The first time I read What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold, I recommended it to anyone who would listen. I remember both thinking to myself and saying out loud, "This would have changed my life if I had read it in high school." I thought that every adolescent girl--nay, every English-speaking human over the age of 15--needed to read it. I even brought it up at an interview for a middle school teaching job. They asked me to share a book I enjoyed, so I mentioned What Girls Are Made Of, and I remember that my explanation of why I liked it so much involved the range of bodily functions that it depicts. I was like, "This novel is so gross! I love it so much!" A lot of blood comes out of vaginas in this novel, and it is glorious. As a grown adult woman who should be too smart for this, I am still ashamed of my bodily functions, so this representation is sorely needed.
The other thing that I will always and forever love about What Girls Are Made Of is its unflinching representation of what it's like to grow up as a girl in a patriarchal society and to unpack a deeply rooted patriarchal history. Through protagonist Nina, Elana K. Arnold depicts the process of discovering your autonomy and giving yourself permission to consider what you want out of life rather than trying to please men and blindly adhering to societal norms. Nina accomplishes incredible growth over the course of the novel. It took me about ten years to achieve the level of growth that she manages over the course of the, I don't know, month of real-time plot in this book.
Arnold does a brilliant job of highlighting the obstacles that stunted her development and that get in the way of her growth, but Nina manages to clear these hurdles. Even though her alcoholic mother tried to pass on her skewed worldview to Nina, and even though Nina is fighting against a patriarchal society that has been inhospitable to women for thousands of years, Nina develops a sense of self-worth and starts exercising it. In reflecting on how she managed to pull this off (and why the amount of growth we see in this novel took me ten years), I realized that there is a foundation for it even during her ugliest moments. Even at her ugliest, Nina is an honest and transparent narrator, and she tells her whole truth about her actions and motivations. This requires self-worth. Nina believes that her story is worth telling, and she is brave enough to reveal the most disturbing parts of it. She demonstrates self-compassion and shame resilience, and she continues to cultivate these skills over the course of the novel. They facilitate her growth, and she could not have done it without them.
At the beginning of the novel, Nina is dating a boy named Seth and is entirely codependent. She worships him and cannot see value in her life outside of her relationship with him. Every time they are together, she pays no attention to her own needs and instead focuses on behaving in a way that will make Seth happy. Early in the novel, she explains that he is far and away the most exciting part of her day: "My school day is completely average and unremarkable, save for the presence of Seth. Not worth talking about." She illustrates this point by taking us through her day and distinguishing the noteworthy events, which involve Seth, from those that are not worth discussing. I was surprised, appalled even, that she did not let herself observe and enjoy her fascinating high school surroundings. Anybody who has ever been in high school knows that the school day is full of adventure. As annoying as school can be, it's a stimulating place where you acquire experiences and observations that are unforgettable, usually but not exclusively due to how egregiously, hilariously awful they are. An example: I fell asleep during a physics test during my junior year, and I will never forget it. Why did nobody wake me up? How was my teacher so horrible as to not realize that one of his highest performing students failed to remain conscious during a test? (I had taken on too much my junior year. I reached my breaking point during this physics test, apparently.) Another memorable high school moment: One time during Spanish class, two boys stood up and put on a weak performance of pretending that they were going to fight each other. It was surreal. It was like they both knew that they were obligated to perform masculinity in such a way, but they absolutely were not interested in going through with it. Wild. When Nina takes us through her day, she starts at the very beginning, her zero-period AP Chemistry class, and she says that there is nothing to report because (of course) Seth is not in that class. And, honestly, it is inexcusable to leave your zero-period AP Chemistry class with nothing to report. It is simply impossible that there is nothing to share after spending time with half-asleep, high performing