Sugar and Spice

I like Sady's post about how girls are expected to be sweet and innocent, and while there's nothing wrong with being a "sweet" girl (she offers compassionate as an alternative), those words deny girls their power. However, this is one of things that annoys me most about contemporary feminism when the talk invariably turns to girlhood and femininity:

"The image of girlhood that we’re taught and sold is pink, it’s happy, and it’s nonthreatening. It involves canopy beds and no discernible desires excepting the endless one to please and appease others (especially men), and perhaps occasionally to roll around in a field of flowers, giggling. Now: If someone were to offer me a pink canopy bed I would take it, no questions asked. But actual girlhood (as any girl knows) isn’t really like that. There are sharp angles, corners, and shadows, and to erase those from the picture creates an unrealistic ideal that no real person can ever live up to—plus, it leaves a lot of the interesting stuff out."

This image of girlhood is heavily, heavily classed. There's a quote from one of Lynda Barry's books I keep going back to, something like, "there were a lot of girls in my neighborhood, but no 'girlish girls." There were few girly-girls in my neighborhood, too, and I don't think it can easily be chalked up to internalized misogyny. Those things -- the canopy beds, the princess clothes -- weren't even a consideration for me. And, I suspect, they weren't for a lot of other girls, too.