“We are constantly being told not to be angry. As a black woman especially, I hear it from all corners. To be angry is to give in to stereotypes of the shrill feminist, the mad black woman. To be angry is to trade intellect for emotion. To be angry is to be irrational and violent. To be angry is to be like them. To be angry is to lose. But none of that is true. I am angry because I love. I am angry because what I love is being harmed. I know why my people matter, why the environment matters, why human rights matter, why justice matters. And I know that this all deserves love. I know that it deserves protection. And I know who is fighting to deny it what it deserves. I know that when that which we love is being harmed — to not be angry would be unconscionable. […]
What if we took that anger beyond the internet? What if we took it into the streets more than once every two years? Into our boycotts? Into our strikes? Into the voting booth? What if we took that anger to our city council meetings? What if we took it to their campaign events and press conferences? What if we took it to our school boards and our workplaces? What if we took all this anger born of righteous love and aimed it?”
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In a radio interview on September 18, Iowa senator Chuck Grassley said of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings: “You understand we’re talking about thirty-five years ago. I’d hate to ask, have somebody ask me what I did thirty-five years ago. And I think I look at it this way.”
As many commentators have pointed out, disturbed, Senator Grassley was a senator thirty-five years ago in 1983. He had entered the chamber two years before, elected by Iowa farmers like my father, who hoped Grassley would represent them as agriculture prices plummeted. Thirty-five years ago, Senator Grassley was fifty years old, an elected official who had served the public since he entered the Iowa House of Representatives in 1959. It is absolutely our right to know what he was doing thirty-five years ago.
But what about Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee? Do we have the right to know—or even to ask—what he was doing thirty-five years ago? Thirty-five years ago, Brett Kavanaugh was seventeen, attending the exclusive and expensive Georgetown Preparatory School, an all-boys Catholic school. He was captain of the basketball team, he was cornerback for the football team, and he might have sexually assaulted a classmate, Christine Blasey Ford, while his friend Mark Judge watched.
Thirty-five years ago, Brett Kavanaugh was seventeen, attending the exclusive and expensive Georgetown Preparatory School, an all-boys Catholic school. He was captain of the basketball team, he was cornerback for the football team, and he might have sexually assaulted a classmate, Christine Blasey Ford, while his friend Mark Judge watched.
In hours of testimony from both Ford and Kavanaugh on September 27, senators in the judiciary committee attempted to determine what exactly happened in those moments when Kavanaugh was seventeen. Who was lying? Whose memory was flawed? And the shadow lurking behind the questions, echoed in that radio interview with Grassley: did anything someone did thirty-five years ago even matter?
Or, to phrase the question more baldly: if a man commits violence at the age of seventeen, should it harm his chances of meting out justice in the highest court in the land at the age of fifty-two?
Every day of the week, I spend hours in a classroom with seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Every day of the week, I pose questions to them, I listen to their observations and arguments, I read their written ideas. They are not children, though they clap their hands when I occasionally bring them treats, and they cheer on the rare day I give them a break from homework. They would surprise most of the men and women in the Senate Judiciary Committee with their adultness, with their sense of right and wrong. They are fully formed people at seventeen and eighteen: their emotions are complex, their awareness of the world deepening, their ability to express themselves strengthening.
They are fully formed people at seventeen and eighteen: their emotions are complex, their awareness of the world deepening, their ability to express themselves strengthening.
A seventeen-year-old who forces a girl onto a bed and thrusts himself upon her, laughing, does so recognizing the violence. Maybe the next morning, he will regret it, maybe he will hate himself, maybe he will even apologize, but he is as responsible for it at seventeen as he will be at fifty-two. What it reveals about his nature is the same at either age.
However, what that seventeen-year-old does not have is a fully developed frontal lobe. That last part of the brain to develop—which does not finish developing until a person is twenty-five—is the part that governs judgment, emotional expression, and sexual behavior. It’s the part that stems our impulses. In a classroom of high school seniors, this means a boy will sometimes lob a ball of paper across the room, or a girl will blurt out an insult to someone else, or someone will throw a punch. Later, in response to that adult question “Why?” the answer is often, “I have no idea.” It’s true. Their filters aren’t fully operational yet. Give them eight more years.
