When I was 10 years old, my favorite babysitter and I would paint our nails together. She liked lilac purple, I liked hot red. We would sit on my bed together and paint our nails as I told her about my day. But as she painted the clear top coat on her nails, ensuring that the polish would stay in place for days to come, I would break out the nail polish remover and wipe my nails clean. She’d shake her head. “What’s the point of painting your nails if you’re not going to wear the nail polish?,” she’d say.
I’d shrug. I liked painting my nails with her. I didn’t like other people knowing I liked girly things like nail polish.
I, like many other young girls (and boys), was ridden with internalized misogyny. It was better to be a boy than it was to be a girl. No one said these words aloud; no one even knew that they held this opinion. But almost everyone did.
This ideal wasn’t dealt to us directly -- no one in our lives had explicitly told us that the male sex was superior. We adopted it indirectly, through television and advertisements and the subtleties of American culture.
If I’d had it my way, no one would even know I was a girl. I never wore pink (“I don’t even like pink!”), I wore a boy’s swimsuit, I had short hair. I fought for the boys’ team in sex-versus snowball fights. I didn’t do girly things like wear nail polish. I thought that the girls who did were silly. Like the boys, and many other girls, I decided that the girls who were interested in makeup and shoes and glitter were vapid and shallow -- otherwise something I did not want to be. I was ashamed of everything about me that could be labeled “girly.”
One time while painting my nails with my babysitter, I decided to throw caution to the wind. Who cared if I was girly? I was a girl, for Pete’s sake. It would not stop traffic if I wore nail polish to school for one day. I had done my nails especially well that afternoon and my babysitter was right. What’s the point if you don’t wear it for the world to see? I wore the flaming red nail polish to school and regretted it instantly.
“I thought you, of all people, weren’t interested in things like nails,” is what almost every one of my classmates sneered at me, especially the boys. I tried to make excuses -- my fingernails were dirty, I was asleep when my cousin did them to me. Me, of all people, wear nail polish? On purpose?
I stopped painting my nails with my babysitter.
Embracing femininity took a very long time for me. I wanted to be girly for years, but (I thought) no one liked girly girls. It wasn’t until high school that I started wearing makeup and dresses and stopped wanting to be a boy just because I thought it would please other people.
If I could go back to my ten year old self, I would want to tell her: being girly is fun, and it doesn’t make you stupid or air-headed. The way you dress and act doesn’t determine how smart you are. People will like you even if you wear red nail polish.
