A Pick-Me Girl Ethics of Reading
Read like it’s mating season.
Ramon Casas, Jove Decadent, 1899. Also, me, 2024, enraptured by Percival Everett’s James.
“The great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
- James Baldwin
“What’s the only ethical way to be a billionaire? The only ethical way to be a billionaire is in a video game. If you’re a billionaire-real-estate-railroad tycoon in the video game Transport Tycoon, and you know, you crush the competition and have a monopoly and charge exorbitant prices to your digital citizens––no one cares. No one gets hurt. You get to be a billionaire, you get to achieve and conquest and make your number get super high––higher than everyone else, you can even compete with other people playing the game. But that’s the beautiful thing, right? No one is actually getting harmed.”
- Stephen Russell
Something happened around the turn of these roaring 2020s. I witnessed it in slow-motion because I’m not very online, but it registered for me nonetheless: the term “pick-me” entered the cultural lexicon. The pick-me, short for a Pick-Me Girl, became a recognizable archetype to which (mostly) women, young and old, frequently referred. I heard it at boarding school when I was still teaching there; I heard it among my own adult friends! I became curious about it, especially because I often heard it out of the mouths of avowed feminists. Was it a critique of patriarchy? Was using the term, and thereby acknowledging the phenomenon, a sign of feminist consciousness? Does knowing the term make one conceptually less susceptible to patriarchy’s traps?
Or, as I tended to suspect, was it patriarchy in disguise? Yet another camouflaged epithet, mentally impeding genuine solidarity and mutual respect among victims of gender-based oppression?
“She’s a pick-me,” girls would say in class, their voices dripping with derision––or worse, dismissal. “You know, the type who says, ‘I’m not like the other girls.’”
“She’s so desperate for male attention. Never trust a pick-me.”
“Ew, I can’t stand her. She’s a classic pick-me girl.”
Urban Dictionary confirms this definition:
(For those who love tangents as much as I do, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Urban Dictionary.)
Let’s do a little close-reading of this confection of crowd-sourced cultural lexicon, shall we? “A pick-me girl,” it begins, is a girl who seeks male validation by indirectly or directly insinuating that she is ‘not like the other girls.’” OK, so the mechanism here is not just that she “insinuates” her otherness from her gendered tribe––it’s specifically that she does this in order to seek “male validation.” To seek: to pursue. The quest for the Holy Grail: validation. How does a “male” “validate”? In my past experience, he lent you his power, the way an expensive brand name might. He became a kind of accessory to one’s own conspicuous consumption: of social capital. The “male” doing the “validating” performs, it seems, acts of public relations for the validated girl: by telling others aligned with the “males” that she is “cool”; by giving her his time, money, attention; by inviting her to parties; by speaking of her as his property. Validation: you belong.
Look closer: the pick-me examples illustrate her unlikability. She’s calling other girls “catty.” She’s a poser, posting on social media about her “one good run boarding.” (She spent all day, possibly all week, practicing that skill on her board so that the boys would let her hang. In the process, she learned a skill. She probably has bruises on her butt. The girls didn’t invite her over because one of them has a crush on Sk8r Boi #6 and is filled with righteous indignation. Our Pick-Me Girl, it seems, is willing to work hard for a kiss. She’s willing to scrape up her knees and spend all afternoon at the skate park, where instead of sitting around scheming for a symbolic future happiness, she gets to exercise in the sunshine. On the board, she flies.)
OK but perhaps you want me to cross-reference with another source? Someone’s citing a “Dictionary.com” definition that reads “obsessively seeks attention from men at the expense of other women.” Pick me––and not her. Wiktionary confirms this two-pronged definition: unhealthy attention-seeking; harmful to friendships.
Wikipedia cites three sources for its definition: a July 2023 article at Bustle magazine about the “Pick me boy” TikTok trend; an article in Student Life magazine from February 2024 about the evolution of the pick-me girl; and a summer 2022 feature on the Pick-Me Girl TikTok trend.
