Book Review: Lammy finalist Melissa Febos’ ‘Girlhood’ makes a case for listening to one’s body

Years of internalising the fear and shrugging off trauma leave an indelible mark on one’s psyche. On top of it, structures of hetero-patriarchy across the world make one feel devoid of choices and even culpable for being wronged. In her book Girlhood: Essays (Bloomsbury, 2021), Melissa Febos, winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the Lambda Literary Award finalist in the ‘LGBTQ Nonfiction’ category, dissects the patterns of ‘predator victimhood’ and the burdens of shame and culpability that a woman must bear.

Girlhood is at once a work of deeply personal writing and a playbook for young women to assess how their past experiences shape their later lives. Febos starts off the book with a classic question: “What was wrong with me?” All those who have had a tormented childhood would immediately be pulled into this narrative because this question alone is a sum of all the fear, hurt, and vulnerability one experiences because of being queer, and more so if one is a woman.

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She writes that the “training of our minds can lead to the exile of many parts of the self, to hatred for and the abuse of our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to values that do not prioritise our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure.” While this ‘training’ disempowers women, it emboldens men to assume they’re entitled to violate women. The ongoing debate on marital rape is a case in point. Men think of women’s consent to be an empty one without understanding “the distinction between giving empty consent for physical safety and giving it for emotional relief”.

Sample this, an excerpt from an interview Febos conducted with a woman called Charlotte: “It was just easier to have sex with them than to explain to them that I didn’t want to or to make them angry.” When one can foresee incredible harm their way, would one want to refuse to have sex with this man? Further, Febos’ partner Donika adds a layer to that: “Even when it’s technically consensual, there’s a big power differential.” This must make all of us rethink consent.

The insights on pleasure-seeking are rather strikingly original in this book. It may be because Febos was part of the sex industry herself and could bring in an insider perspective. In the maiden chapter, she writes about spitting “in an unwilling face” because a man paid for it. This exposed her to several enquires: Was she angry at men? Did she draw immense pleasure in reversing the domination matrix during a sexual act? Some writers overindulge in such interrogations under the garb of ‘objectivity’ but Febos’ writing doesn’t do a disservice to its readers. She deep dives into each emotion, evaluating every angle of a story much more eagerly, making this volume a unique assessment of women’s motivations.

“We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives,” Febos writes. “And feeling something neither proves nor disproves its existence. Conscious feelings are no accurate map to the psychic imprint of our experiences; they are the messy catalogue of emotions once and twice and thrice removed, often the symptoms of what we won’t let ourselves feel,” concluding that in that act of spitting, she was indeed thrilled by this transgression — “[o]f occupying a male space of power”.

Though each essay in this collection revealed profound findings, personally I felt touched reading what Febos wrote about her body — the vessel that can be at once a boon or bane — and queerness.

Febos writes how she was troubled because her body was “too big in all the wrong ways”. She notes that her body revealed something new every day when she happened to be alone or with a woman — “a seething world of which men knew so little.” Here’s what she documents beautifully: “How wrong I had been about freedom. I had mistakenly thought that beauty was the price of it, that I must succeed at erasing myself in order to be myself. In fact, it was the opposite. Only when I divested from the systems that benefited from my self-hatred could I relinquish it and glimpse freedom.”

There’s a chapter in this book that sort of does an autopsy of the word ‘slut’. And in another, Febos writes about the audacity, or even entitlement, with which men stalk women. The impunity that the overall male-dominated system enjoys and how it pronounces women guilty of being ‘careless’. Febos writes, “The difference between consensual voyeuristic practices and non-consensual is analogous to that between sex and rape. By condemning these practices wholesale, we make it that much easier to erase their complexity, the vast spectrum on which they function.” Further, on how men rob women of their agency, she notes: “Make sex a moral duty, too, but pleasure in it a crime. This way you can punish her for anything. You can make her humanity monstrous. Now you can do anything you want to her.”

This makes Girlhood not only a powerful personal record that lays bare the inherent violence of growing up in a hetero-patriarchal structure, but also the political act of writing that makes for a case for inclusivity, intersectionality, and inventiveness in the queer-feminist discourse — of ‘listening’ to our bodies, as words like ‘abuse’ and ‘trauma’ have completely lost their meaning as they get ‘overused’ and ‘misapplied’ increasingly.
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Saurabh Sharma (He/They) is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist._

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