Looking forward - supporting girls with becoming young women

Interesting thread. My DD is 11 so just heading into all this and I really want to get it right, to help her feels confident and good about herself, and her body, and not be bound by stereotypes of what girls and women are supposed to be. But I'm not sure how best to do it. Also how to keep her safe! She needs to know that some men and boys can be a threat to her so she needs to be careful in certain situations but how to communicate that without scaring her?

Single sex spaces for girls are critical to girls' sense of self which isn't about being objects.

I also think boys need a lot more work on porn. I watched a childline supported knobhead yesterday talking about porn and the piece about consent was right at the end. There was nothing about the fact that there are many more women in porn that men, that there is a high number of girls who have been trafficked and exploited and that actually quite a few of the women you are watching didn't consent.

Plus nothing about the awful effect of porn on normal sexual response.

It is also important to adult women to have single sex spaces that they can share with other women. Whether that's leisure activities like a women's pool, sports clubs, or support activities like a breastfeeding group etc If spaces that support women's wellbeing and independence are increasingly encroached upon less women will feel confident to use them and less confident in themselves as a result.

Women have traditionally taken up less public space than men, we need to protect the space that we have gained.

But it is perhaps up to us all to support adults with any mental health issues, to ensure that people have accurate information, and to ensure people understand all the options

Agree young women and girls need support and to feel confident and powerful in who they are.

But past that into adulthood...they are adults. It’s not up to me to tell another adult what to do.

I’ve been thinking about the kids already on blockers, whose cases will be reviewed and the in-depth research that (I hope?) GiDS will ask them to take part in, about their experiences and outcomes.. these will be important findings of use to make new policy to help other kids in future. (I really hope that GIDS are actually going to do this work, I have no idea what their plans are).

@HecatesCats Thanks!

I wish it could be covered in schools - the difficulties of puberty; misogyny; feeling ‘different’; dealing with societal expectations related to gender stereotypes.

I went to an all-girl school and there it was made explicitly clear to us that we could do anything, present in any way, and that there were no ‘rules’ we had to follow as girls. I don’t think many girls today even have that. They’re pressured by SM and all the gender ideology which, to me, only reinforces regressive stereotypes.

Even with the support I had in school, I still found the changes of puberty hard. I was also discovering my sexuality so that added to the difficulty.

I really wish we had an organisation of women that could go into schools and basically say “You’re ok as you are” and explain the difficulties so many of us have had, and provide reassurance and empowerment.

A Mighty Girl might have some book recommendations that are suitable for your daughter Sometimes. If you search in personal development (you may need to apply a woo woo filter) www.amightygirl.com/love-your-body

I have never felt like most other girls, I have never been interested in their music, their shows, their celebrity crushes, their books, their fashion. How about instead of inducting people into the status quo and conformity, we support those who fall into the cracks and are ostracised?

I was the same, it's why I was drawn to the goth scene. The thing is, looking back and talking to other women, I've realised that I was so focused on differences rather than what we had in common. I had absorbed the media messages about what women were like, and also not taken into account that women were punished - especially girls - for not conforming to those stereotypes. Those girls weren't inherently different to me. I think it would have done me good to have felt less alone, to have recognised common ground, and it might have helped them too- shown them it was ok to be themselves rather than feeling they had to conform. It's one of the reasons I live MN, it made me realise that I wasn't an outlier, that other women struggled too, they just hid it better.

I have never felt like most other girls
Why do you think most girls all feel the same way? You are talking about half of humanity! What we have in common is our sex, not much more.

I would like to see a book like "my body is me" but for older kids. My dd is 10 and it really is heartbreaking to see how she is gradually learning to be more self-conscious, aware of her appearance and to generally take up less room in the world.

My abiding memory of adolescence is painful self-consciousness, trying to avoid male attention and a bubbling anxiety about how my body was going to embarrass me next. And I was a late starter. I tremble for the little girls who develop early, in primary school. Being the first girl in the class with breasts must be so scary.

social space away from the male gaze can be such a relief

Amen

Great idea for a thread. I will think more about ways to make girls feel good about being girls. (Or just even not making their biological sex a consideration is also fine). I would suggest access to an all-female environment is good, as this can create space for all sorts of conversations and examples outside of the dominant misogynistic culture.
It’s such a horrible shock how girls overtly get projected on to them all kinds of awful misogyny, highly sexualised, being shouted at in the street by strangers and generally becoming public property for comment.. so social space away from the male gaze can be such a relief. Also a social mix of different ages can be important for that as well as peers in a same sex space.

Then the other side of the coin, how to stop girls and young women feeling shit about themselves. So many great suggestions on the thread. Porn culture, social media, undermining of safeguarding and regulatory capture and the reach of capitalism into every last area of our personal lives is a toxic combination for young people and for girls in particular.

I’d suggest one specific example of an action which I think would help pre-teens- age ratings on music videos, in the same way we give them to movies.

That should read 'punishing', don't know where the 'me' came from.

Dido, I find this really interesting because my entire life I've been surrounded by women whose relationship with their bodies has been complicated, to say the least. A mother who was permanently on a diet, school-friends with anorexia or bulimia (a girl at my school was hospitalised). In my adult life most of the wonderful women I know have a shall we say 'punishing me relationship with their bodies, they either exercise to much, or too little, eat too much, or too little, and so much of it is about emotions and how the way they look defines them. I don't buy your assertion.

Yes, I definitely hated my female body too as a young teen. This is so common, it's almost unusual not to experience it, I think

Actually I think the experience of posters who post on here saying this are the unusual ones. Perhaps it's a "birds of a feather flock together" situation I've never come across the sort of body hatred amongst girls or women which seems to be the norm on here.

To be absolutely honest if I had a teenage daughter I'd be as wary of letting her be influenced by the negativity of a lot of what is posted here every bit as much as the ideology of "genderists"

I think this is a key aspect of growing up female that we need to get a handle on if we're to persuade girls that being female is a positive thing!

Oh god Newlygranny your post is so on point. I only ever wanted girls and sometimes I wish they were boys because of the insidious shift towards sex acts that mainly satisfy men = liberation/lib feminism for girls and women.

Until recently, this place would have been Girl Guiding. My unit is full of GNC girls, as was the one I attended. I met my fir at girlfriend at Guides! We don’t do much of the official stuff and do lots of getting lost in the woods and setting fire to things.

Sadly HQ seem set to destroy that.

To nurture girls - and boys - to grow up happy in their own bodies, we need to address the toxic, porn-soaked culture they inhabit. I'm not a bit surprised that girls are terrified of maturing into the sobbing, helpless victims they see being choked, spat on and generally degraded in the increasingly violent porn that sickens their youth. Likewise, how confusing is it for boys to be indoctrinated into beliefs that their mother, sisters and female friends are only fit to be treated like that and that they must learn to be callous, vicious abusers if they are to become men?

I think I would have liked a book called something like 'How to hold your nerve during puberty and not freak out about feeling like a weirdo, because it'll (probably) be (sort of) alright in the end.' Not sure it would sell well.

Nail on head though