(To desire, to exist, and to fear)

Girlhood does not exist.

Girl is not to woman as boy is to man. Boy becomes man when he turns eighteen, girl becomes woman when man no longer wants to fuck her. To escape the label of ‘girl’ is to be respected but not desired. 

And so, many of us women often find ourselves reaching backwards in time. We play dress-up in the themes of our youth: Hello Kitty devolves quickly from childhood-best-friend to sexy-halloween-costume. This return to girlhood is too oft-repackaged into an acceptable version for the pedophilic eyes of man and offered to women wrapped with a pretty pink bow. There is a reason “virgin” and “teen” are top categories on pornhub. Men crave your naivety, your innocence, the roundness of your eyes when you look up from under them. They don’t want a woman, they want a child with boobs plastered on.

The problem with this is that it feels as though there is no one to blame but ourselves. The presentation of our sexuality is presented as a personal choice; we chose to wear that sexy Hello Kitty costume after all, how could it be anyone’s fault but our own? It’s not the man’s fault. He has never told you what to wear, or what to buy for him on Valentine’s day – you just knew. And who do you blame for that? Society? Capitalism, even? Blame is not so easily assigned on a larger scale; it doesn’t feel fulfilling to scream at the corporations of yesteryear; they can’t hear you either way. 

And am I not a guilty party? Indeed, I struggle with feeling wanted by men and simultaneously questioning whether I want men at all. We’re in a complicated relationship, men and I. I wear a dress that shows off my boobs, they look at my boobs, and a shrivel of disgust rolls down my back anyway. Am I tempting them, or are they tempted by my existence? I don’t know. 

In some capacity, I do want them to look at me, but I think I’ve yet to grasp that they lack the competence to do so in the way I want them to. Ironically, I think I want them to look at me in a boyish way. I want them to be left wordless; not because they’re imagining every position to fuck me, but because they’re imagining how best to make me laugh. Maybe I have a complex. 

To men, my girlishness is the measure by which I can be controlled. To myself, my girlishness is the measure by which I am lonely. 

We lack, I think, the complexity to simultaneously criticize and sympathize with the women who perpetuate the sexuality of girlhood. Guilt, I find, is not so easily distributed evenly. The scrutiny falls on the woman monetizing her girlishness but turns a blind eye to the men who make it so profitable. If men didn’t crave girlishness, these women wouldn’t have an audience to cater to in the first place. In this way, men are too often exonerated of their responsibility. The complication of my dilemma is that it is not a mutual one. I find it hard to believe that men wax and wane over their sexualization of my childhood. Some part of me thinks that they find secret pleasure in the ability to influence the way women dress, even if they don’t fancy themselves the type to objectify women. 

At times, I struggle to see men as more than the conglomeration of man. The connotations of man brew a disgusting cocktail of fear and desire within me. I feel as though I exist simultaneously as a servant and perpetrator of their desire. I am to blame for the way I exist through their lens of reality. 

I think this is why I don’t view my guy friends as men. I don’t want to associate them with the crimes of man.

As I continue to exist as a girl, I am forced to grapple with the reality that our entire selves are eroticized. That there is no action I can do, no thought I can think of, and no feeling I can feel that has not, will not, or cannot be fetishized by men. My suffering is made consumable through the trope of the mascara-running-braless-drunk-and-helpless-sobbing-in-the-living-room kind of girl. And as I exist and know this pain of being a girl, I am prematurely terrified of the pain I will experience as a woman. I am terrified that to exist in femininity is to exist in pain. 

Girlhood does not exist because it is stolen by man.