What About a Girl's Body Requires So Much Policing?

Thoughts on the DNC and whether its okay to hate women (it is!)

My goal this week was to put pads in empty classrooms. The thing about being a preteen girl is that you never know when your body is going to betray you, one day you wake up three inches taller, but the next day you’ve got a zit the size of Florida and cramps that feel like someone is trying to squeeze your intestines out of your body. Puberty is a series of betrayals within your body, changes upon changes shaking you out of the comfort of what used to be “you.” Some people, stupid people who are so removed from the kind of dread changing anatomy brings that they wouldn’t notice if their own body morphed into the shape of a donkey, try to reinvent adolescence as a time of rebirth and eternal growth. If you’ve ever met an adolescent, and spewed this hot garbage they would definitely make you wish you were reborn- as someone else.

When I talk about these people, the “rebirthers” and the “crown straighteners” as they like to call themselves, I think of the kind of feminism that reeks with this desire to push itself forward at any cost. Over the last few days, the Democratic National Convention was a flagrant display of this toxic positivity. It’s senseless influencers hopping from “empowerment” event to “empowerment” event, grabbing free dinners and tacky merchandise trying to convince the starving masses of people who make fan edits of what they wish their fridges could look like (all they really want is nice cheese) to vote for a woman because she is THE woman.

Now, I’m not against women-for the most part. But in the past year I’ve realized that girlhood is not all hot pink and Barbie movie flair or this relentless campaign to get a woman of color genocidal leader elected instead of a man, it’s the shame that comes from having a body. A period is a quiet demon that attacks you at your weakest- adolescence- and then spits you out when you’re old enough to get used to it. An antidepressant that makes you gain ten pounds is an invitation for people to comment on the way your body moves now, even though it’s a blessing for it to be moving at all because you were rotting in your bed months before that. A change in skin color because of the summer sun becomes a debate within your family about the bad genes you inherited from your other side. What about a girl's body requires so much policing?

When I told my coworkers about my idea to put pads in each classroom an older colleague jumped in. She warned against it, saying that girls tend to take advantage of the pads we give out. According to her, in the past, they used to have a box of them in the main office, but they would always run out early in the year. She puts forth this conspiracy that the girls take more pads than they need. (Should we behead them?) 

Pads aren’t like chocolate, you can derive little joy from them. You can’t stick them on bathroom walls without them slipping off or pass notes through them because they’re so bulky someone will definitely notice, nor can you eat or drink or throw them around. A pad is just a pad- no hidden features somewhere in the wings. So if a girl takes two more pads than she should, we should assume it’s out of necessity. There’s nothing fun about menstruating.

My coworker opens the door for a kind of womanhood, one created out of doubt for those who share your gender. See now, womanhood, girlhood, and all the other labels under which the female experience can be described become a scale, one end being this world of rapid policing, to constantly monitor a girl in every aspect of her life, from counting pads to guessing weight. The other end of the spectrum is women who get away with anything and everything because of the protection womanhood entails, “I’m just a girl” -ing their way out of responsibilities, while also claiming to be the future of the female race.

For the life of me, I can’t decide what’s worse. Until I saw footage of the DNC. Nancy Pelosi being called BRAT. Kamala Harris and her “baller” moves, as described by her one black nephew on stage. The use of shallow influencers and their hollowed-out eyes asking governors about their first periods and thinking they created a new genre of bravery. Isn’t it funny that grown women with resources falling out of their pockets, who claim to be activists and revolutionaries in the field of “womanolgy” come to promote the first woman president as a way to rub shoulders up to the glass ceiling they wish to break? And so they sit in these fancy rooms coloring and doing “outfits of the day” on cruise ships. When asked about Harris in their comments they say “the alternative is worse” and post pictures on the stage, where they certainly do not belong, for their thousands of followers encouraging them to vote because for some reason people who film themselves drinking coffee in New York City are helping cultivate the political landscape of these United States of America.

These women, deluded into thinking they are well-intentioned, love a powerful female figure. First their brave “mama bears,” then Hillary (begrudgingly so), then Barbie, and now Kamala. A strong woman they can project their fears, and hopes, and dreams onto, many times using her as a way to reconcile with the ugly parts of life. One example of this is the “period fairy” phenomenon, an imaginary figure who helps girls with their first periods or shows up to save women during period emergencies. Some say this is a beautiful community of womanhood and acceptance and embracing the change in life (again, people who don’t know anyone going through this kind of change), others acknowledge the hollowness of it all. The period fairy isn’t real. It’s underpaid teachers setting up period stations in their self-funded classrooms, and mothers who buy pads from discount stores miles away to save money on tax, and big sisters and cousins and all the other people in a girl’s village trying to map irregularities in her cycle, because who can afford a gynecologist these days?

So, before we wave flags up in the air for genocide Barbie and thank ourselves supremely for the difference we are about to make, we should circle back to the autonomy of a young girl and how the way her body works against her more times than not.