When I look back at girlhood, it’s through a gauzy filter of time. Lines blur and colors bleed into one another, and what’s left is a sepia-toned montage: lying on a blanket under a tree, raking fingers through a friend’s hair, and decorating our wrists with braided dandelion stems.
Or maybe my memories are straight out of Hollywood and fiction; the borders are porous these days.
Girlhood friendships are the stuff of books and shampoo ads. The best were like a hand to hold as you found your balance in life—at least until our bodies started blooming like the flowers and something imperceptible shifted, a slight movement to the right.
One day, you’re happily playing dolls with your friend Denise, and the next, someone chucks a Ken into the mix. Suddenly, the Barbies are all fighting over a man doll with no genitals.
The games and dandelion jewelry got replaced with nail polish, eye shadow, and bras no one really needed. The words got a little sharper, meaner, and the secrets weren’t shared as much as weaponized.
It was like someone flipped a switch, and we all knew a truth without anyone telling us. Your friends were still your friends, but now they were also your competition.
In fifth grade, the girls sat in a darkened auditorium and watched a film about periods. No boys allowed. Some of those girls had undoubtedly already been initiated into Auntie Flo’s monthly club. I remember one girl who was already in a C cup by then, ogled and envied in equal measure. Most of us, I imagine, were only just starting to pine for something to put into our training bras.
We didn’t need a movie in the auditorium to tell us something else that was becoming increasingly clear. We saw it all around us. We absorbed it like radiation until we were practically glowing with it, all of us kettled into a new phase of girlhood, one with a shiny prize at the end of it.
A boy.
Even the boob pining—we must, we must, we must increase our bust—wasn’t really for us. No one longs for boobs because they think breasts are the precursor to studying bioengineering. It’s to attract the attention of another, and back when I was a girl, the another was automatically presumed to be a boy.
Even as girls, we were taught to prioritize men, even if it was just the idea of them, far in the future.
The carrot dangling in front of our female cart was always a man.
No one taught me to prioritize women.
No one taught me how to prioritize my female friends, my female family, or, crucially, myself. Everything I saw screamed the opposite. Boys and men must be prioritized, even if the cost is your self.
My mother took care of my father, in sickness and in mental health. His needs came first. His activities took priority. His opinions counted for more. His time was more important, our schedule was constructed around him. In most of the homes I saw, it was the same. Not just the real-life homes in my neighborhood, or of my friends, but the homes on television, in books, and movies.
Men, their needs, and even their whims were prioritized over and above everything else.
I don’t think my mother was explicitly taught to do that, the same way that I wasn’t explicitly taught to do that. No, she would have learned by watching her mother, who watched her mother, and so on and so on.
And the lessons were reinforced by the world around us.
Ladies first might work in lines and on lifeboats, but in real life? It seems like it is anything but.
As teenagers, we compared our breasts, waists, weight, and shoe size. No one wanted to be the tall girl, the flat girl, the girl whose hair couldn’t hold a perfect feather. We all understood the rule—smaller was always better.
Unless it was boobs, then bigger was better.
We starved. We crimped and plucked and shaved and used sharp pencils on the inside of our eyelids to make those bodies more attractive, not for ourselves, but for boys, in the hopes they would notice us, choose us, love us.
We hid our bodies from one another, changing behind curtains and locked stall doors.
Our bodies were not for each other. Our bodies weren’t even really for ourselves.
Our bodies were a gift, our virginity something to be given to a boy who was deserving of such a prize.
We gave. They took.
God knows how many orgasms have been thwarted because no one taught girls to prioritize themselves.
Nine times out of ten, men will prioritize other men. Men will give men the benefit of the doubt. Men will believe another man over a woman most of the time, especially if the woman is saying something damaging about a man, even if it’s a man they don’t know. I don’t blame them; they are absorbing messages just like the rest of us, glowing with it all.
Protect your own. Prioritize your own.
It makes sense, right? Protect and prioritize your own. Except that on the whole, women don’t. On the whole, women don’t protect or prioritize other women. A large enough percentage of us, especially those of us who are white, don’t protect or prioritize other women.
A lot of women continue to prioritize men, at the expense of other women, sometimes at the expense of themselves.
I’ve done it too, in small ways and sometimes in bigger ways. I’ve pushed my own needs to the side, buffed my martyr crown until it shone in the dull light. I can wait to get a haircut; we need the money for something else. I know you make Sunday dinner, but you’ve had a rough week at work, I’ll take care of it, even though I don’t want to.
Maybe these things are small kindnesses. Maybe it is me not prioritizing my own time, needs, or wants. Likely, they hover somewhere in between.
I’ve always had female friends, even if we weren’t really making dandelion jewelry.
My best friend through middle and high school was also my biggest competition. She won, almost always. She broke my heart in ways I didn’t understand until I was grown. If I saw her now, it would all look different.
In college and young adulthood, I had friends who made sure I got home safely after too many drinks, who held my hair back while I puked in an alleyway. There was often a live wire of envy that ran below the surface, especially if one friend was one step closer to the prize.
Later, when friends began to pair off, the partnership took priority. I get it. I did it myself. And maybe there’s something biological there, some cellular imperative we have no control over that is propelling us toward continuing the species. Who knows? Not me.
I’ve always had female friends, but I didn’t always prioritize them. No one taught me to prioritize women, not even myself.
It was a lesson that took me far too long to learn.
But I did.
American Woman is where I write about life through girl-colored glasses. Thanks for being here and supporting my work. Please like, share, comment, or considering a financial support in the form of cold, hard cash. xx dmh
THIS. As an older woman I am in my matriarch era and actively prioritizing women in my life, starting with myself, my daughter, my Mom, my friends. I have one good male friend (who is young enough to be my son), a single dad who is capable of actual reciprocity in relationships with women, he and his daughters are part of my elephant 🐘 herd.
As always. You do it, you name it. And yes to all of the above. The home I grew up in was complex. My father was not a typical, straight dad. He was a closeted gay man who had particular hobbies, interests that weren't anything close to the "typical" macho stuff that straight men are often drawn to, so I saw some flexibility in the roles available, but out in the rest of the world, what you describe is absolutely what I experienced. Yes, the boys were sent out of the room for the "menses" discussion. We were sequestered, shamed for the function, even though it meant once we started bleeding WE COULD CREATE LIFE! How powerful and scary is that? I think we could all write a book on it. I have so much more to say. Maybe I'll write about it too? Yeah. I do. I will. Women need to boost each other up, every day. Go team! xo