A Girl's Journey.
The cost of growing up.
In a previous essay called Hero’s Journey: The Girl With a Thousand Fantasies, I spoke about the hero’s journey model in storytelling, how such stories most often center on men and male values, and questioned what kind of real-life tales I might be missing about women who made a similarly inspiring impact on the world around them or - at the very least - the people who knew them. Not to say that my childhood was completely lacking such stories.
I’ve said before that in all girls school, the stories available to us in the library and the ones assigned as reading for the vast majority of my upbringing depicted girls from every time period most often turning their entire village upside down trying to escape arranged marriages. While I certainly agree with the sentiment, you can see how such tales might’ve not been the most captivating to me at the end of the day.
My favorite pieces of media are most often action-packed and exciting. And I can’t help but notice that for a woman in her thirties, I vocalize my active imagination more than what might be considered typical.
I’m not catching an Uber to the airport. I’m diving into the getaway vehicle after a mostly successful heist but surely the feds will be scanning for my face in the security line because of a small but pivotal slipup so I’d best keep a low profile using my baseball cap as a disguise. I’m not writing an email. I’m out in the field using code to put together an encrypted message to send back to headquarters. I’m not grocery shopping. I’m tailing a key suspect in an assassination plot against the queen foiled by yours truly.
At home, my shelves are filled with countless character figurines, replica fantasy weapons, books, and comics. “I was hoping you’d be going for something a bit more mature,” my mother says, frowning at the many posters framed on my wall. I waltz over to one of my shelves and ignite my lightsaber as a response draped in my Jedi bathrobe. It’s moments like this, I realize, why so many of my peers compare me to things they’d seen on The Big Bang Theory, a show I admittedly never watched.
While perhaps not typical, I know I am not unique in this sense. After all, I follow plenty of podcasters and YouTubers who have their nerd collections displayed proudly behind them in every video. I’m vaguely aware of some arrested development narratives as it pertains to millennials and something about childhood now mentally extending through the entirety of one’s thirties, unlike all the previous generations who allegedly had all their shit together at sixteen.
There’s a certain degree of flashy ingenuity and resilience and general kickass-ness that I am drawn to in superheroes, secret agents, space wizards, and all manner of Chosen Ones. It’s why, in a very indirect sense, I view such forms of media as aspirational in nature. I wish I could be like that, but I’m not. There’s also the aspect of teamwork and camaraderie in such stories which will always get my heart to swell.
It is exceedingly rare that I will encounter media that I can relate to on a personal level whether that be songs or books or TV shows or movies. Granted, I have long since identified my genres of choice and don’t find myself straying outside of those boxes all that often which is where these relatable stories would be found. When I do stumble upon relatable media, I am often struck by a sense of hopelessness and inevitability that I’d much rather not dwell on so… back to the whacky adventures of Sherlock Holmes it is!
A friend of mine is all about coming of age tales and is being quite well fed in all these young adult novels getting movie and show adaptations in recent years. Her favorite by far is To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. What can I say? She has always been an endearingly clumsy hopeless romantic and I, her faithful friend side character, a role I took seriously and with honor in the era before all of my protagonist friends settled down into their respective marriages just like the scripts tend to dictate. At best I’ll find these stories quaint and funny but they’re about as foreign to me as Battlestar Galactica without the bonus of cool space stuff and fictional political intrigue.
Once in a blue moon, I’ll stumble upon a delayed coming of age tale for which the main message often leaves me conflicted. What I can’t fault them for, however, is accuracy. Far removed from flashy space battles or colorful school romances, they’re so painfully accurate that I avoid most rewatches. This kind of media usually features a young woman who is likely to be seen as unusual (neutral connotation, not necessarily negative or positive) having to come to terms with the fact that a key feature of growing up is losing (to varying degrees) her strong relationships with women to men.
Even just typing that made my spine tingle with a sense of immaturity because let’s face it - relating with such stories (as perhaps also signified by my replica lightsabers) often implies on some level a reluctance to let go of childhood, the mature response being a quiet acceptance of your loved ones succumbing to deep-rooted conditioning that binds them to their oppressor.
Yes, yes I can hear you all laughing now. What an extremist I am implying getting married and having kids is not an original idea at all and completely enforced by the world around you that ultimately serves the purpose of maintaining the core structure of female isolation and subjugation under male rule. And while that might not be the tone of the entire plot resolution, it will definitely be a key feature of the earlier acts of the story.
What I find myself thinking most often at the end of these stories as well as in real life is… why? Because in coming of age stories about men, they are not expected to sacrifice anything. Their battle is all internal usually symbolized by something external like… I don’t know… excalibur (don’t quote me on that I’m really not well versed in Arthurian tales and outside of the BBC’s Merlin series am not sure if this counts as a coming of age story at all). Keep in mind, I’m really quite ignorant as it relates to the social lives or inner worlds of men so I take my cues from the stories they write and the breaking news headlines they generate.
Anyway, I also don’t think that it’s a coincidence that in all these admittedly male-centric stories I enjoy, the friendship between men is indicated to be a key strength rather than something holding them back from their destiny. It is a throughline for all the ups and downs of their lives rather than this starter relationship that they are meant to grow out of or else be framed as some kind of forever child who can’t let go.
Whether the men in question are on the same page fighting side by side or fighting each other to the death due to some grandiose misunderstanding in any given tale (note that there is always a fight involved because this has value within the culture of men), it is the most emotionally charged aspect of the story with any noted female love interests serving as background motivation or lazily slapped on right before the end credits because what’s the point of beating the bad guy if you don’t end up with the car and the girl at the end? Just ask Anakin Skywalker, it sucks.
Of all the discourse I see about women, in particular, being prone to “shipping” such characters together despite there being no canonical romance between the men present, I think this is the inevitable result of actually assigning value to friendships on screen as a form of love that matters and that is primary. For even in real life it is often argued in select feminist circles that men are only capable of loving each other even if they happen to enjoy having sex with women, thus this subtext that women and girls the world over are forming entire fandoms around. Romance as a genre primarily serves as cultural propaganda to keep women joyful in their cages vying for the attention of men who spend little to no time thinking about them at all outside of fucking and keeping up appearances with their male peers, not dissimilar to the men in the “great epochs.”
In my previous essay on this topic, I ended by contemplating what these “hero’s journey” tales would look like removed from male cultural values and beliefs. Now I ask the same about tales of women. Prioritizing bonds between women stereotypically only exists as having personal cheerleaders for gaining the courage to put yourself out there, grow up, and partner with men. Giving priority to such bonds past that most often signifies an aversion to change and being stuck in the past.
The resolution most often depicts stubborn girlhood eventually giving way to the mandated heterosexual romance. Rarely it depicts the unusual woman accepting a life of relative solitude and individual adventure knowing she has at least stayed true to herself. Almost never does it depict two women actively choosing each other in any sense and if I dwell on it too much it really does break my heart, how of all the absurd and fantastical things I see play out on the page or on screen, it is this most natural magnetism I feel in my life that is loathe to even come true in fairytales.