Girlhood, Melissa Febos

I had very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the prose is great — it really gets under your skin in a very visceral (and sometimes pleasurable) way — and there are some really interesting observations, and ways of bringing different facets of a topic together. A lot of the essays really compellingly use personal experience to sort of climb inside various abstract ideas and feel them out, probing issues of consent, compulsion, desire, etc.

On the other hand — and it feels churlish to complain about this — there’s a sort of relentless focus on awfulness that shades into a kind of attachment, or self-definition, around woundedness, that bothers me. Especially because the collection is entitled Girlhood, and there are repeated allusions to the idea that these experiences are definitive of femininity, etc. And look, I’m not going to argue that patriarchy doesn’t harm women in very direct ways, and that there’s no value to illuminating those ways. I just wanted there to be…other aspects too. And there were these brief tantalizing glimpses into various kinds of pleasure and joy, but it just felt like there was inevitably a return to badness, and it was wearying. I recognize that this sounds like me saying something to the effect of, “You’d be prettier if you smiled a little more,” or, “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?” and I don’t feel great about that, but I guess in my defense, the continuous return to the negative didn’t seem to yield up any new knowledge or insight, after awhile, whereas the avenues unfollowed glinted with intellectual promise.

Like, there’s a chapter on consent and cuddle parties (that I think circulated on social media awhile back?) that is super helpful in that it identifies how, even in situations where you are actively supposed to only do what feels good to you, and clearly invited to change your mind, etc, in other words, in a space that seems engineered to produce only enthusiastic consent — a woman will still accept unwanted physical touch out of, like, the gendered socialization to be accommodating. And I’m tempted to assign it to my Women’s and Gender Studies students (I teach the short story “Cat Person” precisely in order to address similar topics, but it has its own drawbacks) but I feel like it ultimately borders on saying that this is inevitable (though it does note that one of the women with her doesn’t seem to have this problem). I want to give my students an essay that will help them say no, and I worry that for many of them, this would end up having the opposite effect — it would anchor them in a sense of fatalism about the inevitability of going along with things you don’t enjoy. And I’m not saying it’s Melissa Febos’ job to tell all of us women (because yes, I also have this problem!) how to avoid doing this, but given that she recognizes that some people are able to, and given that she has close access to one such person, why not ask a few more questions? The narrative frequently pulls in other people’s experiences, drawn from conversations and interviews, but it’s almost always to confirm things Febos has herself experienced, as if to say, it’s not just me! We all know how unfortunately necessary such authentication is, especially when it comes to experiences of sexual violations of various kinds. But if you’re inviting in other perspectives, why not stretch a little and try to add some that offer an alternative; a roadmap to other, better possibilities?

Again, I feel guilty about saying this, but there’s just something so pessimistic and unappealing about the idea that we’re all so wounded, to various degrees, and that’s something we inevitably carry with us and live through. I’m not saying we should gloss over or repress the bad things we experience, but I also don’t feel a need to identify so strongly around them. I recognize that the choice not to do so isn’t entirely free — it’s not exactly right to say that while you can’t control what happens to you, you can control how you react to it. You can’t always control that. It takes time, sometimes, to get perspective and distance and work through it, and not everyone has that luxury. I think this is what I admire so much in Sohaila Abdulali’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape — that it’s a book that gives you permission to say, this experience will not define me. Febos alludes to the fact that her life is so much better now, in all kinds of ways, but she doesn’t really tell us about those parts, and I think this would be a more compelling book if she did.

One of my favorite parts of this book was the last essay, which describes a friendship Febos formed with a random guy in Paris. She had come to escape her life; especially her heroin addiction and her boyfriend who was a partner to it, but she ends up seeking out drugs, and finding a buddy to use with. And she spends what seems like a fairly enjoyable week getting high with this random dude. And you’re holding your breath for the bad thing to happen, but for once, it doesn’t, it’s just sort of a lovely little interlude, and while it’s of course very Unhealthy and Bad in all kinds of ways, and not the sort of thing that one would want to really glorify or advocate for as an experience everyone should try sometimes, it’s also…sort of nice. And I was grateful for it.