These sources yield up an even more anthropologically articulated formulation––and an almost gender neutral one: “Someone who seeks validation by trying to stand out, often putting down others in their gender or group to gain favor or attention.”
At this stage of my research, it feels apparent to me that this definition, which perhaps harkens the concept of solidarity, is not engendering solidarity. It cannot be performing anti-sexist work, for it relies on sexist structures of power for its very operations.
If the very second line of the Urban Dictionary definition––“basically a female version of a simp”––did not confirm that we are in unenlightened territory regarding gender, then consider a worldview in which boys pick girls, but girls can’t show they want to be picked. They must get picked, and ironically enough, by being a pick-me, they aren’t getting picked; they’re asking to get picked. There is a difference. It’s the asking that disturbs people. It’s that she’s showing her desire: her desire to be picked. This––in this worldview––makes her less valuable. She was only valuable if she was hard to conquer. Perhaps you’re starting to observe features of rape culture.
But then again: couldn’t one argue that identifying and labeling the “pick-me” serves to critique the culture of getting picked, and therefore attempts to undo the power structure that reinforces rape culture? Stop seeking male validation! Don’t be a pick-me! Be a “girl’s girl” instead: “A girl who has respect for female etiquette. A girl who is not petty and strives to be ethical and decent in her dealings with her female friends” (Urban Dictionary again, of course).
(But wait, I have to show you the example they offer:
Marie: Ashley just broke up with Josh, you should totally go for it!
Megan: Nuh-uh! Josh is totally off limits!
Marie: But you've been crushing on him for months.
Megan: So what? Ashley and I are friends. I'd totally be shitting on girl etiquette to go after her ex.
Marie: Wow Megan, you're a real girl's girl.)
I strive to be decent. I really do. But there’s only so much I can deny myself.
When I established this blog almost five years ago now, I envisioned it as a space to write about books that “picked me,” and not ones that someone––Western Culture, the NY Times––assigned to me, or that I felt obliged to like. I wanted to write about books that put me in thrall to them: whose narrative machinations worked on me. I am gesturing at the language of seduction here because I do want a book to pick me. I do. Badly.
The irony is not lost on me that as a literature teacher, I professionally assign books for other people to read. And I admit: I hated being assigned books as a student, and I (clearly) still struggle with a reading assignment. As the neutered teacher, the functionary, I’m taking all the desire out of reading as an activity. Reading is such an intimate experience; it fills you, it possesses you. Getting a teenager to enjoy a book you’ve assigned necessitates a great deal of trust and goodwill between teacher and student. Even with that goodwill, the student and teacher both might feel like they’re obliged to read with that person perched in their skull, and who wants that? (To be clear: one is never obliged to read in any particular way. They can’t read our thoughts; not yet. That said, the knowledge that one is reading collectively, as part of a collectivity of known others, does change an audience’s experience of a piece.)
If a reader doesn’t feel great about using their time to live inside a particular book––for any number of understandable reasons, including resenting the authority of their teachers––then they probably won’t use their time to live inside that book. They will not seek out that reading experience as an imagined pleasure. They will instead turn to summaries online or other shortcuts, such that they might maintain the veneer of obedience while avoiding the unpleasant, even invasive, experience of reading something that doesn’t resonate. Truth is, assigning books sucks. I don’t love having to fabricate conditions to generate goodwill toward reading. I just…like…reading. I like talking about books with others––but after the reading has been privately enjoyed.
Reading is, for me, pleasure.
Staff Picks, therefore, became a space for me to let books pick me. The seed for the blog came in the mid-2010s when I was working in a suburban town with a very nice public library. I’d wander the stacks and just see what was there, pulling out various volumes to skim a few pages here and there: poems, by poets I’d heard of but never dabbled in; novels, to see if I could make predictions or feel kinship within the first few pages; conclusions to non-fiction books, maybe to find out “the point,” or maybe also to see how the thinker manages a last impression.
Inevitably, this browsing model led me to a kind of receptive stance toward reading again, a stance that didn’t feel entirely consensual during my schooling. I trusted my teachers enough, I suppose, but did I know there was pleasure to be had in these books? In those days, I was under the impressions that all the pleasure was centered in the boys. I thought receptivity ought then to be reserved for them: for the boys.
