Girlhood Quotes

“It is through the collaboration of all these factors, of course, that patriarchy is enforced: an elegant machinery whose pistons fire silently inside their own minds, and whose gleaming gears we mistake for our own jewelry.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“By the time I was thirteen, I had divorced my body. Like a bitter divorced parent, I accepted that our collaboration was mandatory. I needed her and hated her all the more for it.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Not all men! cry the good ones. They don’t want to be feared, so it is our job to fix our fear. That is, sure, being a woman who gets assaulted and fears it at every turn sucks, but it’s not as bad as getting your feelings hurt. It is the job of women to caretake the feelings of good men, even at the cost of our own safety. We are trained from birth to accommodate them and their uncontrollable urges.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I had learned about the male gaze in women’s studies classes, but knew no way to dig it out of me.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“True love is not the reward for a successful campaign to domesticate oneself. It is the thing I was practicing all of those years ago, in my own constructive play. It is entering the woods a stranger, shaking loose the stories assigned you, and naming the world as you meet it, together.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“As a young woman I struck myself against everything - other bodies, cities, myself - but I could never make sense of the marks I made on them, or the marks they made on me. A thing of unknown value has no value, and I treated myself as such. I beat against my life as if it could tell me how to stop hurting, until I was black and blue on the inside. The small softnesses I found, however fleeting, were precious. They may have saved my life.
Now, I am so careful. The more I know my own worth, the less I have to fling myself against anything. When I go back, I can see all the marks that girl made so long ago. I reach my hand through the water and touch their familiar shapes.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“The more we want to exploit a body, the less humanity we allow it.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“In Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary (the precursor to the Oxford English) a slut is simply a dirty woman, without any sexual connotation. In the nineteenth century, a slut also becomes a female dog, and a rag dipped in lard to light in place of a candle. Though in the twentieth century its meaning solidifies as an immoral woman, "a woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered shamefully excessive."

It is a brilliant linguistic trajectory. Make the bad housekeeper a woman of poor morals. Make her maid service to men a moral duty, and every other act becomes a potentially immoral one. Make her a bitch, a dog, a pig, any kind of subservient or inferior beast. Create one word for them all. Make sex a moral duty, too, but pleasure in it a crime. This way you can punish her for anything. You can make her humanity monstrous. Now you can do anything you want to her.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Sometimes our best efforts at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that anyone realistically expects young women to easily say no to anything, least of all the sexual desires of men. If I struggle to say no to a lunch invitation, a work request, any number of less fraught entreaties, when I have some pressing personal reason, how can a teenager be expected to stop a man’s hand as it reaches under her clothes? Some do, of course, which seems miraculous.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“slut is a word that men invented, like witch, to maintain power over women and to keep them in service to men.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“My poor body. My precious body. How had I let her be treated this way? My body was me. To hate my own body was to suffer from an autoimmune disease of the mind.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Instead of criminal, women's bodies are inherently defective, aesthetically defective. To the body whose value is judged almost solely on aesthetics, it is a devastating sentence. We are too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too dark, too stiff, too loose, too solicitous, too yielding, too assertive, too weak, or too strong.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I forgive myself for ingesting shame I did not choose but was fed anyway,” says Aja. “I may not yet be unashamed, but I am wholly unapologetic.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I would have liked the movie immeasurably better if, instead of being about a beautiful, smart virgin who acquired an unearned reputation and then cleared her name and bagged the super-nice boyfriend, it was a movie about a girl who actually had extremely hot sex with her queer best friend and then fcked a bunch nerds for Home Depot gift cards and was still presented as a sympathetic protagonist.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“During fleeting casual sexual encounters, women and girls are expected to place a man’s physical and emotional interests above their own, to assume responsibility for ensuring that they are met. But in committed relationships, they are often expected to do this every minute of their lives.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I am that careless girl, hands sunk haphazardly into the dough, bedroom a sty, pen stilled against her hand, eyes cast out the window, humming a song, thinking of something else. I am that outspoken witch; I will disagree with any man. I am a firework gone off in the dark, a spectacle of disobedience, a grand finale of orgasms anytime I want.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“What we are taught as a practice of beauty, of femininity, is also a practice of submission. A trans woman friend of mine recently explained to me how the technique for training your voice to sound more feminine has a lot to do “with speaking less or asking more questions or deferring to other people more.” We must not exhibit creases in our faces that indicate any critical emotion, because we should not express any critical emotion. Remember: women have been burned to death for as much.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I have since learned that recognizing the invisible parts of oneself in another person can feel like a radiant kind of love.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“My desire was a galloping thing, and her touch, unlike that of boys, didn't snuff it out. If my body had been a passive machine from which men made withdrawals, like an ATM whose code they were handed on the day of their first erection, then with her it was a winning slot machine, screaming jangly music and spewing coins.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I was not a little mother or a hot mama. I was an eleven-year-old girl. Now, it seems to me a startlingly efficient way to age a child in a single word. Sometimes the word itself matters less than the authority with which it is spoken. It is the act of naming that claims you.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“both men and women prioritize the comfort and well-being of men over women’s safety, comfort, even the truth of their bodily experience.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I knew exactly what Donika meant, but I had no words to name it. My knowing was from a time before I knew such experience was speakable. Our sex does not feel like an exchange of power, but like a natural event that can only occur when both of us stop thinking of ourselves and trust our bodies completely. No one plays the boy, because no one plays anything. It can't happen unless we trust that we'll be loved at our most animal.

Intimacy, I've found, has little to do with romance. Maybe it is the opposite of romance which is based on a story written by someone else. It is a closeness to another person that requires closeness with oneself. It is not watching lightning strike from the window but being struck by it.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Though I felt gigantic, I wasn't. It was not the first time I mistook the feeling for the object, and not the last. This is what happens when you give your body away, or when it gets taken from you. Its physical form becomes impossible to see because your eyes are no longer the expert. Your body is no longer a body but a perceived distance from what a body should be, a condition of never being correct, because being is incorrect. Virtue lies only in the interminable act of erasing yourself.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“To be human meant that unlike in most other species, females were the cultivators of meticulous plumage. We competed to be the weakest and smallest and most infantile. We seemed to spend all of our resources withering ourselves to be attractive to males. The goal was to be as soft and tidy and delicate as possible. It made no sense at all. I was not in the habit of withering myself. I was not tidy or delicate.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I have never been a victim of home intrusion. I have never been raped. It is not a reenactment of such a trauma but a preoccupation with the threat of it, with the problem and necessity of refusing without ever saying no.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Now those moments seem proof that self-love is an instinct, as animal as any other function of the self. The ferocity of my affection could not be erased, only suppressed under total vigilance. My self-hatred was not self-generated. It was an expression of the environment outside of my body, which, it eventually turned out, I could change.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Daisy Miller dies of Roman fever. Nana Coupeau dies of smallpox. Ophelia dies by drowning herself. Tess Durbeyfield dies by execution. Emma Bovary dies by swallowing arsenic. Anna Karenina dies by throwing herself under a train. I did not die.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“don’t want to take the word slut back, like I don’t want to own a gun. It was never mine.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Patriarchy colonizes our brains like a virus.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood