There's a lot to unpack in Melissa Febos' memoir Girlhood. While this book is very much Febos' experiences, in a more general sense, it's the experience of every girl and woman in this country.
You'll remember your own sex ed class where you learned about periods and unwanted pregnancies (and maybe how to put a condom on a banana, though that wasn't until college, for me). You may have looked at a diagram of female anatomy, "but now how or even if women masturbated" (p.36).
You'll also understand when Febos writes about a woman's double self: her public self and her real self. Or how we can't defend ourselves from cat-calling for fear of physical violence. Or how men seem to think we owe them something, and when they take it, our first response is to protect them. "We are exaggerating. We are overreacting. We are villainizing hapless men" (p. 160).
The book is very much literary non-fiction. I wasn't really sure where the book was going through the prologue or the first chapter. However, once I got to the chapter titled "The Mirror Test", that's when I started underlining passages.
My non-fiction writing professor would have loved this book because Febos writes about her own personal experience, the experiences of other women whom she has interviewed for this book of essays, and historical information she's researched. Did you know that the word "slut" originally meant "a dirty woman" without any sexual connotation? It could also have meant a female dog or a rag dipped in lard to light in place of a candle. It was only until the 1960s that the word started to be used to describe a sexually promiscuous woman.
As Febos writes, "Make her maid service to men a moral duty, and every other act becomes a potentially immoral one...Create one word for them all. Make sex a moral duty, too, but pleasure in it a crime. This was you can punish her for anything." (p.35)
This book doesn't have a happy ending as far as being a woman in today's society. This book will make you mad. But maybe this book will also open up the conversation among your friends, your book club, or even just the voices in your head, and when we start talking about these things instead of hiding them away for fear of shame, then maybe we can also start talking about how to bring about change.
Girlhood is published by Bloomsbury Publishing and is available to purchase now. I received a free review copy.
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