Like most other seventeen-year-olds, then, seventeen-year-old Brett Kavanaugh had not yet developed an ability to control his impulses: his drinking, his anger, his sexual hunger. The future judge lacked judgment.
But maybe the person who exists before the filter is fully formed reveals exactly what we need to know. There is a purity in my seventeen- and eighteen-year-old students. They shimmer with the raw truth of who they are. A girl who will, in ten years, discover how to smile a certain way and dress with power and walk with assertiveness, now hides between the dark curtain of her hair and talks only to a few trusted classmates. A boy who will, in ten years, learn to defer to colleagues in meetings and to allude to pop culture at office parties, now unapologetically divulges his expansive vocabulary and poses complex philosophical questions in discussion. They straddle a divide, these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, between the children they were and the adults they are not yet. They will learn to adjust, to adapt, to control—to judge. But not yet.
But maybe the person who exists before the filter is fully formed reveals exactly what we need to know.
This makes some of them terrifying. A boy who barges forward with his impulse to hurt a girl reveals a true self. Yes, he will learn to control those impulses later. But there is still the truth revealed.
Lately, my colleagues and I have had many conversations that begin, If I was held accountable for what I did at seventeen… We murmur about illicit drug use, lies we told our parents, pranks we played, risks we took. Sarah at seventeen, her own frontal lobe underdeveloped, stayed out too late, drove too fast on dark Iowa country roads, and trusted a boy too much. But. Sarah at seventeen—the core truth of her—was also a glimpse of me now, at forty-one. At seventeen, as now, I was often uncertain and awkward around other people; alone, I was self-assured and strong. At seventeen, as now, my strength and my flaw was my passion for everything to mean something, my sense that I was responsible for it all.
And Brett Kavanaugh at seventeen? Accounts emerge that point to an aggressive drinker, a fraternizer who joked freely about sexual exploits, a boy driven to succeed academically who cared little for gentleness.
The question before the FBI is what, exactly, he did at seventeen. But at the Supreme Court hearings on September 27, Kavanaugh revealed that, regardless of crimes he may have committed then, who he was at seventeen was a glimpse of who he is now, at fifty-two. At fifty-two, he is belligerent, rude to those who question him, simmering with an anger barely controlled.
But at the Supreme Court hearings on September 27, Kavanaugh revealed that, regardless of crimes he may have committed then, who he was at seventeen was a glimpse of who he is now, at fifty-two. At fifty-two, he is belligerent, rude to those who question him, simmering with an anger barely controlled.
Senator Grassley hints that actions committed thirty-five years ago matter little to him when he considers a person’s qualifications now. Then let him see the man before him, who, at fifty-two, in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, looked far less like a Supreme Court judge and far more like a wounded and offended teenage boy. Regardless of what the FBI investigation discovers about him at seventeen, Brett Kavanaugh at fifty-two has revealed himself as utterly unfit to act as a balanced, impartial justice for this grown-up nation.
"Piecing Me Together" Is a Gorgeous Collage of Self-Discovery
As a Black non-binary queer person, my life and my identity are made up of a variety of experiences and influences.
While I’m more aware of who I am now, there was a time when I just wasn’t sure about it. In Renée Watson’s beautifully written book Piecing Me Together, the main character Jade creates a collage out of her experiences to figure out who she wants to be.
In order for Jade to figure out who she is, she has to wade through experiences and perceptions that allow others to define her.
In order for Jade to figure out who she is, she has to wade through experiences and perceptions that allow others to define her. The main focus of the book is Jade’s experiences with the mentor program Woman to Woman and her Black upper-class mentor Maxine. Jade feels that Maxine is treating her like someone who needs to be fixed. Since Jade is a thick-bodied, dark-skinned, Black girl from a working-class family, she is considered to be an “at-risk” teen in danger of becoming a statistic.
