Is Alison Roman A Momfluencer Now?
She's not like other momfluencers. She's a COOL momfluencer.
For as long as I’ve been conscious of being perceived, I’ve longed to be perceived as cool. I was an eye-rolling tween, and in high school, existed in the social milieu located squarely between drama nerd and book nerd. But the person I was trying to be was a person who was not popular enough too cool to care about being popular cool.
As a teen and young adult, my favorite movies reveal A LOT about this mission to be cool. Reality Bites, the Gwyneth Paltrow Great Expectations . . . GARDEN STATE [I’m cool enough now, you see, to admit to this last particularly humiliating fave]. Oh! Atonement. Obviously.
Gillian Flynn famously codified the millennial Cool Girl in Gone Girl.
Being the Cool Girl means I am 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.
She’s changed a bit over the years, but one of the most salient characteristics of the Cool Girl is her aversion to being like the other girls. Her allergy to basicness. Most successful momfluencers thrive on their ability to perform relatability, which is arguably at odds with an ability to perform cool. But Alison Roman’s recent foray into momfluencing has made me reconsider this.
