how to be respected as a teen girl

i think more women tend to have insecurity about their gender than men

as a girl, like a young girl, maybe you get the impression that boys are cool in a way girls aren't. people praise and laugh at boys for doing high risk things. boys do all the good thinking and flying planes and action movies. and they put women in action movies too but it doesn't reflect life around you - the women you know are moms and shy and weak. you can feel the weakness emanating off of them. they do have passive endurance, of lifestyle martyrdom, of quietly putting up with so much. that’s a type of strength, they say.

"Maybe women shouldn't have been allowed to vote" is a conversation you hear occasionally, slightly tongue in cheek but also kind of not. you’re embarrassed to watch romance movies in the same way you might be embarrassed to watch reality tv - if you do it you've got to be meta about it, like 'lol yeah just giving into a guilty pleasure'. it has to be guilty, it can't just be pleasure.

women should be loved, but men should be respected. you hear people say those words verbatim when talking about conflict between adults. you feel hyper aware of your status as not 'one of them.' You aren't an adventurer, you aren't meant to do cool things. you don't have the capacity. you're supposed to be cherished, and you're supposed to be happy with that. you’re told it’s probably not a good idea for women to be leaders because they’re too emotional. but that’s okay - you don’t want to be a leader anyway, everyone assumes you would never actually want that.

when boys are insecure it’s because they’ve failed at being manly enough; but for you there’s no comparison. no girl feels like a failure for not being womanly enough; really, the more womanly you are, the more humiliating. sure, boys strive to conquer their worthlessness, but at least they’re striving to be worthwhile as a man.

your mom finds you crying one night alone in your bed, crying in grief that god hadn’t made you be born a boy. boys get to do so much, but you’re a girl and you’re doomed. your mom tries to say no - children are such a blessing, and so you figure you must just be messed up to not get it.

your identity as a woman gets real weird and tense. you are desperate to be respected on men's terms, but embarrassed about it because you are supposed to be happy with being a woman, and because a weak thing really wanting to be strong is pathetic. you are desperate to feel a little of that magic 'respect' that men get for their manliness. it’s like this elusive light that shines in bursts off men during moments of coolness, where the crowd gazes rapt in awe and jealousy. you learn that being like a man is the way to get respect. people get frustrated when you do girl things like cry. people don’t like weak people. people like it when you do boy things like being smart or brave.

so you want to be the kind of girl who does boy things. there's a flushing self conscious intensity at walking into a LAN party as the only girl. your skin is hot, and your face is intentionally smiling like everything is normal. nobody says anything about the gender ratio, but you are so alert - you are here as WOMAN, trying to compete with men on men's terms. you have fantasies of being incredible, of playing their video game better than they do, of pulling from deep nerd lore in a way that impresses them. Wow, you're not like other girls, they'll think to themselves. You're actually cool. Maybe we should take you seriously and listen to you?

then you'll have Actual Power, somehow. you'll have some real way to touch the world and show competence and be valued in a way that matters. the thought is noisy and vibrating but your entire being is warped around becoming that, your thoughts are straining hard to be Boy, and flinching away from anything too Girl.

but you this is your first time playing the video game they’ve all been habitually playing, you keep killing yourself, and it's embarrassing. you feel so aware that you're not just a person failing, you're a woman failing, and you're confirming all everybody knows to be true about women - they're not good at the cool things that boys like. it’s not even like you have the capacity to disappoint them - they never expected anything from you.

you go home and keep writing your epic fantasy story where a woman is doing cool stuff. you feel kinda embarrassed about this, because it's clearly fantasy fulfillment, some private desire of yourself showing in some pathetically vulnerable way. you're not supposed to want to be boylike, that's kinda sad because you obviously are not cool enough to be a boy.

you need really good reason to write in romance, because romance is for girls, and you're trying to write something boys might respect, so you have to make it plausibly deniable, and minor, but you still write it like a compulsion for vice and as you do you are flushed with shame.

you watch the Incredibles when it comes out and are hyper fixated on the young teen girl with superpowers. or rather, you're hyper fixated to how she's represented, and how other people react to her. Are they laughing? are they all like 'it's cute how they're trying to make women feel better by putting in a strong teen girl'? in a way you're checking to see if people find her character believable. because you don't, but you so so want it to be true. some tiny, unacknowledged part of you is hoping against all hope that if people respect the teen girl on the screen, they might be more likely to respect you too.

