love and loathing in girlhood

Every time I see a piece of media about womanhood or girlishness or femininity or a plethora of other descriptors for the endlessly free yet consciously limited experience of girls it often falls into one of two categories. Firstly, it could be a criticism of women as bitchy and competitive and snide, condemning us for our gossip and frivolous interests. The second category is a retaliation to this, an attempt to manufacture proof of the appreciation and deep care that girls share for each other. It fully rejects the idea that we could ever be anything but kind and loving and maternal towards absolutely everything. Girls are either ruthless monsters who devour everyone in their path and cannibalise each other, or we must shit sunshine and cuddle our equally radiant friends in fields of strawberries watered with white wine. If it is not yet apparent, I think that subscribing to either of these ideas is a reductive way of thinking about womanhood. Though, I am also very conflicted about my female friendships. I don't always think that my girls are infallible, amazing people, but I don't not love them and I'm distraught to be leaving many of them all too soon. Each time I sort through my memories of us I am left with a confusion as to how we are friends and an oceanic appreciation that we still are.

We giggle in the loos in a haze of smoke, limbs draped and pressed on limbs in a desperate attempt to fit into one cubicle. We walk aimlessly and we (I) make passive aggressive comments loud enough for them to hear but quiet enough that they think they weren't supposed to and then we (I) storm off to let them think. We fill a helpless little car with our screechy scratchy singing and flailing arms and we smile wider and more truthfully than we could anywhere else. We despair about the inevitability of these moments just being moments but despair even more about still being schoolgirls when surely, at this point, we must be women. We cut each other out of conversations and engineer social situations with more vigour and precision than has ever been given to our platonic loving. We share sweets calmly and selflessly, like how our mothers trained us to, having a contented moment in flavourful silence before bickering over who takes the dishevelled packet to a bin not 5 metres away, like how our siblings trained us to. We used to whisper but now we proudly chant advice and stories about menstruation and sex and how that boy over there looks like the type of person to have something strange going on down there, probably oddly sized balls or something, and then we bitch the overwhelming societal pressure to get up before the sun to beautify ourselves properly. We murmur about how she gets around too much and then boast about our recent conquests and past mistakes. We endlessly rehash arguments from long ago to defend the catty names we call that girl who kissed the boy I liked that one time and then tell each other how we would never do that to someone else when we absolutely would. We know we could never feel as happy and full in any other life with any other people and yet we find unity in our desperation to leave. We love each other and hate ourselves, forgetting that we are one.

This isn't to say that girlhood can't be lovely, it is the loveliest thing I have ever been a part of, but people are people and flaws are flaws and loveliness isn't always stainless.