To put it plainly, there is no such thing as “the pretty girl”. She simply doesn’t exist, acting only as a figure of our fantasies, serving only one purpose. Our own delusion. The pretty girl is more of a reflection of our desire than it is a reality. That’s not to say there are no pretty girls. Of course, there are. But the way we think of The pretty girl is a myth.

Three years ago, what we now call a pick me girl would have been considered a “cool girl”, using her ability to relate to guys, along with her striking good looks to “get the guy”. We’ve widely agreed that “the cool girl” isn’t real. She’s merely a projection of male reverie, created to cater to the unoriginality of the male gaze. The cool girl was never meant to be real. And in trying to make her real, we prolong our own delusion. The same is true for The pretty girl. She’s the perfect example of femininity. Rarely as promiscuous as Jessica Rabbit, but never stays as uninterested as pre-makeover Andy Sachs. She always ends up falling perfectly in the middle, like a post-plastic Cady Heron. The pretty girl is never just pretty. She has to represent everything inherently wrong or perfectly right with a woman’s beauty. The blonde girl is either a gold digger or just a dumb blonde. The dark-haired woman is the experienced femme fatale. And the redhead is fiery and often unattractively headstrong. The pretty girl is never just pretty. She always upholds some quintessential shortcomings of female beauty and recognizes that she only has two options. She can either “fix” herself, and get the guy of her dreams, or she can embrace her wrongs and end up the lonely villain. The only time The pretty girl is spared from these expectations is when her beauty is created by a man. Take “My Fair Lady” (1964) or The Princess Diaries. Her beauty is constructed by the men and people around her, creating feminine “perfection”, and eventually, the ultimate “Pretty Girl”.

The (most often) desirable options for women are almost always binary, either comparable to doll-like perfection (thinking of the “lotus blossom” stereotype for Asian women) or the rebellious mystery of the femme fatale dragon lady. While these stereotypes are subjective in terms of personal preference, they all serve the same purpose. They all feed the delusion of social consciousness. It reinforces the expectations of men and pushes young women to idealize an impossible standard. I’m no Cady Heron. I’m certainly not Cher Horowitz. And as much as I’d like to be, I’m not Elle Woods or Gabrielle Union’s Isis. Most of us will never quite achieve the perfect balance of Love and Basketball’s Monica, with her passion for basketball unwavering even after finding love. Most of us are busy buying army pants and flip-flops because The pretty girl wore army pants and flip-flops. None of us are The pretty girl. And that’s okay. I’d much rather be real.

Delusion, and not the fun Gen Z kind, is a social currency. Feeding into someone’s delusion will gain you more than your authenticity. What better way is there to feed into delusion, than to reinforce the male perspective? What better way than to chase beauty for their sake? To pursue only the kind of beauty that the man of your desire most prefers? With the rise of TikTok trends that analyze what kind of beauty you possess, stereotyping is inescapable. But who wouldn’t want to know if they’re model pretty, natural pretty, or model pretty? Who wouldn’t want to know which kind of pretty they can identify with? I suppose we’ve grown largely unsatisfied with the old classifications of beauty, leaving us with free reign of social perspective. But we’ve taken the reigns and shifted only in a parallel sense, not necessarily forward or back. Our primary goal is consumption over authenticity (throwback to my article about originality) and instead of dismantling the myths of beauty, we uphold and complicate them. I know we love being delusional for the plot, but I have a gnawing feeling that we’re telling the wrong story. Beauty is no longer raw. It’s endlessly curated and classified, leaving us unable to identify truth from counterfeit, and unable to perceive ourselves as we are, instead of as we should be.

At the end of the day, The pretty girl isn’t real. We are.

Photo by Molly Blackbird on Unsplash