xii ' 0 2
Contents
Chapter 13: Unwelcome Intrusions: Sexual Coercion
in the Lives of Girls 123
Chapter 14: Raising Sexual Girls: A Few Words to Parents 134
Part II: Aggression, Destruction, and Being Mean
Chapter 15: Aggression in Girls
Chapter 16: A Good Girl Doesn't Do That
Zeroing In On:Tomboys 155
Chapter I 7: Dear Diary, I Hate Her! Secret Anger in Girls 159
Chapter 18: The Aggressive Acts of Good Girls 166
Zeroing In On:Pranks, Mischief:and Little Meannesses 173
Chapter 19: Feeling the Power 178
Chapter 20: Getting Physical: Girl Athletes 189
Chapter 21: Class, Clothes, and Cutting Her Down to Size 198
Zeroing in On:Language and Loudness 204
Chapter 22: "I'm No Sucker": Fighting and Fighting Back 209
Chapter 23: Raising Aggressive Girls? 221
Conclusion
Chapter 24: Welcoming Sex, Power, and Aggression
into the Lives of Girls 227
Preface
1his book celebrates two aspectsof girls' lives that they try hard to
keep secret: sex and aggression. After years of studying girls' reactions to
victimization and women's memoriesof both sexualvictimization and sexual
play at Harvard, Children's, and Massachusetts General hospitals in
Boston, Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and now Saint Michael's
College in Vermont, I've learned that girls and women have amazing
strengths and clever, if hidden, ways of acknowledging feelings of sexual
agency as well as anger and aggression. Although I have learned to welcome
these forces in the lives of girls, I haven't always felt this way. I initially
came to this work with a guilty conscience.
When I was a child I had played sexual games with other girls and was
deeply concerned for many years after about what I had done. I had even
had sexual feelingsduring these games.For many years I believed I had seduced
another girl into playing with me, although years later I found out
that she didn't see it that way at all. The games I played were delightful
games of heterosexual romance where a handsome young "man" would seduce
or trap a young "woman" into sharing his bed and rubbing up against
him. But I felt so terribly guilty for years about these games that I sought
out therapists and sochl workers in high school to tell me if there was
something wrong with me.
By the time I began working on this book, however, I had sufficiently
dealt with those issuesinmy life,through courseworlcasI trained to become
apsychologist, through therapy inmy twenties and thirties,and throughmy
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xiv -b= Preface
work as a feminist, a professor, a therapist, and a researcher of sexual abuse
andvictimization. Inmy earlierboolcs,TheTroublewithBhme andNewVersions
ofvictims, I easily disclosed that I had been molested at the age of six
by a neighborhood adolescent boy,and although it was a scaryand confusingexperienceatthetime,I
emergedrelatively unscathed and considermyselfluckycompared
to themany victims of sexual abusewho experienced so
muchmore-penetration, threats,bribes, assaultsto their verybeing.What
I think is so interesting and also sets the stage for this research about girls
and women that I have done is that an experience of sexual pleasure (the
games I played) was so much more life-defining, threatening to my ego,
shameful, and disruptive than that experience of abuse.
Another defining experience was my work with Carol Gilligan, who
taught me how to listen and direct my attention to the words of the girls
and women I interviewed. But the body of work that arose after her original
brave book, In a Different Voice, pushed me in a different direction. In
the 1980sI wanted so much to join the crowd of believers in women's caring
natures and their deep strivings for connection, but I felt that I didn't
belong. As a woman who experienced anger, wishes for vengeance, who
could be sexual, mean, bad, and as a woman who grew up in a lower class
family where some forms of aggressionwere valued, I felt at odds with the
glowingimageof girlsand women that became a popularized version of the
ethic of care.And asCarol's originaland political messagebecame reduced
in the public arena to the simple thought that women are both caring and
more caring than men, I felt uncomfortable with the model of girlhood
that seemed to be emerging.Redefining my sexual urges and needs forvengeance
as deep-seated strivings for connectedness did not ring true to my
own experiences. Theyhad a life separate from my wishes to be lcnownand
loved and even to be "good."
That is why I think I have a new perspective to offerreaders on the development
of girls and women, a perspective that gives girls' sexuality and
aggression their due and doesn't subsumeit under a blanket of caring nor as
a defenseagainst oppression. This is a perspective that returns us to a more
complicated version of girls, that understands sexual and aggressivefeelings
as "normal." Hopefully, it's a perspective that will help girls to integrate
these acts into their definitions of who they are and how girls are
~'supp~sed'~to be.
