Word: girls
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When I did research for Odd Girl Out, my main finding was that the pressure girls face to be nice all the time leads them to repress some of their most powerful emotions and deprives them of skills to express those feelings. As a result, a lot of anger gets expressed indirectly, like online or behind someone's back, earning girls a reputation for being sneaky and cruel. Again, that's not about girls themselves but about the culture that they're growing up in. (Read "The Myth About Boys...
What were your experiences with the good-girl identity crisis growing...
...think I understood how much of a good girl I was until I grew up. I was always the loud girl, the expressive girl. I had no problem telling everybody how I felt all the time, probably too often. I think it was more that I noticed around me that my friends very often could not express themselves when they were unhappy. I spent so much of my adolescence going up to friends and saying, "Are you mad at me?" And having them say no but knowing that they were. I had so many confrontations in my youth with girls...
Dads just need to be themselves. Not every dad is going to be a stereotypical guy who acts as a counterpoint to the typical good girl, but there's no question that men have more social permission to take up space, in every sense of the word. So just having a father in your life who takes up space comfortably and who helps you do it and makes you feel good about the times that you express yourself completely has an extraordinary impact on a girl's development...
...think so. Not to say that men don't have conflicts. A really great exercise that I learned from a colleague is to ask girls to sit the way a typical guy sits and then ask girls to sit the way a typical girl sits. And you will see two completely different postures. Guys have way more permission to take up space in every sense of that phrase. There just aren't the same rules as there are for women, and that's going to lead to a different consciousness and a different set of concerns...