Some Girls want Out
The title of this piece is taken from a wonderful essay by the late author Hilary Mantel, published in the London Review of Books. As far as I know, you can still read the whole article at this link, and it definitely repays reading.
Some Girls want Out, by Hilary Mantel
Mantel is a very thoughtful and penetrative writer (though that latter adjective does rather touch on the points she is making in the essay). I love the way that she gently takes you with her, as she does in her fine trilogy of novels starting with Wolf Hall. The content of the essay is ostensibly a review of four books which have as their topic the virgins and saints and mystics (all female) who are known for their mortification of their flesh, and specifically their starving of themselves. The connection with our modern version of this, anorexia, is standing hugely elephantine in the room, and Mantel does not overlook it.
She describes the way that the lives of these women (girls in fact, many of them, when they started their mortifications) were interpreted at the time, and later, and now. Some of the subjects, such as St Theresa of Lisieux and Saint Gemma Galgani, lived at the time when psychology and even psychotherapy were developing their own theories of what makes people do things that harm themselves. Whether their interpretations were any better than the Pope's I leave you to decide.
But what the essay made me think about was something that Cro talked about and which I have heard from other female friends and relatives. Girls sometimes want out. Out from the whole business of turning into a woman. As Cro described it, you felt as you approached puberty, that your body was propelling you into an existence that you didn't ask for and didn't really want. I am sure that the undesirability of female adulthood to a young female teen is made hugely worse by the expectations that we keep heaping on women. You would assume that a very traditional society would be oppressive enough, but I feel we have managed as a society to make a liberal, modern society just as oppressive.
By the 'expectations' we have of women, I don't mean what we expect them to do; I mean what we expect them to be. You can't look like that, or dress like that, or like that activity. It feels as though we all feel we have a right to an opinion of what women should do, much more so than any right to tell men what to do. As a simple example, when did you last hear a male politician criticised for his choice of clothes? (The only recent one I can think of was Zelensky, but most people seemed to think the criticism was worse than the clothes).
Also, there is a pervasive sexualisation of our media which means a young female teen cannot have avoided the way that many people look at women. They may also, I'm afraid, have seen or been shown the readily-available pornography on teens' mobile phones which can leave them in no doubt what some men think and intend.
So I can see why a girl might want out. I can see why the saints did, and the anorexics, and sadly I can also see how it might influence trans-identifying girls now. The pressure has never lifted if you are a teen on the verge of female adulthood, and although I think the majority of girls find their way through it without too much harm or distress, there is a significant percentage in every generation who find it extremely difficult and who look for a way out. Cro certainly said it was a very pressured time in which she felt her body was betraying her. Luckily, she made her way through into the adult and happy and fulfilled woman that she became.
So how do we make things better? How do you turn down the pressure and the temperature? Well apart from turning off phones and devices (which is a good idea for nearly every problem), I think we should have a moratorium on telling women what they should do or be. And that moratorium applies as much to women's opinions as men's. Just leave some space where we don't comment on appearance and behaviour quite so determinedly as we now do. Do not imply that some women are doing adulthood wrong. Stop producing TV programmes that allow us to goggle and gloat (Mormon Wives and Geordie Shore are the first two for my shredder). And just give women and girls a break, so that Out is not what they want.
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