These are fantastic—thank you. Non-supernatural ones are by far the scariest. Humans are the worst.

Yes, it’s disappointing. But thanks for the dialogue.

Perhaps at a superficial level, but you can’t skip the underlying developmental steps, otherwise it’s a shallow sort of “improvement” indeed. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad you have decided to live differently as an adult than you did as a young person, but I take issue with the “it’s all hindsight in a lot of ways”…

Ehhhh, not so fast. If you did recognizably shitty things, then yes, you should beat yourself up over it. Not forever, but long enough to use painful reckoning as a transformative process. In other words, don’t let yourself off the hook too easily, that’s not giving you enough credit for your own agency and it’s not…

I think it’s generally used as mentioned—women shoehorning themselves into an idea of what guys want. It sounds like the guy’s brother was a jerk, but he may have had some idea that you were sucking up based on past experiences. Another classic cool girl in media is Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s wedding.

A Cool Girl tries to her idea of a guy’s perfect woman because being an actual woman (i.e. themselves) is too scary or upsetting. It’s also a lot more visible when a Cool Girl is in front of men. My friend is in many ways wonderful and inspiring and I have some faith that things are reaching a crisis point and she’ll…

Absolutely agreed. Unfortunately my best friend is a “Cool Girl” so I think about it a lot. She loves me and has a long-standing group of female friends and also a lot of guy friends and she always says things like “girls are mean to me” when from what I can see, she likes that men give her a lot of attention and want…

It’s fine to enjoy being around guys and to be drawn to things dudes like. However, the essential problem of Cool Girls is that they replace male attention for self esteem and are doing their best to be liked by men because they can’t imagine that being a woman is as valuable as as being a man. For me, the litmus test…

I copied this from my response to the origional poster in this thread in case you missed it:

I think you’ll have to evaluate each situation individually. In general, if the woman was upset enough that she cut off contact with you, it wouldn’t be a good idea to override that as you’d again be violating her boundaries. However, if it’s one of those situations where you have an ongoing relationship with someone…

I went to prom with a guy from Beverly Hills and his zip code was 90211. It was the closest I got to being cool in high school.

Seems like a straight up sadist.

Anything you can say anonymously? He seems like an absolute horror.

My dear friend’s husband suddenly stopped being interested in sex shortly after they got married and he would get super grossed out kissing, germs, sexual fluids, you name it. All he wanted to do was stick his dick into her and not be touched or touch her. Finally, after about 10 years they realized he was…

Sadly, I agree. If you’re a person to whom sex is important, it’s horrible to live without. And that magical sexual connection gets you through tough times too.

Mine too! I went to a women’s college and they were in their own little tub cubicles for privacy.

Really lovely, thoughtful response. It’s such a shame when men see something written for women and think it has nothing to do with them, not realizing that women read and learn from stuff written for men all the time.

I’m also a sun dress lover and the anti-chafing stuff is a miracle in the summer.

It saves me on the thighs but I hear you, everybody is different.

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