While Jade spends time with Maxine and Woman to Woman, she also encounters other significant experiences in her personal and student life. At her elite high school St. Francis, she befriends a white female student named Sam and learns how their racial backgrounds cause them to be seen differently. Walking alone on the street, men harass her because of her body and their sense of entitlement. When an incident of police brutality occurs in a nearby neighborhood, Jade feels compelled to take action even though she feels helpless.
These experiences make Jade feel that she is constantly coming apart because of how other people see her. She sums it up best with the following lines:
Listening to these mentors, I feel like I can prove the negative stereotypes about girls like me wrong. But when I leave? It happens again. The shattering. And this makes me wonder if a Black girl’s life is being stitched together & coming undone.
These lines made me really connect to Jade as a character because of similar feelings I had as a teenager. Like Jade, I felt like my identity was constantly under attack by expectations and preconceived notions of what a Black person is like. The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable so I learned to hate myself. Unlike Jade, I didn’t have the self-worth and knowledge to define myself on my own terms until my twenties.
Another thought about Jade defining herself on her own terms is expressed when she says,
Sometimes I just want to be comfortable in this skin, this body. Want to cock my head back and laugh loud and free, all my teeth showing, and not be told I’m too rowdy, too ghetto…. Sometimes I just want to let my tongue speak the way it pleases, let it be untamed and not bound by rules.
While I have never been called too rowdy or ghetto by others, these lines made me think of the ideals of respectability that I unconsciously learned from various media and my own parents. I was expected to go to college, get the right degree, and not be too influenced by “bad” Black kids who got pregnant in high school or dropped out. At one point, I was also told not to watch too much BET and not speak too much slang when I wasn’t around my peers.
The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable.
Out of all the ideals of respectability and success, the idea that a Black person needs to escape their “bad” living areas in order to be successful is one of the most pervasive. It is this idea that Jade combats in the book, even as she yearns to travel the world and speak Spanish. Since Jade sees the beauty in her friends, family, and her neighborhood of North Portland, she uses those influences to define herself in a positive way and make her collage art.
Not only does Jade undergo self-discovery with her present day life, but she also uses historical influences from the past. One day, she learns about York, a Black slave who went on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She is drawn to his story because he was having his identity and personal story defined for him. Jade also learns about Black collagists like Romare Bearden and Mickalene Thomas later in the book. Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Through lived experience, art, and learned history, Jade literally puts together the pieces of who she feels she wants to be. As an artist, daughter, student, and more, Jade refuses to let others define who she is as a Black girl. Jade is a collage worth seeing in all its pieces and glory, and that makes her story powerful.
The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.
Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.
When I was my students’ age — seventeen, eighteen — I didn’t know what a strike was.
I had never witnessed one. In U.S. History, a teacher must have mentioned one of the famous ones — the labor strikes of the 1800s, maybe, or the post-WWII auto strikes. But to me at seventeen, a strike sounded simple: the workers refused to work, the owners tried to hold out, the workers kept refusing to work, the owners tried extreme measures (police, water, threats, firings, replacements), and usually, the workers won. The end. I was a farmer’s daughter when I learned about strikes for the first time, the daughter of a man who daily labored for himself and for his land, and who could not refuse to work a single day, because the hogs would suffer, the corn plants would wither. It seemed a kind of privilege to refuse to work.
On the Friday before the Denver teachers finally went on strike on February 11, I stood before a class of high school seniors and tried to explain to them why I would not be standing there on Monday if the district could not reach an agreement with the union. The students listened quietly, a little warily. The Denver Public School PR machine was regularly cranking out emails to the community insisting the teachers were refusing “millions” on the table and demanding more. The real story — that Denver teachers wanted a traditional salary schedule with dependable annual base pay, limited incentives, and respect for what we already do as professionals — was a more nuanced and thus more-difficult-to-craft soundbite.
