My reflexive reaction upon seeing these words tagged on a wall in my neighborhood.
How does your body respond, seeing them?
If you were assigned female at birth, chances are this shit has followed you around in one form or another your entire life.
It is bone deep to the world we inherit, that command to be a good girl, so omnipresent as to give the appearance of immutability, as structural as any fact of nature.
It is fundamental to the church and to the state, to our education and our finances, our rituals and our artifacts, our relationships, our transmissions to our children. If that phrase was an arrow, you could shoot it in any direction with your eyes closed and know you’d hit the target every single fuckin time.
We enter this world already pinned by the violent expectations that are part & parcel of what it is to perform as a good girl, overlaid upon the reality of actual, visceral, real-time life in a body. A body with a nervous system that responds to social exclusion as a direct survival threat. Which is to say: the stakes are very high. And we see that play out in all directions as well, in the guarantees of safety inherent to a good and successful performance, and the dire repercussions of a failed one. What happens to “bad” girls? Or to “failed” girls? Girls who don’t perform femininity well enough?
Combine that with any number of other marginalized identities, and the repercussions intensify. If those intersecting identities are visible, they become an immediate axis of danger that must constantly be navigated. We invent our own way amidst all the risks, or we submit to the grinding wheel, or we oscillate and compartmentalize in an attempt to fulfill ourselves inwardly while meeting the expectations of others outwardly.
At the tip of the iceberg: to the extent that we choose, what compels us, still, to follow these tired-ass, unresponsive scripts?
And, deep to that, the rest of the iceberg: how do we emerge from the trauma of this? The wounds of the ages, of our people, of our culture? How do we heal ourselves and each other? How do we transform the culture?
Everyone I know has their own version of this story.
Mine is a story of reclaiming what belongs to me in pieces, one by one, until what I knew for myself and of myself formed a dynamic and unpredictable whole, a whole composed of multitudes that continues to surprise me. Turns out I am not here to serve up the shallow-ass, disconnected performance art of the good girl.
The role of the good girl is not a fact of nature.
My body is a fact of nature, and my body tells me a different story.
A story of a fast, expansive, discerning consciousness. Of hair that grows wildly, everywhere, and of strong teeth. A particular love of big spoons for taking greedy bites. Of wanting lots of sex with lots of different people. Of a lot of noise, ugly and beautiful noise, when grieving or joyful or enraged. Of delights and triggers and reflexes and balms. Of climbing like a monkey, and disdaining high heels and makeup and uncomfortable clothing except for the rare occasion when my contempt for discomfort is outweighed momentarily by the opportunity to peacock in a fun costume. Of knowing and loving the feeling of taking a knee to an assailant’s balls, hard enough to drive a body back several feet in space. The surges of adrenaline that are more and more familiar to me, that move through me and metabolize quickly these days, as a mother and a fighter and a person who gravitates toward the edges. Of deep, quivering pleasure, and rest, and the cracked-open, resilient capacity for endurance and creativity that parenting has shown me.
This palace of a body, that belongs to me, in freedom. Mine.
I haven’t been anybody’s good girl for a long time, but I still feel the compulsion of it. And I no longer reject the places in me that stir to meet those expectations, because that very desire in me to avoid and cast out arises, sneakily, from that same root of violence, the cruelty of self-improvement, the same compulsion to perform perfection and purity that causes the exile of inconvenient aspects of self, when the reality is of course a far more rich, complex, conflicted and ambiguous living truth song than that.
Everyone in me has a seat at the table these days. There is no out to cast to. Not really.
And it’s an ongoing process, applying antidote to such a banal and ubiquitous poison.
If the poison is the constant threat of disconnection or annihilation unless roles are convincingly performed, the antidote is the exalted voice of my body over time, and the deep kindness and generosity of kinship with other humans and with the living world of other-than-humans. The capacity to hear the voices of desire and refusal, and the decision to honor them over and over again. If I can honor my own, I can honor yours too.
In the flux and flow of my own power, I can see and hold your power as fact, your agency as magnificent, your voice as essential. In my recognition of our kinship, there is no part of you that is unwelcome. You don’t exist for my convenience. You exist for your own joy, and that is more than enough for me.
In that quality of presence, the spectre of the good girl loses its power to compel. Slowly, if we’re fortunate, we make our homes elsewhere, in landscapes that are more honest, more forgiving.
Like all urban people, I am a scavenger, and moreover a multidimensional scavenger who delights in making art out of trash. Born to this, it is my right to pick and choose from the shreds of the destroyed good girl as I wish, the powerful visuals of the femme, like a kid with a costume chest. This boa, yes. These heels, no.
When I’m complete, I am unrecognizable to the algorithms who demand my compliance and try to sell me shit. We no longer speak the same language. I’m busy making beauty to delight other gods.
I am blessed to sit at the feet of elders who were busting the algorithms long before I took my first breath, because this all requires a thorough rewriting of many aspects of learning and doing.
The sexual body is one of them. Arguably the most intimate and hotly-contested territory of all. (Although our dealings with money run a very close second.)
This weekend, I’ll be holding two pieces of this puzzle, and I invite you to join me if they’re useful to you.
On Saturday, I’m teaching Take Back The Speculum, the sex ed that everyone should have gotten at the onset of puberty and virtually no one did. The version that centers the agency and wholeness and innate brilliance of all of our bodies. The version that champions the entirety of the clitoris as the true center of a pelvis with three holes - a version of anatomy that was erased from medical literature, and that no current provider ever learned in medical school. The version in which we divest from the body-shame to which we have been conditioned, such that upon any encounter thereafter that requires the performance of good-girlness - with a lover, with a friend, with a boss, on the street, with a doctor, etc. - we will find ourselves responding differently, because we are different people when we remember our own agency.
And on Sunday, we gather for Tending The Well, a strongly-held ritual space for each of us to tend to our own bodies and to re-establish connection with our own pelvic space when the signal has been lost or obscured by trauma, shame, or other destructive conditioning. Where Take Back the Speculum is primarily focused on information and visual learning, Tending The Well centers the exploration of sensation as a gentle, guided hands-on, hands-in embodied meditation in which your experience and choice is held as the compass. Because lasting transformation doesn’t happen just by thinking it, but happens in the body as a deeply felt movement toward something new.
If either of those sound right for you at this time, join us.
Come as you are. All of you is welcome here.
XO