Shadowing Practice: why i stopped calling myself a "girls girl" - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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I am not a girl's girl.
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I am not a girl's girl.
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No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You what?
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I was rooting for you.
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We were all rooting for you.
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How dare you?
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Before you guys click off this video, let me explain.
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I think I have like a genuine,
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physical, visceral reaction to every single time I hear someone use the term girl's girl.
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And for like the longest time, I couldn't articulate why.
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Like I just didn't know why that term bothered me so much, but it does.
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Let's get into it, guys.
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Because to say I'm not a girl's girl and to even question that feels like this horrible crime.
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You might as well just get on stage and announce that you hate all women.
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But first, we need to backtrack a little bit and define the term girl's girl for everyone.
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Who the hell do you think you are?
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Half-five!
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So the term girl's girl didn't emerge out of nowhere.
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She was born as the opposite of pick me.
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And if you somehow missed that entire era of the internet, lucky you.
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The pick me girl was supposedly a woman that put other women down to gain male approval.
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It was that girl that just says I get along better with guys.
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She doesn't wear that much makeup She's just like a natural girl,
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you know, and most of all she's just not like other girls
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and look pygmies are real I have met a couple of pygmies in my lifetime.
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I'm sure everyone has they absolutely exist I would honestly argue
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that most women go through a pygmy phase in their teenage
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years Your hormones are calibrating you're adjusting to the male population for the first time
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and you just end up doing weird Embarrassing things to be noticed
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and I think that's honestly a pretty normal part of just
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growing up Most of us just cringe about it later and move on.
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But the internet does not move on.
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The internet never moves on.
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Miss Jackson!
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What happened next is what always happens with internet discourse.
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The concept expanded and expanded and expanded
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until PickMe stopped meaning women that undermines other women
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and started meaning any woman that doesn't perform female solidarity and femininity in the exact way that the internet has deemed correct.
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And on the other side of the coin,
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the girl's girl became the gold standard,
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the aspirational identity, the right way to be a girl.
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So now we have a binary.
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You're either a girl's girl,
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which makes you good, supportive,
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trustworthy, a real one, authentic,
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you're a real woman, or you're a pick me,
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which means you're a sellout,
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a traitor, a man lover,
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a whore, basically just the worst kind of girl ever.
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And the threshold for falling on the wrong side of the line is remarkably, almost comically low.
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You don't want to share where you got your boots.
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Pick me made a joke that was even mildly critical of women as a group.
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You're a pick me, not a girl's girl.
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Are you a private, competitive,
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or even a blunt person?
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You're a pick me.
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We have created a sorting mechanism for women,
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and the criteria is, are you agreeable enough?
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The way the internet uses girl's girl has nothing to do with supporting women and everything to do with controlling them.
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So I remember seeing this TikTok a while back,
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and I'll put it up here.
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I had one of the most unhinged interactions with a girl
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that i've had in a long time today and it's just
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so weird to me because i think i forget
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that not every girl is a girl's girl essentially there's this
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woman at a market in silver lake she sees another woman
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wearing these cowboy boots she goes up to her ass where do your boots
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and the other woman says i don't want to tell you
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i would have never done this to you i would have
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never done this this interaction gets posted on tiktok it gets like over seven million views
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and everyone just unanimously decided that the girl that didn't want to share where she bought her boots from was evil,
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was a pick me, was like the scum of the fucking earth and ultimately was not a girl's girl.
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And within days even brands hopped onto this.
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The boots I think were just from Urban Outfitters and Urban Outfitters,
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the brand, completely rebranded around this moment.
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Urban Outfitters sent out promo text no gatekeeping here.
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Like a woman's minor social boundary became a whole marketing campaign.
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This is where it gets interesting to me because when you actually list out what being a girl's girl requires,
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when you strip away like the branding,
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the TikToks, the snarky comments,
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the checklist looks like this.
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Be generous, be supportive, be not competitive,
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be warm, be accommodating, never be publicly critical of another woman,
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always uplift, always share, always hype.
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Now, I want you to listen to that list again
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and tell me that just isn't a repackaged version of every expectation
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that the patriarchy has imposed on women for centuries because that is the list.
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It's always been the list.
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Be nice, be pleasant, be agreeable,
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don't be too much, don't make waves, definitely don't be difficult.
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Women have been conditioned into agreeableness for so long
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that it's basically just like ingrained in our freaking firmware at this point
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and what the girl's girl era has done to that conditioning,
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which we should have been interrogating in the first place,
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which feminism was supposed to actually help us unlearn,
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turned it into an identity,
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a feminist identity no less.
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So if anyone ever puts us back on this expectation
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that you should be endlessly warm and generous and accommodating to women at all times,
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you're not just being rude, you're being anti-feminist.
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You're failing the sisterhood.