I told the students I wanted them to apply to the events of the strike all the college-level research skills we’ve been learning: stay curious, formulate your own deep questions, evaluate each source for credibility and originality, question everything again, compare what you’re finding so you can discern the truth. Still, they watched me from the corners of their eyes.
“You’ll remember this,” I said finally, “far more than you’ll remember any college research skill I could teach you.” This made them laugh, and the room relaxed. Because of course they would. All their teachers were marching out of the building and refusing pay, starting Monday. They’d be in these classrooms with district-paid substitutes, staring out the tall historic windows at us on the picket line. I told them I’d wave, which made them laugh again.
“You’ll remember this,” I said finally, “far more than you’ll remember any college research skill I could teach you.”
It is a privilege to refuse to work. My family had enough in savings that I could afford the pay cut for a few days, but what I meant was more profound: I work as part of a collective group. I am no single farmer cultivating fields alone. I show up every day to teach in a classroom that is next door to ninety other classrooms, and our school is united with 161 other schools in the district. I’m not alone. When working conditions are unacceptable, it’s our great right to link arms together and demand more. Alone, it would be impossible. That’s what I didn’t understand at seventeen — what my students, each engaged in his/her individual battle for college and future, do not understand.
When working conditions are unacceptable, it’s our great right to link arms together and demand more. Alone, it would be impossible.
It’s what the Denver Public School District did not seem to understand, either. It’s what any group of powerful bosses does not understand. They tell us what to do, what to accept, what to swallow, until one day, we rise up as a group and shout “No!” and the bosses realize they never actually had power, that their power all along was dependent on our acquiescence.
On the Tuesday of the strike — day two — hundreds of teachers dressed in red marched down Denver’s Colfax Avenue to Civic Center Park, where we gathered with more hundreds, our signs aloft. The signs said it all. “You can’t put students first if you put teachers last.” “I choose to change the things I can no longer accept.” “More education, less administration.” “Pay us a living wage.” The one I carried asked, “What is the value of your child’s education?” On the other side, I alluded to the 1912 Massachusetts textile workers’ strike: “Teachers deserve both bread and roses.”
They tell us what to do, what to accept, what to swallow, until one day, we rise up as a group and shout “No!” and the bosses realize they never actually had power, that their power all along was dependent on our acquiescence.
On all sides of us, members of other unions marched, too: firefighters, steelworkers, truck drivers, plumbers. My colleague Nick, from Michigan, often insists that ours is a blue-collar job, which seems strange, since we all have college degrees and many of us have master’s degrees and PhDs, but in these days of marching miles and miles through the city, chanting for fair pay and respectful working conditions, I understood how right he is. The teachers who marched on either side of me just wanted the chance to buy a house in this city; they wanted to have some money to save for their children’s college educations; they wanted to emerge from three decades of teaching other people’s children and find some kind of rest. They are also the most hard-working people I know. They are people who stay late to tutor students, who step out into the hallway to comfort students, who wake early to give students meaningful feedback on papers, who spend all weekend planning lessons that will light learning in students’ minds.
Without teachers in the schools in Denver, the city was eerily silent. True, the schools are open, but most students stayed home, waiting for us to return. Some marched with us. One student’s sign read: “I march because our teachers love us.”
I didn’t know how difficult it would be to strike. It was far harder than teaching all day. Every day, I woke early and put on my long underwear and then my jeans and my three sweatshirts, stocking cap, two pairs of gloves. On the picket lines each day in the cold, we walked nine, ten miles. My hips and lower back ached. And yet: every day it became clearer that if we did not strike, the bosses would continue to do as they please. This was our reminder of who was in power.
Every day it became clearer that if we did not strike, the bosses would continue to do as they please. This was our reminder of who was in power.
