Have you ever known someone who just seems to revolve everything in their life around getting a man? Someone who says and defends the most backward shit just to seem chill and down? Twitter would define this kind of person as a “pick-me”. Usually, it’s women who say this kind of stuff just so their crushes will acknowledge them and well…maybe pick them. I’m not one to give two thoughts to what someone else does because if you want to look like an ass, that’s your business, not mine. However, I thought more in-depth about the topic I realized that this subtly feeds into misogyny.
An example of pick-me culture would be tweets where a man says, “I only like women who have hairless armpits.” Then you’ll see a bunch of likes and a couple of retweets with 15 comments underneath it of women saying things like ‘I get full-body waxes once a week’ or ‘everything on me is hairless *insert winking emoji*’ or they’ll just drop a funny GIF that correlates to what was originally said. It really blows me away when I see that because the man could literally be mediocre looking at best or be a bum and have 5 kids by 3 different women and they still swoon. I’ve attached a real-life example below:
That's me 🙋. I don't have shit to say to anyone lol
— Krystal✨ (@K6ANG) November 29, 2018
When this tweet first showed up, I thought it was funny, but then the more I thought about it the sadder and more desperate I realized it was. The guy looks okay, but why are you openly broadcasting your desperation for twitter to see? Then the more I thought about it, the more I connected the dots to misogyny because this woman felt the need to demean herself for a man’s satisfaction so he might give her the time of day. And some men know that they can manipulate people like this for reasons that are still a mystery to me. They also make colorist jokes on twitter as well and there are still some light skin black women, non-black women of color, and even white women who laugh along with it in hopes of seeming cool and “being able to take a joke”. This is in hopes of seeking male approval so that in due time they will be picked. This is sickening to me because every other day there’s discourse on twitter about female empowerment and feminism. Then as soon as some conventionally attractive man fixes his lips to say something like ‘I like skinny women’ here come the birds in his mentions with the raised hand emoji or dropping their selfies and pics under the tweet. This perpetuates the misogyny men have been conditioned and tricked into thinking is acceptable.
I’m not saying all of this to pick on them, because a lot of them aren’t self-aware enough to even realize what they’re doing. I used to be a pick-me when I was younger. I didn’t know any better at the age of 12-14 that what I was doing was perpetuating misogyny in hopes of getting my crush to pay attention to me. I would see girls wear pencil skirts to school and call them sluts, make fun of their silly selfies on social media and say they looked idiotic, and just overall shame them for clout in front of guys. In the end, no, my crush never asked me out, and I never had a boyfriend or a first kiss until senior year of high school. That’s because I was so focused on always trying to shame the girls, that I never focused on myself to figure out why I wasn’t getting that sort of attention (the reason being my hair looked like a rats nest, all I wore was one oversized hoodie every day for 8th grade, and I was kind of annoying).
Even in my adult life having learned from that and changed my way of thinking, I catch myself doing little pick-me things such as changing myself and my life in a way that inconvenienced me completely in my last relationship so my partner wouldn’t leave me. Or now in my current relationship when I found out my partner was still on good terms with their ex and they talked about me so, in turn, I said that’s why her wig is shiny and she’s a bum. I really had to step back and evaluate myself after that one because I’ve never even met the girl and I only said that because my partner said it. Then it dawned on me, no matter how woke and understanding he is, he’s still a man and plays into misogyny from time to time. Sometimes he looks like “who done it” and I still tell him he’s handsome, meanwhile if I’m having an off day, he’s the first to say something about it (we do have a good relationship and it’s all in good fun but still). He also told me a couple of his boys only like light skin girls and some of the girls they date know that and still fuck with them. It made me super uncomfortable about my boyfriend when he told me that considering I’m dark-skinned (my mac shade is deep dark and my Fenty shade is 450 if that helps), but he assured me he isn’t that way and I do believe him because he celebrates my skin and my body with me. But not only does it make those girls his friends date pick-mes, but it plays into the misogyny I’ve been talking about because men can say that stuff and have those preferences but look like real-life walking talking garbage. Make it make sense.
Pick-mes will never completely go away since they’ve been around since the dawn of time and some people choose to be willfully ignorant. But if you don’t want to play into that, you can try catching yourself when you say or about to say something ignorant and pick-me-ish by thinking about how you’d feel if it was being said to you or if it even positively contributes something to a conversation. You can also stop dating and entertaining men that talk bad about women just because they’re not talking bad about you. Imagine if they’re saying detrimental stuff about other women, what do they say or have said about you behind your back?
