A Woman is A Monster

Women from Emily Bronte to Taylor Swift have lamented about the loss of the wildness of their childhood. In a society with rigid beliefs about gender and its presentation, girlhood is the last time in a woman’s life that she is not seen as a capital-w Woman and is allowed the freedoms of someone who is not yet seen as a person. Ironically, being a girl may be the only time in a woman’s life that she is actually seen as a person who is allowed to act as she wants, but because personhood is often linked socially to adulthood, women often instead compare this time in their life to feeling more animalistic or proto-human. Emily Bronte states in her novel Wuthering Heights, “I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free… Why am I so changed?” mirrored two-hundred years later by Taylor Swift in her song “seven”, “please, picture me / in the weeds / before I learned civility / I used to scream, ferociously / any time I wanted.” Both women long not for the idealistic, candy-coated, bright pink version of girlhood many may think of, but the feeling of being feral and ugly and not yet aware that their bodies would ever be viewed as anything but a vessel to play and move and get dirty.The memories of my girlhood are all wrapped up in an animalistic simplicity. I remember running around from the moment the sun came up until it went down, coming inside with my feet blackened from dirt and road and crusted with blood from the plight of spending days barefoot and exploring. I remember crying as my mom had to comb through days worth of knots, hair tangled from days spent in the lake, out in the grass, rolling on the ground and somersaulting my way through the world. I will never meet more loyal people than the girls I surrounded myself with in that time, bound together by the line between creature and girl.

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