When I was 11 years old, I decided it was time to smell better. I, of course, cleared this with my mother, who, the year before, responded with cheerful, unmistakable horror after I casually mentioned that I’d just shaved my legs for the first time. But I was much older now, and it was summer, and anyway, Alice Mazer and Cassie Fleming had both gotten their periods already and I hadn’t yet, so maybe by using “Spring Fresh” chemicals to trick my body into thinking it was older, maybe I’d finally become older, too.
In my memories, childhood summers are always blue-skied, smell like hot dogs and paint, and someone somewhere is using a power tool. So I honestly couldn’t tell you whether that morning was actually as nice as I remember it. It could have been hailing. But still, as I remember it, one powerfully blue morning, I hopped on my totally rad yellow, green, and purple Trek mountain bike and pedaled the mile to the CVS. I locked it up, leaned it against a cement pillar, and passed through the automatic doors into the Temple of Adventure.
CVS was the most exciting store to visit when I was a kid. There are three reasons for this. First, everything was reachable. Unlike other stores where the top shelf is approximately 70 feet off the ground and meant for enormous adults, in CVS, everything, from the bright green hand sanitizer to the lint rollers to the Tostitos salsa was within a kid’s grasp. At last: a store that encouraged children to squander their money alongside their parents. Second, almost everything was affordable — either with the allowance you’d made that week (what’s up, “90210” lip gloss) or the allowance you’d been saving for a few weeks in a row (what’s up, Aspen cologne). And third, every product sold pulsated with the promise of being somehow utterly life-changing while also being safe enough that your life wouldn’t change too much. Don’t like your hair? Color it! Want your bathroom to smell like you live in France? Have a Yankee Candle! Smell too much like a human being? Allow us to introduce you to Aisle Seven. Take your time. Really think it through.
And I did. Oh, I did. I spent so long in there that my mom almost asked my dad to go looking for me. There were simply too many choices and this was, to me, my Big First Decision. First of all, what texture or substance did I want? Solid? Gel? Some witchcraft called gel-solid? And what did I want to smell like? Spring Rain? Blooming Meadow? Summer Fresh, which is entirely counter-intuitive? In the 45-minute-long end, I chose a purple bottle of Teen Spirit gel, the scent of which I can’t remember the name of but its fragrance is still buried in my nose: sweet and spikey, in a neon green, Miami Vice kind of way. It smelled like what I imagined successful, competent women smelled like. So I, newly successful and competent, with a stick of Teen Spirit in her Dad’s old green backpack, unlocked my totally rad yellow, green, and purple Trek and pedaled home. I had successfully conquered my first test of womanhood.
The Karo tribe of Ethiopia does not consider a male to be a man unless he has leapt, naked, over a bull. Boys in Vanuatu become men by jumping off of a wooden tower with a vine tied around their ankle. In Ancient Sparta, only after participating in the krypteia ritual, during which he had to kill as many slaves as possible without being caught, would a boy become a man. There are no such tests for American girls to enter womanhood. Womanhood isn’t at the end of a cause-and-effect relationship, it doesn’t happen when you’re ready, and it’s not the reward for a feat of derring-do. It’s lying in wait from the moment your chromosomes snap into the same letter, and it just shows up one day without asking. Because the girl-to-woman path is a lot more, shall we say, apparent, girls are encouraged — from a nauseatingly early age — to keep things under control, plucked, tweezed, leak-proof, glossy, supported, and, of course, Spring Fresh. (A Buzzfeed article from 2013 lists “The 23 Most Mortifying Milestones On Your Way To Womanhood.”) This begins with gender identification — and not you identifying yourself, but rather, being identified by others.
Let’s discuss.
For about fifteen minutes of my first day at my first camp, I was a boy. After getting dropped off by parents and funneled into a playground, we campers encountered a man and a woman with clipboards and whistles and polo shirts standing, legs akimbo, about 20 feet apart from each other. One of them yelled for us to split into two groups; I can’t remember whether it was actually verbalized that we were supposed to split into gender-distinct groups or what, but that’s what everyone did. Except me. I sat with the boys. I kind of knew I was a girl, but I also really didn’t see what that had to do with anything. And anyway, the boys all looked more like me — they had short hair, I had short hair. They wore high-top sneakers and neon t-shirts, I wore high-top sneakers and neon t-shirts. So I sat with them. The man with the clipboard and whistle and polo shirt started calling off names. It was a pretty long list of names. I waited. My name was not called. I raised my hand. “What’s your name,” asked the man with the clipboard and the whistle and the polo shirt. I told him my name. “Are you a girl?” “Yes.” “Well, you aren’t supposed to be here, are you?” I looked around, and blankly looked back at Clipboard Man. “Go and sit with the girls. …Over there.” So I, now even more nonplussed, got up, brushed the mulch off my shorts, walked the 20 feet to the girls’ group, and sat back down. They were clearly more advanced than I was because they knew enough to laugh at me. They had already started their training.
