Nobody Wants to Be THAT Girl

An urgent call for female solidarity

* For today’s post, I have taken down the paywall so feel free to listen to me read this piece and to comment!

sasPhoto by Obie Fernandez on Unsplash

When you wake up to sexism, you find out quickly that what you hope to eradicate and the harm you experience because of it seem non-existent to others. That’s exactly what Priya, one of my patients who’d begun doing anti-racist gender justice work for a local organization, was discovering. So accustomed to my own compartmentalizing, I found it painful to watch Priya experience the sting of each new instance of unfair treatment and its denial. The sting was especially agonizing when it came from other girls, as it did from her friend Eve.

I have vivid memories of moments like this from my own childhood. Being told by my mom when I questioned it, that being addressed on envelopes and invitations as Mrs. [Husband’s First and Last Name] is “just how it’s done.” In my synagogue, the seats for boys and men flowed down the center, while those for girls and women were situated on the sides, making clear our place in a man’s world was on the periphery. “It’s tradition,” I was told. My brilliant high school English teacher, a minority woman, put thick red slashes through the “her” portion of “his/her” that I’d used throughout an essay. She explained, “To avoid confusion, use ‘his’ instead of ‘his/her,’ ” and then added, notably, “It’s not sexism, it’s accepted practice.”

Tradition. Accepted practice. To avoid confusion. But nothing was more bewildering to me than having authority figures tell me in ways large and small that the erasure of girls was okay. It would take a long time to understand that “sexism” and “accepted practice” are categories that can and do routinely overlap and that a person’s discomfort with that overlap is often dismissed as oversensitivity.

Today, some of those sexist practices are going the way of the corset. But evidence of progress is too often used to shut down questions about the work still to be done. Given that women are only 28% of congress, that girls worldwide believes their most important asset is their appearance, that diet culture rages on, that violence against women continues unabated, and that females on TV are twice as likely to solve problems using magic, while males generally use science or their physicality, we have ample proof that inequality is far from solved.

Priya was aghast when Eve sided with their male friends who were tired of Priya’s “feminist bullshit.” Roe v. Wade had just been overturned, and Priya was trying to grasp how girls in Florida seeking judicial bypasses could be told by judges they weren’t mature enough to end their pregnancies but were presumably mature enough to parent. What might have been a fruitful discussion between Priya and Eve about sexism and what it means to be female devolved instead into a hotbed of envy and competition between them—the kind of fighting that’s culturally sanctioned and expected among girls.

You’d think something as pervasive as sexism would unite girls and women, but by its very nature it often does the opposite. A patriarchal society does its most effective work when it turns women against each other, making them afraid to be feminists and encouraging competition and distrust between them. Girls learn early to compete both for male attention (which allows boys to do little to earn admiration) and for a limited number of token spots at the top.

Nobody wants to be that kind of girl—the aggressive one, the needy one, the uptight one, the slutty one, the prudish one. In a culture that sees human attributes as divisible into “masculine” and “feminine” and assigns those it doesn’t value to the latter pile, any kind of girl may be viewed as “less than,” prompting girls to declare themselves different from, better than, or more chill (one of the boys) than other girls.

Priya and Eve drew directly from the patriarchal script and attacked each other with the stereotypes girls desperately want to avoid. Priya decided Eve was “a bimbo who drank the sexist Kool-Aid,” while Eve viewed Priya as “one of those girls who moans about everything” and repeatedly demanded she lighten up. Before Priya found her megaphone, she, a girl with Indian roots and brown skin, had felt “wrong.” Eve’s accusations both enraged her and stirred up latent insecurities. She said of Eve, “It must be nice to be rich and white so you don’t have to worry about anything.”

In Taylor Swift and the Good Girl Trap: Winning is Losing,

Anne Helen Petersen

writes, “…I have also come to understand that trying to fit into society’s understanding of a ‘good girl’ is a trap, the same way that the ‘model minority’ and the ‘good gay’ and the ‘good fatty’ are all traps. Even when you succeed at it you lose, because these roles are all ultimately means of containment: of circumscribing power by putting exacting, contradictory, standards on the way you’re able to ‘appropriately’ wield it.”

