The first problem with the mythical Other Girl is that it takes these traditionally feminine activities, roles, and interests and labels them as Undesirable. There’s absolutely no innate reason why a woman who likes football should be more valuable than a woman who likes shopping. Who the hell decided the artistry of make-up was a more vapid or meaningless hobby than learning about classic cars, anyway?
Beyond that, and more importantly, you can have exclusively feminine traits and still have depth of character.
Which leads us to the second problem. we are told that this is impossible. That if you care about how you look and like traditionally feminine things, this can only mean that you as a person are shallow and worthless. Femininity is conflated in a lot of pop culture with snobby attitudes, a lack of intellect, or “slutty” behavior–which is a whole other mess of assumptions and double-standards all its own.
It all comes to a head with this almost obsessive desire to distance ourselves from the femininie traits which have been–largely arbitrarily–declared as negative ones. We want to say, “I know how to be a woman, but I want to do it without being too much like a woman.” We end up saying, “In order to be accepted in a world where masculinity is valued, we must make ourselves as little like women as we can.”
