"In the fictional town of Pawnee, there’s a group for girls called the Pawnee Goddesses. They took up a lot of the episode, and their normalcy was fascinating. There were no crazy girl-on-girl competitions or mean girl antics. Their faces weren’t caked in makeup, their conversation wasn’t focused on the bunk of boys next door. They were too busy receiving badges for best penguin blog or cooking homemade Korean food for their bunk over a campfire before an epic pillow fight. And when they weren’t busy making s’mores, they were busy making their voices heard. When their chaperone/ group leader Leslie Knope turns away a boy who wants to defect from the Rangers (the original, all-boy version of the Pawnee Goddesses) and become a Goddess, the girls insist on a public forum where they talk about Brown v. The Board of Education, educating the genders separately, and the merits of candy. In the end, the boys are allowed to join the Pawnee Goddesses. And when a new group comes to town that’s all about wilderness training and survival, you better believe a couple of those Goddesses join Pawnee’s “most hardcore wilderness group,” for boys and girls who “march to the beat of their own drum, and made the drum themselves.”
This episode revealed some revolutionary concepts in the backwards world of girls on television: Girls can fish and play in the woods, and girls can throw a puppy party and a s’more competition. They can be smart and silly, tough and sensitive. They can be a Goddess and a Ranger. And boys can too—one of the best parts of this episode was that the boys weren’t afraid to join a group of Goddesses if it meant they could eat candy and hug puppies and hang out with their new friends. There was no flirting or rampant cooties, just kids having fun together."