Grow Up, Girls

your arrested development is not just your problem

a dril meme to lighten the load

Yesterday, the very famous and classically beautiful trans actress, Hunter Schaefer, posted online about receiving a male gender marker on her passport following a recent executive order. It’s hard to keep up with news items that horrify me these days.¹ But something about this instance — perhaps the scale of her celebrity, the quickness with which this order took effect, the fact that this is happening to many other people with less social cache than Schafer — jolted me into some kind of action.

I’m here to rally my people. My girls, as it were.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of womanhood and how, depending on the historical moment, it backslides into the more defenseless “girlhood.” Women stepped up to run the factories in World War II, only to become the girls brainwashed by the Free Love movement and the Beatles. Women leaned in and entered the corporate world of the 2010’s, leaving just enough time for the internet-addled, deer.jpg, i’m-just-a girls to occupy this current reality.

If you’re reading this on Substack, I needn’t waste time establishing my point that many people are talking, writing about, and identifying with girlhood these days. Many people have written about this idea extensively and, at the risk of girlhood discourse fatigue, I’ll give you what I think is one of the more salient points of the whole conversation, written by

Delia Cai

in Vanity Fair:

“We crave our girlification as a coping mechanism. Adults have to worry about rent, student loans, climate change, political demagogues, bodily autonomy; “girls” don’t. At the heart of this imagined girlhood is an expression of femininity without consequence.”

And who wouldn’t want to check out of this political moment right now? We all need a little escapism (as the girls would say, “as a treat”). I think you should watch reality television and do feral screams in the woods and stay up late blowing up the group chat. But I also caution against letting this particular kind of political dissociation slide into a potentially harmful political identification.

Being convinced that you are powerless is dangerous for oneself, but it’s also dangerous for other people. Aside from the fact that believing you are incapable of scheduling your own doctor’s appointment means that you will be no help at all in organized resistance, the political position of the “girl” is one easily weaponized against everyone else — the girl, as the most helpless, least agentic, is who must remain protected. When Conservatives say that something is about “protecting the children,” they are often truly meaning it’s about protecting “the girls” (which of course we read, here and everywhere, as “the white girls”).

Protect the girls from men in their bathrooms. Protect the girls from butchering their bodies and becoming men. Protect the girls from being impregnated by undocumented immigrants. Protect the girls from distrusting authority.

To my girls, please hear me when I say this: I understand that a lot has been taken from you. I understand that your girlhood was, statistically, cut short by the sexualization of your child body, by traumatic instances in your home life, by sexual assault. Now, as a woman, it may be finally safe for you to be a girl. I’m not trying to take your sleepovers or glitter pens or Yellowjackets fancams (God forbid) away. I’m only hoping that the idea of being a girl can be discussed without the inclusion of that sneaky, disempowering adverb: “just.”

In their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media, Herman and Chomsky note that “convenient mythologies require neither evidence nor logic.” We can see the principle of manufactured consent play out in the way that the American government has continually justified aiding Israel as to “protect” itself or its allies — no matter that the comparative Palestinian death toll makes clear exactly who is in need of such protection. As our systemic, Freudian father, the American government has a vested interest in the idea that the girls need protection, too. It wants you to believe that you are powerless — powerless to stand up to them, so much so that you may call on them to stand up for you.

I’m not saying that putting a bow in your hair and reading some Joan Didion is tantamount to falling in line with the fascists. I am saying that this kind of identification has power. I’ve perused the history and, speaking to other cis white women here, abnegating responsibility and letting other people “defend our honor” is a very classic move for us that I would rather not see us repeat in my lifetime. We have more power than they want us to believe, and I believe that claiming this power will help us out of this regressive hole we’ve, somewhat willingly, climbed into.

Womanhood is scary, in part, because personhood is scary. Being responsible for yourself is a literal nightmare, but it’s one made harder by our increasingly atomized culture. Maybe being a person wouldn’t be so hard if we could envision ourselves as part of a community.

I think, in fact, that impulse is what created the sisterhood of online girls. This is the part that we can and must hold onto for the future — that ability to see and be seen, that willingness to make space for each other, that openness to connect on shared experience. Don’t let them trick you into giving up your power for their protection. They were never going to protect you anyway.

1. Which is, of course, the point — read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine if you want to feel less crazy right now