Drowning in a crowd of hot people
Reflections on learning how to flirt
Last Friday, upon entering a new bar in Bushwick, I found myself delighted to discover it was filled to the brim with people I considered particularly attractive.
One survey of the plant-filled, wood-paneled space, and I couldn’t help but feel invigorated by the evening’s new potential. I was surrounded by a rare and impressive quantity of the aesthetically blessed.
“It would be a waste not to talk to at least three people,” I told my friends, and they agreed.
After one-and-a-half gin martinis (and a few glasses of wine from the previous bar), we considered our courage at a high enough level to begin our work. We performed the standard two laps around the bar to the beat of Fleetwood Mac, and before we could even strategize our next move, one of us had broken off.
I looked around my shoulder to see her in the center of a group of approximately five guys. Tall ones. I miss the introduction, but quickly get pulled into conversation with a real 6’3+ footer that went something like …
“Where do you live?”
“The East Village. What about you?”
“Oh nice! I’m in Williamsburg.”
“Nice.”
“What do you do?”
“Sorry, what?”
“What?
“Sorry, it’s so loud.”
“What do you do?”
And then I have to tell them I’m a copywriter, and they don’t know what that is anyway.
For me, these kinds of conversations are doomed before they’ve even started. I approach with such aspirational intentions that I’m never able to deviate from the traditional location, job, hometown territory and into more enjoyable banter. I dwell on what to say next, hoping my questions don’t feel basic and trying my best to appear calm, casual, cool girl. But before the conversation even gives me that opportunity, I hear …
“It was great to meet you. I’m going to get another drink,” and instead of a number, I’m left with intensified social anxiety and an identity crisis.
Rejection often hits me like a wave, sudden and consuming. Am I hard to talk to? Uninteresting? Why didn’t he laugh at my jokes? Maybe he just doesn’t like the way I look. One insecurity after another crashing into me, pulling me deeper and deeper inside myself. It feels like I’m drowning.
There I was last Friday, drowning in a crowd of hot people.
I talk to enough women about the dating world to know I’m not supposed to feel these insecurities. Just be confident. You shouldn’t care what they think. Actually, your lack of confidence is probably why you get rejected.
For the rest of the evening, I carried on dancing and chatting, pretending not to care. Inside though, I couldn’t escape the thought: Why not me?
As one of four sisters and a former all-girls school escapee attendee, the majority of my early life experiences were shaped by women.
My mom handed me and my siblings copies of Little Women and Pride and Prejudice like they were required reading. My high school was a place where yelling, “does anyone have a tampon?” down the hall and skipping your hair-washing routine for more than a few days were perfectly acceptable.
In my early life, the distance between me and testosterone kept me blissfully unaware of what it was like to be a woman in the world. I won’t claim I didn’t understand the male gaze—I grew up on rom-coms of the Meg Ryan variety—but I didn’t have to think about it in the first person.
I rushed a sorority my freshman year of college, hoping to find a similar sisterly bond to the one I had with my high school classmates. I expected a haven away from the gender I found so intimidating, so it came as a surprise when the first three things I learned were:
The only social opportunities on campus available to me would be run by fraternities.
I would need to make a valid effort to befriend these fraternity boys, so I could score my invite.
When I’m there, I would need to uphold my sorority’s reputation by behaving as a hot, chill, smart girl.
It wasn’t until college, when, for the first time in my life, boys were a regular presence and a powerful one.
Forgive my naïveté, but it was an unnatural experience to reckon with patriarchal elements like the male gaze after my personality was almost fully baked. Instead of butter or eggs, my awareness of this POV was slathered sloppily on top like frosting. Did I need it? No. But who wants a cake without frosting?
Getting dressed became a mental battle between what I wanted to wear and what I thought I should—the crop top and leggings always winning over pieces more closely aligned to my personal style. The feeling of discomfort in my physical presentation manifested into an overall awkward personality. I had no clue the kinds of conversations an 18-year-old boy considered socially acceptable. They probably didn’t involve talking about my love of musical theater, I gathered through context clues.
I was looking at myself with my eyes second, and it felt deeply uncomfortable. Until college, all I knew about womanhood was sourced from women. All of a sudden, I couldn’t define it without a man’s perspective.
“Margot meet patriarchy. Patriarchy meet Margot,” the world screamed at me.
There’s a term for this kind of character. The one who allows their personality to take shape by their desire to be chosen: the “pick-me girl.” This TikTok-dubbed archetype adopts behaviors and traits that make themselves more palatable to men i.e. being low-maintenance, effortlessly pretty, smart, but not too smart. The pick-me girl is not like other girls.
When I first heard this term, I was met with an instant fear that I, too, was a pick-me girl. I’m certainly aware of what men want me to be. I admittedly crave their attention from time to time. There have been moments when I even altered my personality to receive it.
I regret to inform you, I pretended to like sports once.
I can’t help but think about the impression I’m making when flirting in a bar. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that this is how I’m conditioned. I’ll admit, I’m not wearing a short skirt on a 40-degree evening to keep eyes away. I worry I’m committing a crime against feminism for feeling this way, but I do.
What I find even more anxiety-inducing about the “pick-me” term is that it comes from women. Origins can be drawn to a famous Grey’s Anatomy line. “Pick me. Choose me. Love me,” Ellen Pompeo begs Patrick Dempsey. While I can’t trace the exact source of the virality on TikTok, it certainly gained traction when women creators started shaming other women for traits that seemed too tailored to the male gaze.
“Male gaze” actually can be traced. In 1977, British film theorist, Laura Mulvey, coined the term in an essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” describing male fantasy projected onto the female figure in cinema and popular culture.1
We’ve all seen films of the likes of She’s the Man and 10 Things I Hate About You, right? They have a special place in my nostalgic heart. John Green’s novel, Looking for Alaska, had me in a chokehold. These are all classic tales of, “Girl meets boy. Girl isn’t like other girls. Girl wins boy.”
Creator, Delaney Rowe (@delaneysayshello), sums it up perfectly with her comedy. The female tropes dominating the pop culture I loved are unfortunately now a part of me.
The weaponization of the term “pick-me” feels especially stressful because now I’m being told—along with everything else like being thin, but never ordering a salad, being bold without drawing attention to myself, experiencing the full range of emotions, but never letting the negative ones show—I must also be capable of severing myself from these expectations I was conditioned to embody.
This isn’t to dismiss the root of the problem with “pick-me” girls. It’s important to acknowledge the pressure women feel to compete with one another for opportunity. It just seems unfair that I’m expected to live up to yet another unrealistic standard. Forget all the movies and TV shows I watched growing up (the majority of which were created by men) and leave behind my human desire to feel desired. Easy.
Experiencing rejection in a new bar in Bushwick isn’t supposed to matter to me. I should be confident enough to brush it off. Caring is extremely un-cool girl. The feelings of insecurity bubbling up inside me—don’t mention them.
If this is the case, then what is the secret to wanting attention and wanting it to mean nothing to me? When I’m hit with rejection, I’m not happy about these feelings of insecurity, but I’m sick of being told I’m not supposed to feel them.
Thanks for listening,
Margot
Jackson, Lauren Michele. “The Invention of ‘The Male Gaze.’” The New Yorker, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-invention-of-the-male-gaze.
i would read your grocery list
Absolutely amazing!!!