What does it mean to be a girl?

The words “…like a girl” have been used as an insult to humiliate both men and women for generations; “you run like a girl”, “you hit like a girl” or even “you speak like a girl” are used to shame and put people down. A few weeks ago the feminine hygiene company ‘Always’ launched their Always #LikeAGirl campaign with a powerful video that, of course, has gone viral gaining over 30 million views on YouTube. It asks young people to demonstrate running, fighting, and throwing “like a girl”. They worryingly respond with flaying arms, waving hands, and hair flips:

http://youtu.be/XjJQBjWYDTs

When young girls are asked the same questions, the response is strikingly different. When director Lauren Greenfield, who directed the documentary ‘Girl Culture’, asks 10-year old Dakoda the same questions she responds by running with determination and strength. When asked to show what it looks like to fight like a girl Dakoda, punches hard at the air with focus and determination etched on her face. Many other young girls responded in similar, purposeful ways.

Some random commercial trying to sell sanitary pads to young women is obviously not about to ‘rewrite the rules’ for girls everywhere, but it highlights an important point: young girls are not the ones holding themselves back. It is society’s hoary old biases that are enforcing gender barriers and creating new ones that shackle these young girls to rigid stereotypes and limit what they think they can and cannot do. As the author Siri Hustvedt said when speaking on underground sexism, “Anything that becomes associated with girls and women loses status, whether it is a profession, a book, a movie, or a disease”.

When J.K. Rowling published her first Harry Potter book, her publisher Barry Cunningham told her young boys did not like reading books by women, especially not fantasy books. J.K. Rowling posted on her website, “He [Cunningham] thought that young boys might be wary of a book written by a woman”. Which is why she used her initials J.K. instead of her first name Joanne. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, as everyone in the world knows, went on to become some of the most successful books of all time, nearly outselling any other book in history, second only to the bible in sales.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that boys and men probably knew Rowling was a woman when they paid for and read her books, given her celebrity status. I remember seeing a group of men who looked to be in their forties sitting at a bus stop early in the morning on the day ‘Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince’ was released. They were clutching their books with fevered joy and reading their brand new copies. These grown men must have stood in line at the special midnight release which took place in selected bookstores, throughout New Zealand in order to procure ‘The Half Blood Prince’ on the morning of its release. Hustvedt writes,

“Unconscious biases hurt women, but they also hurt men. I am sorry for men who feel emasculated by reading novels and doubly emasculated if the novel’s author is a woman. Not only are they the victims of irrational prejudice, they deprive themselves of crucial knowledge about the world”.

Biases and negative perceptions of genders are taught, we are not born with them. The good news is subconscious patterns of perception and behaviour can be made conscious. Siri Hustvedt goes on to say:

“Contemporary science confirms that our attitudes are shaped by implicit influences, but also that attention plays a role in reflective consciousness and judgement”.

Once people are aware of their negative behaviours and perceptions, they can change them. When the director for the Always #LikeAGirl add campaign challenged the negative perceptions the young adults held in relation to girls’ athletic abilities, they changed their minds. One young woman was asked if she would run differently now, if asked ‘how do girls run’? “Yes”, she said. “I would run like myself”.

Young girls may not hold the same biases and sexism towards loaded phrases such as “…like a girl”, but they are acutely aware of the sexism they face as girls. The New York Times recently shot an educational documentary called ‘Gnarly in Pink’ that is beginning to trend on the Internet. It documents a group of 6-year old girls who have started a skateboarding gang called ‘The Pink Helmet Posse’ in America. These little girls are skating the parks of Southern California wearing fairy wings, pink nail polish, and tutus while dropping into bowls and pulling 360s.

Sierra, one of the girls in the skateboard gang said “I want the same amount of girls to be skating as boys. I want to be a professional skateboarder someday”. Sierra, at six years of age, is keenly aware of the lack of female representation in the skateboarding world. As the ed-doc points out, only 33 of the 192 competitors in the X Games in Los Angeles last year were women. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai put it well when she said, “The higher you go the fewer women there are.”

The Pink Helmet Posse has been meet with engrained sexism and have had their abilities undermined, like any girl who takes up an activity or sport that is perceived as ‘masculine’ and is dominated by men, because they are female skateboarders. One little boy asked a girl in the gang called Bella “Can you even skateboard?” Bella was distraught. Her mother told her “You just need to prove you can”. Bella’s mum went on to say, “Her whole life she is going to have to prove to the boys she can do it”. What about proving to herself she can do it? Girls are taught to seek men’s approval from a young age and, as Bella’s mother makes clear, even young boys. As the feminist and Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her Ted talk ‘We Should All be Feminists’: “We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think could be a good thing. But for the attention of men.”

Bella’s mother’s assertion that her daughter would have to prove to boys she can skateboard, reflects a society that is largely dominated by the public opinions and judgements of men. J.K Rowling may have taken the literary world by storm with her Harry Potter series but her books were overwhelmingly reviewed by men, and of course she had to use her initials not her full name to appease young boys and her male editor. When major literary journals review books written primarily by male authors and the reviewers themselves remain overwhelmingly men, as Julianna Ross of .mic suggests, “They make the old boys’ club that is the publishing industry even less hospitable to women, as it reminds them that this is still not their world”.

When I spoke to The Girls Skate Network in America and asked the question “How many female judges are there for the Skateboarding division for both female and male categories at the X Games this year”? a representative said, “There are no female judges for X Games that I know of”.

