What It Feels Like For A Girl

A brilliant, though not unproblematic, talk by Eve Ensler,  playwright, performer, feminist and activist, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. Available is a transcript and subtitles in 8 languages (good learning aid).

Eve Ensler: Embrace your inner girl

Ensler talks about the girl cell in every person, male or female, and how we are taught to suppress that cell. It is essentially a powerful centre of emotions, dangerous to the patriarchal structures of the world which perceives vulnerability as weakness, compassion a waste of time, and tears and pain as unnecessary reminders of its brutality. The girl cell is repressed, instead taught to please. Ensler proposes that instead, girls should use their emotional power to "educate" or "activate" or "engage" or "confront" or "defy" or "create." As examples of such empowerment, she cites girls wanting to swim around the world, get stars tattooed on their face, living in a tree, protesting to the point of being ran over by tanks, loving a rapist's baby they bore, or assaulting their kidnapper. All are acts of courage, all show how you can accept powerful emotions and follow them. She talks about the extraordinary ability to overcome situations. It's incredibly motivational, saying powerful emotions make you stronger, that it makes you present to be intense, that releasing stuff instead of calming it down is the right thing to do. It is also, however, one-sided: powerful emotions don't automatically channel into acts of activism and self-preservation. It seems that Ensler believes in this inner instinct that validates everything going on in our girl cell, and trusts that it will direct us to do what is good for ourselves. Perhaps she's right, it just seems there is a whole side of this she is omitting, a side of emotions that run against ourselves, against our loved ones, that are destructive and weakening. Not all fear motivates courage, and not all hate turns into love in the end. The stories Ensler tells are beautiful, and moving, but they sometimes sound like fairytales, stories that happen to the chosen lucky ones. It's great that she's spreading them, it's great we can believe that we, too, can make our vulnerabilities our strengths in the face of the forces who want to see the girl cell annihilated. But then - do you have to be a hero to be a girl?

t-shirts by Zara

On a different side of what it means to be a girl: the movement behind Pink Stinks (UK), or Boycott Pink (Poland). Both oppose the early sexualization of girls, the body image obsession, and "the culture of pink" - kitschy, glitzy, empty celebrity role models. Pink Stinks encourages "real role models", and aims to "inspire, motivate and enthuse girls about the possibilities and opportunities open to them", "improve girls' self esteem and confidence, raise their ambitions and ultimately improve their life chances", and "challenge the 'culture of pink' which is based on beauty over brains and to provide an aternative". Boycott Pink is not half as well-spoken, but according to an article in Wysokie Obcasy, Różowy sposób myślenia [A Pink Way of Thinking], it operates under similar slogans of discouraging girls from brainless copying of plastic popstars and limiting their interests to shopping and iPhones at the age of 10. Both initiatives protest against the dominance of princesses and pink in toy stores as the only available choices for girls. A great and worthy cause. It's absolutely true that girls are encouraged to imagine themselves as 50s pinup housewives/princesses marrying princes/popstars marrying footballers, that brains are always less important in their development and their worth in the eyes of the society than beauty, and that being sexy/cutesy is encouraged a lot more than being natural and intelligent. So.. what about those alternatives? Boycott pink, but do what instead? The stairs begin here.

Pink Stinks has a whole section that "points you in the direction of some of those [inspirational, important, ground-breaking and motivating] women", and "a sister site for kids, www.cooltobe.me, currently in development, [which] will tell the stories of some of these women, using all that the internet has to offer, and exciting story telling techniques." That's pretty cool. There's a bunch of really great women featured on the main website, but so far only one movie for kids: about Isa, a member of the World Cup Winning Women’s England Cricket team, who "has a degree in Science, likes guitar music but best of all she likes playing cricket and playing for her country." I can't help the feeling that it reinforces a very particular alternative to being a pink princess - that of being a tomboy, a girl who does things stereotypically reserved for boys. Of course, it would be wonderful not to have to make binary choices, to be able to exist on a spectrum and do things because we want to do them, and not to fulfill gender roles. It is an incredibly hard thing to do, however, especially at an age when social acceptance is so painfully crucial for self esteem. What Pink Stinks is doing is fantastic, I'm just saying it's not as easy or straightforward as it may seem - boycott is one, but filling the void is another. My sister is 8, so this topic is of crucial personal importance to me. I'm obviously trying to be as good as I can as a role model to her, but it's very tricky to deal with the gendered princess vs warrior struggle. Sometimes it feels the opposite of liberating, like it's trying to promote toughness and asexuality and unbalanced intellectualization, which means the neglect of the emotional girl cell, in this dichotomy closer to the pink side. Navigating these concepts is hard enough for a grown-up, so I'm not surprised many young girls struggle like hell to figure out what it means to be a girl, which ways are good and which bad, which elements they're supposed to surpress, which come from themselves, and which from outside pressures.