students who have, for some reason, decided to take not one but two chemistry classes in their high school career. I am dying to know what goes on in that room, but Nina has no interest in it. Her inability to be present for her own life is disturbing. Nina goes on to tell us that when Seth is not around, she experiences more than just boredom; rather, she feels deep unease. If she does not see his car in the lot at the beginning of the day, she cannot relax until she sees him in class. His mood profoundly affects her; she says that "the molecular makeup of [her] skin shifts along with it." And she assigns great significance to every minimally kind thing he does for her, even something as simple as smiling while holding a door open. She remembers it. In the middle of this description of her codependent relationship, she pauses to tell us that she knows "it's not cool to define yourself by a boy." She knows that she should be a grrrl rather than a girl, a strong female protagonist rather than the love interest. She knows that she is supposed to have a deep and unwavering sense of her own worth, but she doesn't, and she knows that about herself. Rather than apologizing for it, she just looks us straight in the eye and tells us her truth. She says, "I know what I'm supposed to be, and who I'm supposed to be with Seth, but my desire for him overwhelms me at every turn, it fills my throat like an awful tumor, and I am powerless to define myself any other way." This dynamic is clearly unhealthy. Nina sacrifices herself for this boy, and she knows that this is a dangerous way to live, as evidenced by the way she compares it to a tumor. Nina's narration tells us about her character, and she is someone who is willing to look at the ugly truths about herself. She is highly self-aware and highly aware of her cultural environment. She knows when she's not meeting expectations, and she knows when her behavior is a cause for concern. Even so, she does not deny her truth, and what's even more impressive is that she allows herself to share it with us. While others (myself included) run the other way when they realize something imperfect, let alone unhealthy and harmful, about themselves and their behavior, Nina names it. In high school, I also put a lot of stock in what boys thought of me, but unlike Nina, I never admitted this to anybody. It might have been my biggest source of shame. I envy Nina’s ability to name her truth and to describe it in detail, unflinchingly. A couple of years ago, around the time I first read What Girls Are Made Of, I read Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by psychologist Kristen Neff, in which she asserts that everyone is flawed, and nobody is "better" than anybody else. We all have areas in which we are strong, and we all have areas in which we struggle. This is ok. We should not judge ourselves so harshly for being worse than average in a particular area, or for failing to meet cultural expectations, that we are unable to acknowledge the truth of the situation. Harsh self-judgement gets in the way of us knowing ourselves, and it gets in the way of our growth. If we can look at ourselves clearly and honestly, with compassion rather than judgment, we will feel better about ourselves, and we will be able to grow. Self-judgment and shame go hand in hand, which is why Brene Brown’s work added to my understanding of Neff's. I recently listened to Daring Greatly, in which Brown defines shame and discusses the best way to cope with it. She says that shame is fear of disconnection. It is the fear that people will not want to have a relationship with you if they find out the source of your shame. Brene Brown says that the best way to build shame resilience and to lessen its power is to seek out connection and tell someone you trust about the source of your shame. If shame is fear of disconnection, then connection is the antidote. Nina demonstrates self-compassion through her ability to look at herself clearly and honestly, and as the novel progresses, she also develops shame resilience by seeking out connection. At the beginning of the novel, she hangs out with some people from school but does not genuinely connect with anybody. However, at the dog shelter where she volunteers, she meets Bekah, a young adult with whom she forms a genuine friendship. When she needs someone to be with her during her medical abortion, she contacts Bekah, who she had never previously hung out with outside of work. Bekah comes over and proves to be an incredible abortion buddy. She makes Nina soup, watches movies with her, and is entirely nonjudgmental of what her body is going through. At one point, she goes into Nina's underwear drawer and fetches her a clean pair. Nina and Bekah hang out once more toward the end of the novel, and this time they just talk. Nina decides to open up about her biggest source of