For those readers who might want to lcnow a little about the research I
did, I interviewed women from over twenty-five states, using family trips
and trips to conferences in other states as opportunities to find women and
girlsto interview. Friends and familyhelped me to find parents who would
allow me to interview their daughters. A student with connections to an
elementary school inNew York City introduced me to low-income Puerto
&can women so that I could explorea group of women rarely tapped by researchersfor
a focusonhealthy development. A friend who consulted with
an after-school program situated in a housii~gproject helped me to bring
into my sample low-income African-American girls and women as well as
low-income white girls so that I might write a book that reached out beyond
middle-class white readers alone.
Concerned that African-American women and girls might not open
up to me, I trained Bev Colston, a middle-class Black woman with
Caribbeanroots, to do some of these interviews. Her warmth, intelligence,
and love of the topic produced some of the best interviews. Also, an older
doctoral student in Oregon, Laura Orgel, who had great energy for the
topic, interviewed some West Coast women for me. Students at Saint
Michael's College did some initial interviewing as we developed the interview
questions. I am the interviewer for the rest, the majority of the interviews,
that follow.
Listening to these women and girls was an incrediblypowerful experience.
They were from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, from different
parts of the country, different socioeconomic classes. I worried about
how much truth they were sharing and the limits to that sharing; about
whether I influenced or led women down paths they may not have followed
on their own; and whether I might have made them too vulnerable
or accidentally shut them up. I had concerns about how other psychologists
would see this kind of work, data which would alwaysremain incomplete;
that is, we would never know the whole "truth." And I had feelings
myself when memories came back that I needed to confront.
Of the 122women and girls interviewed, 29 are African American, 21
Latina (primarily Puerto Rican-American),and 3 Asian American. Of the
122, about 30 are children or teens. I reached them all through word of
mouth and through friends who had friends in churches, schools, colleges,
andhousing projects. In the stories that followI may have changed around
characteristics or descriptions of individuals to preserve their anonymity,
but not their words,which ring clear and true.
Perhaps the reader will want to lcnow whether I believe I got at "the
truth." My answer is that I got at some truths, and not the whole story.
Many women and girls are not ready to tell the whole story.
Still, I don't believe people made up stories to impress me. Perhaps
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xvi -c$ Preface
there were untruths that aren't lies-stories that became distorted over
time. These stories arise in a culture and context that cannot be ignored.
For example,how many times did women erroneously remember someone
else initiating a game of sexual play instead of herself because our culture
has taught her that good girls do not "ask for" that sort of thing. I suspect
that when involving desire or the initiation of sexual games, the stories
may have emerged distorted.
And sexual feelings. This is another area where the full story may be
hidden. For some interviews it was difficult to even ask the question, "Do
you think you had sexual feelingswhile playing the game!" If a woman answeredyes,
it was almost always tentative. If I felt bold enough to ask, "Did
you experience orgasms?"and if the woman replied that she did, shewould
almost always ask whether I thought this was "normal."
Shame is a funny emotion, making people want to hide their faces,
their selves,and their stories. It also makes people want to confess in order
to find some relief. I tried to bring out the shameful as well as the delightful.
I welcomed the hearty,joyful stories of childhood power, sexuality,and
aggression, and tried to make room for the scarier, more tentative childhood
feelings.My hope was to begin a dialogue about such taboo topics.
Ihope these storieswillchangethe waypeople talk aboutgirlsandraise
their daughters. Truths or partial truths, I think these stories can offer that.
The book is divided into two parts: The first focuses on sex (thesexualplay
and games in childhood) and the second focuses on aggression (power,
anger, and aggression,to be exact). Feelings of guilt and shame are woven
throughout the storiespresented in both halves of this book, yet so arefeelings
of delight and wonder. Interspersed between chapters the reader will
note sections or minichapters I label "Zeroing In On. ..."These are reflections
or summaries of research or background information on smaller
topics that are aimed at preparing the reader for stories to come.
Through the stories and reflections I hope to offer a more complex understanding
of female development than is currently offered to parents by
psychologists,one that allowsfor a wide range of human desires,emotions,
and actions. While common notions of "girlness" influence girls in ways
that protect and oppress them, making them feel shame and guilt for their
ungirlish acts, the girls in the stories to come challenge these notions.
