Between all the things we “know” about the differences between boys and girls on the one hand, and things we “know” about men and women on the other hand, there’s this roughly three-year gap that… we don’t “know” much about at all.
It’s not that it’s not studied (I’m sure it must be) and it’s obviously experienced by everybody. It’s just that you don’t hear many people talking about it.
It’s that gap between early childhood and early adulthood, the gap where girls hit their growth spurts, and puberty, and cognitive and social expansion, and start developing romantic and/or early sexual identities while boys in their classes mostly… aren’t.
And yes, mileage varies, yes there’s overlap, yes, yes, yes. But…
There’s this little one, or two, or maybe three year window. One that probably seems small to most adults. It’s maybe 20% of an early adolescent’s life.
It’s not talked about much. Outside of middle-school administrator’s offices anyway.
Seems like it probably has an impact disproportionate to how much it’s discussed though.
—-
Another point about this that’s pretty important though: the gap I mentioned between middle-school aged girls and boys would be a gap relative to middle-school aged girls and boys. Not compared to, say, high-school aged girls, not to high-school aged boys, definitely not to adults.
Seems like that probably has an impact too.
Failing to understand it, though, probably has an even bigger impact. Much bigger.
—-
And finally, (and this point is a lot more speculative) I’m not sure when exactly boys start catching up. I’m guessing somewhere between average late high-school and, say, mid-college age.
That definitely seems to have an impact, one that’s probably a little better recognized. And one that I think is considerably exploited by military recruiters and other adults, vendors of gendered-male products and services, and, for better or worse, peers.
Failing (sometimes, I think, willfully failing) to understand that one has, I think, tremendous impact.
—-
Anyway, two questions:
- What’s your recollection of your own middle-school experiences?
- What’s your recollection of the experiences of middle-schoolers you might have watched grow up?
Oh, dude. In middle school I
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Wed, 2010-02-03 13:01.Oh, dude. In middle school I never talked to anyone, had no friends, got Cs in my classes due to lack of motivation, slept ten or twelve hours a day, once attempted suicide and was generally terminally depressed.
Honestly, the only good thing about the entire experience was that through my attempts to escape my depression I read most of the classics of SF/fantasy and discovered punk rock, comic books and online fandom. Also, it gave me a benchmark: “this is bad, but I survived middle school, I’ll do fine.”
Thanks to my reclusiveness, I have no way of knowing the social dynamics of the school or how it might have differed based on gender. But I can state categorically that (a) middle school sucks, (b) middle school sucks for everyone, even if not to the degree it sucked for me, (c) everyone thinks that everyone else is having a great time, when really everybody is completely miserable because, well, see (a).
It probably provides some insight into niceguyism, on second thought. Because I know I spent a lot of time thinking, “I’m nice, but I don’t have a boyfriend. Boys are so shallow, they only want hot girls.” Which, you know, flip the genders and replace the beauty myth with the myth of worthiness…
[“Which, you know, flip the genders and replace the beauty myth with the myth of worthiness…” From my personal observations, both vague memories of my own and from watching my children and their classmates this makes sense. Girls are starting to talk about crushes on boys as early as 5th grade, boys are still talking, a lot, about games involving cards with zombie mice on them in 7th. If you want an actual boyfriend in that window of time you’re going to end up thinking you really have to work for it. (Hey, maybe that’s the source of the Cosmo mythology?!?) And while this is second hand, from middle-school administrators, usually when girls put pressure on their peers — especially anything like sexual pressure — they go into this total avoidance/denial/displacement mode. With (again from some admin friends) sometimes cynical results from girls. But yes, all that also takes place in the context of some serious “wow this sucks” reality. As another admin told a friend when she was student teaching, middle-school is more like a disease. So yikes! Glad you made it, O. —fl]
buhh why you makin’ me think
Submitted by k (not verified) on Wed, 2010-02-03 14:14.buhh why you makin’ me think about these things. You’re looking for gender-related recollections right?
