The Unsettling Rise of the Anti-Pick Me Girl
Punching down at "pick me girls" seems like an act of solidarity among women, until you look more closely.
In Depth
Pick Me Girl discourse is everywhere online. On TikTok alone the hashtag “pick me” has 7.6 billion views and “pick me girl” has another three billion and counting. At its core, the term is a critique of women who seek the attention of men, and always at the expense of other women. A Pick Me might act coy or quirky around men, and subtly or overtly put down the women around her. Other women might, in the eyes of a Pick Me, be too “dramatic” or “girly”—but not her. The Pick Me is the quintessential “not like other girls” trope, a woman who hopes to be seen, and literally picked, by men as different, even exceptional. It sounds exhausting.
To talk about Pick Me behavior, then, is to talk about the subconscious contempt towards women that people of all genders are socialized to believe and act on. “Patriarchal expectations of women teach us that a woman’s value is conferred through her ability to attract a man; she is thus turned into an ‘object’ of male desire. So, many cisgender heterosexual women internalize behaviors or viewpoints that they understand as being ‘attractive’ to men,” says Dr. Christina Riley, professorial lecturer on critical race, gender, and cultural studies at American University. Pick Me characteristics—like “drinking whiskey, obsessing over football, or making fun of ‘girly’ girls,” Riley says—help make this phenomenon visible.
But what started as an earnest critique of power, gender, and identity quickly became a catch-all for any woman or girl deemed too annoying, too attractive, or too friendly. On TikTok, the Pick Me label is applied to almost any type of girl, including those who wear skirts in certain ways or even have a name that starts with the letter M. In fact, the critique has morphed so much that it has led to the strange, meta rise of the anti-Pick Me: a girl who insists she is definitely not like other Pick Mes, but still revels in the same put downs against other women. Except this time, it’s in the name of feminist empowerment rather than male attention.
@kqtiewhitney Sorry but its true 😭🤷♀️ #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #cringe #ick #pickme #pov
It’s not hard to identify the anti-Pick Me. It’s not in her dress, her makeup, or her hair style. It’s in her attitude, and the condescension she exhibits through body language, words, and captions. In this skit, a creator mimics a standard Pick Me girl and the men who want her. The caption exudes anti-Pick Me energy: “They are so naive, it’s giving me the ick.” In this video, another creator mocks Pick Me Girls who wear sexy dresses and makeup; instead, the creator brags, she’s the one who can “actually” get men, all while dressed in sweats and playing video games. No matter what she looks like, or the lip syncs and skit formats she chooses, the anti-Pick Me thinks she’s above whatever the Pick Me is doing—even as she craves the same external validation.
Madeline Webster, 29, has seen the anti-Pick Me pile-on happening all over social media. “I’m always suspicious of a trend that blames women for sexism. They’re simply too easy of targets,” she says. “That said, I think all of us have felt what it feels like to be hurt by a woman stepping outside of solidarity, or ‘being a Pick Me.’ And I think that feels more painful than the ways that men hurt us sometimes, because we expect it of men.”
To understand the rise of the anti-Pick Me girl, it’s important to track the term’s origins. Like many far-reaching internet trends, memes, and social justice causes, Pick Me has its roots in Black Twitter. Starting on Twitter in the mid 2010s, the hashtag #TweetLikeAPickMe often satirized what behaviors did and did not make for a good wife. But as Buzzfeed noted in 2021, terms that originate in Black communities, like “cancel” and “woke,” are often “stripped of their original, more nuanced meanings among Black people.” In some ways, Pick Me has gone the route of “Karen”—another gendered critique that went from confronting the ways white women uphold and embrace white supremacy to a catch-all insult describing nearly any middle-aged white woman with a questionable haircut.
Those girls weren’t cruel because they were girly. They were mean because they were mean.
And as the term traveled from more intimate Twitter settings to other social media platforms, “suddenly, everyone was weighing in on the ‘Pick Me girl,’ everyone had something to add to the list of grievances pitted against this figure, to the point where literally anything could qualify someone as a ‘Pick Me girl,’” says Riley. “What this does, then, is it broadens the terms for women-bashing.” Young girls suffer from cyberbullying at disproportionate levels, she adds, making an already-vulnerable group a bigger target.