“doing your hair the way you like” “experimenting with makeup”
I remember spending hours locked in my room watching tutorials, washing, drying, and frying my hair over and over again with blow driers, straighteners, and curlers, trying to learn how to do pretty things to my hair. (I still can’t do a French braid.) I lost whole weekends to this, weekends I could have spent hanging out with friends or family, reading, writing, studying, playing games, or being outside. I remember spending absurd amounts of money on hair dye, to the point where my own mother forgot that I’m not naturally blonde. I remember the freedom I always felt when I cut my hair short, and how much freer still I felt when I finally cut it all off into a super-short pixie, and I didn’t have to deal with that shit at all.
I remember those same weekends, deciding instead to experiment with makeup. Putting it on and washing it off, scrubbing my face red and raw, over and over again. I remember the makeup causing acne, and wearing more makeup to cover that acne, which caused more acne.
I remember being 14, waking up at 5am to do my hair and makeup before school. I remember coming home after school, when the makeup had worn off and I’d finally gotten annoyed and put my hair in a ponytail, and thinking I looked hideous.
“having a girls night with your friends? having female friends in general?”
I feel like all the lesbians who were never invited to sleepovers will tell you that they’re still female. regardless, having age-appropriate same-sex friends is hardly a “girly thing.” and it’s still weird for grown men to identify with pubescent girls.
“perfecting your skincare routine?”
ah yes, the crippling anxiety caused by not looking like a photoshopped magazine model. followed, in adulthood, by the crippling fear of aging, because a woman who is not fuckable is invisible. I have memories here, too.
I didn’t even have bad acne, and yet, I still remember covering my face in things that gave me actual chemical burns. (I’m allergic to benzoyl peroxide, which was fun to discover, and I have eczema that makes it difficult to use acne treatments.) I have broken capillaries on my nose from using “pore strips,” to try to get rid of my “blackheads” (btw, those dots on your nose are called sebaceous filaments, they’re a normal part of your anatomy, and you really can’t get rid of them.) I remember a whole drawer full of face wash and lotions and creams and spot treatments. I remember friends who were put on accutane, a medicine that can cause severe organ damage, and dries your skin out to the point of pain.
But hey, I don’t need memories. I really enjoy my skincare routine as an adult. But it’s rooted in those anxieties. Stay young, stay pretty, have perfectly flawless skin. I spend an unreasonable amount of money on it. I’m breaking the law for it - I’m illegally using somebody else’s prescription for Retin-A.
“flirting and being flirted with? going on a date?”
Plenty of people don’t become sexually/romantically active until later in life. Lots of lesbian women don’t come to terms with their sexuality until later. They’re still women.
“going to prom? going to a party?”
While admittedly fun for many people, that is neither female-specific, nor a required experience of adolescence. Prom is pretty much exclusively a US thing. It’s also expensive as hell, which keeps it out of the reach of many people who grow up in poverty. And lots of introverted people never go to a party in their life. They’re fine.
This is also neither female-specific, nor adolescence-specific.
I understand that you feel like you missed out on these things, due to poverty and social anxiety, but a lot of these things don’t exist for many people. It sounds like your idea of the adolescence you missed out on is heavily influenced by media. Life for many young girls is not like a teen movie, where they have a cute ~aesthetic~ Pottery Barn-esque bedroom covered in posters and polaroids and christmas lights, and they have sleepovers with their girlfriends where they do each others’ makeup and gossip about boys, and have cute dates where they chastely share a milkshake with the cute guy from geometry, and dance all night at prom. For a lot of young women, adolescence is a time of violent self-hatred, psychological torture, sexual assault and abuse, and anxiety about everything. I notice you don’t include things like “being bullied,” “having the cute guy from geometry spread your nudes to the whole school,” “developing an eating disorder,” “getting three hours of sleep a night to balance school, a social life, extracurriculars, a part-time job, and get up early enough to do your hair and makeup before school,” “crying over college rejection letters,” or “pregnancy scares” in your list of Just Girly Things. But that’s the reality of adolescence for many young women.
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
theartofmadeline
2087
dededos
germansingergirl
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titsay