Although Peterson is talking about this in a slightly different context, I think the argument holds. Too often “winning” for a girl means adapting to sexist structures to gain the approval of the dominant culture. But individual successes won’t lead to liberation on a larger scale. For girls and women, the best revenge against a culture that demeans them is to stick together. Being with girlfriends (or anyone who’s faced gender discrimination) is a balm against the limitations of constantly feeling Other. It’s freedom from having to adjust your behavior and conversation due to the fear that a man may perceive it as tedious or unrelatable.

Mothers are in a particularly powerful position to model solidarity and to dismantle the competition among girls roused by cultural deprivation. When Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles bowed down on the olympic podium to Rebecca Andrade who took the gold medal, they provided the world with a gorgeous example of women supporting women. By reserving judgment—or better yet embracing, admiring, and showing we can learn from other women—we can interrupt the destructive cycle that interferes with girls and women joining forces to oppose sexism and demand better. When we distance ourselves from other women, elevating our choices and ideas over theirs, we teach our girls that their best allies are their adversaries. We must underscore for girls the power of collective action and standing together.

Silver medalist Simone Biles and bronze medalist Jordan Chiles bow down to gold medal winner Rebeca Andrade on the podium

For women with more privilege, such as white women like me, it can be hard to put our progressive politics where our mouth is, so to speak. As Peterson says, “We are generally good at seeing injustice, and we are generally bad at giving up our own sliver of societal power in order to rectify that injustice. What most reliably moves us to act is personal stakes, and the absence of them makes it easy for us to ‘move on’ from causes that other people have no choice but to engage every day of their lives.”

The aggressive policing we’ve seen of Black women since Dobbs is a peek into what’s in store for all of us if the Republican Party wins the upcoming election.

The escalating restrictions on bodily autonomy, (with a November election that will profoundly shape these crucial decisions), is bringing women together from across race, class, and political affiliation more than any other issue. Anyone with a uterus is deeply affected by these bans, but the immediate stakes are higher for women of color, particularly Black and Latina women, who are more likely to face socioeconomic barriers. They are also more likely to be charged with “crimes against their own pregnancies,” if they have a miscarriage or something else goes wrong. Michele Goodwin, author of Policing the Womb told AP News, “Even before Roe was overturned, studies show that Black women who visited hospitals for prenatal care were 10 times more likely than white women to have child protective services and law enforcement called on them, even when their cases were similar.”

The aggressive policing we’ve seen of Black women since Dobbs is a peek into what’s in store for all women if the Republican Party wins the upcoming election. It is a truism: no one is free until we are all free. Eventually, our privilege will not protect us which is one reason we must stand with women who have even fewer rights. Being a good human is the primary reason but I won’t pretend letting go of privilege or fighting for others is easy—especially when many of us are already worn down by misogyny and the demands of everyday life

The stakes of this election make my new book, Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in the Modern world strikingly timely. Fighting sexism on a micro level through parenting and educating is just as important as on a macro level, and even more so when it comes to saving the selves and self esteem of girls. The need for awareness and a fighting spirit to go with the recent hope that’s swept the nation makes me more passionate than ever about getting this book into as many hands as possible.

It takes a village to birth a book so I’m looking for people to join my Launch Team. If you like my work and want to share news of the book with your network in exchange for some extra perks, please sign up for the Launch Team. It’s not a huge commitment but it will give you easy ways to spread the word. If you want to read more about how I worked with my patient Priya to communicate more effectively with her friend Eve, and hear the truly delightful way they resolved their conflict, you can preorder Sexism & Sensibility and have it in your hands September 3rd! Preordering has a HUGE impact on the success of a book. I can’t believe it’s almost here. I couldn’t have done it without The Feminist Parent community standing with me, encouraging me, and even helping me choose a cover! Thank you all!

In solidarity,

Jo-Ann