Girlhood

Published in 2021
330 pages
8 hrs 13 mins

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart, the essay collection, Abandon Me, and a craft book, Body Work. She is the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The BAU Institute, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Foundation, and others. Her essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, Sewanee Review, Tin House, The Sun, and The New York Times. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

What is this book about?
A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.

In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.

When her body began to change at 11 years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defences she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritise their personal safety, happiness or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.

Blending investigative reporting, memoir and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.

Written with Febos’s characteristic precision, lyricism and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, towards a chosen self.

from a helpful review on goodreads by Sophia Judice:
Every woman should read this book. Girlhood is a collection of seven essays that focus on the period between adolescence and womanhood, a time when women initially reap the consequences of the ways that society and the patriarchy have conditioned us to cater to the needs and desires of men, while losing ourselves in the process. Melissa Febos uses some of the smartest and most insightful metaphors I’ve encountered as well as personal anecdotes to relay her messages. The topics covered by the respective essays are as follows:

“Kettle Holes”
– The complexity of “desire”

“The Mirror Test”
– Builds upon the notion that we are molded by society
– Self-actualization
– Origins of the word “slut” and how it’s evolved over time
– Shame

“Wild America”
– How adolescent standards of beauty and existence influence the ways in which we are perceived and perceive others through self hatred and projection

“Intrusions”
– The male gaze
— The absence of male shame
– The pathology of victimhood
– Voyeurism and the “Peeping Tom”
— Stalking as a medium for love and romance
— as perpetuated by media (movies, tv, etc.)

“Thesmophoria”
– The inherent complexity of the mother daughter relationship

“Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” (my personal favorite)
– FOCUSES ON CHANGING THE CULTURE OF CONSENT
– Skin hunger (touch deprivation)
– Empty consent
— Depersonalization
— Fearful consent
— Physical safety vs emotional relief
– The lasting effects of sexual trauma even when you feel as if you’ve never experienced sexual trauma
– Patriarchal possession and coercion
– Sex work and negotiating consent
– The fear of not pleasing
— “…women tended to use their partners physical pleasure as a yardstick of their satisfaction…for men, it was the opposite: the measure was their own orgasm.”
– How do we categorize events that we feel don’t fit the accepted mold of “trauma” or “assault” but still do not qualify as healthy, enthusiastically consensual sexual experiences?
– The paradox of shame (protecting ourselves while protecting the male ego)
– The myth of sexual liberation through a white feminist lens
– Acknowledging the inherent female traumatization of the sexual conventions of heterosexuality
– Gender performance
– The inevitability of the male gaze
— “…the apex of feminine beauty is nearly identical to that of physical powerlessness”
— Sympathy vs emotional labor
— Care vs performing care
— Empathy vs accommodation
– “Yes means yes” as being an unrealistic model for consent
–The struggle of saying no (often out of fear of the alternative)