My recollection of middle school is spotty at best because I have done everything possible to deliberately block out those memories. Middle School was basically High School, Part 1. I was most likely undiagnosed with serious depression (is it normal & acceptable that middle schoolers have suicidal ideation multiple times per week, long term?) and would not ever be formally diagnosed with depression which is bad because I think I really would have benefited from some kind of intervention other than talking to a school counselor, which did nothing and felt threatening. My friends – all girlfriends, some of us were in the same boat – & I never felt like we could open up during talk therapy because of the risk of child protective services getting involved if you revealed too much. I saw that happen with two of them, and it was terrifying. So I wound up carrying over depression into high school.
Middle school was pretty bad, as in, intense & non-stop, bullying came from boys and girls. Some of it – from the girls actually – had sexual undertones. Other times it was about our changing bodies – locker room related, like, menstruation & bras. I recognize now that a lot of the bullying from girls that wasn’t sex-related was class-related, since I was lower class socioeconomically than they were. So say I didn’t get in on a hot trend or got in one it while it was on the way out, that was cause for bullying.
From the boys I think it was mostly put-downs about my looks. Looking back I think they were following the girls’ lead.
A few years later though, I would find out that during high school, those girls who had bullied me, actually went through bullying & assaults of their own during high school.
Basically the bullies changed targets. All of the bullies. Most of the bullying stopped – we didn’t get along or anything – we just stopped interacting completely. They stopped being interested in me & switched over to other people. I still don’t know why that is.
Home situation was pretty f’ed up for Middle and High schools too. It’s still completely f’ed up, but since I graduated college, I just don’t care anymore.
[Yeeks! Sounds like the question is opening a lot of old wounds for people. It was pretty flipping miserable for me too. And I’m guessing, just guessing, that this is another reason a lot of adults block it out. But a fair amount of what you’re describing — from body-change related taunting (loser if you get your period, loser if you don’t) to girls sexually putting peer-aged boys on the spot to boys taunting everyone about their looks and just generally going into David Letterman cynical mode about everything but especially girls — sounds like what I’m talking about in my post. Still, just because we don’t want to go back there doesn’t mean (maybe even especially doesn’t mean) we shouldn’t try to understand its significance. Even though I think as adults too many of us do. Thanks for being willing to share your specific stories, K. Sorry it was so painful. For you. For a lot of us. Maybe for everybody. —fl]
Hmm, that’s a tough one. It’s
Submitted by Shadow (not verified) on Wed, 2010-02-03 15:39.Hmm, that’s a tough one. It’s been a while…
I’m not entirely sure what your definition of middle school is, but given what you have written I’ll answer as well as I can.
Well, I remember being heartbroken over losing one of my oldest friends (who I also had a crush on), when he changed schools due to not getting along with many in his class. That had me crying in private for more than two years. Maybe three. Didn’t really got that closed off until four years after he had left.
Then I remember home trouble with my parents being separated and at the same time being bullied by a boy from the other class of my year(and whoever joined up in the ‘fun’) for some time, until a substitute teacher put an end to it. At the time I actually begged my mom to move schools a couple of times, but she wouldn’t let me ‘cause I was only staying there for another 1½ year.
But like I said it got better. The bullying was stopped and my parents got back together and things overall became better. I wasn’t the popular girl in class, but neither was I unpopular. I just ‘was’. I had a friend, who stayed true through it all, so that probably helped.
I remember fighting mild depressions, but those weren’t particularly related to middle school.
And once I went to my new school a lot of things became better. Not perfect, but eventually okay.
I think my sensitivity and introverted nature didn’t help going through middle school, but I learned to cope with it all, even if I couldn’t become ‘more extroverted’ like I was always told I should be. (What kind of crap is that anyway? You can’t make an introvert an extrovert no matter what you do or say. Only pretend).
But it took some years. A lot of years. But hey, I made it through and I’m still standing.
