AGA Roll Call: Womanchild

I have recently read many articles written by adults who are scared that their preteen girls are growing up in an enviornment that is too sexual and turns their bodies into sex objects.

My response: Um, duh? As a young teenager who sees the effects of rampant sexual objectification on her high school peers, it isn't hard to see where young girls get the idea.

Case in point: Deal or No Deal. The popular television show where the males (the host and the banker) manipulate the contestant in a series of intellectual hoops and enticing prizes, and the women hold boxes. In skimpy dresses. Oh, they pose and smile, too. This isn't a controversial fringe show, this is a game show blasting in millions of homes across America. A girl's parents probably watch it- and then wonder why their daughter wants to buy a tube top.

When I think of my puberty years, I think of them being anything but ‘magical.’ I would like to have been invited into womanhood with a ‘period party,’ like I’ve heard some mothers throwing…I would like to have known everything there is to know about what was going on with my body…I would like to have been educated by something other than a Disney-produced pre-teen girls guide to living as a lady VHS. I would like to have discussed it more, instead of mysteriously disappearing from the classroom with all of my girl classmates. Buuut, I wasn’t. Instead, my puberty years, (probably like some of yours,) were littered with embarassing leaks, some awkward times with a tampon applicator and some ruined pairs of jeans.

I don't remember developing breasts, but I do remember fighting the bra my mother wanted to buy me. Why on earth did I want to wear that thing, with too many straps that I was constantly adjusting? Puberty for me was more linked to that *other* development in female sexuality.

Sixth grade, after school, late in the year when the weather was starting to warm up in Florida, I went to the bathroom, pulled down my jeans, and immediately started to squeal for my mother. How had this happened! Nothing hurt, nothing was wrong, but it had to be! My mother leaned in on the door frame, an inscrutable look on her face, until suddenly she burst out laughing. "Clean up, we'll go get some pads." PERIOD?! Oh. Well, I should have known that, right, but it took me completely by surprise.

Puberty, for me, was something long-anticipated, and finally dismissed. I positively loathe the term "late-bloomer"--not only because it implies that one is "late," when one is really right on time for oneself, but also because it implies that there is "blooming" going on, rather than just awkward physical and emotional growth, which seems to be a much more accurate description of what goes on during puberty. Not that I'm trying to be cynical about puberty or anything, I just hate the whole mystique about a young girl "blooming" into a woman the second she sprouts noticeable breasts. (This mystique objectifies women, and it disgusts me that even relatively feminist women like my mother say things like, "She's really a woman," when they really mean she's grown a certain type of figure.)

I remember when I first started noticing my body changing. I was sitting in the bathtub, thinking about life, school, music etc. I looked down at my body. I noticed, my chest wasn't right. My nipples had gotten bigger and my chest had fat on it. I had...boobs. I got this instantly and it was a little weird. What I thought would never happen, happened, I really was a girl!

For years my boobs grew, I eventually got pubic hair, which I wasn't sure what to do with (my mom and sister never shaved their pubic area...I didn't know what to do about armpit and leg hair). Then I got my period. Everything had been fine up to this point. I got that women had breasts, I got that. I didn't get this whole bleeding from my crotch thing and was convinced I had colon cancer. Yeah, thanks 20/20. I really didn't know what to do. I couldn't tell my mom. I was just perplexed in fear. I started using my mom's pads thinking, she won't notice if I just used one...

I was one of those girls who went to bed one night a Girl, and seemed to wake up the very next day with a giant set of breasts. My body developed early: I was the first girl in elementary school to have breasts, the first to try and figure out, alone, why I both wanted to hide them and have them seen. I was the first to be forced into a brassiere (and was really pissed about it), the first to have to fend off the strap being snapped behind me all the time.

What came with that was an unexpected bipolarity of being treated like a girl -- including the benefit and enjoyment of some level of androgyny, being allowed to play football afterschool with the boys, picking fights, having "buddies," not being groped -- and then being treated like a woman, but only in the respect of appearance and sexuality, as well as sexual objectivism. I didn't inherit any new rights with my changing body: of course, it was a woman's body, so there weren't any real rights to inherit.