With honor and integrity, many find a way to stay "good" while incorporating
their secret urges for sexuality,power, and aggression.
Introduction: Good Girls
versusReal Girls
AS Sarah,naked and vulnerable, struggles to free herself from the
imaginary bonds that tie her hands to the bed Erame, Lisabends down over
Sarah's naked body and slowly but gently places a kiss on the top of her
bare vagina. Because they hear footsteps in the hall, this electrifying act
signals the end of the game, and both girls, seven years old, hasten to get
their clothes back on before Lisa's mother knocks on the closed and locked
door of her bedroom. They are now satisfied and silly but still hopeful that
tomorrow or the next day they will find another time to reenact this powerful
game as well as switch roles. Next time Sarah will be the man, Lisa
the woman.
Lisa is a Jewishwhite girl and Sarahis a Christian JapaneseAmerican.
Both do well in school, are their teachers' pets, and they are best friends. It
is 1962, long before children were likely to be exposed to semipornographic
magazines, TV shows, movies, or videos, and long before these
children could read well enough to learn about the erotic traditions of romance
novels. Yet at some time during their imaginative play, a game developed,
secret and even unspoken between these two, that reproduced
one of the most sexually thrilling scenes of female imagination for the
time-to be captured, stripped, and then, not degraded or humiliated, but
adored.
This is not an unusual story of two oversexed seven-year-olds who
found each other, but a story more colnmon than not in the secret lives of
girls. Like Sarah and Lisa, there are other girls who play these games and
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2 -p Introduction: Good Girls versus Real Girls
games like them with other girls as well as with boys. There is Chrissie,
who loved to kiss the boys on the playground when she caught them.
Abbie played mermaids and rubbed her naked top against her friend's as
part of the game. So many other girls play "I'll show you mine if you show
me yours," usually with boys. Some enjoy getting together with friends to
play "naked Barbies."
There are also typical stories of girls whose secrets are about pleasurable
aggression. Leah, for example, got a "kick" out of kicking the boys in
the crotch and running away as they doubled over in pain. Chanelle beat
up a girl in her school who had nice clothes, and enjoyed it.
The following pages hold many stories from girls and women I interviewed
about the sexual play and games of their childhood as well as the
moments of aggression and sometimes evil they committed. These interviews
about the secrets they've kept have shown me a few things about
what goes on behind closed doors, and what sorts of behaviors have been
hidden by women and girls to preserve their outer image of goodness.Two
themes stand out: sex and aggression. Girls hide their sexual acts and feelings
as well as their aggressive impulses because girls are not supposed to
have these. But sexualfeelingsand aggressiveimpulses are a part of human
nature. Theycan be about power as well as self-discovery.Their narratives
show that
many girls play sexually,not just out of curiosity. Many have sexual
feelings and pursue these feelings. They teach themselves
and their friends (boys and girls) about their perceptions of adult
sexuality. Even at early ages, they incorporate into their sexual
styles images of what they think adult female sexuality is really
about.
many girls do aggressive things to other people, and not always to
retaliate or out of frustration or because they were losing a connection
to someone. Some enjoy their aggression,and especially if they
have grownup inpoverty or in dangerousneighborhoods, they wear
their aggressionas a badge of honor. Middle-classgirls livewith lifelong
secretsof what they seeas inexplicable outbursts or furtive evil
done to another, badness they have never been able to explain to
themselves.
many girls crave power and seek it in their relationships with others,
not only to connect, but because power over another is sometimes
pleasurable.
Introduction: Good Girlsversus Real Girls 3
There are an amazinglywide variety of sexualand aggressivebehaviors
in childhood, but most girls and women see the incidents from their own
lives as outside the range of "normal."
I interviewed girls ages six to eighteen and women from eighteen to
seventy.They came from over twenty-five different states, a variety of upbringings,
poor, low income, working class, middle class, and wealthy.
Some grew up on farms, some in housing projects, some in high-rises, and
some in suburbanhouses. And what I found traveling around the country
is that many girls and women have secrets, secrets of sexual play and
games, and secrets of aggressive acts that surprised and sometimes scared
them. It's not my intention to shock the reader with raw sex and pure aggression
in the lives of girls; instead, after reading story after story and
learning about the meaning of sex and aggressionin girls' lives, I hope that
for some this behavior will look a little more "normal" than it did at first
glance.
