I was a 'pick me' girl – I thought the best thing ever was to be liked by men

Throughout my adolescence, I, like many women my age, survived on a media diet of National Lampoon films and direct-to-DVD American Pie spin-offs.

Combine that with the fact that Dane Cook was the first comic whose standup bits I ever learned by heart and you’ll understand that there was nothing in life I wanted more than to be a ‘cool girl’.

The Gen Z term for such girls is much more nuanced, they call them ‘pick me girls’. 

Addicted in equal parts to burgers, basketball, and blowjobs, ‘pick me’ girls are living embodiments of the quintessential male fantasy. And f**k me, was I good at being a male fantasy. 

To give you an idea of how genuine my commitment was to ‘not like other girls’-ing myself into the sun, there was a four-month period in 2011 where my university major was sports management, despite, as you may suspect, having no real interest in sports management.

Within a few years, I realised that the reward of male attention was not worth drinking my weight in beer every night. 

Talking about Radiohead may have been their fantasy, but listening to men talk about Radiohead certainly wasn’t mine. Moreover, the rise of the MeToo movement and the revelations around it genuinely made me want to set my former self on fire. 

Women were my tribe and I felt I betrayed them. 

I kid you not, there was a time in my life where the first thing I did when I woke up in the morning was mouth the Cool Girl monologue from Gone Girl into my bathroom mirror. 

‘Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex…’

Perhaps I thought one day Rosamund Pike would actually appear? I learned the monologue as a party trick and it inadvertently became my mantra. 

There’s a lot of ironic redemption around the character of Amy on the internet right now, almost glorifying a woman fed up with unrealistic expectations, but in retrospect, my Patrick Bateman-esque ritual wasn’t the anti-’pick me’ statement I thought it was. 

I was still quoting a David Fincher movie with a Trent Reznor soundtrack. As Margaret Atwood famously said, ‘even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy’.

New and improved, I binned ‘the chick who can hang’ persona and put my signature dedication and surgical precision into creating her antithesis. If I had to pinpoint it, my truest moment of liberation was when I found out that Courtney Love said the following about Kurt Cobain: ‘I wanted his babies. I saw something I wanted, and I got it. What’s wrong with that?’ 

There was something pleasantly disorientating about reading a woman say something so vulnerable and traditional without a shred of insecurity. 

I thought about every time I said I wasn’t looking for anything serious on a date or waited four hours to text someone back. Who was I doing that for?

Here was a woman saying plainly what she wanted and what she wanted was embarrassingly clichéd, and not only was she not judged for it – she was celebrated as one of the ultimate rock’n’roll rule breakers – and the rules she was breaking were that of the Cool Girl Code of Conduct.

Thus began my love affair with the women of modern music. I got drunk on their vulnerability and started craving the boldness of unapologetic desperation. I listened to Gwen Stefani dream about an accidental pregnancy on No Doubt’s Simple Kind of Life, as she sang, ‘I always thought I’d be a mom/Sometimes I wish for a mistake’. 

I listened to SZA use the cool girl kiss of death – the word ‘clingy’ – in her song Drew Barrymore and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard: ‘Sorry, I just need to see you/I’m sorry I’m so clingy I don’t mean to be a lot’. 

I played these vignettes over and over in my head, finding comfort in how these women made those experiences normal, and dare I even say, cool?

At Dreamland just a few weeks ago, Mitski sang, ‘if you need to be mean, be mean to me’, recounting the feeling of despair and bartering one feels in a doomed relationship. I screamed the lyrics at the top of my lungs along with her and felt any self-consciousness leave my body. 

I’m sure you’ve felt this feeling too. It happens in karaoke bars all over the world. Whenever anyone inevitably selects Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know. All patrons, young and old, scowl and sing without even looking at the screen, ‘Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theater?’

For just over four minutes, nobody gives a s**t about being a ‘cool girl’. Instead, they summon the anger of every heartbreak under the sun and proclaim, ‘does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you died? But you’re still alive!’

If I woke up in 2011 and found out that I drunk texted anything to the effect of those lyrics to a guy I was seeing, I would have a heart attack. Now I mouth them in the mirror every time I brush my teeth. 

This new girl may be cringe, but she’s got amazing taste in music. 

So if you’re considering hanging up your unspecified sports jersey, I cannot recommend it enough. 

Oh, and it turns out that if you talk a guy’s ear off about Taylor Swift, he will still very much sleep with you.

Olga Koch’s Just Friends is at Edinburgh Fringe and will be on tour around the UK until 19 November. Dates and tickets can be found in this link here.

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