GIRL TALK: "Hey, Girlfriend," says my favorite radio talk show host in LA , answering calls from female listeners. When I call my sisters on the phone I say "girl this" and "girl that" and we say everything we love and hate in an hour and that's our weekly therapy. We're girls, and proud to say so.
My, my, haven't we come full womb. Yes, and it was a long loop through linguistics to get from there to here. If someone had referred to me as a girl a decade ago I would have answered "that's WOMAN to you."
So why now Guerilla Girls, the Indigo Girls, Tank Girl, Girls With Guitars, riot grrrls, and "everything girlie," as Celina Hex, editor of the quarterly girlzine Bust calls the phenomenon. "In the time of 70s feminists, women fought for the death of the word girl, but now we're all embracing it like a well-worn teddy bear," she writes in her latest issue titled My Life as a Girl. Hex says it's the triumph of the "fierce inner-girl." We're coming out and we're telling it like it is and was. The first person articles in her indie rag are by girls grown up and talking about life as a cheerleader; all the names our mothers told us to call our periods ("did you get your friend?"), best friends who were bitches, growing up "nice," our fabulous Barbie collections. The stories, some great, some lousy, address a 70s girl experience that made us into WOMEN.
One of my sisters is still uncomfortable with what she sees as the comeback of the girly word. But she speaks far too many languages to be totally coherant on the issue without writing a dissertation, so we'll excuse her on that account, girlfriend. And besides, we're not killing off the woman--far from it--but among ourselves, we are beginning to ease up, have fun, like when we were girls. It's a kind of street talk, friendly, we-know-where-we've-been-and-we-know-what-we-can-do kind of talk. Hey, we like ourselves, we really do.
Once in a while when someone says to me, "Oh, you grew up in the 70s, when nothing happened except bad clothes and Watergate," I unpolitely suggest that the entire women's movement came of age then. We found out we could compete with men, beat them and tell them so and still date them afterward. It was fun. Men started to get the hang of it too and you could find plenty of them on the picket line supporting equal pay for equal work.
But I still can't stand it when a waitress, I mean waitperson, I mean server, comes to the table and asks a table full of women, "So, what are you girls having today?" I dunno, how 'bout some Womanhattan clam chowder?
Maybe I'm not as 90s evolved as I thought, warriors.
--Hannah Glasston
For a $10 subscription to Bust, write BUST, P.O. Box 319, Ansonia Station, New York, NY 10023.
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