Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Everett
It’s hard to forget the searing “Cool Girl” screed from Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl and the 2015 movie adaptation of the same name. To refresh, it goes something like this:
“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, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
The wild thing is: Barring a few, this list of adjectives reads like the character description of one Andie Anderson, protagonist of 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which turns 20 years old this week. Can you believe a) that Andie perfected the cool girl schtick while Flynn hadn’t even yet published a novel about it, and b) we are so old?