between being a multi-faceted human being and looking a certain way but a lot of people do act to feel this way because they feel bullied and socially excluded and while that doesn't excuse someone implying everyone and their gender but them is bad it doesn't mean we should broaden our scope in terms of who we criticize and why I also think it's worth mentioning that creating the stereotype of this evil less feminine woman who universe Eliza's all other women as silly and trivial mrs. Oden part of the picture and that's that implying women are dumb and only care about boys and make up an art capable of rational thought is 100% not unique to women guys do it too and we don't have specific negative labels we ascribe only to guys for implying women are bad and dumb take this whole meme about guys versus girls in the locker room generally the framing is that girls are busy gossiping and talking about frivolous things while guys are being quirky look how unique the boys are guys they're so quirky in addition we have people making fun of women on the basis of how they dress and what music they listen to aka the whole problem with end logs in the first place under the guise of making fun of n logs even when they haven't said or done anything to imply that about themselves see memes like this which make fun of girls who wear chokers and say they have a mental illness and listen to the Arctic Monkeys see if she smokes and dyes her hair and listens to Billy Eilish that's bad we don't like girls who do that this is the thing many girls do but not me I don't do that I don't listen to Billy Eilish and we're thigh-highs because I'm not like other girls in effect what happens is that in our attempts to criticize women who mock and shame other women we've just created another archetype of woman who it's okay to make fun of and in doing so we've created a really specific image of the type of person who shames women and is bad which means we've completely ignored the fact that a many feminine women also bully and shame less feminine women and B many men also fully in shame both more and less feminine women and in both these cases that's not the behavior we're focusing on instead we're focusing all our energy on criticizing the archetypical and log this whole phenomenon of women loudly and aggressively insisting they're not like other girls is a really complicated one that happens for a variety of ways and in a variety of contexts we've constructed this archetypical idea of what an other girl is and she often gets mocked and treated as a representation of what all women are like attempts to explain why this happens ranges from these women are taught femininity is bad - these women are trying to attract men - a combination of these reasons and certainly insisting all girls but yourself are bad is a really shitty thing to do it essentially implies your whole gender is lesser and ends up shaving women for harmless traits like enjoying certain music and certain styles of dress if you talk about other women like this that is bad and you should stop that being said while we've created this persona of a quintessential other girl to mock we've also created this persona of a quintessential not like other girls girl to mock and that's not better in effect that leads to us deciding that because some women who shame other women possess certain traits like dyeing your hair or wearing thigh-highs it is now acceptable and okay to mock women who have those traits this is harmful for a few reasons for one it frames the bulk of women making fun of other women as nlog shaving other girls even though a lot of this bullying actually happens the other way around and is a motivating factor for girls to distance themselves from other girls in the first place some women who dress like this bully other women sometimes so it's moral to make fun of all women who dress like this is bad logic whether you're talking about the girl in combat boots or the girl in kitten heels it also obfuscates the fact that there are many men who do this to women too and effectively creates a socially acceptable type of girl to mop under the guise of feminism when there are men who make fun of women for being too girly and there are also men who make fun of women for trying too hard to be quirky it's not great that the only face of people who make fun of women for how they act and dress is another woman of course many women do bully other women for a variety of reasons and we also shouldn't pretend it's only men doing that either I think on the whole we just need to be more not [ __ ] in terms how they treat each other part of that means that we need to move away from these societal pressures that reinforce the idea that there's only one way to look or dress or that rejecting this perspective means that there's something wrong with you as an individual we also need to take a broader outlook in terms of understanding why large groups of people all feel a certain way instead of just assuming they're inherently bad as individuals when there's a massive gendered phenomenon of women seeking to distance themselves from other women in a way that doesn't really exist for men we shouldn't and can't stop short of just assuming it's because women are somehow naturally predisposed to hate one another usually when this degree of hatred for one another is happening it's because someone somewhere benefits from it even something as simple as we push girls into playing with aggressively pink toys and boys into playing with aggressively blue toys tends to happen because someone is making money off of it and they don't want us to leave behind these made-up social roles and pressures because not pushing one another into spending hundreds of dollars of makeup designed to make it look like you're not wearing makeup doesn't make them a billion dollars I watched a movie the other day from Norway called blind about an author who loses her sight and begins to stay in her apartment all the time as she isolates herself from the rest of the world she becomes more and more paranoid as time goes on that her husband doesn't care for her anymore and she begins to imagine these complex scenarios about what's going on away from her she quickly begins to lose hold on what isn't isn't real and at times we don't even know it gets really complex and really cool very quickly and I won't spoil it but in effect it's about the harms of isolation and the necessity of connecting with others and the whole time I was watching it I was just thinking about how when we're young girls who feel socially isolated from our peers the ideas we construct of what their social lives must be like are so warped to the extent that we think we're the only people in the world with real feelings we need to fight that and we need to understand there are entire industries predicated on pressuring us to look in these certain ways our kindness to one another and ourselves is a necessary antidote starting from a place of love for one another is never going to be universal because there's people who are going to be dicks no matter what and you're not going to dismantle every harmful social force in the world through kindness but you also can't dismantle every harmful social force in the world without kindness and it's a necessary starting point for treating one another with respect I watched the film blind on movie who I'd like to thank for their sponsorship basically movie is like having an ongoing Film Festival at your fingertips which for someone like me who loves movies is amazing every day they hand select a new film often something that's showing at a film festival somewhere a cult classic or an underrated pick that it's hard to find anywhere else movies stay on for 30 days and a new one is handpicked by a human curator every day and there are no ads which means that no matter where you live you basically have a permanent Film Festival at your fingertips if you're interested in watching blind to any of the amazing Halloween movies they have right now like white zombie with Bela Lugosi or a host of really cool foreign films you can try a movie free for 30 days at movie.com slash serozha that's movie.com slash there's a god I wish I had access to film festivals for free I don't think I'm on that level of influencer yet be kind and roll credits [Music] if you're wondering where I got this mug I have fantastic news for you and that is that this is one of my official merch items which I am so excited about the link is in my description so if you're interested in getting this mug these super cool enamel pins that I'm just like so proud of they turned out amazing I'm so excited about them this awesome t-shirt with like the Zen tea logo on it or these really cool stickers which basically like you can do anything with you can put them on your laptop you can put them on your fridge you can put them on your water bottle you can put them on a cow and have it be an official Sara's then cow it's probably gonna start making video essays in a few days you can do all of those amazing things if you would like any of this merch just follow the link in my description yes I'm very happy and proud and excited about all of this I love this mug so much

Channel: Sarah Z

Views: 609,445

Rating: 4.9266291 out of 5

Keywords: sarah z, video essay, video essayist, analysis, not like other girls, i'm not like other girls, nlog, feminist, feminist analysis, feminism, mean girls, reddit, twitter, tumblr, media criticism, review, reviewer, youtube criticism, philosophy, breadtube, film review, lindsay ellis, tiffany ferg, tiffanyferg, political commentary

Id: BNCWW80WTPY

Length: 28min 48sec (1728 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/randomonmain]

Sarah Z's video on this phenomenon was really interesting. What do you guys think of it?

[u/Situationalists]

She seems like she wants to broadcast herself saying as many smart words as possible... guess she’s not like the other girls because she uses smart words.

[u/TheSpookiestGoat]

She's making a video about the not like other girls thing, watch the video a bit before you judge it

[u/Movie-head-]

I love her!