Let me start by saying, girls are goddamn awesome.
We are warriors who have to put up with a lot in the world. Some of us more than others. A lot of us, but not all of us, can create life. How cool is that? We have many different stories, ideas, experiences, identities and struggles. I am here to explain why girls supporting girls is so extremely important and, overall, quite magical.
The road to my feminist identity has been a long and necessary one full of discovering and working to destroy the internalized misogyny that I had hosted. This road came with many trips and stumbles. Perhaps one of the most difficult but freeing changes of thinking I had to trudge through is the shift in seeing that other girls are not my competition, but instead are my teammates in this crazy thing called life.
I grew up in a society that was constantly egging girls and women to tear each other down. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her TED Talk, "We Should All Be Feminists", (side note, if you have not watched her speech, do so right now), "We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men." Society and media are constantly pitting women against each other to battle it out, usually for a man's approval. Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" music video is a great example of this. With lyrics like, "She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts. She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers," the video suggests that one girl deserves the attention of the boy while the other one does not because she is not following certain "guidelines" in being a proper female. This is extremely problematic and heteronormative. There is not a wrong or right way to be a girl. There is no definition of what a real girl or woman should be.
All through elementary and middle school, I was envious of this one girl, since she received a lot of attention from the cute boys in my class. In my own mind, I would validate my own worth by weighing myself against her in ways in which I came on top. She might have gotten more gushy love notes from boys than I did, but I had the better grade on the last vocabulary test or the nicer clothes on a certain day.
As I grew older, I realized she was never my competitor, for boys' attention or for the best grade, but instead just a classmate that I was not in a silent and secretive race with. I often catch myself wondering if maybe a friendship could have formed if I hadn't been keeping points between us. Letting go of that urge to be the "best" girl in the room was immensely freeing. It also allowed me to learn how important supporting other girls was. Which some might be asking, what does girls supporting girls even mean?
Supporting each other means encouraging our passions and desires, reminding each other to never settle in a world that always wants us to, speaking up in times when another girl needs help, giving a voice to girls that are often quieted, listening to each other's stories and the simple things as well, like complimenting each other's smile or cute shoes. Girls supporting girls is like saying, "Hey, I'm here right behind you if you need me. I got you and you got me." It's solidarity.
Sometimes I struggle with slipping into old habits. I'll catch myself going in defense mode if I'm intimidated by a fellow girl, thinking I have to prove that I am as good or even better than her. Something I always remind myself of is, someone's success is not the absence of your own. As Danielle Prager says in her Huffington Post article, "We can choose to take the easy route and fall into old patterns of behavior, or we can challenge ourselves to rise up and to set an example of what being a strong and supportive woman really looks like."
In a world that is constantly pushing us to tear each other down, why not rebel against this gross initiative and love and support each other? Because girls are goddamn awesome.
