As you get older, the messages intensify, which is to say that the more you become your own person, the more you will be met with advertising and marketing and parental critiques about what you are supposed to be and what is appropriate for your sex. Girls do not climb trees and play in the mud or roughhouse. Girls don't get violently angry or play rough. This is the domain of boys, and if you do partake in such activity, you are a "tom boy" whatever that really means. Neither boy nor girl.

You will be taught to cross your legs "properly" and if you are in Catholic school, heaven forefend you should cross your ankles for you will be reprimanded for sitting "suggestively" as I was told before the hard snap of the ruler cam down on my palm. You must be prim and proper and well-groomed. You must play with your dollies while the boys run in the garden and scamper up trees and play at shooting each other, you must be docile and sweet. Let's face it, in many ways, the rules for girls are a lot more rigid than for boys, and while boys certainly receive their own share of marketing messages, rarely are the forced or seduced into believing that they need undergo brutal and medieval self-enhancement technologies like waxing and breast jobs and botox the way girls are. Boys, it seems, are allowed to have a helluva lot more fun than us girls.

With all of this conditioning (and I've only touched on it here, for it goes far deeper), girls soon learn that in life they are to be subordinate to boys. That we will be paid less, that we are to be appropriate at all times, and we should never shout or lose our temper the way boys often do because that makes one a bitch. For a man, he may be considered tough; try the same shit yourself and you are hands down a bitch. I see this every day in the workplace. A man may be eccentric, but a woman with the same behavior is labeled borderline or nuts, where as a man is simply eccentric.

Granted, this isn't true of all cases, but it is true of far too many, and let's not forget that we still get paid less than men for doing the same job. And forget about libido. As a girl, it is simply unacceptable that you sometimes, just would like to fuck and be fucked. Boys do this, girls do not. We are to wait at home, docile by the phone, willing it to ring, and if we have a libido, it is not attractive, we are told, to let it show, and if you do, then you are a slut.