The cool girl has retired: Why women today have bid farewell to being 'cool'

For every emotion that bubbled to my conscious mind, stronger still was the urge to flatten it into "Oh, I barely noticed. It doesn’t bother me." And that’s how a lot of us have spent our childhoods, teenage years, and eventually young adulthood. To care is to be uncool, and to be blissfully unbothered is desirability at its finest.

To care is cringe, to not is to be fiercely wanted.

To be emotional is unseemly, unless it fits within carefully constructed boundaries of aestheticised expression.

Perform vulnerability, but only at specific moments and never inconvenience anyone.

Above all, the crown jewel of feminine desirability was coolness in every way.

For a long time, women mistook this performance for freedom. Increasingly, however, it feels like we’ve reached the final act of the 'cool girl era.'

The Exhaustion Of Being Unbothered

The problem with being cool was that it required an extraordinary amount of effort.

For years, women were encouraged to minimise their needs in the name of desirability. To be accommodating, not honest. To be low-maintenance, not expressive. To become experts in swallowing disappointment before anyone could accuse them of asking for too much.

Somewhere along the way, being unbothered stopped feeling empowering and started feeling lonely. And deeply alienating.

Regardless of what popular culture often suggests, most people do not actually want to be loved at arm’s length. We want to be seen at our lowest and still held. And you can’t do that if we’re standing out of reach.

The Return Of Yearning

If the 2010s belonged to the 'cool girl,' the 2020s increasingly belong to the 'yearner.'

The internet is full of women openly discussing crushes, heartbreaks, loneliness, desire, friendship, grief, and longing. Contrary to the culture that was fed to us: unbothered, unaffected, and effortlessly cool (which required more effort than we would ever be able to articulate).

Yearning has become a cultural language.

Women are admitting they care. They are confessing attachment. They are discussing emotional needs with a level of openness that would have been considered deeply uncool a decade ago.

This is not a rejection of independence. It is a rejection of emotional performance.

For years, women were told that power looked like needing nobody. Today, many are questioning whether power might instead look like honesty.

What Comes After The Cool Girl?

The woman replacing the 'cool girl' is not perfect.

She is often emotional. Sometimes contradictory. Occasionally embarrassing. She yearns. She cares too much about certain things and not enough about others. She sends the text. She admits she was hurt. She asks questions. She takes up space. Most importantly, she no longer mistakes emotional distance for sophistication. For perhaps the greatest lie of the cool girl era was that detachment made women powerful.

In reality, it often made them smaller. And if the cultural mood of the present moment tells us anything, it is this: Women are no longer interested in being admired for how little they need; they are becoming far more interested in being loved for who they actually are. 

Lead image: IMDb

Also read: The tennis necklace gets a cool-girl makeover

Also read: All the cool girls are accessorising their boots in 2025