"Normal" is something that we as a culture construct. In America
today,we can look at a girl's sexual talk and games and call her prematurely
slutty or, using a more clinical word, oversexualized. We can look at her
plans to play sexuallywith another girl,the sexualfeelingsshehas with another
girl, and we might call her a lesbian. Or, we might simply say "this is
what childrendo,""they have bodies, they have sexualfeelings;the exploration
and expression of both are normal" no matter whom they are with.
Some people would say that we shouldn't even use the word "normal"
and they might be right. It's hurt too many people and gives special power
to the word "abnormal." But the one question that girls and women asked
me over and over when I was interviewing them Gas "Am I normal!" Usually
what I told them was that I had heard many stories like theirs already,
and that answer seemed to satisfy.What they really wanted to know was:
Am I different?Should I be ashamed?And more often than not, Should I
continue to be ashamed?Rather than encouraging the self-condemnation,
secrecy,and shamingof these girls,I wanted them to seethat what they did
was more or less typical of girls growing up, that sex and aggression are a
part of human experience, and even sometimessources of pleasure. To see
sex and aggression aspart of life and even a sourceofpleasure doesn't mean
we ought to abandon all efforts to treat these as moral acts, but that we
base our moral judgments on issues of harm and caring, justice and individual
rights, rather than on conventions of purity and outdated stereotypes
of women and girls.
After sitting with and listening to over 120women and girls acrossthe
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4 dL,r Introduction: Good Girlsversus Real Girls
country I know a little bit about what goes on in the privacy of children's
bedrooms and backyard playhouses. And after reading this book, so will
many others. In knowing this, maybe we all will look at girls a little differently,
and maybe we will reframe our own pasts, reclaiming some lost parts
of ourselvesthat were discovered in the basements and closets of girlhood,
in the spots where teachers and parents weren't looking.
Good Girls and Guilt
This book tries to undo the imageofthe good girl that I think has been unnecessarily
harmful to girls as they grow up. And this book tries to take a
second look at all this moral language, such as "good" and "bad," when it
gets applied to sex or aggression. The word "good," when used to describe
girls, has little to do with real morality and lots to do with social norms. I
think of social norms as rules about what's "proper" or acceptable, rather
than rules about what's morally right. These rules rein in women and girls
and restrict their development in important ways.
While the exaggerated guilt and shame that little girls carry around
with them for their secret acts of sexual pleasure or aggression is a burden,
it is the hemming in of girls through the rules of "niceness" that hurts girls
most and causes the guilt and shame. The girlswhose stories are told are all
too aware that they act in ways not befitting a girl or young woman, and as
acting like a girl gets merged in their minds with being good, they grow up
with a nagging guilt that they are never good enough, nice enough.
How could so much be going on behind the scenes while still so many
girls and women continue to think they have done something perverted,
abnormal, or horribly cruel?There is some greater social force teaching
girls and women how to interpret their acts and impulses. On the one hand
society suggests these impulsesto them, for where elsebut from our culture
(parents,movies, peers, advertisements, and more) do ideas about sex and
aggression come from?And then, on the other hand, societalnorms aimed
at girlsmake them feel bad about it, bad and immoral.This is a real shame.
It's a shame that women and girlshave to learn about themselves and their
potential for both sexuality and aggressionin a secret and shame-evoking
manner. I want this book to free up women and girls to acknowledge all aspects
of being human and to take off the shimmering costume of a femininity
that equals goodness.
But the point of this book is not to find yet another area in which girls
Introduction: Good Girls versus Real Girls 5
are victims of the culture. (In some cases it certainly is true, yet women,
who were once girls themselves, are key shapers of girl culture.) The larger
purpose is to expose all of these acts that are going on in secrecy so that
!girls and women can feel less guilty about their sexual desires as well as
their aggressive impulses, can learn to accept these as part of themselves
and still love and honor themselves for them. It is so that the goodness of
women and girls can be defined in terms of a more universal morality,
grounded in justice and caring, instead of in terms of their ability to sit still
in a classroom or restrain themselves from the human desires for revenge
or sexual pleasure.
You might think that feminism has done a lot already to change this
popular image of the good girl. But, in some ways, it's probably helped it
along a little bit. What popular feminism has taught us about girls over the
past twenty years (after the sixties, that is, when anger and rebellion were
celebrated) is that girlsare more caring and more vulnerable, more likely to
be victimized by the culture and more likely to nurture, more likely to suppress
their anger so that they don't hurt others and more likely to try to
please.While therealsohasbeen a traditionrewardinggirls' spunkiness and
resistance to imagesof purity,psychologistshave for the most part told parents
that these qualities in girls of caring and sensitivity are to be admired.
