Learning To Be A Girl

By Ccandysarao

I’ve always made a bad girl.

I don’t mean to say that I’m bad. I’m far too responsible for that. I listen to NPR. I vote in primaries. But when it comes to femininity, to the trappings of girlhood (the shoes, the makeup, the cooking, the arcane household crafts), I just do not get it. I am not good at it. I fail to perform “girl” correctly.

It’s not as if I haven’t been trained for the job. Throughout my childhood, several family members staged interventions and crash courses on femininity, from the grandmother who told me that I could be so pretty, if only I’d try a little, to the cousins who told me that ya cain’t use big words on a guy, or he won’t like ya. My father – a check-bouncing, hard-drinking, waitress-dating guy who rode motorcycles and used the word f*ck approximately eight times in any given conversation – despaired over my failure to become, in his words, “a real lady.”

I tried. I really did. Before I knew what feminism was, I studied gender, the assumptions and behaviors and roles that were assigned to the men and women around me. I didn’t have revolutionary aims. I just wanted to know what I was missing.

This is what I picked up:

Boys are strong. Girls are gentle. Boys are brave. Girls are patient. Boys want to have fun. Girls want to have babies. Boys are attractive because of what they do. Girls are attractive because of how they look. Boys smoke, drink, and screw. Girls cook, clean, and marry. Boys pick the girls they want. Girls take the boys who pick them. Boys can’t help themselves. Girls spend their time helping.

To borrow a phrase from my dear father: f*ck that sh*t.

I decided that I could be whatever sort of girl I wanted – that I could pick and choose from the vast range of human behaviors without regard for whether they came from the “male” or “female” side of the menu.

I started with the smoking, drinking and screwing. That part seemed like the most fun.

It’s also been the most controversial. I’ve never been short of kissing partners. But to be an openly sexual girl – to take the male prerogative of choosing partners, making the first move, and viewing sex as a worthy act in and of itself – flies in the face of the idea that “ladies” are restrained, commitment-minded, and reluctant to take off their clothes without first receiving a vow of everlasting love and adoration. Some people are contemptuous; others are just plain scared.

Early on, I made the mistake of dating men who were threatened by my sexuality, or by my forthrightness, or by the fact that (as my cousins warned me) I just used too many of them big words. It offended them if I initiated sex, if I made intelligent points in conversation, or if I asked them to do what I liked in bed instead of gently submitting to their manly urges. Hell, some of them got offended if I paid for my half of a date.

But when men told me that I was “too aggressive,” or complained that I didn’t let them “take the lead,” it didn’t disturb my confidence. I just started dating different men.

The real problems have come from acquaintances: people who know my MO, but refuse to accept it. Many of these people still think in terms of boxes: the virgin and the whore, the girl you f*ck and the girl you marry, the smart girl and the sexy girl. They’re fine with a woman’s sexuality, as long as she’s using it to please a man, and as long as she knows that her job is to be wanted rather than to want. Presenting myself as a full human being, an intelligent adult who claims her right to desire on her own terms – that confuses these people. They feel the need to tell me what I’m getting wrong; they typecast me as a man-hater or a slut; they bait me or avoid me or treat me like some sort of entertaining sideshow to their own, more “normal” lives. They can’t figure out which box to put me in.

That’s fine by me. In fact, that’s the whole point: there are no boxes. There were never any boxes. We imagine them, and we shape ourselves to fit them, because we believe that we have to do so in order to be accepted. The less we do that, the less restrictive those boxes become. There is no “right” sexuality, and no “natural” way to be a girl. There are only people, and the choices they make. I make my choices moment by moment. So do the people I love.