Originally published in: QUIRK-E Collections – 2010
A line being regularly delivered by male comedians in jest is “don’t be such a girl,” or the variant, “he screamed like a little girl.” Man up. Shrill, demonstrative, emotional response to the fright, pain, abandonment, and other negative experiences must be born with a stiff upper lip, wailing and flaying aside, most people don’t die from hissy fits, and, in the long haul of statistics, females live longer.
It is a desperate planet for some. Many girls still learn to navigate the world in minis and high heels, to daintily dab their mouths with their napkins while carefully camouflaging healthy appetites and love of visceral experience. The young female is allowed loyalty to a pack or to an ideal, but not so much what she owes herself. The winds of the imperfect world buffet young women with the stuff headlines are made of. All the competing challenges of society at large are tediously interspersed with her personal life‘s mundane drain of reality. She watches the years roll by.
Of course, there are the exceptional, with their adventurous forays and inspired accomplishments. Stepping out of line can be a personal and social journey to hell and back on a Dante‘s quest. A silly, shrill little girl approaches the netherworld outside of convention to become flotsam in a gradual downward spiral through successive layers of historic, religious, and legal insults or assaults. Knowledge tears the facade off the perceived equal rights of the social order. Plumbing the depths, she emerges only on the wings of hope that there is a place for her in society. She emerges from her societal or personal gauntlet of being “the weaker sex” changed, but never fully purged or healed.
In maturity, most decide it is best to concern themselves with life behind the scenes and concrete things. Victory is measured in the degree of control over their person and estate. Everyone faces becoming sexually and reproductively redundant. The little girl, morphed into old woman, can have some of her hardest battles yet to fight. Perhaps she is a single empty-nester who now sees how loneliness and physical challenges seep into pores, etching into lines and melding with the soul until it is who she is, regardless of who she is with, regardless of what she needs to do. However, on her better days she finds she still has the will and the strength to scream like a girl and work out the mysteries of existence with her screechy pen.
