Julie Klausner recently wrote a great piece begging grown women not to be so girly, which I agree with wholeheartedly. If I can get on a Grampa Simpson soapbox for a moment, I think nearly everyone in my generation and younger, regardless of gender, needs to grow the eff up a little bit. C’mon, guys. We can go a day without playing kickball. Let’s do this.
On top of that, there are some particularly thorny issues when it comes to the ladies acting like kids. Such infantalizing reintroduces an element that I thought was dead, the “what do I know? I’m just a girl!” idiocy, a sort of no-wave feminism. Not to mention the creeptacular implications of women acting girly-but-sexy, which we don’t even need to get into. Naturally, Katy Perry is at the forefront of this nonsense, a personality whose schizophrenic sexuality makes Britney Spears seem like Andrea Dworkin.
However, I wonder if, in the case of women, the Girly Thing is something of a reaction to not having much of a girlhood. Boys can remain boys for a long time. Entire industries rely on it. If men couldn’t act like kids–if they weren’t almost expected to–it’d be the end of Hooters, Dave & Busters, Judd Apatow’s filmography, and every light beer ad campaign of the last 20 years. I doubt there’s a female equivalent of the Mancation, at least as a business model. Dudes feel entitled to have breaks from family life–from adulthood, really. Women rarely have this option.
I hope all of this doesn’t come off as Mansplaining. Women don’t need any dude to detail their plight to the world, least of all me. But now that I’m the father of a girl, one that gets older every day (that’s how the aging process works, apparently), I’m constantly confronted by unfairness like this that I was only vaguely aware of before. Abstractly, I knew all of these things already. Now I get to see it act on my four-year-old, see little bits of kid-dom taken away from her day by day.