First, I now see that the stuff of girls is meant to be consumed—sugar and spice and everything nice—yummy sweet treats that melt in your mouth.
And it reads to me now as a warning rather than as an assessment. It’s an imperative: to be a girl, one must be sweet and delicious. One must be made entirely of everything nice. There is no room in girlhood (and, perhaps, femaleness) for anything else.
But this is not my experience of femaleness. As I grew up, I became distinctly aware that I was not made entirely of sweetness. The things I was made of sometimes disgusted me—my feelings of jealousy and rage, the functions of my body, the things that came out of me on a daily and monthly basis. I was so ashamed of the fact that I was a human body that urinated and defecated that I would pop out a contact lens whenever I needed to go to the bathroom; so deep was my shame that they might know what I was doing in there, I needed the contact lens on my finger as proof that I was going into the restroom for something else, not that.
When I was eleven, a neighborhood girl told me a horror story about a girl whose mother wouldn’t let her shave her legs and who was teased constantly by everyone she knew—“Ape Legs,” they called her—who one day found a straight edge razor in the sand of the play yard, near the swings. She took it into a bathroom at the park, and when she didn’t come back out after many minutes, the group of girls who had teased her followed her in to see what had become of her. They found her perched on the edge of a sink, her leg in front of her a mess of blood and gore as she ran the dirty, rusty razor up her shin again and again, ruining herself in an attempt to be pretty, to be more like what a girl should be.
The girl told me the story with a soft voice and wide eyes, a tone of awful glee propelling each word. Was it a warning, not to shave with dirty razors? It seemed to hairy-legged eleven-year-old me more of a cautionary tale that I shouldn’t wait much longer before I rid myself of the unsightly fuzz.
Four years later, legs smooth, tanned, and thin, I walked home from school with a friend whose legs were not as lithe as mine. I was wearing a new floral skirt that flared when I spun, like a little girl’s dress, but hugged my hips and butt in a way that wasn’t little girlish at all. And looking down at my long, shiny calves, I blurted, “I have perfect legs.”
It was a rare moment of confidence and joy in my own flesh, but as soon as the words were spoken, I regretted them. This was not something you said aloud—ever—of your own body. That it was pretty, that it was perfect, that you loved it, even for a second, even just in the right light, the right skirt.
Girls should be made of long legs and long hair, but they should be made of shame, too. Of modesty. Of ignorance. And woe to the girl who isn’t.
Recently I read that, when asked how to judge if a sex act has been successful, teen girls list as of primary importance whether the boy enjoyed himself. After that, the markers of successful coupling included: if her body presented as attractive; if nothing embarrassing happened; if the boy contacted her again afterward.
Maybe I should have been shocked that nowhere on this list appeared: if the girl enjoyed herself; if she experienced pleasure; if she achieved orgasm; if she left the experience with the desire to repeat it.
But I wasn’t shocked, or surprised, though I did sigh and shake my head and feel so, so sorry—sorry for the girl I once was that my own pleasure and safety weren’t priorities to me; sorry to be part of a system that creates girls whose bodies seem to belong to everyone but themselves.
It’s not new, our valuation of young female people for how they can serve, satisfy, and satiate. Our girls are both the platter and the meal, and we eat them up—we eat their meat, we lap up their sweetness, we covet and control and consume.
I am angry about all of this, but What Girls Are Made Of was not born solely from my anger. It was born equally from my complicity. The ways I submitted to what was expected of me when I was a girl, and the ways I still feel the impulse as a woman to submit. Now, though, what is expected of me is different—as a woman in my forties, it seems that what is expected is for me to fade, to fold inward, and to disappear.
Recently, a boy said something about my daughter that got back to her. She was not pleased. By the time she told me about the incident, she’d already blocked him on social media and told him that what he had said was not respectful. I was absolutely blown away. She asked what I would have done if something like this had happened to me when I was her age; the answer, sadly, was that I would have laughed it off, felt sick to my stomach, and done nothing more.
My freshman year in college, I wandered across the hall from my dorm room and into the room of two boys. It was late morning, and almost everyone else who lived on our floor had gone to class. I sat on a beanbag; the boys sat on their beds. They were stoned, a little red-eyed, and handsome in the disheveled way boys can be. I don’t know how we got on the topic of sex, but I wasn’t surprised that we did. Most conversations, it seemed, went this way. What did surprise me was when one of the boys opened a drawer and removed a straight edge razor, then straddled me where I sat and pressed the edge of the razor to my neck.
“I could rape you,” he said. The other boy, still on his bed, watched with lidded eyes.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to scream, but on the other hand, I told myself, what if he was joking? What if I yelled and made a big deal out of it and it turned out that really nothing was wrong?
Minutes passed like that, and I felt the hardening erection the boy grew as he straddled me, as he dominated me, as he grinned down at me. Eventually he dismounted and I said I had to go to class and I left.
I went to the bathroom and into the farthest shower stall. I sank down to the cold tile floor and curled my knees close to my chest. I pressed my hands into my face and cried as quietly as I could. Even then I didn’t want to make too much noise.
How did I come to think that I was a person who wasn’t worth screaming for? How was it that the fear of overreacting was stronger than a sense of self-preservation?