What exactly is the Good Girl? The Good Girl (including a modern variant, the Cool Girl) is an internal identity archetype that has little to do with who we are as women and everything to do with what we’ve been told we should be. The ache we feel when we believe that we’re not being woman enough is called ‘gender role stress’.

The Good Girl appears in reaction to the fear of behaving assertively and the fear of not being nurturant, two of the five points on the female gender role stress scale. This can look like:

“I’d better not rock the boat”

“I hate conflict, it’s easier to just smooth things over”

“I couldn’t possibly ask him for that!”

“25 new ways to please your man”

“After the kids are at school, the house is clean, laundry is done, bills are paid, there’s no time or energy left for me”

“My [kids, husband, boyfriend, family, friends, work] is/are my world”

The Good Girl is an archetype of self-sacrifice and diplomacy. She’s the earliest training ground many women had in the art of emotional labour — good girls listen, good girls comfort, good girls transform sad and angry feelings into positive ones. Good Girls anticipate needs. Good Girls are there for service — you don’t hear them much unless they are reflecting you. They are pleasant, they’re not challenging, they give you what you want so that you feel happy.

Essentially, a Good Girl is an empath on steroids. And, just like anyone on steroids, the Good Girl inside of a woman is prone to flare up and rage. If you move to act against the Good Girl’s prerogative — if you decide to speak up, to set a boundary, to pursue something because you want to rather than for the benefit of others, to make noise and take up space — she’s coming for you. It isn’t pretty when this happens — you feel your stomach hollow out, you feel fear, and you hear critical voices from long ago, the loudest of them being:

“If I do this, I am unloveable.”

Women carry around this internal struggle between their true self and their Good Girl, between their powerful needs and wants and the thing that tells them they shouldn’t want more than they have. This struggle is mostly unconscious and difficult to see for what it is. Much of the time, we only notice glimpses of this battle by feeling really bad about something and not knowing why. Sometimes, this arrives on a wave of sadness and self-pity. Other times, it flows through us in a rush of shapeless anger and frustration.

The Good Girl is there to enforce a rigid gender role that separates us from who we want to be in the world, and from the world we collectively want to create. She dampens our power. She blocks our orgasms. And the millions of Good Girls living beneath the surface inside of millions of women collectively bring about disastrous consequences.

Good Girls & Jealousy

Your internal Good Girl regularly stands in the way of pursuing the things that you want, especially those things that you want solely for your own selfish pleasure and joy. You can’t have those things unless you behave assertively and act to nurture yourself. So when you see others ignoring the directives of their inner Good Girl, this creates jealousy.

Why the hell should she get away with that? What gives her the right to just act that way? Who died and made her God?

It’s said that envy is wanting the same thing someone else has, whereas jealousy is not wanting others to have what you don’t. It’s wanting someone else to lose out to keep things ‘fair’, rather than wanting a rising tide to lift you both up to a ‘fairness’. This clip is an accurate representation of jealousy, in Polish with English subtitles.

Jealousy is a complex emotion because it is constructed of different feelings — anger, fear, sadness, frustration, among others. The glue that holds them together is an overriding feeling of — I don’t want you to have that. The Good Girl breeds jealousy in us because if someone’s not being a Good Girl and still getting something that you don’t have, it’s not fair.

What’s more, this may drive us to project the Good Girl onto other women — to judge the women in our lives, on our TV screens, and in our governments by the Good Girl yardstick. We happily offer commentary up to our friends, disparaging those we see daring to step out and away from this model of what we perceive women should be. This creates an effective double-bind — a jealousy that keeps us in our place and a projection that tells the women closest to us — if you dare to step out, prepare to be judged.

Deconstructed, it’s easy to see that this is bullshit. Jealousy keeps us away from what we want and divides us against other women. It makes us lash out because we aren’t asking for what we want. It makes us want to take from others because we aren’t meeting our own needs first. It wastes our time and eats up our energy. It feels bad.

Good Girls & Resentment

Why wouldn’t someone want to be “good”? We have a whole collection of myths and fables about self-sacrifice — about martyrs that gave up their lives in the service of others, about mothers sacrificing everything for their children, about startup founders sacrificing all that they own in the service of a vision.

Indeed, the most level-headed accounts of love recognize it as an active force rather than a feeling; a giving to others before we give to ourselves. That’s almost right — love is active, it’s about “seeking to understand before being understood”, it is effort and action.

However, Good Girl “love” and “goodness” are different in a critical way. A Good Girl sacrifices because she should do those things, and the world should give her love in return. This is the breeding ground for resentment:

“No one cares about me”

“How dare he do that, with everything I’ve done for him”

“My kids are so ungrateful”

“I guess I’m just here when it’s convenient for you”

Good Girl “goodness” and “love” is missing something critical. Love is powerful only when it is it is chosen, when you want to love rather than feeling that you have to love. Love is only actual love when it is given free from any attachment to an expected, or owed, outcome.

When we engage in self-sacrificing behaviours at the behest of our Good Girl, because it is the right thing and we should do it, we’re not loving to address the needs of others. Instead, we’re doing this because I have to do this so that people will love me.

Once again, this is bullshit. Being driven to act this way by our Good Girl isn’t a drive to act in love or goodness. It’s a drive to get love through a pastiche of love. Love is self-sacrificing from a position of power. Love is a desire to give a gift to address need without obligation on the part of the receiver. Love is vulnerable. Good Girl “goodness” is a recipe for resentment from the beginning, because we can’t control others and their choice to love us. We’ve been told that doing “good” things will get us the love that we want when, in truth, there is no guarantee.

