What constitutes being a 'cool girl'

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl.

Being the Cool Girl means she is a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are, above all, hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

I remember the first time I read this passage from Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl. I didn’t entirely love the book, but I knew when I read these words that Flynn had defined something that I had long known to be true but had struggled to articulate. I knew the Cool Girl.