Elise Loehnen on Girlhood, Ageing and Double Standards
October 2 | 5 minute read
Words by Elise Loehnen
A girl is metamorphosis, presiding over a sacred, liminal space where she gets to be different every day.
It is a time of self-expression and exploration, a threshold and a pause; while adulthood beckons, she does not yet need to step into who she will eventually become, to bake her identity into a gloss. Girlhood is a time of perpetual transformation, of mutable identity, of resistance to being fixed in time. It is magical.
For eons, beauty has always been one of the places of play – a space and time for try-on and make believe, where the possibility of transformation unfolds in front of the mirror.
As a culture, we struggle to allow this without comment. We’re quick to judge and shame girls and women for frivolity and superficiality, for drawing attention, for enjoying, decorating and celebrating themselves, for being enraptured by what they see in the mirror.
The suggestion is that a focus on the outside suggests a lack of interest or quality on the inside; it’s a story as old as time, a way to pit women against women, and women against girls. The word vanity comes from vanus (Latin): “Empty, without substance.”
I do not have a daughter; I’m not marched to MECCA on the weekends for skincare and lip gloss. But I do have two boys, eight and 11. As I watch the conversation and hand-wringing unfold across the global media landscape about girls, and skincare, and body spray – its price tag, its self-obsession, its status-seeking, its silliness – I chafe on behalf of all women and girls, and not because I’m not a good feminist.
I chafe because my boys treat me like an ATM for Robux and V-Bucks, shaking me down every weekend so they can buy armaments, ‘skins’ (outfits) and ‘e-motes’ (i.e. dance moves) for their army of Roblox and Fortnite characters. They set alarms for the latest drops, they obsess over their loot, and then they preen and flex to their friends.
It’s pretty silly, and yet I don’t see 1,000-word think pieces about the stupidness of their pursuits, their inability to manage money, or the fatuousness of their minds.
I don’t see outrage about the hours they spend on YouTube watching other boys play video games in the same way female creators on TikTok doing Get Ready With Me (#GRWM) videos bear our censure. We allow them their boyhood without much comment. Boys will be boys. Girls may be girls, but picking on them is a global past-time. Our culture is full of these double standards.
There are some salient points in this conversation though; important considerations that we, as women, must collectively solve. As we age out of girlhood, women can become static and stuck – fixated on preserving our faces, of concretising our image, of refusing to accept the tick of time.
This makes perfect sense: In our culture, we have three archetypes: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The etymology of crone is caroigne: carrion, carcass, old ewe. You can’t make this up. While we revere and venerate old men, we despise older women; we cast them as batty witches and fear becoming them.
When our 12-year-olds ask for products loaded with highly active, anti-ageing ingredients, they are holding up a mirror, showing us that they also fear the fate we’ve decided is terrible. While we tear our hair out that they’re growing up too fast, they’re showing us that they don’t want to grow up at all – that even as they mimic our concerns, they don’t actually want to be us.
It’s not for us to shame them for loading their carts with retinol; it’s for us to reimagine our relationships to our own ageing faces and bodies, to come to see that our beauty – wrinkled and hard-won – is something to glamourise as well, something to which they can look forward.
Beauty is mutable, not static; it shifts and evolves, revealing itself at every age. It is animated and embodied, a new stage to express.
On International Day of the Girl – and every day of the year – it’s on all of us to put guardrails around girlhood, not to control or corral what happens in that liminal space, but to keep it sacred, unrestrained and free from our prying and judgmental eyes.
Meanwhile, may we all resolve in ourselves what we want for our daughters, which is what we would have wanted for ourselves as girls. Let’s remind ourselves of the faith and trust that they deserve; that they’re capable of figuring out both who they are, and who they want to grow up to eventually be.
For the latter, may we celebrate the journey and the ticking of time, reflecting back to them that yes, there’s something truly beautiful about girlhood – and there’s something truly beautiful about ageing too.
