Submitted by wednesday in Feminism

[this is an expression of something i've been thinking through recently; i don't know if it makes any sense, or is completely wrong-headed, or just pointless, but i'm putting it here in case anything thinks it's worth commenting on - even if that comment is that i should immediately stop writing :-)]

An idea commonly discussed in modern feminism is "infantilisation", that is, the denial of woman's agency as a fully developed human person - as we might imagine is accorded to man - by way of treating her, in both a figurative and literal sense, as a child.

This process of infantilisation in achieved in various ways, but here we are mainly concerned with its articulation in language through the use of the word "girl". This is expressed in one of many largely interchangeable think-pieces like so:

[T]he tendency of referring to women as "girls" is simply patronising, whether in a social situation, a work environment, or even in an inspirational campaign such as this.

A girl is a female child, under the age of 18; a woman is an independent adult. By describing a woman as a girl, society is taking away her agency and reducing her to a figure which is unable to control her own life. To put this in perspective, a male over the age of 18 is never called a "boy" but is almost universally referred to as a "man".

(source)

We are then told that:

A woman is a leader, an adult, in charge of her own life and her own decisions, capable of independence and, most importantly, an equal to men.

Here we find the fundamental difference between a girl and a woman: unlike a girl, a woman may be equal to men. Needless to say, this idea is not novel or particularly controversial: much feminism is concerned with woman's desire to stake a claim in the spheres formerly reserved for man, so she may stand tall beside him as an entrepreneur, a leader of nations, an architect of His-story who through her deeds will create a great Her-story to rot beside it, and suppose the two are not the same.

She shares this dream with the queers who would rejoice as they feast on the crumbs heteronormativity offers them - equality, integration, gay marriage - then stand in the registry office and smile in praise of their former enemies, thinking their battle won when in fact they lost by default when they ceased to exist entirely.

But there is no need to criticise this desire to attain equality with man; many feminists have already enumerated the evils of man, and asked why woman should want to share in them, though their voices are not so often heard.

Instead let's return to the one person who seems to have been forgotten in all this reformist squabbling: the girl. We might object - at least from a linguistic angle - to the claim that:

A girl is a female child, under the age of 18

After all, if this were really true then our writer would presumably have no cause to raise any objection in the first place. But we find this definition useful to our inquiry, so we shall accept it for now.

We are then told that:

a girl is small and unthreatening to the male world, someone who needs to be taken care of, and incapable of assuming responsibility. [...]

Although there has been movement to the reclaim the word and use it instead for female empowerment [...] it makes little difference to the wider connotations of the word. In general it is a term which is patronising and infantilising, and which undermines the intelligence, power and independence of women.

Now we find the assumptions that stand behind this disavowal of the girl: firstly, she is weak, useless, and incapable of defending herself; and secondly, having written her off as such, we need not bother to defend her ourselves, but may - like the priests of old - sacrifice her at the altar to serve the desires of woman.

We can understand this as a twisted form of respectability politics, wrought by a division of the self: while the respectable victim of queer oppression divides his class by proclaiming "I am a good, upstanding gay, not like those other immoral queers", the respectable woman proclaims "I am a strong, independent woman, not like those weak girls"; but unlike the repsectable gay, she cannot point to the other outside of herself; she must instead try to box up and contain this shameful aspect of her past, that it might be offered for sacrifice in place of the other.

Our task here, then, is to pry open that box and see what's inside. And what treasure we find: innocent, unbridled joy, expressed for its own sake; an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and new experiences; creativity unconstrained by learned boundaries; an endless cycle of instinctive destruction and re-creation, perceived always as play and never as work. We have found the very soul of anarchy itself embodied in the girl - this is the shameful past that must be locked away?

But we know why it must be so, for this soul of anarchy is the most dangerous threat to that monster we call "civilization". The soul must be restrained from birth; taught the ways of society, first at home, then at the prison we call school, where its mind is filled with useless knowledge as its spirit is drained out; until finally it emerges, blinking, into the light of the civilization, and proclaims: "I am woman".

And we will not be surprised to find that woman, after looking at her lot in life, will embark on a quest to become man - to finally realize her transformation from anarchist to citizen.

So what of "infantilisation"? Let's discard this word; it is useless, just another weapon in the armoury of Leviathan. Instead let us talk of the girl - the soul of anarchy, the emodiment of all we crave but cannot find. In the girl we find all that we can be, and wish to be. We shall express our innermost desires in the form of a plaintive cry: let us be girls, not men.

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ChaosAnarchy wrote (edited )

A girl is a female child, under the age of 18; a woman is an independent adult. By describing a woman as a girl, society is taking away her agency and reducing her to a figure which is unable to control her own life. To put this in perspective, a male over the age of 18 is never called a "boy" but is almost universally referred to as a "man".

By this argument whoever wrote this reveals their ageism tendency. Because with this sort of logic they say that people below 18 are not "entitled" / are not intelligent enough to do choices, etc.

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ArmyOfNone wrote

Don't wanna throw a judgement or anything, but just wondering if you also consider Age of Consent policies to be ageist, too?

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roanoke9 wrote

Interesting, but even the idea of adult is disempowering. It generally translates to "i gave up and now I just do what I am told, what is expected of me". Being a child has more to recommend it but the assumption that a child is less autonomous than an adult is pretty baked in to the concept . I don't want to be a man, boy, girl, woman, infant: these all constrict, contain what I might be. How about this: I'm an ineffability. Except when I choose not to be. Even the static idea that I might ever be something as opposed to a constantly changing amalgam that cannot be frozen in a single point in time contained by language is a simplification. This is messy stream of conciousness tbh but its what the post made me think of.

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wednesday OP wrote

thanks! yes, i agree with you.

a stream of consciousness is more or less all i can produce; i'm not particularly interested in (or skilled at) constructing logical arguments for a position, since i believe nothing of value was ever won by logical argument (rather than feeling and instinct).

perhaps i should say it this way: even if 'adult' and 'child' are only imposed labels we should do away with entirely, i would rather be a child than an adult...

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lettuceLeafer wrote

I don't have any disagreement except for saying that yes men are called boys often. The boys are back in town song, referring to your group of adult men as "the boys" and melania trump wrote that "boys will be boys" about donald trump. (Not blaming melania for shit, just thats what she said about her husband

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8__D wrote

I really enjoyed the article as well, but I did find it brushes over male infantilization. Maybe everyone is being infantilized? Maybe tying your identity to a mainstream gender too tightly infantilizes regardless of which gender? Who knows! I certainly think the author is equipped to tackle some of these hard-hitting questions.

Also, @OP, great writing! Many parts gave me chills :)

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Fool wrote

When I was young and they asked me what I wanted to be, I would say a girl, but it seemed impossible, since to be grown up was to be a woman and not a girl.

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