What it’s actually like growing up as a girl

I recently read an article about how being black is something of an art-form, and it got me to thinking, so is being a girl.

Being a girl isn’t easy. If it’s not pressure from magazines and advertising boards to look a certain way, it’s pressure from your peers to behave a certain way in order to fit in. I soon learnt that being a girl isn’t something you’re born with, but it’s something that’s transferred onto you throughout your life.

Being given a baby doll to play with at the age of three when your male cousin is given a toy car teaches you a lot about a society. Even though I loved cars and going outside on my bike, it was always my job, as a girl, to look after my younger cousins at parties and family gatherings whilst the boys could go outside and climb trees. Of course, as a girl, you’re physically restrained from climbing trees by your pretty pink dresses and ballet shoes.

Being a girl is being told to watch a cartoon about princesses and fairies when you’d much rather watch a programme about nature or science.

Being a girl is going to tennis practice, Jiu Jitsu and football club, but being the only girl there and people in your class describing you as a “tom boy”.

At the age of eight, you’re given your first comic book or magazine filled with pages about how to plait your hair, or how to do your eye-shadow. It’s pressure about how you should look ‘pretty’. It’s being asked what your favourite shade of lipstick is.

At the age of nine, one of your friends tells you she’s “going on a diet” to get in shape before the school disco. She scorns you for eating “full fat” yoghurt and crisps, even though boys are allowed to eat as much as they want.

At the age of eleven, you start going to high school where it becomes clear that in order to “fit in”, girls must be thin and wear heavy make-up. The girls who don’t straighten their hair or wear foundation are called “frumpy”.

At the age of thirteen, you’re pulled over in the corridor by a teacher and told your skirt is too short. When you ask why, you’re told it’s too “distracting” to the boys in your class. The same is said for netball skirts and shorts.

Being a girl is when you’re told that your intelligence is “intimidating to boys” and that the lads like a girl who acts stupid. Being a girl is going to the teachers to choose your GCSE options, and being told that you’d be better off doing the “girly” subjects such as art and drama, rather than business studies and IT.

Being a girl is when, at the age of fifteen, I’m cornered by a lifeguard whilst on holiday. I feel particularly vulnerable as I’m wearing just a bikini, and I’m trapped in a small shed with him. My heart is pounding and I don’t know what he might do to me. I laugh it off with friends, but I can’t help feeling like I could have lead him on in some way. Even though I realise now it was in no way my fault, it was the first time I’d felt my body was a sexual object.

Being a girl is being entered into a beauty pageant, as girls should be ladylike and beautiful.

Being a girl is having to be in control of birth control despite there being two people in a relationship. It’s having to remember to take it every morning, and taking it even though relatively little is known about its effects.

Being a girl is travelling the world, but having your photo taken on a beach on India whilst you sunbathe. It’s going out for a jog and having men catcall and beep their horns at you.

Being a girl is having to walk home with a group of people rather than on your own past dark as one in four women are sexually assaulted. It’s wearing a skirt to a club and having your bum pinched as you walk past.

It’s having boys “mansplain” to you things you already know about how to change a washer on a tap, or how to fill up your tyres with air. Or the very same boys saying that pint of beer you just ordered in the pub is “unfeminine”.

Being a girl is telling your careers adviser that you want to be a journalist, and him asking “ah, what kind? Fashion or beauty?” rather than “politics or sport?”. Being a girl is going into the workplace knowing you’ll earn 13.9% less money than your male co-workers just because you happen to have a vagina, and they have a penis.

Being a girl is an art form. We are all born as blank canvases, but pink and glittery paint is thrown at us, and we are turned into beautiful pieces of art that people feel the need to critique and point at.