My BFFs and I are not fuddy duddys, I swear. And, recently, on one of our regular zoom calls, two of the four of us voiced serious skepticism and downright fuddy-duddiness regarding the whole ‘pronoun thing’. As it happened, I had just been reading an excellent book, Good Girls by Hadley Freeman, subtitled A Story and Study of Anorexia, in which I believe she makes a great argument for getting the fuck over ourselves re: pronouns, respecting peoples’ choices (which we should all do regardless,but still, make the argument, GF). Freeman is a journalist and recovering anorexic; she does a deep dive into body dysmorphia, which is on the rise among all children, but which is particularly acute and increasingly prevalent in teen and pre-teen girls. We’ve moved into an age wherein our youth, especially girls, are bombarded on line by body image insanity (advertising, influencers, pornography, air-brushed and filtered photos of everyone on the planet who has access to the web, etc.), and – Freeman extrapolates – are often caught like deer in headlights, frozen in an impossible position at age twelve or thirteen or fourteen: that’s how I’m supposed to be??!! And, as a result, more often than in any other time in our history these young girls are opting to declare themselves non-binary because having seen what’s required to be female (a maze inside a pyramid inside an optical illusion inside an impenetrable tower of insanity), they’re concluding ‘Nope. I won’t, I can’t comply with the (binary) choice before me.’ They are saying, in essence, that they do not want to be “a woman” whatever that is according to the societal norm of the moment, not to mention the pressure within their human families, where all too often female children are pressured to be not only thin but to also model a way of being that is compliant, overtly feminine, and well-behaved: good girls.
This made and makes sense to me. I grew up in a household with an obese mother who hated her body, and with an older sister who was anorexic and bulimic, which I witnessed from age nine until I was twenty-four, all from the standpoint of complete ignorance, but knowing in my gut that something was very wrong. No one knew much about anorexia and bulimia in the 60s and 70s, or the 80s. Diet culture was in full swing, and showed (shows) no sign of abating. Both of these options of how to be a woman were untenable to me, and in my late twenties after almost a decade of therapy, I finally acknowledged that I needed to do some serious work on how badly I felt about being a woman, being born a woman, as well as having been raised in a family with absolutely horrid role models, in a culture (a maze inside a pyramid inside an optical illusion…) in which I was clearly an affront to men and women because I was intelligent, assertive, and female, while also being treated like a piece of meat by nearly every man and a threat to far too many women I encountered from my earliest childhood.
My mother and my sister were both so angry. So was I. Angry, confused, and flummoxed. I gravitated toward my dad because he was charming and funny and not angry, but he also objectified me, and women in our community; he was also addicted to porn. What’s a girl to do, especially a girl who has been sexually assaulted as a child, and who clearly doesn’t fit the conventional mode? How about checking out, in my case not being a ‘they/them’ but by sinking into depression, and being deliberately unconscious about my body and choices for much of my teens and well into my twenties. Both of my sisters were angry, and both acted out in various ways punishing my parents once they had children of their own by withholding their kids from contact at various periods, for years at a time. It seemed to me then and now that acting out as I did during my teen years – by doing shit I thought was perfectly normal because they were (drinking, dating, dancing, staying out late) – was a better choice, and certainly less painful for my poor parents, who like so many in their generation were completely unprepared for the vagaries of their Boomer and Boomer adjacent kids. But. The message I got was that my version of being a female teen was wrong. My sisters were good because they stayed home on the weekends, didn’t play all those sports, didn’t date or had one steady (my little sister), a boy of whom my mother approved because his father was a Doctor. Even my older sister’s anorexia was a good thing, dangerous, maybe, but she was thin, and thin, low energy, mostly silent and complaint (except in that one teeeeeeeny area: food) at a nice round size zero is good, is feminine, is better than big energy, loves boys, messy, loud, athletic Moj.
As women have made huge strides in equity and equality over the last fifty years, so has the backlash hardened to protect and project ‘traditional’, conventional standards and norms regarding everything defining female. Toys are more gendered now than they were fifty years ago; on-line doxing and threats against women are a constant reality of life for women and girls; pornography is ubiquitous; the onslaught of images girls and boys are faced with, both real and faked, is endless. If a percentage of girls want to separate themselves, take a break from the pressure to be whatever the current model of female is, can you blame them? Having read Ms. Freeman’s story of anorexia and drug abuse (they often go hand-in-hand as do anorexia and autism), and having watched my elder sister go through all those years of self-punishment, punishment that continues in a different, less acute form to this day (she is sixty-seven, and is a size zero), I think a little courtesy, flexibility, and open-mindedness and patience regarding pronouns is a helluva lot better for girls, and for us all, while they figure it out, and – I am so hopeful about the younger generations – figure it out they will.
I say often and often that I’m not sure I would’ve survived high school in the internet age. The world is changing, and if our sons and daughters want to embrace a new way of defining themselves, especially given the vital, oft ignored aspect of their mental health at a time when hormones are raging 90mph, isn’t that their job, that of separating from their parents’ generation in new and different way to meet this new and different world? Yes, I believe so. They are us, we are them, and they are ours, after all.