I was reading Tina Fey’s book Bossypants and came across this quote: “When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?” We wrote down our answers and shared them, first in pairs, then in larger groups. The group of women was racially and economically diverse, but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. “I was walking home from ballet and a guy in a car yelled, ‘Lick me!’” “I was babysitting my younger cousins when a guy drove by and yelled, ‘Nice ass.’” There were pretty much zero examples like “I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team.” It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they’ve crossed into puberty? If so, it’s working.”
Girls shouldn’t associate entering womanhood with being sexualized by men. They should be told positive things about their mind and body, should build confidence, not the fear that men will objectify them. The fact that this still happens today makes me frustrated, we have progressed so much in technology and other things, why is it that gender inequality is still an issue women have to face?
Then I saw a commercial for Always called #LikeAGirl and I realized that the first time girls are faced with inequality is not when they enter womanhood, it starts as they grow up and hear terms like “You run like a girl” and suddenly being a girl is a negative thing, it means you are lesser. So when a girl is turning into a women and a man catcalls her it is just seen, as an experience that every girl goes through.
But in this commercial they called attention to the negativity of the sentence “like a girl.” Questioning why it has to be seen as a negative thing. Like a girl can mean you run fast, that you are strong. They end the commercial asking, “Why can’t run like a girl also mean win the race?”
This commercial gave me hope. Maybe now people will think twice about saying that doing something like a girl is negative. Maybe girls will stop growing up in a world that objectifies them and labels them as lesser. People will stop catcalling and hopefully women will enter womanhood with confidence and that knowledge that being a girl is awesome!