shame. She did something awful to another girl at school, and it was the reason that she had to start volunteering in the first place. Though she decided to continue volunteering of her own volition, it began as a punishment for her actions. Her actions were indeed abhorrent and inexcusable, but instead of descending into an endless shame spiral, she owns her story and shares it with Bekah. When she sees an opening in the conversation, she says that "[she] did something really terrible once." Bekah prompts her to continue. She hesitates and then decides to tell the story because, as she puts it, "the things I do and the things I have done are parts of me--the things I'm ashamed of just as much as the things I'm proud of, the stories I've written, my time at the shelter, and the way I helped the broken dog die." The way that Nina is able to gather the strength to share her source of shame with Bekah is by remembering that this is one choice that she made, and it is a part of her, but it is not the whole picture. As Kristin Neff encourages, she is able to look at herself clearly, seeing the strengths as well as the flaws, and as Brene Brown encourages, she develops shame resilience by seeking out connection. And as a result of her self-compassion and shame resilience, she grows. By the end of the novel, she has a real friend who knows her and who she trusts, and she also begins to unlearn her dependence on Seth and on men in general. Her decision to have an abortion serves as the catalyst that empowers her to begin developing autonomy in other areas of her life. She begins to think about what she wants and what would be best for her rather than what would most please the men around her. She even goes so far as to withdraw a writing piece that she had submitted for grading because she (correctly) does not think her male teacher is the right audience for it. Rather than submitting it to be graded, she decides that she has no interest in being evaluated, and she accepts half credit for completing the assignment rather than the A she probably would have received had her teacher graded the work. That takes serious guts, and the person who did it is the same person who did not value any part of herself or her life outside of Seth earlier in the novel. It is important to note that Nina did not invent the phenomenon of losing yourself in a relationship with a boy. She is responsible for her behavior, but the forces that influenced it were entirely out of her control. From a young age, her mother, who is an art history buff, an alcoholic, and a wee bit of a monster, has been telling her violent, gruesome bedtime stories about the female saints who endured torture and often sacrificed their lives as a demonstration of their devotion to Jesus. As a Jew whose knowledge of Christianity is limited to Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert, I don’t really know what saints are, but I think it’s safe to say that these are well regarded people in the Christian faith. Their stories have been passed down for hundreds or thousands of years, depending on the saint. The stories of the virgin martyr saints are horrific, combining murderous incels with medieval torture. I guess the Christian powers-that-be are into that, because these stories have been preserved and immortalized. All of them are extremely fucked up, but the one that sticks out most in my mind is Dymphna’s. After her mother died, her father decided that he was going to marry her, which she did not want to do for the obvious incest-related reasons and also because she had taken a vow of chastity and promised Jesus that she would not have sex. Her father, a murderous incel, sliced her head off because that was his response to being rejected. (As a sexual partner. By his own daughter. Jeez.) Since the stories of the virgin martyr saints were written by men, they depict these women as powerless. Even their small triumphs are attributed to Jesus. In these stories, the most significant parts of women's lives occur when men are present. The stories of the virgin martyr saints do not even come close to passing the Bechdel test, and the women spend their time either physically trapped or running away from danger. They do not have agency or autonomy, and the way these stories are told, they also have nothing going on in their lives that does not involve men. The men chase them, save them, torture them, and murder them. The women just show up and respond. If these are the narratives that Nina has grown up with, how is she supposed to know any different? Nina’s outlook is not a personal failure. It is not a failure of character; rather, it has a lot to do with both her horrible mother and a system of oppression that has forced women to rely on men for centuries. (Remember when women weren’t allowed to open their own bank account? That was less than a hundred years ago!) As