Girls, Interrupted

6 minute read
Caitlin Flanagan

The occasion of a girl’s first period always brings with it a bittersweet moment in her mother’s life. It is a harbinger of something she may have dreaded since her baby was born: the separation, the pulling away, the disappearance of the chatterbox little helper and the arrival of the moody, private young woman. It’s the beginning of what I call Girl Land: the attenuated leave-taking each girl must undertake in adolescence, putting away the person she was as a child and coming to terms with the new identity she will assume as a woman. The mother isn’t just melancholy about the loss of the antic, besotted companion, however. She may also be ambivalent–at best–about her daughter’s having to confront the big, complicated reality that is female sexuality.

A little girl’s life is drenched in romance. Even the most stalwartly progressive of mothers will throw up her hands at a toddler daughter’s sudden and impassioned embrace of princess dolls and stories, her fascination with brides and the search for Prince Charming. All of these fantasies, of course, depend–in one way or another–on sex, but sex is the furthest thing from the mind of a little girl. She’s just playing at something that enchants her, something that is in fact the soul of innocence. The grotesque way our culture continues to sexualize little girls–marketing thong underwear for school-age children and padded bikini tops for 7-year-olds–may be hideous, but it’s not depraved. The reason is that little girls don’t interpret these things the way adults do. They are presexual beings, and while deeply attracted to the exciting world of teenagers–one they imagine to be composed entirely of dating and fashion and telephone calls with handsome boys–they envision it as being as chaste as the Disney movies they loved when they were really small. When a little girl calls an outfit “sexy,” she means that it’s cute, that it’s something the big girls she idolizes might wear.

This begins to change, dramatically, with the arrival of the first period. Even those girls who are thrilled to have joined the club discover something sobering: that a period has nothing to do with teen culture or fashion and everything to do with the preparation of their bodies for the rude fact of human reproduction, in all its bloody profundity. The first period is not a gentle next step into the world of teenage excitement; it’s the undeniable fact that a relatively young girl is now capable of reproduction. For centuries, a mother’s sadness over a daughter’s period was caused by the knowledge that the closer a girl got to giving life, the closer she was to potentially losing her own. In the first world, we no longer have to contend with this reality because blessedly few women die in childbirth nowadays. But some of these dark sentiments linger on, and for all these reasons, a girl and her mother greet this marker of change with a complicated set of responses.

Imagine now this totemic event’s taking place not at the beginning of Girl Land–at the age of 12 or 13–but in the middle of actual childhood. Imagine a little girl who is still reading Pippi Longstocking and sleeping in a bed covered with stuffed animals and still imagining in a vague and inchoate way that the man she marries will be some version of her father–a man who is so wild about her, who puts all her best drawings up on his office wall and whose idea of a physical embrace is a kiss on the cheek and a piggyback ride all the way to the dining room. What is a child of that age to make of the arrival of menstruation, this sign that she is biologically capable of mating and reproducing? And what of the fact that the hormones that initiate menstruation also initiate the beginning of a girl’s sexual awakening?

For these events to occur when a child is only 8 or 9 years old constitutes something at once unprecedented and dearly in need of some deep thought on the part of parents, teachers, doctors and even policymakers. Schools will need to grapple with whether to begin sex education at ever earlier ages–a potential boon to girls on the cusp of precocious puberty but a development that might be deeply troubling to the other very young girls. That there seems to be a correlation between precocious puberty and poverty should also concern us. Girls from low-income families are already at the highest risk for becoming pregnant as young teenagers, with all the attendant woes that come with it. If they are becoming fertile in childhood, we could see an acceleration of that ruinous trajectory.

It’s unrealistic to think we will be able to reimagine early puberty as a part of childhood rather than its end. But it is also painful to contemplate the consequences of our continuing to sexualize little-girl culture, given a significant trend toward earlier and earlier onset of puberty. Girls who are biologically and emotionally grounded in a presexual world can survive, without too much psychic damage, a common culture that suggests sex should be the driving value of human experience and especially that of young females. But a very young girl who has begun to develop will interpret all these messages and imperatives very differently. They will pollute her girlhood in some ways that will inform her sense of herself for the rest of her life.

One of the astonishing things about a recent collection of women’s memories of their first periods, My Little Red Book, is that even the most educated and modern girls often report that their first thought when they saw blood in their underwear was that they were dying. That’s how shocking the beginning of this womanly process can be for the uninitiated. Adolescent girls are urged to rush through Girl Land–to become like the jaded, highly sexualized young women they see lionized in our popular culture. It’s cruel to expect adolescents to make the change from girl to woman without any special protections against the corrosive forces of the world, without sufficient time and privacy to work out the big questions of their lives. To expect actual children to manage this without a special and intentional level of care and protectiveness is even worse.

Flanagan is the author of Girl Land, to be published in January

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