⭐️ New Blog Post Up!
#The Common Denominator: Girlhood and the Education of the Body in Eliya Smith’s coming-of-age dramedy play, Dad Don’t Read This
We are used to thinking of a girl’s subordination as something done to her by men, and it is. But the daily labor of enforcing it, of making sure each girl learns her place and keeps to it, falls largely to other girls. This is the quiet horror underneath the whole exchange. The friends are not Sophie’s opposites in this scene, nor the safe harbor against the man’s incursion. They are his instrument, though they would be appalled to hear it, because the lesson he began to teach they finish. He tells her body it is readable. They tell her the reading is her fault.
At this age the policing is at its most merciless, because everything is still being decided — who is desirable and who is not, who belongs and who is cast out — and a teen girl often falls into the pitfall of securing her own footing by finding the fault in another.
Read the piece thing → Here