But they are also qualities that confirm a stereotype that works against
girlsfeeling powerful. Readers have come to know the rebellious lost teens
of RevivingOphelia as really and truly empathic, caring girls who have lost
their grounding connections with adults. Mary Pipher, who wrote Reviving
Ophelia, is so like the good nurturant mother who has come to pluck out
the treasured adolescent soul, preserve it, and cherish its goodness for all
time. Many will also remember the voices of caring, nurturing women
who were ignored by male psychologists who valued independence and
rational decision-making. Women psychologists gave these women's
voices a hearing. But are these pure and caring voices so different from the
good girl of yesterday?Whether or not these voices box girls in or recognize
a reality of girls' development, psychologists continue to re-create
them on the covers of best-selling psychology books to the exclusion of
other parts of girls and girls' development. The point is, we all would so
much rather look like the lovely lost souls found by Mary Pipher than the
bad girls we suspect we really are.
Not so long ago, girls and women were viewed as evil temptresses, seductive
witches, and manipulative matriarchs, but even when these images
flourished, there was always the opposite image of the pure and good
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6 Introduction: Good Girls versus Real Girls
girl, as in a fairy tale, set beside them for comparison. It's time to take a
look at the fantasies that we allkeep repressing-those fantasies of women
as insatiable, angry witches and bitches, oversexed, with monstrous appetites,
women who actually want power over another person, who want
to dominate, and women who find pleasure in sexual feelings and aggression
against another. And when we allow them into our lives, they may
not feel so exaggeratedlywrong.
Creating an "Other"
Little girls' attempts at being active, angry, and sexual are pushed away by
the culture and by themselves. They hide these from us or we don't see
them for what they are. And when they are aggressive or sexual, they
L'~therllthe experience-someone else made them do it or they see it as
something outside of themselves, a strange and weird occurrence. In fact,
in these pages you will hear the words "weird," "strange," and "not me"
used over and over to describe these experiences.
Another way of "othering" the experience is to project it onto women
and girls who really are considered others in our culture, for example,
African-American and Puerto Rican girls. Because when we conjure up
the image of the good girl who "minds" her parents, does well in school,
and doesn't dirty herself, we do not usually picture her Black or Latina. It's
easier for society to see aggressionand sexuality in, as well as project them
onto, these girls. It fits the stereotypes and allows white girls to feel superior
in comparison. While it is difficult for African-American and Latina
girls to project an image of the "good girl," given the culture's unwillingness
to see them that way, there still is a lot at stake for these girls if they
embrace sexualityor aggression.
In this book I include stories from Puerto Rican and AfricanAmerican
women as girls growing up in a culture in which they are othered.
The scope of the study did not allow me to collect enough stories
to explore other groups who are treated as others, such as other Latina
groups, Native Americans, or Asian Americans. Even as I tried to integrate
the Puerto Rican and African-American girls' and women's experience
into these chapters I was acutely aware of the intersection of class,
race, and ethnicity and how these complexities are difficult to do
justice to within one short book. O n the other hand, I also was aware
of how at times I may be treating "whiteness" as some monolithic term
without reference to the variations in class, ethnicity, and experience
within this group.
Yet while the realities of many white girls' lives do not conform to the
stereotype of the white middle-class girl, as the realities of the lives of
African-American or Puerto Rican girls do not conform to the culture's
stereotypes of them, there is still an image of a girl, a good girl, that is internalized
for all girls. This stereotypical ideal may indeed loom larger in
the lives of white girls than in those girls whose lives become other to the
stereotype. Girls growingup in situations that make such a stereotype seem
less attainable will in some way be freed from the stereotype, but they will
be hurt in other ways. This othering brings about harmful counterimages
of sexual and aggressivegirls that they accept or resist to their detriment.
The general kind of othering (the other girl started it) that is so much
a part of how middle-classgirls explain sexualityand aggression is done out
of guilt and shame. But in the following pages we will take apart this guilt.
Some of it is appropriate, and we would wish that all people might feel the
sense of guilt and remorse that many girls feel when they've hurt another
by acting out aggressively. Even so, because these acts are forbidden, they
carry with them an unrealisticburden of guiltfor girls. And they try to hide
the fact that these are human impulseswe all share-the taste for revenge,
the sexual urges of the body, the desire to dominate another.
