The Ever Recurring Predicament of Girlhood

My aunt was my IT girl– still is. When I look back on the course of my personal perspective of femininity, she stands there, either in reach or miles away, no inbetween. To me, my existence was stationary and would stay as such until I held a lipstick in my hand. Of course, I was more dramatic than the situation warranted, but when was I not? This idea that to be female, I needed to be sexy has been following me all my life. A thought process that hasn’t quite left me, passing by in fleeting thoughts and most definitely hasn’t left anyone else. The dreaded 10-year-old girls at Sephora.

Every few scrolls through any social media page is of these young, young girls rampant at a women’s store. While some of this can be attributed to the parenting (and that’s a different issue), I can’t help but feel for these girls. They’re acting on the same thoughts we had as little girls but are in an age where it’s more accessible. Their circumstances are different and it's not fair to judge them by it. The tween obsession with brands like “Drunk Elephant”, “Glow Recipe”, and “Sol de Janeiro” has only grown from the emergence of these viral videos. Where I only had my aunt’s makeup bag with all the wrong shades, they have whole stores with designer brands and constant coverage of it in the media.

And on the other of the spectrum, is the bow trend. Bows, most commonly associated with little girls and feminine innocence, have made a huge comeback in teenage and young adult female fashion. They’re the face of the movement that has been followed by the barbie phenomenon, “teenage girls in their mid-twenties”, and increased popularity in shows like “The Summer I Turned Pretty”. An entire generation realizing how short lived their girlhoods have been and attempting to reclaim it. Just trying to grasp on to any shards of their innocence that may remain.

This is the ever recurring predicament of girlhood. Being a girl and finding out how freeing it must be to be a woman, and then being a woman and realizing how freeing it was to be a girl. Now I won’t exaggerate too far as to say this is unique to the experience of being a woman, because it’s not. It’s the same issue everyone faces, all their lives, but it is at this point in time, with the simultaneous existence of both gen alpha at Sephora and bows for teenagers, that this phenomenon has been put into worldly perspective. We spend all our lives chasing after the next thing, we don’t realize we are living the life we prayed and ached and worked and cried and bled for. You are who you have always meant to be, consciously or not.