This is a ritual that, over the ensuing 27 years of my life, has repeated itself thousands of times, and laid the cornerstone of my awareness of being in a separate category. I learned I was Other, Not Male, before I learned I was Female. And then I learned that this distinction was important because I was, at some point, going to go through “changes,” “beautiful transformations,” and become “interested” in boys. I needed to get ready so I could transition without incident, without complaint, and, critically, without deviating. It was my job to make it easier for the people around me to keep me cleanly categorized. And while I absorbed the language of Otherness, I also absorbed the language of work. Change always involves work, and accessories, and inconvenience — and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. This was…just…so…stupid.
So I shaved my legs at 10, because I figured, “Welp, I better get this show on the road at some point,” and I bought my first deodorant/antiperspirant at 11 because, even though pre-pubescent me didn’t smell any different no matter how much softball I played, I wanted to make sure I was ready with my brand of choice when the time came. I created my own rituals of womanhood. I was ready for some great quiz I already sensed I’d have to take.
But I still rode my totally rad Trek — which was, I hasten to mention, a boy’s bike, and God bless my parents for not making a single comment. And sometimes I would spritz the Aspen cologne I got at CVS in my room because it smelled nice, having no idea that that was fragrance made for a man. No, this isn’t some ramp-up to a story of my emerging gender dysphoria; I’m still a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman married to a white, cisgender, heterosexual man. But the older I become the more often I think back on these choices because I lament ever having to start making them— choices based on who I believed I had to become rather what kind of bike pattern I liked. For one thing, I wish I had never, ever started shaving; and I finally understand why my mother was so upset.
This tension between authentic content and external expectation gets excruciating in high school — but that’s because everything is excruciating in high school. I must have listened to Sarah McLachlin’s “Angel” 75 times in my bedroom, sobbing about, oh, God, pick anything. Alex Miller and I went out on a date and he bought a hat on the date and then kissed me and then never called me again so I’m obviously loathsome and will die alone. (Aside: I found his hat on campus months later. I put it in his locker. With a note. WHY. WHY. I have never forgiven myself for that. Why add a note? Why gild the lily? He would have known it was me — who the hell else was with us on the date, Colin Powell? The Bass-o-Matic? I should have played it cool and left it in there alone. But no. I wrote a note, that said something as asinine as, “Found your hat. Was it too hot for your head?” GIRL. OH MY GOD.) But high school is a smoothly paved breezeway compared to the moonlit, over-iced alpine pass of adulthood, down which you hurtle at high speed while trying to stay on the median between who you’re supposed to be and who you actually are. Performing my gender appropriately has gotten so much easier with practice, but the stakes are a lot higher these days. It seems there are landmines everywhere. Wear a pantsuit to a work meeting and I’m either butch or badass. Wear a dress or a skirt suit and I’m either angling for ogles or bravely embracing my femininity. Lipstick is either nothing, or, as Ani DiFranco wrote, “is a sign of my declining mind.”
And the thing about all of this that kills me is that this daily performance, our daily performances, are the result of decades upon decades of learned behavior. It’s no wonder my generation is in therapy all the time — who are we? And why? And how did we become this way? And, most important of all, do we like it or do we not?
In a time when consent is still somehow confusing but we have started to have the conversation, when a female president is fine but a “shrill” one isn’t, when men are just finally free of the Budweiser-steeped “I love you, man” trap but are still referred to as Bernie Bros, and when transgender men and women are able to serve openly in our armed forces but not yet pee in the bathroom of their choice, I wonder — are we finally on the cusp of divesting ourselves of the gender wardrobe we have been hauling around with us everywhere we go? Will my daughter be able to spend her mental energy defining what girlhood means for her without worrying how that will conflict with, and ultimately lose to, what society dictates? And is there a hammer somewhere around here so I can start the great and beautiful demolition?