Girl Power
Finally, someone reading this book is bound to ask, What about "girl
power"?Aren't girls today more powerful than ever thanks to those early
feminists who fought for the empowerment of women and girls?Don't girls
today have better self-esteem?Can't they do everything boys do?In sports,
for example?And even sexually, aren't they worlds apart from the whiteglovedMommy'shelper
of the fifties?Many have commented on how high
school girls today seem unashamedly raunchy in their discussions of sex
and bodies.
Teenage girls today engage in sex earlier and speak more freely about
their sexual exploits. These acts frequently do not derive from a love of
their bodies or an urge to express and understand themselves sexually, but
from a desire to garner male attention and define themselves as desirable,
even if "wild," in the eyes of boys. They don't divorce themselves from the
image of the "good girl" but evaluate their behavior against the backdrop
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8
-?*,
Introduction: Good Girls versus Real Girls
of this image,which makes them feelsomewhat ashamed. If recent reports
on teen sexuality are accurate, sexuallyactive teens frequently regret their
early sex, wishing they could do their teen years over again. The raucous,
in-your-faceteen sexuality of today is not a sexualitythat leaves them feeling
powerful.
But what about "girl power," the media slogan that focuses on the preteen
as well as the teen?Even the new movement about girl power plays
into this image of goodness and sets up unrealistic images. For white
middle-class girls, the image of "supergirl" is evoked by shouts of "Girls
rule!" This is the girl who can achieve well in school and pursue a career
when she grows up. Girls knew, even before these slogans appeared, that
they did better than boys in school and were well loved by teachers for
their achievements. But ValerieWalkerdine, a British sociologistandfeminist,
points out that the image of the supergirl that "Girls rule" and "girl
power" suggestsets up an opposing image of the girl of color or froma lowincome
familywho is the other and not given the opportunities to achieve
superwoman status. And it ignoresthe privilege that helps only certaingirls
become supergirlsand makes them sufferwhen they come close to achieving
this status, working as hard as they do for some perfection or recognition
that is often unattainable.
Girls love these slogans,though: Girls rule! Girl power! And why?Because
so many girls seem to love power and love to win. And girls have
been deprived of that exuberance for a long time. Boys in our culture have
greater freedom to engage in transgressive activities and call them their
own. They are free to explore, rage, experiment-free to be ravenous, sexual,
and outrageous. Their secrets are of a different kind and deserve their
own treatment elsewhere.
When boys act "bad," a different kind of distancing from their acts occurs,perpetuated
by the boys themselves, their parents, educators,and the
media. Rather than othering (projecting their badness onto others),boys
are excused quitd publicly for the sexual and aggressive acts they commit.
Unless the boys take guns to their high schools or rape another student,
adults in the United Stateswill tend to see their aggressiveor sexualacts as
typical, and in some cases, biological-a part of who they "really" are.
When we hear of a sexual game or an aggressive act of a boy we say that all
boys are like this; we say "boys will be boys."
Who Are the "RealGirls"?
It would be tempting to tell you that the stories ahead showwhat "real girls"
do,just as William Pollack asserts about "real boys" in his book of the same
name. Any such truism would mislead just as much as the prevailing
stereotypes of girl and boy behavior do. Biologicalurges get shaped by the
social expectations of specificcultures and specific times. The "sexual girl"
is no more real than the pure and innocent girl, for both potentials are in
us and our children. Still, recognizing the potential for sexuality and
aggression in our girls affords them a little more privilege in this world,
helps them to lead more fulfilling lives in our current culture, protects
them from self-destructive acts, and encourages them to be "good" in truly
moral (seeking peace, justice, and care) rather than in merely conventional
ways.
If parents want their daughters to be full and moral people, aware of all
aspects of their humanity, good and bad, they need to accept certain impulses
in girls that up until now they may not have wanted to see. Girls,
like boys, are deeply sexual, deeply aggressive creatures. And these impulses
exist alongside their sweetness,competence, and ability to love and
care for others. Real girls are morally complex, interesting, and interested
creatures, and while the culture may do its best to simplifyand codify their
"girlness,"box them in so to speak, they do their best to resist, rebel, redefine,
and explore this girlness through the secret games they play and the
secrets they keep.
Určeno pouze pro studijní účely