She’s A Girl Who Can’t Say No
It starts from the second you start to show.
Your body is public property, up for consumption. Questions, comments, hands placed upon you without warning. Advice from friends. From strangers. You are not pregnant, you’re a host for something inside of you.
God help you if that baby inside of you is a girl.
From the second she leaves the womb, she will be cute, she will be pretty, they will remark on her long eyelashes and her big eyes and her toothless smile. Her screams will inspire people to tell you “she’s going to be a handful.” Because you are a girl, it is your job to be toothless. It is not your job to yell.
She’ll grow up, and suddenly she’ll be away from you. The questions and comments from strangers will not stop. Maybe she’ll develop early and boys in her class with start to make comments. She’ll take them to her teacher, who will tell her to be a good example. She will take them to a male vice-principal, who will tell her that she needs to be nice. She will try. She will be quiet and sweet and wear sweatpants, but the groping will continue. She’ll hear the word “rape” used for the first time in relation to her (but not the last.) She will have to threaten a boy with a pair of scissors under the desk in order to sit through humanities class without being molested.
It only gets worse. There are the people she babysits for, the dads who don’t touch her but ask if she has any boyfriends, and when she says no, respond that that’s because she’s the type of girl that older men appreciate. He hands her a ten dollar bill and then leans over her to unlock the door. Somehow she was capable enough to watch his children at 10pm on a Saturday, but not capable enough to open a car door on her own.
At some point, she realizes that she does not have the energy to fight it anymore. So she tries something else. She embraces it. She runs toward it. She makes the first joke, the worst joke, always at her own expense. She is a Cool Girl, she is smooth like glass, letting everything slide off of her because if she does not, she may shatter.
Soon she’s an adult and this is who she is now. The only way to reclaim her body is to give it away freely. And then it isn’t being taken from her. It feels like a choice.
(It is not a choice.)
She is not made of glass anymore, though. She is polished smooth like a diamond, the layers developing around her over the years, 20-carat armor that is impenetrable. But diamonds cut glass, and what is inside is left scarred and rotting. Eventually you’re just a collection of pointy shards rattling around in a skin suit.
You meet someone who is also broken, albeit in a different way. Together you help put each other back together. There are still broken pieces, but together you discover that there is more than one way to assemble yourselves. There is no one way to be. But it gives you the confidence to finally start saying no.
So for the first time in your life, you can start saying yes.