Having been a girl

Having been a girl, I related to and sympathized with the “Cuties,” and Amy, who desperately wants to fit in, be popular, be “liked.” Having been a girl, I identified with that longing to feel included, to feel like I was getting it right during that confusing liminal time between girlhood and womanhood. Having been a girl, I remember studying magazines, other girls, movies and music videos to decipher the codes of femininity and awkwardly and embarrassingly figure out sex. In an overlapping pursuit, I remember hours (if you added them up it would probably be weeks’ or months’ worth of hours) spent in front of MTV with other girls learning dance moves from Madonna, Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson. It was FUN! We watched and helped each other with the nuances. We learned to move our bodies and enjoy that movement.

So, I watched the movie and took on the perspective of the girls, as the filmmaker intended (fully acknowledging here, that there are always multiple potential readings and interpretations of any text), and I think the movie got a lot of things right. What’s so shocking about the movie is just how right the girls get and perform the definitions of womanhood they see around themselves. The outrage should be directed at the culture (ours) that infantilizes adult women as a form of sexualizing and objectifying them (us).

Let’s break it down.

Granted: my own perspective was as a cisgender, heterosexual, white girl, now woman, so, my experience of this sort of binary threshold (you’re on one side and then you’re on another, with a crossing over in between) does not reflect the experience of transgender and non-binary people, and BIPOC people generally, and is not identical to the experience of Amy in the movie. She’s got a lot of more going on, which is tenderly and empathically portrayed by the filmmaker throughout the movie.

But let’s just take that one aspect of Amy’s situation: She’s at the cusp of “womanhood” — at least according to those people who believe that starting your period magically and suddenly transforms a child into “a woman.” Significantly, this is a period of a girl’s life full of wonder and experimentation and naiveté and humiliation and fun and heart break. It’s a frickin whirlwind! It’s also a time when relationships really matter (thank you, Carol Gilligan) and we (as girls) really come to know ourselves through those relationships. Objectively, it is a time of physical growth and change, which we learn through culture has other significant meaning for us that we don’t understand yet… so we turn to each other, other girls, popular culture and our families to understand.

The filmmaker does a wonderful job of portraying the on/off approach to womanhood — that weird equation of menstruation—a bodily process you have about as much control over as your blood pressure, and about which you’re spent a similar amount of time even thinking—with the wholesale transformation from girl child to (adult) woman. You didn’t even know it was happening and then it happened. For Amy, this sudden change means taking on more womanly household responsibilities (fun ones, like cutting bags and bags of onions), and some vague understanding that she, like her auntie and mama, would belong to a man (through marriage) someday… and hopefully soon. At the same time, she sees her mother’s suffering, sadness and humiliation at her own husband’s decision to take a second wife. Who wants that? Amy would rather have more agency.

With very little explanation, suddenly your body has this new additional social meaning. And, in Amy’s case, and in the context of her “studying” music videos, dancing, and the social structures at school, this particular part of her body also has power.

She pieces it together, and her conclusions are not wrong. She sees the videos and learns to move her own body that way. It elevates her social status at school and wins her new friends. For her, it’s dancing. She and the girls understand that it is sexual, but they don’t understand what that means, really. Amy looks around sees even her mama and aunties—these women who are successful in their own cultures—have and present boldly their own big booties.

So, I’m a woman now? Booty shaking it is!

I LOVED the scenes of Amy teaching the other girls to twerk! The filmmaker captured to pure pleasure of girls being silly, moving joyfully, being in close contact with each other, exploring roles and the intimacy of friendships. They aren’t dancing to BE SEXUALIZED. Yes, sex is on their minds. But for them, sex and the power of sexual attraction is social currency. (WHICH IS ACTUALLY A HUGE PART OF WHY THE SEXUAL OBJECTIFICATION OF GIRLS AND WOMEN IS SO FUCKED UP. Sex becomes mainly a transaction for status and power.) Over and over again, the filmmaker takes pains to demonstrate that these girls are still children BEING CHILDREN (eating tons of gummy bears, messaging each other with stuffed animals, and braiding each other’s hair).

From the perspective of the girls, this dancing is agency that gives them social status, and possibly power over or at least with boys.

2. Adolescence for girls is a time of comparing ourselves to what we see defining what it means to be a woman, and figuring out how we measure up.

Girls are SMART. We don’t just passively watch tv, or now scroll mindlessly through social media. We STUDY it. We want our dance moves to be exactly right. We try on things and see what works for us.

Successfully performing femininity (whatever version of it you’re going for) is in the details. Amy is a brilliant student of the form. (Which is also something the filmmaker did well — portraying the ability of marginalized communities to keenly observe the workings of the dominant culture). When Amy teaches the girls to twerk, she also teaches them the important mannerisms of looking “sexy.” My favorite was putting your finger in your mouth — just right. Your lips have to be relaxed. The finger goes between the teeth — just the tip of the finger. Each of the cuties adopts this move in their dances. The effect is like looking into a brightly lit funhouse mirror at the tropes of porn. The girls have observed and adopted a mannerism, a prop, a tool. They look utterly absurd.

I thought this was a great device in the film to demonstrate the arbitrary, limited, ridiculous and performative nature of heteronormative female sexuality design for the male gaze.

Rather than vilify the filmmaker, the critics of this film should be vilifying the culture that fetishizes these looks as both something to aspire to and be reviled for.

3. We learn to perform these gender roles before we know what they mean.

I remember so clearly the time my friend, a neighbor girl down the street, schooled me in sexual attraction. I was in elementary school. We were listening to the Bee Gees (Saturday Night Fever) and she asked me, “Which one do you like?” The question made no sense to me. What do you mean, like? What did that have to do with these awesome, danceable songs? She told me you’re supposed to “like” one of them. So, I picked Robin! He had pretty hair. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean to “like” one of the Bee Gees, but I bought a poster to put on my wall so I could tell people who I liked.

My strongest desire wasn’t sexual. It was social. I wanted to fit in. To use the words I used then, I wanted to be “normal.” Later, normal wasn’t enough and I wanted to be “popular,” which entailed appropriating more of the accoutrements, props and behaviors of femininity. The most important one was a boyfriend. Sex and relationship became my transaction for success. Boys were objects of my desire — for social status.

4. It’s a no win situation

No matter how right we get it, we still can’t win. Somehow there’s always a way for us to be revealed as frauds or shamed as sluts. After poor Amy demonstrates her (actually quite impressive skill) dancing, she is ridiculed for wearing baggy, little girl panties (with kitty cats on them, no less!). A shopping spree for big girl panties mends her own self image. But when the school still denigrates the cuties for being little girls, she turns to what she understands is her power, the source of her womanhood, and posts a picture of her naked … what shall I call it? Pussy.

Well, you know how that is going to turn out.

In the end, the cuties dance in the big contest and the small audience of presumably other girls’ parents are CLEARLY shocked by what they see—which is a very well executed imitation of the videos the girls have been studying. They are clearly NOT going to be rewarded the way they had hoped they would be. Amy runs out of the performance midway through to return home, where he family is “celebrating” the second marriage of her father. Amy does not take part in the festivities, but goes outside to jump rope with some other girls. The final images are of her jumping, floating, flying… joy in her face, wind in her hair… a little moment of freedom from “womanhood” back into the simple joys childhood.

I really felt the movie shows how we can’t get any of it right, and we will always be punished for being women, and that starts with being a girl.

I see the outrage over this movie as part of the problem itself, not a reaction to it. I found this movie to be much less shocking or sexual than 13 or American Beauty, two other important critical commentaries on being a girl defined by heteronormative sexuality. The pearl clutching from the left (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard, see NYT story linked above) is particularly infuriating, maybe more so. Aim your outrage where it belongs.

###

Things not discussed in this piece, but could and should be by someone:

Related posts:

The Mayfair Business Improvement District formed two years ago with a mission to bolster the fortunes of merchants, mostly along Frankford Avenue. There was already plenty going on in the…

From a collection of writing. “Poetry Entry No. 1” is published by Heather Grey.

Python is currently the go-to coding language with many people eager to try and get involved but not quite knowing where to start. My aim here is to simplify the learning path for the most non-tech…