girls and women try to figure out our relationship with men, we are also processing and unlearning lessons from history, the media, and our friends and family. This is a messy process, and nobody should expect for it not to be. This is why I love that Elana K. Arnold represents it realistically, without an ounce of sugarcoating. Like Nina, my relationship with men is messy, and it is a source of shame, but unlike her, I avoid thinking about it whenever I can afford to, and I certainly avoid discussing it with others. Since Nina is straight and I am not, my story has an additional layer to it, but our stories are fundamentally the same. We have both needed to unlearn what we’ve been taught about the relationship between women and men, and we have both needed to figure out how to relate to men in a way that is healthy and appropriate for us. I can barely even think about some of my misguided attempts at relating to men without wanting to curl up in the fetal position on the floor. The shame is so strong that I try to make these stories fade to black whenever they turn up on the movie screen inside my head. Actually, a more apt metaphor is that I tear down the screen. I tear it down through brute strength, like I’m fricking Godzilla, and I do it immediately so I do not have to witness the story play out. I can barely tolerate knowing these things about myself, let alone sharing them with others. But maybe it's time for me to take a cue from Nina and from the great Brene Brown and Kristin Neff. I know that my attempt at heterosexuality is just one part of my life, and it’s ok that I’m not proud of it. I also know that it is not entirely my fault, and perhaps voicing it will not only give my shame less power but will also give patriarchy and heteronormativity less power. Our culture facilitates shame, and as such, women and girls are given expectations that are impossible to meet and that are often paradoxical. In high school, while we both cared very much about what boys thought of us, Nina and I (and countless other adolescent girls, I'm sure) also believed that we were supposed to be strong female protagonists who were blissfully uncaring about the very thing we found ourselves focusing on. How were we supposed to make that complete 180 from where we were to where we thought we were supposed to be without first acknowledging the reason we found ourselves caring about boys to begin with, honoring that truth, and working to minimize its power in our lives? You can’t just eliminate patriarchy overnight. Sure, we have made great progress: we have three waves of feminism, commercialized feminism (for whatever that’s worth), and Beyonce, but this does not mean that the problem is solved and the wounds are healed. As we try to turn the tides and smash the patriarchy, girls and women need a little grace. We need room to mess up and to be flawed, and we are not granted this space to grow, so we need to claim it for ourselves. Even though Nina makes herself smaller in her relationship with Seth, she refuses to disappear, and she claims her space by telling the full, ugly truth about the situation. This is worth emulating. Women and girls are told to feel ashamed of so many reasonable aspects of our personalities, behaviors, and appearances. In naming our sources of shame, we give them less power and take one small but meaningful step against patriarchy.
Everyone stands to benefit from dismantling a system of oppression, even the oppressors, so this message is for men too. If men were committed to developing self-compassion, shame resilience, and a healthy resentment of the patriarchy, maybe the scene from my high school Spanish class would have turned into a heart-to-heart in which these two boys shared that they just weren’t really into fighting, even though they felt like they should be. Maybe they would have had a good laugh about it, and we would have been able to continue our lesson about the difference between ser and estar. Can you imagine if these boys had even had an ounce of Nina’s self-awareness?
I won’t go so far as to say that deep and unflinching self-knowledge can fully liberate us from systems of oppression. It takes a whole lot more than that (institutional change, for example), but it certainly makes a difference, and it is the first step toward change. We have all been consumed by politics and by the civil rights movement lately, and we are acutely aware of how fucked up things are institutionally. In light of all of that, my discussion of self-compassion might seem naive and trite, but there is great power in acknowledging truth. On both a personal and institutional level, there is great power in knowing what you have done wrong and looking at it with an unwavering gaze. Acknowledging the truth, even within yourself, is an act of resistance. Lean into the discomfort, and know that there is growth ahead.
