Review: Girls Will Be Girls by Emer O'Toole

Girls Will Be Girls is that sparkling book we need. The book was first published in 2015 by Orion Books and written by the brilliant Emer O'Toole. I want to talk about it now because it just arrived in Italy in July 2021, thanks to a new publishing house called Le Plurali Editrice, founded by four enterprising women with the aim of publishing and rediscovering women. “Feminist books for curious minds” is their motto.

I must admit that my feminist conscience, which was also present before this reading (perhaps it was just a little dormant), was somehow jolted. I had never considered certain aspects of my life from such a broad perspective. I have never thought that I would have so much in common with a person I have never met, who comes from another country and has lived a completely different life from mine.

And yet in our daily lives, there are gestures that we all witness ourselves repeat. Trivially, I never thought I would find my father telling me about my great-grandmother, who always served meals to men first, represented in Emer's father telling her (ironically?) that women are made for this, right? Another example is the feeling of anger that I unfairly feel towards my mother who takes care of the house by herself as if it were her sole duty: she tidies up things that are not hers, prepares meals for everyone, does the laundry for everyone. And this without ever asking anyone for a hand, but above all without ever receiving a hand from anyone. It is as if there was an unspoken agreement between the members of the family, so that everyone knows that after eating they can get up, go and sit in the living room, but not her because it is up to her to wash and put away the dishes – along with any women present. And if we point this out, we pass for madwomen, because what's the big deal about household chores(!) - chores that nobody ever offers to do anyway. These are just two aspects that I am convinced we have all experienced, with rare exceptions. This book, however, is much more than a denunciation of the inequality of housework, or the unhappy remarks of one parent from an older generation.

Emer O'Toole brilliantly explains the difficulty of eradicating society's misconceptions about gender and sexual orientation (i.e. the structure), and in particular how they shape our choices (i.e. our agency, our performance) and how they have changed standards of normality. This is why a girl, or whoever identifies with the female gender, is led from a young age to carry out transformations on her body to achieve an unattainable ideal of beauty for the sole purpose of appearing not even beautiful, but normal. No one has ever formally imposed depilation, make-up, long hair, heels, long nails, dyes, and those all beauty treatments that require time, pain, and loads of patience on us. We do this ostensibly out of a personal and conscious choice, and practically because this is what others expect us to do to be considered normal. We are constantly altering our bodies in the name of a paradox: a normality that has to be achieved and is often not attainable. 

The author (through references to authors and scholars who have given me the inspiration to delve deeper into the subject - thank you, Emer, if you ever read this "review" that finally sees daylight) takes you with her as she retraces her story. She describes her experiments with her body, the injustices she experienced, and her achievements. She tackles topics ranging from the language of a discriminatory culture to the distortion of sex created by pornography and the controversial figure of the woman inside the industry, a subject on which feminists themselves sometimes have different opinions. She has a simple, straightforward, unabashed style, which is simply beautiful because there are so many topics regarding women and their bodies that have been neglected for decades: such as the ridiculous censure of the structure of the clitoris in medical textbooks. Let the taboo on the female body and the inequality of our gender come to an end! I welcome those who tell me about their initial discomfort in letting hair grow, which is absolutely natural and biological, but for women, it is as if it should not be so.

Reading Emer O'Toole's book is like listening to the experiences of a friend, whatever your age. There are the thoughts of the 15-year-old Emer, of the 29-year-old Emer. I imagined it as that nice chat during an aperitivo, where your friend tells you in confidence about her emotions or anxieties, and then suddenly she pulls her papers with data and studies out of her backpack. Your eyes widen, then you squint and concentrate and finally say: wow. And, at the end of the book, you see the world differently: now you see that there is no more difference between a male body and a female body than between a male body and another male body, like Emer’s in Dublin Port for a photoshoot with Spencer Tunick (“But you are not naked!”).

At the end of the book, you wonder about the choices you’ve made in your life: did you want to make them, or were you simply influenced by your surroundings? I started thinking about this when, while reading the book, I went to the hairdresser one day. While I was waiting for 45 minutes to rinse my hair dye, the hairdresser welcomed a man, washed his grey hair, cut it, dried it, and left. I looked at my watch and had another 20 minutes left to wait, for a total of three hours inside the shop. Crazy, isn't it? It may seem trivial, but isn't this difference an indication of different social expectations? I have started to think about this more often and more deeply, and I thank Emer, who has sharpened my feminist knowledge during our educational aperitivo.