For the Birds
There’s nothing quite like a fall visit to your hometown. Turning leaves, crisp air, pumpkin pie - Thanksgiving is a romantic season of chilly weather and nostalgia.
What a perfect place to stay for International Day of the Girl tomorrow.
My brain the Friday before Thanksgiving
When I was a girl in the suburbs, my best friend and I stayed up all night playing M.A.S.H. and imagining who we’d become. I idolized men, mostly. I loved comedians who always had something witty to interject and brooding songwriters that oozed depth. I wanted (and still do want) to be the next Lemony Snicket.
The women I loved, I also shamed. They were too slutty, too fat, or too dumb. Every potential female role model was held to an impossible standard. As was I. I remember boys in school calling me chunky, boring, and desperate. Later, I was “easy.” Whatever I did, some name was sure to follow.
There are a million and five ways a woman doesn’t measure up. As a girl, believed those flaws were critical. I never wanted to be someone too loud, or meek, or flabby, or messy, or anything other than robotic. Only now is the world looking back on flawed women with grace.
Many media outlets have started to recognize the scrutiny we put on women in the public eye. We’ve started, barely, atoning for the sins of our past slander. We should have left Britney alone. We should have seen how Monica Lewinsky was struggling. We should have believed the women who warned us about R. Kelly.
We should have listened.
TMZ mocking women’s bodies
In all the reminiscing, our actions aren’t changing.
I sit at the same table I did as a child, and think of all the ways my gender is being let down. I try - genuinely try - to be thankful for the progress. Today of all days, I sit with my heaps of potatoes and squash and imagine how things have changed for girls. I see Monica giving Ted Talks on cyberbullying, freed Britney sharing her body on her own terms, and R. Kelly in prison, and I hope that the next generation is set up differently.
Across the table, my mom is commenting on how I dress just like she did in the nineties. It wouldn’t look as good on her now, she says. Next to me, my grandmother is perched like a chickadee, head tilts and all. She’s losing her mind but has enough wherewithal to ask if I lost weight.
While there’s been progress, the three of us are still marked by the way women have been told to look and act. Change doesn’t happen overnight.
My eyes land on the pile of turkey flesh in the centre of the room. Its legs have been ripped open and tossed onto plates. Its skin snails across the serving platter. In its carcass, I see women up for slaughter. The week’s headlines settle in my gut, and I realize that our girls are still living in a world of gore.
Suddenly, I’m stuffed.
Dancing at the top of my throat is the new Marilyn Monroe “biopic.” Blonde is a disgustingly graphic film that the director is touting as feminism. In his view, the nudity, rape, abortions, and camera-into-cervix scene explore her trauma in a gritty way.
In reality, it’s more exploitative.
As Martha Gill notes for The Guardian, “If this serves a feminist purpose, it is lost in the larger patriarchal one: to reduce even successful women to sexualised and traumatised bodies.”
We are birds being carved for entertainment.
I’d be shocked, but these depictions have seeped into the everyday. This week, an all-male college staged a mass catcalling of a female dorm. Dozens of men, en-masse, screaming threats at women. That idea isn’t born out of thin air.
The men in question called it part of school initiation. A right of passage, so to speak. As if being called a whore in your own home is a regular occurrence. As if violence is a normal part of girlhood.
Though, maybe it is.
When Johnny Depp won his defamation case against Amber Heard this year, he proved that we don’t have to believe women - especially if we don’t like them. It didn’t matter how credible her stories were (or that he’d previously been found guilty of those assaults). Depp fuelled everything into a smear campaign. And it worked.
Since Heard’s loss, survivors of domestic violence have been pulling out of court cases and retracting public statements. Angelina Jolie, who’s recently accused Brad Pitt of abusing their children, is already getting the Amber treatment. A man in the UK was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend. He saved her name as “Amber Heard” in his phone.
To the next wave of girls, her name is synonymous with defeat. It’s better to stay silent than to be Heard.
It’s not a holiday without a dose of cynicism
We expect the media to fail our girls, but more and more organizations are revealing themselves to be full of traps. They’ve allowed abuse to congeal around them like gravy. In the last week:
We discovered that Hockey Canada had a second secret fund to pay for sexual assault settlements.
The U.S. National Women’s Soccer League found rampant emotional, mental, and sexual abuse across their teams.
Iranian teenagers were murdered for protesting hijabs.
Down the street from where I’m eating dinner, my old high school is trudging up secrets of its own. My grade 7 math teacher, Mr. Despatie is charged with 14 child sex offences, and local Facebook pages are flooded with accounts of misconduct dating back to the 90s. His trial started last week.
One former student told the court that he used to lock the door and force her onto his lap. Despatie rubbed her legs up to the shorts she wore under her kilt.
When I was a girl, rumours flew about Mr. Despatie: he gave girls special attention, he hazed male students, he looked up skirts... You name it, we thought it. The only thing I knew for sure is that he would yell if my homework wasn't done. That was bad enough for a 13-year-old.
Because of privacy concerns, none of the victims have been named. It's been years since I've talked to anyone from my grade 7 class, and I don’t know if he preyed on my peers. This women’s testimony is visceral. I remember those shorts. We all wore them as a way to be modest under our skimpy uniforms. Clearly, they didn’t help.
When I was sitting in his classroom, I had no idea how many girls had lost something around me. I wonder if they were the same girls we gave bad reputations.
The girl told the court that she reported the incident to a guidance councillor and nothing happened. Logically, she stopped fighting. He did it at least nine more times.
“You feel disgusting down to your bones," she testified.
I couldn’t say it better myself.
When I think about my girlhood, I wonder when, exactly, I started noticing the double standards, creeps, and dangers. At some point, all girls are forced to become women. Many don’t do it on their own terms.
Despite the awful news and my queasy stomach, the best way I can think to celebrate is to focus on the positive. More and more of these stories are coming to light because we care - because we’ve started believing. For this International Day of the Girl, I’m going to hold onto the hope of a kinder future. One day, we’ll sit around Thanksgiving dinner without feeling the weight of our body image issues, the women being sacrificed for the good of entertainment, and the girls being preyed on in places they think are safe.
How nice would it be to only focus on the bird on our plates?
Tomorrow, I’m braving the halls of my elementary school to read my book to students. My childhood self would think that’s pretty cool. She might even think I made it as the next Lemony Snicket after all. Maybe I’ll even inspire someone else.