At the beginning of the novel, Nina is dating a boy named Seth and is entirely codependent. She worships him and cannot see value in her life outside of her relationship with him. Every time they are together, she pays no attention to her own needs and instead focuses on behaving in a way that will make Seth happy. Early in the novel, she explains that he is far and away the most exciting part of her day: "My school day is completely average and unremarkable, save for the presence of Seth. Not worth talking about." She illustrates this point by taking us through her day and distinguishing the noteworthy events, which involve Seth, from those that are not worth discussing. I was surprised, appalled even, that she did not let herself observe and enjoy her fascinating high school surroundings. Anybody who has ever been in high school knows that the school day is full of adventure. As annoying as school can be, it's a stimulating place where you acquire experiences and observations that are unforgettable, usually but not exclusively due to how egregiously, hilariously awful they are. An example: I fell asleep during a physics test during my junior year, and I will never forget it. Why did nobody wake me up? How was my teacher so horrible as to not realize that one of his highest performing students failed to remain conscious during a test? (I had taken on too much my junior year. I reached my breaking point during this physics test, apparently.) Another memorable high school moment: One time during Spanish class, two boys stood up and put on a weak performance of pretending that they were going to fight each other. It was surreal. It was like they both knew that they were obligated to perform masculinity in such a way, but they absolutely were not interested in going through with it. Wild. When Nina takes us through her day, she starts at the very beginning, her zero-period AP Chemistry class, and she says that there is nothing to report because (of course) Seth is not in that class. And, honestly, it is inexcusable to leave your zero-period AP Chemistry class with nothing to report. It is simply impossible that there is nothing to share after spending time with half-asleep, high performing students who have, for some reason, decided to take not one but two chemistry classes in their high school career. I am dying to know what goes on in that room, but Nina has no interest in it. Her inability to be present for her own life is disturbing. Nina goes on to tell us that when Seth is not around, she experiences more than just boredom; rather, she feels deep unease. If she does not see his car in the lot at the beginning of the day, she cannot relax until she sees him in class. His mood profoundly affects her; she says that "the molecular makeup of [her] skin shifts along with it." And she assigns great significance to every minimally kind thing he does for her, even something as simple as smiling while holding a door open. She remembers it. In the middle of this description of her codependent relationship, she pauses to tell us that she knows "it's not cool to define yourself by a boy." She knows that she should be a grrrl rather than a girl, a strong female protagonist rather than the love interest. She knows that she is supposed to have a deep and unwavering sense of her own worth, but she doesn't, and she knows that about herself. Rather than apologizing for it, she just looks us straight in the eye and tells us her truth. She says, "I know what I'm supposed to be, and who I'm supposed to be with Seth, but my desire for him overwhelms me at every turn, it fills my throat like an awful tumor, and I am powerless to define myself any other way." This dynamic is clearly unhealthy. Nina sacrifices herself for this boy, and she knows that this is a dangerous way to live, as evidenced by the way she compares it to a tumor. Nina's narration tells us about her character, and she is someone who is willing to look at the ugly truths about herself. She is highly self-aware and highly aware of her cultural environment. She knows when she's not meeting expectations, and she knows when her behavior is a cause for concern. Even so, she does not deny her truth, and what's even more impressive is that she allows herself to share it with us. While others (myself included) run the other way when they realize something imperfect, let alone unhealthy and harmful, about themselves and their behavior, Nina names it. In high school, I also put a lot of stock in what boys thought of me, but unlike Nina, I never admitted this to anybody. It might have been my biggest source of shame. I envy Nina’s ability to name her truth and to describe it in detail, unflinchingly. A couple of years ago, around the time I first read What Girls Are Made Of, I read Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by psychologist Kristen Neff, in which she asserts that everyone is flawed, and nobody is "better" than anybody else. We all have areas in which we are strong, and we all have areas in which we struggle. This is ok. We should not judge ourselves so harshly for being worse than average in a particular area, or for failing to meet cultural expectations, that we are unable to acknowledge the truth of the situation. Harsh self-judgement gets in the way of us knowing ourselves, and it gets in the way of our growth. If we can look at ourselves clearly and honestly, with compassion rather than judgment, we will feel better about ourselves, and we will be able to grow. Self-judgment and shame go hand in hand, which is why Brene Brown’s work added to my understanding of Neff's. I recently listened to Daring Greatly, in which Brown defines shame