TigerEatsCow

There’s this scene in Balto (1995) that forced its way into my head the other day as a core memory. In it, a lady dog seduces the antagonist dog of the movie. As a young child, raised a girl, it was a core memory. A formation in my mind that something there was powerful: that beauty could persuade, even if it existed in an anthropomorphic dog.

I’ve long thought about the parts of my childhood that defined girlhood, or being assigned and raised female at birth. Now, I refer to my gender as “whatever the fuck I’m feeling that day” or “blobfish on codeine” or “noodles” but as a child, it was embedded there. I’m not sure what trashcan I fished all the ideas that would compound into my values growing up, but I quickly learned — from magazines, or childhood talk, or just through existing in a society — that parts of a woman’s value were her looks, her sexuality, and her ability to catch a husband. Like fishing!

Girlhood for me was confusing. I didn’t ever know, nor do I know now, how to perform like a girl. I dyed my hair blond in college and wore crop tops so boys would like me, all the while masking my shame at my virginity (I had vaginismus). It got me no where, really, that mindset. It just got me further from myself. And when I look at women sometimes, like this Shabbat dinner I went to weeks ago, their acrylic nails and expensive skin and hair routines confuse me. It’s a language I can admire but don’t see myself as part of. It’s performance, but I am too lazy to do it.

Growing up I am convinced I was a dirt child made of radishes and fish guts. I loved nature and the woods. I wasn’t afraid of frogs or snakes or dark things or Halloween. I didn’t want to be a Princess. Sure, there were Polly-Pocket houses and American Girl Doll horses. But there was also rolling in the mud, and Star Wars, and my parents dressing me in clothes from the boy’s section pretty much my whole tiny upbringing. Sometimes, they’d get me into a dress. I REALLY wanted a sword.

I also had a childhood with traumas I won’t mention. I think what inspired these pieces isn’t just girlhood specifically, but how vulnerable you are as a child and how trauma can follow you, show up in your body, and seem, at times, like a dark red horizon, stretching, constantly, no matter how far you run from it.

Childhood was insufferable to me. I hated being told what to do. We had a school uniform. We had strict (stupid) rules. Childhood was sharp and it cut you. In retrospect, it felt like needles. It was isolating, powerless, and unenjoyable. Some people mourn their childhoods. I do not. I never will. I never have.

One of the themes I also played with here is sexuality and the violence of girlhood. Girlhood is blood in your pants at age 12. Girlhood is a low, seething rage, confusion about desires, fear of the world. At least, from my experience. I’m a spoiled white person. Girlhood for me was isolating and fraught— to others it’s different. Some don’t even get it. For some, girlhood is being raped by your uncle who tells you you’re pretty. For others, it’s screaming for your dad to buy you a Barbie doll. But in all of them, you have little power (in a legal and social sense) in your family and in your community.

Girlhood is violent, bloody, horrifying. It is realizing you are often the victim. It is the realization that your family will train you not to do certain things to keep you safe, but that they DO have the power to make you feel unsafe in your own house. Girlhood is learning about makeup, pearls, diamonds, and how your body makes that old man hard. Not because you like these things, but because someone tells you so. Vogue. Hollywood. Your grandmother. Republican social policies that should’ve died before they were conceived.

When I turned 26 I grew out of the precarious age range where you are mostly likely to be sexually assaulted. I learned most teen pregnancies are caused by men 21-29. And I began to see girlhood everywhere: in the 17 year olds butchered in the murder podcast I entered, in the single women trying to regain their childhoods, in the Black women practicing boundaries and softness, in the trans girls coming out and being girls, outwardly, for the first time. So there is joy in girlhood, I think. There are flowers, and patience, and gestures of love.

But blood is more fun.