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You're not a girl's girl.
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And that's where it gets good.
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You can't critique the expectation of agreeableness without being disagreeable.
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And being disagreeable is the one thing that kicks you out of the sisterhood.
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And what's wild is who's actually enforcing this because it's not men, it's women.
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You cannot be for real.
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Oh my God, you for real.
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The girl's girl framework has essentially outsourced patriarchal policing to women themselves.
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We have become our own oppressors, guys.
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Think back to the cowboy boots lady, okay?
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She didn't insult anyone.
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She didn't compete with anyone.
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She didn't tear anyone down.
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She just said, no, I don't want to tell you where my boots are from.
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And yes, maybe that wasn't the super friendly or super socially acceptable thing to say,
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but she had a boundary.
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And the punishment for that wasn't anything from men.
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It was from thousands of women who essentially just called her a pick-me and not a girl's girl.
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Like when you fix a stranger's hair in the bathroom,
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when you bond with your girlfriend at the club,
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when you tell a girl that her outfit looks amazing,
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these are lovely gestures, genuinely.
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But the moment that these gestures become mandatory,
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the moment a woman is punished for not performing them,
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you're not describing solidarity.
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What that is, is just compliance.
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And here's the part that I actually find quite funny.
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The entire premise of a girl's girl is that she centers women.
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She puts women first.
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She's built past the petty,
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man-obsessed era of the pick-me movement and is now focused on what matters most, women supporting women.
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But look at what a girl's girl actually does.
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Look at what earns you that title.
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You help your friends get ready for a night out but you're getting ready for what?
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For whom?
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You share your beauty secrets,
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but beauty by what standards?
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You don't steal someone's man,
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which frames women as inherent threats in a competition that is by definition organized around male attention.
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So much of what earns someone a girl's girl status is still focused around attractiveness,
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desirability, and the rules of heterosexual dating.
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Like the cowboy boots drama.
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If you like strip away the girlhood solidarity language,
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what it's really about is style.
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Not willing to share her style.
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And style is looking good.
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So it's really just about the currency of being attractive and whether you're willing to share your cheat codes.
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And who gets called not a girl's girl most often?
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Women who are competitive, women who are blunt,
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who are private, women who aren't necessarily super warm.
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In other words, women who don't necessarily make themselves easy to be around,
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which has always been the requirement, right?
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Be easy, be pleasant, don't be a problem.
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The whole girl's girl prison is still just about making women palatable.
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And then there's a part where all this becomes a product because of course it did.
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The girl's girl quickly became a social identity to a brand identity.
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Influencers, brands, they started selling girl's girl totes,
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girl's girl merch, shirts, hats.
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It was like the same energy that they used to sell feminist merch five years ago.
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Girl's girl became absorbed by this content machine and it became an aesthetic.
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It became a content category.
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It became a very distinct trope online.
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Someone I saw described it as kitsch feminist slop.
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That's pretty good.
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That's pretty good.
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Because that's exactly what it is.
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It's essentially just feel-good feminism.
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It looks like solidarity.
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It sounds like solidarity.
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It is, in practice, a marketing strategy.
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And this matters because it replaces substance with performance.
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When supporting women gets reduced down to sharing where you got your boots from and complimenting strangers' outfits,
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the definition of solidarity shrinks until it's almost meaningless.
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You don't have to change anything structural.
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You don't have to sit with disagreement or complexity.
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You just have to be nice and share where you got your clothes from.
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What the hell is that?
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A dress.
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Says who?
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Calvin Klein.
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So I want to be clear about something because if you're only half listening to this,
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you probably hate me at this point.
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I'm not making the argument that women should just be mean to each other
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and see each other as threats and not help each other out and just be super ultra competitive.
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Of course not.
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I'm definitely not nostalgic for an era
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when women tore each other down for male attention and I'm not like other girls was such a dominant personality trait.
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We all agree that was bad,
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but I just think that we overcorrected into something that also is bad,
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but it's just a harder thing to verbalize and articulate because it's so like,
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it's like a feminist identity at this point.
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Here's what really bothers me about being a girl's girl.
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You have to do things like this.
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Share your lip gloss in a club bathroom.
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Tell a stranger her outfit is cute.
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Hype someone up in Instagram comments sharing where you got your freaking cowboy boots.
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And that's it.
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That is literally the bar.
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That is what supporting women has come to.
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Surface level pleasantries.
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These are like micro gestures of solidarity that cost you nothing.
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And look, these things are nice.
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They're good.
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They make you feel good.
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Obviously, it feels nice when someone compliments you on the street.
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I'm not mad at anyone for being kind in a bathroom,
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but I feel like we've confused these tiny micro moments of support with real support
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and they're definitely just not the same thing.