and discusses the best way to cope with it. She says that shame is fear of disconnection. It is the fear that people will not want to have a relationship with you if they find out the source of your shame. Brene Brown says that the best way to build shame resilience and to lessen its power is to seek out connection and tell someone you trust about the source of your shame. If shame is fear of disconnection, then connection is the antidote. Nina demonstrates self-compassion through her ability to look at herself clearly and honestly, and as the novel progresses, she also develops shame resilience by seeking out connection. At the beginning of the novel, she hangs out with some people from school but does not genuinely connect with anybody. However, at the dog shelter where she volunteers, she meets Bekah, a young adult with whom she forms a genuine friendship. When she needs someone to be with her during her medical abortion, she contacts Bekah, who she had never previously hung out with outside of work. Bekah comes over and proves to be an incredible abortion buddy. She makes Nina soup, watches movies with her, and is entirely nonjudgmental of what her body is going through. At one point, she goes into Nina's underwear drawer and fetches her a clean pair. Nina and Bekah hang out once more toward the end of the novel, and this time they just talk. Nina decides to open up about her biggest source of shame. She did something awful to another girl at school, and it was the reason that she had to start volunteering in the first place. Though she decided to continue volunteering of her own volition, it began as a punishment for her actions. Her actions were indeed abhorrent and inexcusable, but instead of descending into an endless shame spiral, she owns her story and shares it with Bekah. When she sees an opening in the conversation, she says that "[she] did something really terrible once." Bekah prompts her to continue. She hesitates and then decides to tell the story because, as she puts it, "the things I do and the things I have done are parts of me--the things I'm ashamed of just as much as the things I'm proud of, the stories I've written, my time at the shelter, and the way I helped the broken dog die." The way that Nina is able to gather the strength to share her source of shame with Bekah is by remembering that this is one choice that she made, and it is a part of her, but it is not the whole picture. As Kristin Neff encourages, she is able to look at herself clearly, seeing the strengths as well as the flaws, and as Brene Brown encourages, she develops shame resilience by seeking out connection. And as a result of her self-compassion and shame resilience, she grows. By the end of the novel, she has a real friend who knows her and who she trusts, and she also begins to unlearn her dependence on Seth and on men in general. Her decision to have an abortion serves as the catalyst that empowers her to begin developing autonomy in other areas of her life. She begins to think about what she wants and what would be best for her rather than what would most please the men around her. She even goes so far as to withdraw a writing piece that she had submitted for grading because she (correctly) does not think her male teacher is the right audience for it. Rather than submitting it to be graded, she decides that she has no interest in being evaluated, and she accepts half credit for completing the assignment rather than the A she probably would have received had her teacher graded the work. That takes serious guts, and the person who did it is the same person who did not value any part of herself or her life outside of Seth earlier in the novel. It is important to note that Nina did not invent the phenomenon of losing yourself in a relationship with a boy. She is responsible for her behavior, but the forces that influenced it were entirely out of her control. From a young age, her mother, who is an art history buff, an alcoholic, and a wee bit of a monster, has been telling her violent, gruesome bedtime stories about the female saints who endured torture and often sacrificed their lives as a demonstration of their devotion to Jesus. As a Jew whose knowledge of Christianity is limited to Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert, I don’t really know what saints are, but I think it’s safe to say that these are well regarded people in the Christian faith. Their stories have been passed down for hundreds or thousands of years, depending on the saint. The stories of the virgin martyr saints are horrific, combining murderous incels with medieval torture. I guess the Christian powers-that-be are into that, because these stories have been preserved and immortalized. All of them are extremely fucked up, but the one that sticks out most in my mind is Dymphna’s. After her mother died, her father decided that he was going to marry her, which she did not want to do for the obvious incest-related reasons and also because she had taken a vow of chastity and promised Jesus that she would not have sex. Her father, a murderous incel, sliced her head off because that was his response to being rejected. (As a sexual partner. By his own daughter. Jeez.) Since the stories of the virgin martyr saints were written by men, they depict these women as powerless. Even their small triumphs are attributed to Jesus. In these stories, the most significant parts of women's lives occur when men are present. The stories of the virgin martyr saints do not even come close to passing the Bechdel test, and the women spend their time either physically trapped or running away from danger. They do not have agency or autonomy, and the way