NLOGs (Not Like Other Girls) and the ‘Other Girl

NLOGs (Not Like Other Girls) and the ‘Other Girl’ - internalised misogyny and the harmful effects it has on women

“She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.” Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792 To some women the worst thing you can be is ‘like other girls’. On the internet and in real life, there is a significant backlash, largely by young women, against other women who look or dress in traditionally feminine ways or primarily enjoy popular femineine media and music. This often takes the form of phrases like ‘I’m not like other girls’ and 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 NLOGs for short). Many people feel as though NLOGs are simply pitting women against one another, one Odyssey think-piece by writer Kelsey Dilling 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 women have been on both sides of the NLOG trend at different points in our lives. Many girls have at some point gone through a phase of hating this archetypal idea of “other girls’’ and eschewing 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 NLOGs to a certain degree, there is a clear 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. 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? 2

What is a NLOG? No two “NLOGs” are exactly the same, as there are many ways to be “not like other girls”. It’s difficult to group women who are “not like other girls” into any one specific social category, rather, the common thread tying all of these posts and comments together isn’t about any unique identity that the NLOG 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 isn’t, “Who are the NLOGs”. It’s “who are the Other Girls”? While what NLOGs are tends to vary by subculture, the universal image of what she isn’t tends to be pretty consistent - The Other Girl. We see the ‘Other Girl’ in all kinds of popular media; she’s typically blonde, 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. The Other Girl is also represented as an archetype media, typically as antagonists, bad because they’re mean and rich, but also because they’re popular, vapid, and fundamentally shallower people than our multifaceted protagonists, who are often valued for their wit and lack of conformity to cultural norms. Most representations of the NLOG and ‘Other Girl’ serve to highlight the protagonist’s awkwardness compared to the flawless beauty of the Other Girl, imbuing further sexist ideals of female beauty. These representations seem to impart a level of authenticity upon their protagonists that isn’t awarded to the rest of society and to the ‘Other Girl’, more interested in makeup and revealing clothes than intellectual pursuits, and don’t seem to be capable of any individual, rational thought. This concept tends to rely on a lot of false binaries when distinguishing between the protagonists and Other Girls - that you can either be an independent human who likes reading and hoodies, or a vapid Other Girl who likes lipstick and miniskirts. The idea that you could 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 strawman embodying everything the author hates about society. So, why does this phenomenon seem to almost exclusively exist within women? Broadly speaking, we’re not typically seeing men who prefer doing something typically ‘unique’ over something more common, feel the need to excessively imply the ‘Other Guys’ are dumb and shallow and they’re the only multifaceted guys in the world. 3

Basically, It’s misogyny. What if the “Other Girl” is Good and what if the main reason NLOGs don’t like Other Girls is because society is fundamentally misogynistic? This is the thesis of a lot of arguments discussing NLOGs, including that of a video by YouTuber Tiffany Ferg titled “I’m Not Like Other Girls”. She argues that we’re taught from a very young age to hate all things typically associated with women - nail polish, clothing, makeup and anything else traditionally feminine - and deride it 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 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 femininity might lead us to believe that women are lesser, which we might apply both to ourselves and to other women - typically called “internalized misogyny” (which is a controversial term but shouldn’t be).

Our dislike for women is reinforced in a few ways, one is popular media. For example the phrase, “You’re not like other girls” has been a compliment from men in romance movies and books for ages, and it’s typically considered to be a very high compliment. 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 of my whole gender that being as little like a girl as possible is a high compliment”? When you see and absorb these messages from a young age, it’s easy to be 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. Generally speaking, when love is involved in 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. When the TV and movie representation of Other Girls is generally as shallow, unlikable people, while our female protagonists are portrayed as unique in their depth and intelligence, it makes sense that a lot of young girls are going to start to believe they are the only girl out there with intelligence and depth. That would also serve to explain why this is a phase a lot of women grow out of as they get older, once our worldview becomes shaped a lot more by the people we interact with than 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. 4

And the idea that NLOGs 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. Many online groups calling NLOGs ‘pick me’s’, alluding to the fact that NLOGs are primarily seeking out approval from men (‘Get picked’ tends to mean being romantically desired by a man, although this can also more broadly mean wanting to be seen as “cool” or “one of the guys” by men). 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 to me this just 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 work is to attract men, while we simultaneously have people claiming the only reason a woman would aggressively reject makeup or high heels is to attract men, it kind of makes you wonder whether people think we have any agency at all.

So why else might women end up being NLOGs? And is the idea of the quintessential NLOG just as flawed as the idea of the quintessential Other Girl? Again, It’s Misogyny, the idea that the main reason women might seek to distance themselves from more feminine women is internalized misogyny. But I also think that this idea blames the individual and concludes that the problem is endemic to her and that’s overly simplistic. This characterization that Hating Feminine Things explicitly means you always have internalized misogyny misses out on a big part of the picture, and that’s that there’s a real pressure for many women to conform to society’s mold of femininity. 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 are treated better than women who don’t do this. Societal pressure for women not to appear overly 5

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 the 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 where less feminine women are somehow the oppressors of more feminine women doesn’t hold up, a lot of the conversations surrounding NLOGs are too quick to frame it automatically as less feminine women always bullying more feminine women.

In effect, when misogyny in this context is used more for a hatred of femininity than of women, that can equate being a woman with being feminine and that can ignore women who don’t conform to gender roles in a variety of ways by implying they’re somehow privileged or that their desire not to be feminine is a result of the hatred of women. Creating this stereotype of the evil, less feminine woman who universalizes all other women as silly and trivial misses out on part of the picture. And that’s that implying women are dumb and only care about boys and makeup and aren’t capable of rational thought is 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. In effect, what happens is that in our attempt to criticize women who mock and shame other women, we’ve just created another archetype of women 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 bully and shame both more and less feminine women, and in both those cases, that’s not the behaviour we’re focusing on. Instead, we’re focusing all our energy on criticizing the archetypical NLOG. 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 who possess certain traits it is now acceptable and okay to mock women who have those traits. This is highly problematic as It obfuscates the fact that there are many men do this to women too, and effectively creates a socially acceptable type of girl to mock under the guise of feminism. 6

On the whole, we just need to be more kind in terms how we treat each other. Part of that means we need to move away from the societal pressures that reinforce the idea that there’s only one way to look or dress, and that rejecting that perspective means 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 at assuming it’s just because women are somehow naturally predisposed to hate each other. Usually when this degree of hatred for one another is happening, it’s because someone benefits from it. We need to understand that there are entire industries predicated on pressuring us to look and be certain ways. Starting from a place of love for one another isn’t ever going to be universal, because there are some people who are going to be terrible 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.

However, more recently there is a phenomenon of young men participating in this culture too. Historically we haven’t seen 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. However, due to social media apps such as tiktok, and the rise of ‘alt’ groups, male stereotypes are instead sorted into sections rather than one group pitted against another. These groups include the ‘alt’ boys, ‘skaters’, and ‘femme boys’, they have existed for decades but are now being reinforced through social media. However, this doesn’t seem to be a mass phenomenon across a huge number of young boys the same way the NLOG phenomenon exists for young girls. But will this phenomenon grow for men in our society? and if it does, will it cause the same level of harm as it does for the women of our society?