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You know what actually looks like to support women it looks like showing up for your friend
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when her relationship is falling apart not just in the first week
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but in month freaking five
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and she's still not over him it's advocating for women at work who are still underpaid even
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if that's inconvenient for you it looks like having hard honest conversations with your friend
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when they're fucking up instead of just gassing them up
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when they really need to hear the truth it looks like fighting for maternal rights reproductive productive rights, real shit.
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This stuff like doesn't just fit into a TikTok.
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The work is unglamorous, it's uncomfortable, it's hard.
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It takes a lot of freaking time.
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And it usually doesn't come with a bunch of praise,
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a title, it doesn't come with,
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you know, the glory of being a freaking girl's girl.
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And that's why the girl's girl's brand just doesn't touch it.
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Because real solidarity requires effort.
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It requires sacrifice.
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It requires disagreement, telling another woman that she is wrong holding her accountable,
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having conversations that aren't fun.
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The girl's girl version of feminism skips all of that
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and jumps straight to the part that feels good and looks good on camera.
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And it ties it all in a neat little bow and calls it the sisterhood.
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And I think what just really freaking pisses me off is
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like women who use the term girl's girl most are the quickest to freaking turn and tear another girl apart.
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Like I don't know if you guys share this experience,
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but I feel like a of people I know that use the term girl's girl unironically,
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they will say all these things like,
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oh my god, this girl's so nice because she shared me her lip gloss.
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Oh my god, she looks so pretty.
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And then immediately turn and say the most hateful gossip-filled thing about another woman.
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Make it make sense, guys.
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Make it make freaking sense.
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The girl's girl versus pick me binary is not new.
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It's just the latest version of a game that sorts women into good
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and bad based on how well they perform the version of femininity that the internet society has decided for them.
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The rules change every decade.
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In the 2000s, you were supposed to be the cool girl,
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chill, low maintenance, one of the guys.
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In 2010, you're supposed to be the girl boss,
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ambitious, leaning in, having it all.
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And in 2020, you're now supposed to be the girl's girl.
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Warm, generous, endlessly supportive, and never difficult.
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But the underlying structure is exactly the same.
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There is a right way to be a woman.
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And if you deviate from it,
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other women will let you know.
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Honestly, the most radical thing that girls,
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women, feminism could do right now is just to let women be.
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Let them be generous or guarded.
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Let them not share your freaking cowboy boots.
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Let them be warmed or reserved without turning every one of their personality traits into something
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that dictates how supportive they are to the gender.
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I feel like I've been thinking about this topic for a really long time
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and I've never really had the right words to articulate it and honestly I'm really open to conversation.
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Maybe I'm completely off about this.
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Maybe girl's girl is a really good thing for feminism
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and really good thing for women and we should hold more women to this standard.
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But I feel like this term has just always made me uncomfortable.
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I just hate how women use it to essentially police other women.
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I think there definitely can be a balance here or honestly maybe I just hate the way that the internet uses it.
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Girl's girl, it just.. and yeah I think we'll leave at that.
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Let me know what you guys think about girl's girl in the comments below.
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Bye!
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will practice listening and speaking using a captivating video discussing the term "girl's girl" and its implications in contemporary society. By engaging with the content, you will enhance your comprehension, pronunciation, and overall fluency in English. This video offers a perfect opportunity to explore the nuances of language and societal labels while improving your spoken English through engaging and relevant material. As you learn, aim to apply the techniques of shadowing, which will help you mimic the speaker's tone and rhythm, allowing you to improve English pronunciation effectively.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Girl's girl: A term used to describe a woman who is perceived as supportive and aligned with female solidarity.
- Pick me: A term describing a woman who seeks male approval often at the expense of other women.
- Aspirational identity: A desired persona that one aims to embody or achieve.
- Binary: A division into two mutually exclusive categories.
- Emotional reaction: A strong affective response to a particular stimulus or situation.
- Female solidarity: Support and unity among women.
- Authentic: Being true to oneself and genuine.
- Undermine: To weaken or damage something, often subtly.
Practice Tips
To maximize your learning experience from this video, consider using a shadowing app that allows you to listen and repeat phrases in real-time. During the video, pay attention to the speaker's intonation and pace, as they express strong feelings about societal labels and identity. Start by watching the video once to grasp its overall message, then replay it a few times.
While shadowing, focus on mirroring not only the words but also the emotional inflections present in the speaker's voice. This will assist in improving English pronunciation and enable you to convey emotions effectively in your own speaking practice. Additionally, if you're preparing for the IELTS speaking practice, this is a perfect opportunity to incorporate complex topics and vocabulary into your speech.
Lastly, utilize learn English with YouTube tutorials or discussions on similar themes to expand your vocabulary and deepen your understanding. This method not only increases your listening skills but enhances your ability to articulate thoughts on current social issues, making you a more capable English speaker.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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