In the end, the Denver strike was the shortest in the city’s history: only three days. The district awarded us the salary schedule, and raised everyone’s salaries to meet surrounding school districts’ levels. By Thursday, we stood in our classrooms again, exhausted and exhilarated. By the middle of Thursday, it seemed we had never left; we were badgering students about turning in assignments on time; we were trying to motivate a whole class to care about our content areas; we were again fighting the relatively smaller battles between teachers and administrators. But there was this difference: starting in August, the pay we receive for this hard work will actually allow us to put down payments on houses in Denver, save for our kids’ college years, and maybe travel a little. In Denver, teachers will have enough to buy both bread and roses.
A few naysayers visited us on the picket line. One man squealed the brakes on his shiny silver BMW and jumped out, shaking a fist and shouting, “Get back to work! Get back to work!” I’m sure he believed his tax dollars fund our salaries and that we shouldn’t complain. I’m also sure that, if he had chosen to make a living as a teacher, he would have likely been out there marching with us, too.
Most of us keep slogging on, because of the shining moments when a student gets it, and cares, because it is actually wonderful to plan educational experiences for teenagers each day — far better than working in an office would be.
The Friday before the strike, a student in one of my colleague’s classes rolled his eyes at her and said, “I don’t know why you’re so upset about the pay. You chose this job.”
True. And most of us teachers, at some point, frustrated by student apathy or by parents’ vitriol or by administrators’ hoops or by the long hours of grading papers and planning lessons, have said we wish we could quit. It’s a small salve sometimes in this hard job we chose. But it’s also true that most of us don’t quit. Most of us keep slogging on, because of the shining moments when a student gets it, and cares, because it is actually wonderful to plan educational experiences for teenagers each day — far better than working in an office would be.
Now, in Denver — and in Los Angeles, and in West Virginia, and hopefully soon in Oakland — we’re paid fairly for that work, too, because we chose to walk the picket lines for a few days. It’s connected us. When the bell rings to start each class, we wave at each other down the long high school hallways, and then step into our classrooms, to begin.
I stopped being a writer; today I have the words to tell you why.
I don’t write because I’m being watched. I turn off the words; I numb the feelings; I avoid the associations; I distract the thinking; I step away from the situation. I am here to document the ways in which I have chosen silence over action.
Community
The first time I went to Friday prayers after moving to Chicago, no one said salaamto me. I thought, “Is this how a Desi gets treated in a predominately Arab masjid?” I remembered Dad telling me about the young, connectionless men at his masjid. He said, “They keep coming and going out of nowhere – they must be spies. No one talks to them.”
He asked me, when I told him about volunteering at an Islamic nonprofit, where their charitable donations went. He said these organizations get in trouble for sending their money abroad and their members get labeled terrorist sympathizers.
Family
I text my sisters that I have a thing to tell them that’s not bad but I feel weird telling them on the phone so remind me to tell you when we all next meet (days, weeks, months?) so whoever the FBI has assigned to read this group text won’t find out (can’t I have some secrets, FBI agent?).
Love
Before we got married, Neema seriously asked me if I was an FBI agent. “You’re perfect,” he said. Too perfect, he didn’t say.
You could say we’re paranoid; but we’ll say we’re up-to-date on our news and have learned our histories. Connection is risk.
Heart
I decided to practice radical empathy after Michael Brown was shot. I did not and do not have a hard time feeling empathy for protesters, for rioters, for the rage that leads people into the streets or for the rage that leads them to want objects to burn. I never wrote that I felt this way but I do feel this way and have no difficulty conjuring these emotions (but do struggle to make them disappear).
I practiced empathizing with George Zimmerman and with Darren Wilson and with Timothy Loehmann and with the officers of Waller County Jail and with Dante Servin and with the Baltimore Police Department and with Jason Van Dyke and with and with and with and with and with
I didn’t like it and I succeeded. But that’s a different story.
I am going to qualify here because if I do not you will wonder that having empathy for someone does not mean excusing someone.
I tried practicing radical empathy after James Foley was executed.
I am trying not to stop myself from writing this.
