The pick-me is easy to hate. She comes in many forms, but the underlying theme is the same: she prioritizes male attention over female attention and puts other women down to obtain it. Or, at the very least, she thinks less of other women and this mindset seeps out in her behavior.
While a woman who “panders” to men in a particularly sexual or histrionic way might earn the most pick-me accusations, a woman who isn’t feminine enough could fall into this category too, especially if she considers herself more intelligent and worthy than “shallow” women who like fashion and pop music, and even if the only male attention she seeks is platonic. Technically, this archetype is more of a “not like other girls” than a true “pick me,” but either way, the alienation from and condemnation of women is the theme that connects the “not like other girls” and the “pick-me.” For an example of what I mean, here’s my comic on the topic:
I knew a particularly egregious pick-me, a woman on the periphery of my friend group in San Francisco who repeatedly flirted with her friends’ boyfriends, jumped on their shoulders ‘as a joke,” and hyped up the fact that she watched football and drank whiskey. It helped, of course, that she didn’t look like a whiskey-guzzling football fan. Many years earlier, at a teen summer program, a similar girl talked nonstop about how all her friends were guys because the guys were so much less drama and girls were so catty, but the only thing she ever said to girls was that she would love to wear their clothes except her boobs would “bust out” of them.
Yeah, we all know the type.
And yet….
I get the pick-me accusation all the time. At one point, it was probably totally true, both in the “how it looked” sense but also in the less flattering sense. I know this is not hard to believe, but in college, I became an honorary member of the geekiest fraternity on campus and even got my headshot on their fraternity composite, so my alliance with socially awkward men was solidified long ago. (Before you assume this was some kind of group sex thing, I was actually “just friends” with them. I only dated one of the brothers, but…still.)
But why? Why do women go this route? Why did *I *decide that hanging out with a group of twenty guys (who, I should add, did not actually include me in all their social activities and treated me as a sort of second-tier friend) was a better use of my time than just getting into a group of loyal girlfriends?
Women like me (and others who may engage in more insidious forms of pick-me-ism) become that way for a reason. Typically, it doesn’t begin with “hating other women.” They may not hate other women at all, even at the depths of their pick-me rock bottom. While I know I field the accusation quite often, I have never hated other women and I imagine the same is true for other pick-me’s. Instead, this path comes from a very dangerous combination of being socially inept in a way that specifically hinders your ability to read more subtle social cues that exist within groups of women, while being just friendly and cute enough to pass the much lower bar for male attention and male friendship.
What results is a woman who, by virtue of her own social deficits, becomes a “pick me” because it’s the easiest way for her to have a fulfilling social life. But this, of course, makes it worse—being a pick-me (even if only in the “only hangs out with guys” way and not in the “I hate other women” way) *makes women like you even less. *And once a woman experiences vitriol directed at her from the very women she perceives to have rejected her long ago, she reacts in the only way she can: she becomes even more of a pick-me.
