On girlhood

Let girls just be -- to be is enough

Last Sunday I was in a tiny mountain village called Osse-en-Aspe, in the Pyrenees near the Spanish border, through which ran a beautiful stream with a swimming hole. I went for a dip after taking the dogs for a walk through the hills in the hot sunshine. As I sank into the cold, cold water two girls came gingerly down the stream, clearly school friends on a family summer holiday in this idyllic but very quiet, old village.

I could hear their light, airy voices before I saw them. They smiled politely at me as they dipped their feet in and out of the frigid water, intently discussing something with each other. Watching them go up and down on the opposite bank, reminded me of my own girlhood and the summers I spent in a tight, whispering conspiracy with my best friend, both of us wanting to be out on our own, but just a little bit; wanting to be grown, but still at heart a child; wanting to been seen and also to be invisible, all at the same time. 

What we were, my friend and I, and what these girls seemed to be, was free. Free to explore in safety, free to just be. Just like I used to, these girls wore plain bathing suits and long hair, and were barefoot. There were no adults fussing around them. They were not yet teens but just on the brink — and I remember that age, because you attract a certain type of predatory male who you quickly learn to avoid, outrun, or mock. But we were free to think our thoughts and dream our dreams and discuss the type of women we would soon be. It was hard and uncomfortable and embarrassing at times, and at other times, it was thrilling.

Just a girl

Sometimes I worry that I’m like George Orwell, not in the sense of being one of the greatest figures of English literature, but in the sense that he was once described as being incapable of blowing his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry. I, it seems, am incapable of enjoying a mountain stream without musing on girlhood.

But here goes, anyway: I watched those girls in the stream, I thought of my own freedom as a girl, and how it taught me to navigate adult womanhood, and I think of the young women and girls I see on social media, and I feel terribly sorry for them. Even the girls of a few of my peers — my former social set of Brooklyn hipsters — girls who were babies when I left the US and are now young teens in full punk regalia or going by they/them pronouns.

The norm among my former peers (not the majority of my friends, I should add, in case any of them are reading this) really seems to be a deranged interpretation and extremist version of what was once a pretty chill hipster-indie culture I once considered myself part of.

There are a lot of macro factors playing out to damage today’s girls. But when I was in the stream as the two French girls in all their natural loveliness went past me, I thought of the kids of today’s Brooklyn. Their parents, perhaps as way to stay connected to their own cool youth, have trained these girls to be cool in the same way. A whole swathe of kids have received the message, from parents, from education, from culture, that to just *be* is not good enough. They must also be different, be cool, be indie, be a rebel, be an activist, be gay, be trans — anything other than just a young white middle class girl growing up. Anything but that. 

Surely this is, in part, how we end up with young women who claim to have frog/bug pronouns, or ‘gender-faun’ pronouns, and far far worse, young women being encouraged by their culture to butcher their bodies and pump themselves with synthetic hormones instead of just being allowed to grow up.