Good Girls & Self-Policing

Daenerys Targaryen — first victim of, then smasher of, Patriarchy

Feminists talk a lot about the institutionalized, systematic oppression that women have experienced across centuries at the hands of men. And it is true — we have. At the same time, the movement will never be successful in its aim of emancipating people, all people, from the gendered cages of patriarchy until we start looking at ourselves.

We have the most direct control over our own lives — our thoughts, our behaviours, our actions. The patriarchy could never oppress women effectively without us being complicit in this oppression. The Good Girl is our internal oppressor and as long as we allow her to direct our lives, the apparatus of patriarchy will affect us at the most personal level.

How are we supposed to drive forward a movement for freedom when the first layer that keeps us imprisoned lives within us?

Many women struggle with this, and still participate in the movement and identify with feminism. If you are aware of your Good Girl and able to spot her influence, it is possible to be an effective feminist. Many women aren’t aware of their Good Girl, and you see this manifest in their behaviour. The Good Girl shows up in radicalization, in splintering, in violence and holier-than-thou explosive arguments that wind up alienating rather than attracting people.

If you’re acting against your Good Girl, against what you should do, then one way to deal with that is over justifying your behaviour to others. Another is to push away those that don’t agree with you, lest this create a way to let the Good Girl back in — should you really be doing this? See? No one loves you. This may also arise as a desire to do away with the feminine or gender entirely, because there can be no gender role stress without gender; there can be no Good Girl without girls.

This is bullshit. This saps your energy and keeps you away from the things that you desire in your life. When it comes to the Good Girl, there is no one to blame but her living in and acting through you. And blaming others — society, culture, history, men — is a total waste of time until you’ve dealt with her because the Good Girl will affect how you see the world and the actions you take. This self-policing is the biggest hurdle to developing awareness and moving to a position of power to act in your interests without guilt or shame. Self-policing via the Good Girl is your biggest hurdle to living authentically.

Good Girls & Consent

When it comes to consent, the Good Girl is a contradiction. Good Girls make other people happy and prioritise the needs of others above their own. At the same time, Good Girls are “valuable”, they shouldn’t be “too easy”, they shouldn’t be “sluts”. Good Girls think about what they should do to be a woman rather than what they want to do in their lives as a woman, and nowhere is this more dangerous than in the realm of dating, sex, and relationships.

A lot of ire within the community of men that follow Pick Up Artists centers around the contradictory behaviour that women exhibit when they are in conflict with their Good Girl. This behaviour can look like being indirect and leaving hints when you are interested in a man rather than initiating. It can look like batting away the wandering hands of a lover a few times, to not appear too easy, before finally accepting the touch that you want. It can be saying things like:

“I never do this”

“Normally I never sleep with someone on the first date”

“Usually I need to date someone for 6 months before I sleep with them”

…immediately before doing “this”, sleeping with someone on the first date, or sleeping with someone before 6 months is up.

It’s behaviour that contributes to men developing things like touch escalation as a tactical approach in dating rather than as an authentically expressed offshoot of connection. It’s behaviour like this that contributes to men actively pushing even after we’ve given them a soft no, because a lot of the time it works and is in line with the actual desire behind the Good Girl block.

The Good Girl also moves us to stay unaware of what’s going on, even as we’re aware of it, because if things “just happen” or “happen naturally”, then really who is at fault? We still did what we should do and the forces of nature just overtook us — a failing, sure, but an understandable one.

But clearly turning someone down when we’re not interested? Telling a partner to stop doing something because it’s unpleasant and start doing something else because we want that more? Being direct in asking for what we want?

Those actions provoke the Good Girl. We shouldn’t do those things. If we do those things, then we are failing at being what a woman should be in order to be loved.

Sexual assault and rape are very real issues in our society — 15% of women will experience them in their lifetime. I have experienced them. Women disproportionately receive violence at the hands of men, and we’re right to be both angry about this and afraid of this happening to us.

This does not change the fact that our behaviour in our day-to-day and intimate lives with men is also part of the wider problem when it comes to consent.

Consent doesn’t work if it “kills the mood” when a man asks for consent but also “crosses your boundaries” if they don’t ask first. Consent doesn’t work if intellectuals are “all talk and no action” because they are waiting for you to initiate but also “men are such grabby creeps” when they don’t wait. Consent doesn’t work if “he’s not sexy” if he’s not aggressive but “all men are jerks” when he is.

It’s painful and difficult, but I have to say it — this is bullshit. We can’t keep complaining about how messed up consent is if we can’t bring ourselves to say yes and no from a position of power. It is ok to have sexual desires because you are human and it is ok to not want to be sexual with any given person regardless of if you may hurt their feelings or not. Our desires are legitimate and until we can see this, the Good Girl will keep blocking our pleasure, our connections, and our orgasms.

From Good Girl to Powerful Woman

Once “Good”, now Powerful

Reconciling who you are today with who you were told you should be is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight and takes time. It’s also the most worthwhile journey that you can go on for you. Additionally, it’s the most worthwhile journey you can take to benefit your partner, your children, and your world.

All journeys begin at the beginning. Here’s how you can transform your Good Girl into a Powerful Woman: