I’ve been thinking a lot about boyhood and whether I was ever really a girl at all. Driving on the highway at night, my girlfriend tells me that girlhood is still trending. I laugh. What does that even mean? Aesthetically, she explains, girlhood core is in. Think ballet flats and ribbons and cutesy shit, very demure. A quick Google search tells me that ‘girl math’ and ‘girl dinner’ mean you can spend money on whatever you want and you really don’t eat much. NPR named 2023 “The Year of The Girl” (sounds like a new Chinese zodiac sign), and, the girlhood zeitgeist is still alive and well online almost a year later.
It makes sense. Faced with the terrifying reality of what being a woman in this day and age means, who wouldn’t want to go back to a simpler time when things were more carefree? But as a boy who had a girlhood that was kind of a boyhood until it most definitely wasn’t, I’ve got mixed feelings about the nostalgia-dipped #girlhood movement. I can’t be the only one.
Nostalgia requires a selective memory to be effective. What type of girlhood do we remember? What does girlhood have to do with being a woman? Can we want to be a teenager again without regressing or romanticizing? Why do trans mascs want to be boys but are terrified of becoming men? Aren’t all boys terrified of becoming men? Where does the fantasy of gender end and the violence of it begin?
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