"What It Feels Like For A Girl" is also a song by Madonna. It starts with a spoken introduction by Charlotte Gainsbourg taken from the 1993 film version of the Ian McEwan novel, The Cement Garden. It goes:

Girls can wear jeans

And cut their hair short

Wear shirts and boots

Cause it's okay to be a boy

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading

Cause you think being a girl is degrading

But secretly

You'd love to know what it's like

Wouldn't you?

What it feels like for a girl

It's almost exactly what Eve Ensler is talking about in her speech about the inner girl cell and its surpression. "Strong inside but you don't know it/Good little girls they never show it/When you open up your mouth to speak/Could you be a little weak" is along the same lines as "I'm an emotional creature". Madonna goes into the ambiguity of the pressure to be beautiful, infantilized, domesticated, contained and controlled:

Hair that twirls on finger tips so gently, baby

Hands that rest on jutting hips repenting

Hurt that's not supposed to show and

Tears that fall when no one knows

When you're trying hard to be your best

Could you be a little less

So, what's going on on that single cover? Is it ironic? Is is making you think about it, or is it a sweet pop image promoting a pleasant song noone will listen to enough to note the lyrics? It's not subverting anything, it's exactly fulfilling that stereotype of the pink princess, while the song speaks of the pain and enslavement of the "real" girl. What alternatives does the intro by Gainsbourg suggest to break out of the misery - to wear jeans, shirts, and boots?

The video to the song, a first collaboration between Madonna and then-husband Guy Ritchie, taps into that, showing Madonna as an aggressive, confrontational, destructive bad girl. The album version of the song is a ballad, but a remix by Above & Beyond is used in the clip. "This is an angry song and I wanted a matching visual with an edgy dance mix." Madonna said. "In the video I play a nihilistic pissed off chick acting out a fantasy and doing things girls are not allowed to do." She crashes a car full of men, steals money using a stun gun, shoots cops with a squirt gun, blows up a gas station,... "It's a violent video, not something you want to see before going to sleep" Liz Rosenberg, Madonna's publicist, commented. In the US, MTV and VH1 decided to ban the video after only one airing. Madonna claimed the character she played had been abused, and it was an anti-violence message, even though it portrayed graphic violence. The video ends with a car crash meant to symbolize a suicide.

This is the kind of shit that Eve Ensler is not talking about, because in her speech, it would be an example of bad reaction to mistreatment and abuse. This is what Madonna thinks is a good way of showing that it's painful to be a girl. To be a girl, you should be a bit less of a girl; being a girl you can be a boy as well. Push yourself to prove you are not a passive princess whose verb is to please. Be a hero, or a villain, but don't suppress your emotions. Strong is sexy, which is good, but also bad, so watch out not to become a Lara Croft clone. You should cry, you should love everything around you, but you should also turn your powerful emotions into positive things, but not things like birds and flowers. Then again, kicking things and being rebellious makes for a great pop image, so instead of a pink gown wear something dark and be aggressive, because that's empowerment. Be a girl, but also don't call grown women girls, because that's infantilizing. Be fun, but be serious. Weakness is your greatest strength, so while acknowledging all your feelings, please focus on those that tell you to climb Mount Everest. All these things are trying to say we can be whoever we want, but they say it in a way that makes us feel that whatever we do, we've probably got it wrong. My gut feeling to that is somewhere between fucking the system and giving up.