When I talked to Alexis Pritchard-Todd, a Kiwi female Olympic boxer, on the phone, Alexis told me she first started training at 19, and on her first sparring session with her trainer Cam, she noticed he had many female boxers on his team. One of them was as young as 12. Alexis trains in a gym that fosters an anti-sexist and gender diverse environment. Alexis said “I never thought at any stage, ‘oh I am a girl, I am boxing this is not what I should be doing’. The culture in Cam’s gym has always been completely accepting of women fighters I have never ever had a bad comment from any of our fighters”. Creating environments that do not tolerate biases and belief systems that assume women are weak and incapable goes a long way to making women feel they can achieve. Positive role models like Alexis are powerful too. When I asked Alexis “what advice she would give young girls?” she said,

“I think all young girls need female role models or athletes in all sports – whether it be netball or any other sport out there – who are not afraid to be who they are. Don’t conform. Be yourself. That is what my mum always taught me”.

But not all athletic environments are as welcoming to women as Alexis’s gym, as the Pink Helmet Posse Gang has shown. These biases against girls’ abilities in sports and institionalised sexism contribute to them being twice as likely as boys to drop out of sports by the time they are 14. This worrying statistic does not, of course, stop at sports. Cara Santa Maria, a video who chose a career in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) field, said in her recent vid-blog,

 

“Women make up just about half of the American workforce, but we hold less than a quarter of the STEM jobs. In fact, a recent survey revealed some surprising findings about girls’ attitudes toward STEM careers. Thirty percent of teen girls say that math is their most challenging subject, while only nineteen percent of boys say the same thing”.

 

In New Zealand, women make up less than a quarter of those studying for a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and just over a third of those studying for a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology. As the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women (NACEW) points out, “These study trends mean that women do not fully participate in innovative work such as engineering”.

Women’s underrepresentation in science and maths, and occupying markedly fewer jobs in engineering has nothing to do with our abilities or capacity to undertake careers in STEM

“…the truth is, what appears to have the greatest impact on girls’ attitudes are sociocultural factors like stereotype threat”.

As Cara Santa Maria said during a video blog:

“You see, when people are afraid they’re being stereotyped, they can feel those eyes on them.”

Interestingly, the girls in the ‘Pink Helmet Posse’ embrace and at the same time challenge constructed negative “girl” stereotypes  – they are yet to internalise stereotype threat. The 6-year old girls in pink (a gendered colour), skateboarding in tutus and glitter and dressing as princesses while dreaming of making it to the X Games are yet to learn that princesses are rescued and often conveyed as weak or hapless. The girls in The Pink Posse are rejecting and rewriting this narrative – this is a powerful resistance to engrained negative biases held against women and girls. In the book Fifty Shades of Feminism, Lisa Power writes:

“When I was seven, I remember sitting up crying in bed one evening, sobbing to my mother because I wasn’t a boy. Not because I was a boy inside, but because boys got to swashbuckle and command armies and be princes who actually did deeds, not princesses who sat and waited for something to happen to them”.

The girls in The Pink Helmet Posse are not waiting for something to happen to them, they have learnt subversion young. These girls have taken up a ‘masculine sport’ and are facing down sexism while challenging what the world has told them they can or cannot be or do, without compromising their own identities, which obviously they are still forming.

The animated blockbuster Frozen, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, follows two female protagonists, Elsa and Anna, who are sisters and princesses. Frozen’s storyline counters the tiresome and damaging Disney trope of girls waiting around for their Prince Charming. As Lauren Davidson wrote for .Mic:

“Audiences were quick to jump on Disney’s subversive plot [in Frozen] that undermines the traditional concept of ‘true love’. Because the act of true love that saves Anna isn’t a kiss — a passive event from a dominant male that happens to her — but rather it’s the act of sacrificing herself for her sister. What’s more, it’s Anna’s own action that saves herself, and not the deed of someone else”.

Both Anna and Elsa are action oriented in Frozen; they fight monsters and have adventures. They “swashbuckle”. Neither Anna nor Elsa command armies but they certainly command themselves; they make their own decisions and do not seek out men’s’ affirmation to validate their existence.  Frozen does not focus on a princess waiting for true love then marrying some prince charming she just meet, but on sisterhood. Girls banding together to help each other to conquer great obstacles. Frozen was directed by a woman and grossed over one billion dollars; proving ‘female stories’ are something both young boys and girls want to see. Most importantly, this film showed young girls everywhere the power and importance of girls supporting and encouraging each other.

The girls in ‘The Pink Helmet Posse’ have banded together to create their own gang and are supporting each other in a male dominated sport that is, as the sexism they have already faced shows, hostile towards young girls. The more that young girls can see the benefits that come from standing together, the less they will see each other as competition for “the attention of men” and the more they will view each other as comrades who stand together not divided. As Laurie Penny wrote in her new book, Unspeakable Things:

“…it isn’t threats of violence that keep women down but the fear of being unloved; the age-old fear that men don’t want outspoken, difficult women. Deep down, I know if I choose not to play the good-girl game, I might not get as many kisses as I want. And that’s so much more terrifying.”

When women refuse to toe the line, when they reject and challenge archaic gender roles, when they refuse to “play the good-girl game”, when they seek affirmation not from men but from themselves and each other, women and girls can and do challenge and shift biased perceptions. They can change their communities and their lives for the better.