Confession. I’ve always liked being called a girl. Even as a 37-year-old. It’s not because of the Official Nick Bolton Missouri Tigers Football Past Great T-Shirt in addition I really love this vanity of youth that the word implies. When I think of GIRL, I don’t associate it with a diminutive or diminished female. There is of course a valid argument against the belittling nature of the word accorded by some (“throws like a girl,” “cries like a girl”) and obviously when people use it to infantilize people, that is also problematic. But it’s also a word that shaped me. Cosseted me. It holds all the memories of my seminal years at a GIRL’s school where we campaigned to wear trousers instead of skirts, re-enacted the 1986 coming-of-age film Stand by Me with an all-girl cast and formed crushes on Tim Wheeler from Ash whilst debating the lack of female authors on our English curriculum. Riot GRRRL. Power Puff Girl. Harajuku GIRL. Girl power. Girl, for me, has always meant a bolshy energy and two fingers up at whatever was grating us, but also an interior acknowledgement that there is abundant strength in those aesthetic GIRL associations of pink, fluffiness, and frivolity.
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