I tried practicing radical empathy after James Foley was executed. That empathy exists as a heaviness in my chest and a shortness of my breath. That empathy pushes at the edges of my heart but I am scared to let it in. I feel it as a failure of my humanity and I fear it as a failure of our humanity. I do not Google ISIS because I do not want anyone to know I Google ISIS. I do not know the stories or motivations or language of the humans-not-monsters who constitute ISIS because I do not think I can subsequently assert their humanity without putting my own into question. Empathy is risk. I am not a monster.
Mouth
But I will own to being a coward; by now you know this. In my circles we talk about strategies for change: sometimes you want to be a Malcolm and sometimes you want to be a Martin. Mostly I am a chump choking back both my words of violence and my words of peace.
I remember back to my ethics class in journalism school. The question was whether journalists should not publish information that the government asks them not to publish for security. “Well of course,” said the class, “for security.”
For. Whose. Security?
I do not remember agreeing to value our lives more than their lives. I do remember my question knocking up against the insides of my teeth as I kept my mouth shut. I do remember remembering Abu Ghraib and air strikes against civilians and the Pentagon Papers and the people like me who were killed for the security of people like me. I do remember not saying that I thought our allegiance as journalists was to the truth.
I grew out of wanting to argue to argue. I do not hold these ideas as objects in my mind with dimensions I can manipulate and play with. I feel them in my gut and they bubble up as bile in my mouth. I do not want to taste this publicly in our class discussion or over coffee or as a Facebook comment. I do not want the acid that is burning holes in my stomach to sting in polite company. Would you even understand that while I skinned my knees on the same playgrounds as American soldiers and while my livelihood is tied up in American interests they serve, my mouth also prays the same prayers as those Arabs and Afghans and Pakistanis and Persians we are meant to fear? Maybe you could not understand me but you do suspect me in my skinny jeans and brown skin.
Hands
Understand this: I have written. And I have deleted. And deleted and deleted.
Eyes
I know I am watched. As a consequence, I decided to restrict my speech and my press and my pursuit of happiness. I have been silent, but I have not been blind. I, too, have been watching.
I started stealing razors from my dad in the first grade. It was easy.
I watched my mom and older sisters do the same for as long as I could remember. As soon as I began sprouting hair in areas I didn’t want covered (i.e., not the top of my head), I slicked them off quickly and painlessly without telling a soul.
Although I began signaling sexual maturation sooner than most, I was sure that my very understanding mother wouldn’t approve of depilation at age six. I was right. Dr. Miles, my pediatrician, had forewarned her that I showed signs of precocious puberty. My mom vigilantly observed for the markers that I expertly hid.
When I began menstruating at age ten — I concealed that fact for months before an untimely trip to the mall forced me to reveal it — my mom, in shock, exclaimed that it had happened before any pubic hair growth. I sassily retorted that that was only because I handled the fuzzy inconvenience before she even noticed. The glare she darted my way warned me to tread carefully in my remarks.
I was often referred to as “mujercita sin tiempo” — little woman before her time. It began when I decided to put the dolls away and play instead with my little sister. Toys held my interest for a very short period of time. That was the most prominent feature of my precociousness until I opened my mouth. That mouth got me sent to the naughty table in the first grade. It was there that I formed a lifelong friendship with Miguel, the first and only person to know that I had “woman problems” at the time. Perhaps my smart aleck-y attitude should havve alerted my mother to the situation.
Merriam-Webster simply defines precociousness as having or showing the qualities or abilities of an adult an unusually early age, exceptionally early in development or occurrence (emphasis on early). The National Library of Medicine provides a more precise demarcation for precociousness. Precocious puberty is the development of sexual maturation in boys and girls at a chronological age that is 2.5 standard deviations below the mean age of onset of puberty in the general population.
I was often referred to as “mujercita sin tiempo” — little woman before her time.
The language is ominous. Precocious puberty is 2.5 times away from average. Average is typical. Two and a half standard deviations below normal naturally seems abnormal. But is it?
