I'm less angry today and feel I can express
myself better on the theme of #sharedgirlhood. I'm not an experienced blogger
so this will be fairly straightforward to read.
When I came upon this on Sunday I was taken
aback by my feelings. I felt a warmth come from my toes upwards. A huge
euphoric rush. It felt like something really physical was happening and women
on Twitter could actually feel each other. Like we were reaching out and our
fingers were almost touching as something electric passed between us and
carried on down a line creating fibres of a sparkling web that would help bind
us together and support us.
I broke down and cried at the stories
pouring out. Really grim experiences were shared. Things that brought an
uncomfortable smile of acknowledgement underpinned with intense sadness. I
remembered the isolated suffering. I saw one woman talk longingly of how she'd
wished she'd known her sisters were suffering too so that it could have made
her feel more "normal". This acknowledged that we would still have
suffered. We were too young and too knocked down by grappling with our
developing bodies and developing awareness of our oppressed status to know how
to actually join together to try and stop it. But over the weekend women just
let go. We dragged these things out onto a bonfire of our past hurt and we
warmed each other with the fire. What happened felt like healing. It was
beautiful.
And then a terrible thing came. Bitterness.
The cry we hear all year long. "Us! What about us?!!!! You're excluding
us. Oppressing us. Keeping us out. This is horrible and unkind and you're
privileged and you're white and you're rich and ...."
On and on this wave crashed onto twitter.
Until the healing had to stop. Women were suspended. Suspended until they
stopped mentioning #sharedgirlhood.
Now, this needs objecting to. I object. I
am a woman. I was a girl. Things happened to us as girls that did not happen to
boys. Any boys. Much of it revolved around our developing bodies. Blood
featured largely. We all menstruated and it was often a huge event and rarely
celebrated. It brought shame and pain and fear. This was the culture of our
girlhood. We should not have to deny it.
As girls we were subject to random sexual
harassment and assault and sometimes rape. It may have happened to boys but we
were girls and we were sharing being so. That's ok. We can do that. We need not
apologise for what we are or what we were. We lived it. We fought through it.
We are here and we want to acknowledge that.
Posting at the weekend women did not want
to deliberately harm others who had not had that experience. Largely the
hashtag was about the word "shared". We wanted to join together to
make sense of what happened. You cannot deny something happened to you to make
others feel more comfortable.
So, yes for the rest of the year we will
accept your constant, oh so very constant, call to check our cis privilege and
bend over backwards for inclusive terminology and abandon our woman only
spaces. Some of us will tell you to sod off. The war will continue to wage.
But #sharedgirlhood was one thing women who
had one should have been allowed, just once, because it did a wonderful thing.
More importantly, those who sought to bring it down, did not succeed in doing
so. A bitter tinge is left in the air. But we still got it out there and it
still feels warm.