sometimes adults talk about movies where strong fierce women beat up the bad guys. you hear them laugh - "women can't beat up men like that." you know this is truth. know you are weaker than men.

later in life you'll listen to male friends talk about how yeah, their dad was abusive to them too, until one day they hit puberty and then hit their dad back, or something. 'then everything was better,' they say. you listen quietly. you could never physically put your dad in his place, no matter how old you got. you never had nor will you ever have the eureka moment of being safe on the merits of your own body.

you remember this one kids competition you had where you had to build the best bridge out of kinex to carry some weight. a boy won that, beat you, and you figure this is probably the way it works. women are weaker with technical skill too.

and technical skill is what matters, that seems obvious. you want to be able to build real bridges and code real computer programs and play cool video games, the modern day equivalent of fighting war. people tell you that raising kids and being emotionally supportive and being good at homemaking is also cool and respectable, but you don't believe them. Not only does it not capture your heart in the same way, but it's obvious in the ways people talk about it. you’ve never seen people cheer hard for a wife making the dishes real clean. they don't make movies about raising kids. a woman will never earn the respect and gratitude of her fellow countryman for reading bedtime stories with epic prowess. all the best books involve heros doing adventures that men seem better at doing. men seem to be obsessed with skill building in a way that women aren't. the most driven, skill building women you know are using it to sew cosplay costumes or volunteer to care for horses.

men are just better at things that Matter, and you're not a man, and you will never be a man, and if you try to do man things you'll always be a 'woman doing man things.' you feel the womanness on you like a skin that's screaming from every pore. all your thoughts are a woman's thoughts, your actions a woman's actions. your gender is a trap.

and the only way out is to actually be better than boys at boy things, but that's basically impossible. you don't actually have the core boy drive to do boy things. if you were really honest with yourself, which you're too scared to do - you actually do love romance novels and you want babies and all your nerdiest thoughts are ultimately about people, not things. you aren't cut out to be a boy. your inferiority is stamped into your bones.

eventually, your preferences stop being really yours, and start becoming a method of being worthy. you can see that men don’t respect feminist or liberal women - hysterical harpies ruled by their silly woman emotions - so you believe that women shouldn’t have rights. “Actually women probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote,” you say. you are cool enough to do the hard, cold acknowledgement of the limitations of your gender. maybe that’ll be masculine enough to gain their respect.

people talk about how women feel pressure from men to be sexy or a perfect romantic partner - and you feel that too - but really you just feel like you want them to take you seriously. and so you become vulnerable to their desires - you arch your personality into what you think they want, you develop the boyish preferences they have. it’s less that you want them to want you for being a woman, but that you want them to respect you as though you were a boy.

you see hints of this in other women everywhere. you watch a movie where a woman everyone describes as ‘strong’ demonstrates her strength by refusing to take shit, threatening to tear a man’s tongue out of his head if he speaks to her like that again. but this is roleplay - how can everyone not see this is roleplay? she obviously could not tear his tongue out. if they fought, he would win. in the movie, everyone draws back like she’s being scary, and you see it as everyone indulging her in her pretend larp where she has power.

but probably women want to see this, they want the facsimile of being someone to be respected, even if they don’t actually have the strength to back it up. it’s humiliating to live life as someone weaker, who will never have the eureka moment of standing up to an abusive parent, and so everyone paints over it. women have these fake eureka moments in movies all the time, everyone draws back from female rage as though it means anything. but it doesn’t. you’re placated because you demand to be placated, because the crippling insecurity of your gender is too terrible to live with in this stupid world where you drive on bridges built by men, use sewage systems built by men, use an internet coded by men, in a country secured by the blood of men.

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

 To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

-Genesis 3:14-19

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i don’t really feel like this anymore, but was recently reflecting on that strong, peculiar sensation of being a teen girl walking into a room full of boys doing boy things. i’m very grateful to have experienced this both mildly and rarely in recent years, but it’s a sensation i’ve rarely heard other people talk about.