In her novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë states,
“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free.
Why am I so changed?”
Mirrored 200 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 longed, not for the idealistic candy-coated bright pink version of girlhood, but the feeling of being ugly and not yet aware that their bodies would ever be viewed as anything but a vessel to play and move and get dirty.
As you can tell, I feel a lot, all the time, about anything and everything.
And it’s usually about existing, but mostly about existing as a woman.
Gina Martin (2024) on our en-masse paradox of existing beside men:
Every day, I am carrying an unending list of do’s and don’ts with me.
There are, allegedly, endless dualities to our existence as women.
And we’re either tired or ashamed of them.
Still,
All women have been on the receiving end of misogyny by men and,
yet, all women have loved men.
