Revenge of the girl

A friend of mine, transitioning, mused that “girl” and “woman” are maybe not precisely the same gender. They do different work. She is a girl, not yet a woman. Simone de Beauvoir famously argued that you are not born a woman but become one through a process of social conditioning. Girlishness is in fashion though, slow regression towards childhood. Someone gave me silver bows for Christmas and I wore one in my hair along with a set of plastic earrings that look like slinky toy flowers and ballet pumps to a wedding where everyone else was dressed as a woman. Someone asked my mother if I was in high school.

I have already written about coquettes and childhood and the absurdity of Barbie. What is left to say about girls? I think a lot about adolescence, feel trapped in the kind of selfish bohemianness of a Carrie Bradshaw archetype. I have many more shoes than dishes, I have never used my oven, I am in a standoff with my super over who will change a lightbulb. Whenever I meet people my age who seem responsible, domesticated, who cook a lot, who think about healthy living and retirement funds and go to the farmer’s market on the weekends, I feel feral and immature. My mother had children at my age, my grandmother was the kind of woman who when she died, everyone remembered for her hospitality, her caretaking, her cooking, her ability to manage people and emotions. At a family memorial reminiscing about her, no one else mentioned how she liked to shop for fake bags on Canal Street. She was a consummate woman.

To be female, Andrea Long Chu provocatively argued, is to make room for the desires of other people, to subsume your own id. To transcend being female, other people (of any gender) must become selfish. Although this idea was controversial among feminist critics, it is also basically a core tenet of liberal feminism, just with fixed gender attached. Women, in this framework, must become more like men, become presidents, become soldiers, become CEOs, trample on others to get there. Do women have a right to be art monsters, wonders Claire Dederer in her recent book Monsters, or is narcissistic, cruel genius reserved for men? Should women want to be art monsters?

“What is it, exactly,” wonders Isabel Cristo in an essay about the rise of girlhood for The Cut, “that’s so uninviting about being an adult woman?” Womanhood, according to Cristo’s diagnosis, is in crisis. There is no clear blueprint. It requires depressing and painful engagement with the rising tide of misogyny and reactionary, anti-feminist politics. Girlhood, by contrast, is light, universal, joyful. It allows a comforting retreat.

I am suspicious of this idea of feigned innocence. I think those who pretend girlishness to disengage are not always afraid, but sometimes uninterested. Most of them have their own set of politics that emerge. Turning to girlishness seems obviously like a way of avoiding womanhood. Putting bows and ribbons on everything plays up innocence. It is, as I previously wrote about Sandy Liang, basically sexless. The version of sexiness it invokes is disturbingly Lolita-like. Adult women dressed like deranged toddlers in frilled Batsheva type dresses and patent shoes and bonnets run all over New York right now. Their voices go up a pitch when you ask them about anything serious. They are adult teenage girls. They don’t have to think too hard.

But is there any version of womanhood currently being sold to us that is more subversive than the version of girlhood? Is there no radical potential in girlhood? Cristo sees it as a blank slate, a pre-political time where girls are not required to face the choices “that feminism has always concerned itself with — choices about marriage, child raising, career building, homemaking, sex, sexuality, and caretaking.” But many girls are required to make such choices. Many are sexually active while they are still girls. Revenge porn and sexual harassment is rampant in schools. Some transition to girlhood before puberty. Some care for younger siblings, for dysfunctional parents. An increasing number of girls, denied abortion care, give birth and raise children of their own.

Perhaps this is simply womanhood intruding upon girlhood. But it may be useful to also think of girlhood in its own right as a meaningful time and space, as a place for liberation and advocacy and identity formation. We are not adults when we are children, but we are ourselves. We are human and capable of feeling, capable of decision making, capable of resisting indoctrination and distinguishing right from wrong. Even if many women turning to girlhood are interested in it simply as a cop out, they should not be our arbiters for what a girl is, for what a girl can be.

Kate Zambreno writing on the alienation of girls in Heroines, launches a defense of the girl-reporter in Godard’s film “À bout de souffle” [Breathless].

She wants to write novels, someday, like Faulkner, but she needs to sleep with her editor to write articles and she must be a muse-baby for the famous novelist in order to get his attention. And her self-worth is completely bound up in how others see her, through another’s gaze, and like a Jean Rhys heroine part of her only wants a Dior dress and a man who loves her. But there’s this other part that’s just forming, that is having a complete identity crisis, that is Simone de Beauvoir’s woman questioning her immanence, questioning her lack of freedom, wanting something more, feeling dreadfully incomplete.

Beauvoir, Zambreno notes, didn’t have much use for girls. She sees them as frivolous, as unformed, living in a fantasy world, consigned to the shadows of others. Beauvoir is not alone. Many feminist critics do not believe in a philosophy of the girl, do not think it is a concept worth examining. “Maybe the girl seeks revenge,” writes Zambreno, “by wedging herself into the larger cultural conversation.”

And so the girl has.