Some of the picks on this blog did come from recommendations, but a good rec requires a context. My friend Laura and I go on hiking vacations together, so when we exchange paperbacks, it’s part of the unplugged, rustically minimalistic ambiance of the trip to read what the other recommends. I have vivid memories of reading John Williams’s Stoner at a bed and breakfast in the White Mountains, Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends at the campgrounds of Lac Narlay in the Franche-Comté, Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much on an L-shaped couch in western Vermont, and Tomas Le Thermos’s Genderflou on a pull-out couch in the 20ème arrondissement. (Oh my gawd, they’re literally all stories about pick-mes of various genders and cultures, amazing. But does life imitate art or…)
I suppose being picked by a book––or by a friend who sees that you might derive pleasure from a book––is not unlike being anointed with the coveted “male validation.” In thrall to a book, I am most validated: I am my most valid, valued, valuable. The author, the friend, some combination: they offer me a little bit of their brilliance. They offer me their power.
Pick me! I’m willing to wear sparkles, and I’m even willing to dance. If a book chooses me, lets me come to the skate park, I am aglow. Pick me! Completely submissive, yet entirely in control.
The real-life boys don’t usually pick the pick-mes in the end, though. The boys must pursue their own validation, their own version of that Holy Grail quest. He wants power, too. If she doesn’t increase his net worth, she is out. In this (so very terrifying) understanding of the universe, the Girl’s Girl reasons soundly: you probably benefit more from her friendship than his fickle fancy. It sounds empowered.
The problem with the Girl’s Girl, however, reveals itself in Megan’s explanation to Marie for why she would never date Ashley’s ex Josh (did you already forget about Megan and the gang?!): “Nuh-uh!” Megan insists. “I'd totally be shitting on girl etiquette to go after her ex.” Shitting! On etiquette!
But wait, Megan! You’ve been crushing on him for months!
Etiquette is valuable for social life, but it requires a great deal of repression. Thankfully, when I’m reading a book, I am not bound by etiquette. I live in my imagination. My mind is free. My desires are, too. In Megan’s head, she’s in bed with Josh, but her social obligations require her to behave in certain ways in order not to lose Ashley as a friend.
I’d like to advocate for a less repressed reading culture. I want to call for a Pick-Me Girl Ethics when it comes to reading. I invite us to see the pick-me with fresh eyes. Her pursuit of that validation, that power through acceptance, that actualization of socially-sanctioned desire, makes her earnest, even cringe, but it also makes her powerful. A Pick-Me Girl ethics of reading entails desiring a text, and making that desire very obviously known. It entails becoming receptive and submissive to the text, and letting it work its machinery.
It entails cheetah print, as in Jack Harlow’s Billboard chart-topper “Lovin on Me,” when he validates, or perhaps just acknowledges, a possible Pick-Me Girl: “She wearing cheetah print / That's how bad she wan’ be spotted ‘round your boy.”
A Pick-Me Girl Ethics of Reading wears cheetah print to the party; the book likes what it sees, the book knows you want to be seen. I encourage us to read in this openly desiring fashion. Read like it’s mating season. Read for what it can give you: for what pleasure, power, and validation it might bestow.
When I read, I’m in control of my body, but I’ve given over my mind. Boys expected––required, really––so much more. A friend once gave me a magnet that reads, “A book lover never goes to bed alone.”
Because we don’t pick books: they pick us. That’s their power. Long ago I learned desire ought to lead me to the place where I am chosen. Desperate, needy: I hunger for transcendence in my reading, and so do you.
**
This essay is indebted to my favorite thinkers, the ones who live with me in my daily reflections: Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints), James Baldwin, Jia Tolentino, Andrea Long Chu, Jenny Odell, Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Alison Bechdel, Maggie Nelson, Ann Friedman, Anne Helen Petersen. Shoutout to my pick-mes out there; we are trying to be different, so thanks for noticing.
