story of a girl
It starts on the very first day of year one, when you go to sit a table full of boys you know and like and who, you thought, liked you, too, only to have them get up as one and relocate to the next table over, muttering about “girl germs”. You follow them out of shock, refusing to sit alone and humiliated. This time, the teacher makes them stay put. They respond by refusing to meet or gaze or talk to you. The next day, you sit somewhere else.
For the next six years, your ability to play sport will be constantly questioned. At each new game, with each new group of boys, you have to establish the same rapport over and over again, first begging to be allowed to join in, then shrugging off the same hurtful jibes about how girls are bad at handball, at soccer, at football, at cricket, at hockey, until you’re finally tested and found, to their great surprise, to be capable. You establish a reputation as being better than other girls, an exception to the usual rule of useless girlishness, and in so doing learn to hate and fear your own femininity.
Even so, some boys - older, bigger, stronger - dislike your presence in their world. One polices your friendships, mocking the smaller boys who play with you at lunch until they leave you alone. Others bully in subtle ways, stealing your possessions, goading you quietly so that your retaliation, and not their abuse, is invariably reprimanded by nearby teachers. You learn when to resist, and when to keep quiet.
At age ten, a strange boy approaches you at a joint school camp and asks you out during archery practise. You ask him why, rather than saying yes; you don’t know him at all. He grins and tells you his friends dared him to ask out the ugliest girl he could find. Your blank stare clearly disappoints him. He turns away, disgusted and angry that he didn’t hurt you more.
Back at school, your early-developing classmate is teased mercilessly for having to wear bras already. You, meanwhile, are mocked by the very same boys for not needing them.
Aged eleven, you start high school, still braless. Boys and girls both yell at you to cover your tits when you run, then mock you in the next breath for being flat-chested. When you do finally start wearing bras, even the barest visible outline of a strap is grounds for criticism, and lord help the full-chested girls.
In metalwork, a boy with a acne scars grabs a thick metal file as long as your forearm, stands behind you, and shoves it up between your legs. Only his bad aim prevents genuine injury. When you yell at him, he grins.
One weekened, age twelve or thirteen, your parents are mystified to find that one of the family cars has been egged and decorated with tampons, seemingly for no reason. No other car in the street is touched. It puzzles you, too, until you’re passed a note on the train the following Monday, courtesy of boys who are two and three years older than you, only one of whom goes to your school. The rest live in your neighbourhood; they know you only by sight. The note details your physical failings - saggy tits, bad hair, hairy legs. You don’t read any further than that. You hear them laughing at the back of the carriage, hoping for a reaction. Instead, you quietly fold up the note and drop it between the seats.
A year later, those same boys make a game of blocking the train doors, first keeping you away from the water fountain, then preventing you from going back to reclaim your bag until the train is practically at your stop. They do this for days. When you finally snap and shove them, they laugh, pin your arms behind your back, and squirt shaving cream in your eyes.
For unrelated reasons, aged fourteen, you change schools sporting a new short haircut. Because the cut reminds him of Leelee Sobieski’s Joan of Arc, one classmate calls you John for the next three years, even after your hair has grown out.
Hanging out with male friends on the weekend, the lot of you go swimming. Afterwards, your friends awkwardly ask you to put a top on over your swimsuit; the sight is distracting them. They remain shirtless; you don’t know what to say. Later, on a different outing, some of them laugh at the grossness of cunnilingus. Trying to fit in, you make a joke about periods, and find yourself shouted down because the thought of “a bloody axe-wound” is so repulsive.
You learn to tell jokes about women, about blondes (which you are), about domestic violence and sexual assault, in order to fit in. You praise yourself for being better than other girls, for understanding that jokes don’t hurt anybody. (You don’t yet notice how the deception is hurting you.)
Near the end of school, a different group of boys tries to compliment you for your active sex life - or at least, for their perception of it. Much to their surprise, they find they have to invent a word that specifically praises female sexuality: all the existing terms are either critical, or meant in praise of men.
At university, you dodge sexual assault three times: first, when you go to a party at the all boys’ college, and a guy you’ve never met grabs you, kisses you, and repeatedly tries to pull you into his room against your protestations; again, when a boy at your own college drunkenly mistakes your unlocked room for his, climbs into bed with you, and makes several attempts at initiating something before you finally get him to leave; and then again, when a strange man walks with you for twenty minutes after you leave the pub, talking all the while about how you ought to cheat on your respective partners together. When you finally get inside without him, your legs are shaking.
And then, of course, there are the boyfriends themselves. The one who called you “cute and helpless”, and laughed himself sick when you tried to explain how this wasn’t a compliment. The one who tells you, regretfully, how you used to be a “lithe, young thing”, but now that you’ve gone from an 8 to a 10, you have “fat all over your body,” which is a real shame. He tells you his exes “spoiled” him, because they were all so fit, and sighs meaningfully every time you eat ice cream. On another occasion, he gaslights your progressive symptoms of unwellness for over a week, calling you a hypochondriac, saying there’s “no disease in the world” with your symptoms. He stops you from going to the doctor; because it’s a waste of time. Only when you collapse in front of him with a burning fever - the product of a UTI turned into a nasty kidney infection because you didn’t seek help at the outset - does he admit his error. (He never apologises.)
Finally, in your twenties, you discover feminism. You have a good partner now, one who supports and cares for you. You start to blog about the world, about culture, about women, about your experiences, about politics. Slowly, you discover intersectionality, your white, straight, cis privilege. You realise your own internalised misogyny, the lies you told yourself to cope with every scantily-clad billboard model, every male-lead narrative, every princess fad and pink-drenched toy aisle, every joke about how all women love shoes when you loathe shoe shopping as a form of cruel and unusual punishment, every domestic advert about perfect mothers and germ-obsessed housewives - all the flotsam and jetsam of everyday sexism that permeates your life; which has always permeated your life. And in return, you receive, among other things, rape threats, abusive tirades, and calm declarations of disagreement from men who don’t understand why their belief that women are only good for sex and inherently lesser mentally should be at all offensive.
Age twenty-seven, you become a mother to a son, and as you plan for his future, you are overwhelmed when you realise what toxic lies the world will teach him about women, should you fail to teach him empathy.
You aren’t yet thirty, but you’re already tired.
And your story is still ongoing.
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Now realize there are literally a billion stories that are some variation of this.
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