these stories are told, they also have nothing going on in their lives that does not involve men. The men chase them, save them, torture them, and murder them. The women just show up and respond. If these are the narratives that Nina has grown up with, how is she supposed to know any different? Nina’s outlook is not a personal failure. It is not a failure of character; rather, it has a lot to do with both her horrible mother and a system of oppression that has forced women to rely on men for centuries. (Remember when women weren’t allowed to open their own bank account? That was less than a hundred years ago!) As girls and women try to figure out our relationship with men, we are also processing and unlearning lessons from history, the media, and our friends and family. This is a messy process, and nobody should expect for it not to be. This is why I love that Elana K. Arnold represents it realistically, without an ounce of sugarcoating. Like Nina, my relationship with men is messy, and it is a source of shame, but unlike her, I avoid thinking about it whenever I can afford to, and I certainly avoid discussing it with others. Since Nina is straight and I am not, my story has an additional layer to it, but our stories are fundamentally the same. We have both needed to unlearn what we’ve been taught about the relationship between women and men, and we have both needed to figure out how to relate to men in a way that is healthy and appropriate for us. I can barely even think about some of my misguided attempts at relating to men without wanting to curl up in the fetal position on the floor. The shame is so strong that I try to make these stories fade to black whenever they turn up on the movie screen inside my head. Actually, a more apt metaphor is that I tear down the screen. I tear it down through brute strength, like I’m fricking Godzilla, and I do it immediately so I do not have to witness the story play out. I can barely tolerate knowing these things about myself, let alone sharing them with others. But maybe it's time for me to take a cue from Nina and from the great Brene Brown and Kristin Neff. I know that my attempt at heterosexuality is just one part of my life, and it’s ok that I’m not proud of it. I also know that it is not entirely my fault, and perhaps voicing it will not only give my shame less power but will also give patriarchy and heteronormativity less power. Our culture facilitates shame, and as such, women and girls are given expectations that are impossible to meet and that are often paradoxical. In high school, while we both cared very much about what boys thought of us, Nina and I (and countless other adolescent girls, I'm sure) also believed that we were supposed to be strong female protagonists who were blissfully uncaring about the very thing we found ourselves focusing on. How were we supposed to make that complete 180 from where we were to where we thought we were supposed to be without first acknowledging the reason we found ourselves caring about boys to begin with, honoring that truth, and working to minimize its power in our lives? You can’t just eliminate patriarchy overnight. Sure, we have made great progress: we have three waves of feminism, commercialized feminism (for whatever that’s worth), and Beyonce, but this does not mean that the problem is solved and the wounds are healed. As we try to turn the tides and smash the patriarchy, girls and women need a little grace. We need room to mess up and to be flawed, and we are not granted this space to grow, so we need to claim it for ourselves. Even though Nina makes herself smaller in her relationship with Seth, she refuses to disappear, and she claims her space by telling the full, ugly truth about the situation. This is worth emulating. Women and girls are told to feel ashamed of so many reasonable aspects of our personalities, behaviors, and appearances. In naming our sources of shame, we give them less power and take one small but meaningful step against patriarchy.
Everyone stands to benefit from dismantling a system of oppression, even the oppressors, so this message is for men too. If men were committed to developing self-compassion, shame resilience, and a healthy resentment of the patriarchy, maybe the scene from my high school Spanish class would have turned into a heart-to-heart in which these two boys shared that they just weren’t really into fighting, even though they felt like they should be. Maybe they would have had a good laugh about it, and we would have been able to continue our lesson about the difference between ser and estar. Can you imagine if these boys had even had an ounce of Nina’s self-awareness?
I won’t go so far as to say that deep and unflinching self-knowledge can fully liberate us from systems of oppression. It takes a whole lot more than that (institutional change, for example), but it certainly makes a difference, and it is the first step toward change. We have all been consumed by politics and by the civil rights movement lately, and we are acutely aware of how fucked up things are institutionally. In light of all of that, my discussion of self-compassion might seem naive and trite, but there is great power in acknowledging truth. On both a personal and institutional level, there is great power in knowing what you have done wrong and looking at it with an unwavering gaze. Acknowledging the truth, even within yourself, is an act of resistance. Lean into the discomfort, and know that there is growth ahead.
This is an insightful, thoughtful, and truly beautiful thing to read. Thank you for engaging so deeply with WHAT GIRLS ARE MADE OF.
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