For me, it was a minor change. And if you take it from the perspective of pediatric endocrinologist Louise Greenspan, MD, coauthor of The New Puberty, a book geared toward guiding parents through early development and sexual maturation, it’s a minor change for a growing number of girls. In a study launched in 2005 that evaluated a controlled group of girls in three cities, nearly 10 percent of the participants developed signs of puberty before eight years of age.
Precocious puberty is the development of sexual maturation in boys and girls at a chronological age that is 2.5 standard deviations below the mean age of onset of puberty in the general population.
On a slow Saturday night, a Google search of “early puberty” returns approximately 1.3 million hits in 0.31 seconds. The right side of the search window shows a chart proclaiming precocious puberty a rare condition that is treatable by a medical professional.
Several headlines, some by prestigious news organizations, lament this ordinary change, a change that occurs in all (minus a sliver of a minority) sooner or later. Each publication parrots the others, rattling off a list of negative affects of early maturation — depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, early initiation of sexual activity, etc. — expounding the fears of clueless parents.
On a slow Saturday night, a Google search of “early puberty” returns approximately 1.3 million hits in 0.31 seconds.
I was the fourth born, the third girl in a family of five siblings. My home was a stable household steeped in femininity. I watched my two older sisters grow into their womanhood, and the lessons my mother instilled in them flowed unto me in seamless transition. While I didn’t comprehend everything that was happening, I did understand that puberty was a series of events that would occur over time. My mother explained these changes as they were presented to my sisters, as I was a witness to their evolving bodies. My turn would be next. I wasn’t sure when, but I did know it was coming.
Four years ago, writer Elizabeth Weil profiled a mother and daughter experiencing the onset of precocious puberty for a piece in the New York Times Magazine. The article chronicled how Tracee Sioux, mother and now author of The Year of Yes! fought for a “solution or treatment” to the “problem condition” her nonplussed daughter, Ainsley, was traversing. Doctor after doctor had deemed Ainsley advanced but normal, but that was not the answer Tracee sought. The big, ugly world was revealing itself much too soon. Momma bear had to protect and guard against it. A puritanical concept of innocence was at stake.
The big, ugly world was revealing itself much too soon.
The false sense of loss of innocence is the most pressing negative affect of early onset puberty. Society’s fixation on the sexualization of young girls — the famed Lolita Syndrome — should not dictate how we educate our daughters. Let’s divorce the idea of being wanted from that of being a woman and teach girls from the earliest moment possible that they are the owners of their own bodies, and that while they grow, those bodies will change. Girls need to be granted agency over their selves in order to successfully navigate the challenges that arise from childhood into adulthood. Womanhood does not begin with desirability.
In her “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamison suggests that being a woman requires pain. Jamison goes as far as describing menstruation as “one kind of wound.” For such a central aspect of womanhood to be described as an affliction so casually is troubling. If everything ails, nothing will heal. Pain is not a gender.
Let’s divorce the idea of being wanted from that of being a woman and teach girls from the earliest moment possible that they are the owners of their own bodies, and that while they grow, those bodies will change.
Women need to lead the change to stop the stigmatization of our changing bodies. While it may seem preferable to be viewed as a victim rather than a whore, both perspectives are damaging. Our collective understanding of self should be the source of our bonding. The pains of our periods may indicate the possibility of fertility. There should be no shame in that potential. It’s potential: a maybe, but not a certainty. And if it does become a certainty, the reality is just another step in life.
For such a central aspect of womanhood to be described as an affliction so casually is troubling. If everything ails, nothing will heal. Pain is not a gender.
Puberty is a beginning and not an end. It’s a minor change that leads to another that will successively lead to more. It may be scary (or not) and weird at first, but it’s just another phase, like fallen teeth and lanky limbs. Our bodies are our own, and that personal space requires respect. Teach this to our girls and our boys.
Let’s not rob our girls of the beauty of transformation. It will happen whether you want it to or not. Womanhood is process. Revel in the process. Revel in self-care. Love being a woman. It is not unclean.
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