[Yikes! Glad you had some friends to tide you over the roughest parts, Shadow. Thanks. —fl]
My response to this bullshit
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Wed, 2010-02-03 16:59. My response to this bullshit social construct of “teenage girl” (and it would be years later before I knew it was a social construct) was one of Complete, No Compromise, Refusal to participate. People talk about the “opt out revolution” in terms of the workplace. Well, I opted out of all the usual business in our society of being an adolescent female, and completing “revolted” against it, because I found it pretty revolting!! Not to mention stupid, ridiculous, and dehumanizing. YUCK! Who in Gods name said that because one is female and aged 13 through 19, one is supposed to be like this?! It’s fucking demeaning!! But if you weren’t “down” with the whole thing, that was seen as just another form of “the awkwardness of being this age”. So I pretty much said “Fuck it!” only I never used those words even mentally, because I was so proper at that stage. But the bottom line was pretty much that if modern society wouldn’t let me go directly from being a tomboy child to being a woman than I was going to spend a few years hiding out as an androgyne, because to my mind the whole “teenage girl” thing was nothing but sheer unadulterated bullshit. And I did my opting out in favor of working the system for a more rigorous education than would usually have been given complete with three foreign languages and AP classes for Physics, Calculus, Earth Sciences, Biology, History, and English Lit, along with substantial trade school and art. I was also inspired to do Karate by Simone de Beauvoir during the “middle school” years, and ran Cross Country under a really insane coach.[Lucky. One of my nieces did the same: somehow managed to find a public middle-school program that taught Latin(!) and just generally took it from there. She turned out pretty cool. To be honest I’m not positive her experience of that age was any better than yours, or mine, or anyone else who’s commented so far. It’s usually seems to be just a hard few years whether you go along with the trends or whether you resist. Thanks, Red. —fl]
Actually many of my
Submitted by Redleader (not verified) on Wed, 2010-02-03 22:47.Actually many of my experiences WERE quite positive. And the choice DID make a lot of things possible.
My vitriol over the whole bullshit, birdseed, idea about being a “teenage girl”, is not so much because that stage in life was unqualified misery for me. Far from it. In fact, if I had “opted in” and decide to be a teenage girl and do the teen girl thing, I would have been not only suicidally depressed, but I would have probably turned out to be a profoundly different human being-and overwhelmingly not for the better!!
The book “Second Sex” was one resource in that it gave some voice to my feelings-at least better than anything else available at the time. Although trying to articulate any of that was inevitably met with dismissal and ridicule, I knew my own heart better than they did.But all things considered I was probably happier than most people at that age. To most eyes, I was a poor unpopular thing who lacked the confidence to slap on some make-up, but that I was not how I saw myself at all. Puberty was fairly kind to me, and I was a decent looking youngster despite the complete lack of fashion. After a certain point (late 2nd year of high school) most of the teasing ended, and I was generally able to stand up to the most abusive forms of bullying. (I had to hide my status as a karate student to avoid a situation where everyone would want to call me out, however.) And I had some good friends outside of school. So it was far from being all bad.
When I first came across Warren Farrell at the age of 22, it pissed me off, and I considered it very one sided. Namely, because he ascribed both immense social power and inescapable forces of “socialization” and “biology” alike to something I had full stop refused to be. Of course this wasn’t the first or the last time, but Nancy Friday’s 90’s book came out only a few months later, and it really brought home to me how that choice had in some very long term and profound ways made me a bit different from most women in our culture.
Of course, there’s a lot to criticize about Nancy Friday (and loads more about Farrell) but even formulating arguments really put the full implications of that choice into technicolor.
Nowadays, many people would look upon girl who behaved as I often did as likely transgendered or maybe asexual and at the time lesbianism or some vague statement like “uncomfortable with her sexuality” were the biggies. Even feminists then and now, are likely to talk about the pressures at that age either in terms of the price of conforming, or the horrible social consequences of not conforming. Even today I see young females who were much like I was. But they are very misunderstood by the culture generally speaking. Most of them basically happy with themselves and have missed some of the most troublesome aspects of “female socialization” even if they don’t understand it quite yet.
Most of the culture doesn’t understand them at all. Especially not the fact that most of them do emerge out of that scrappy and studious but apparently asexual androgyne phase much better than the “sex positive” movement would generally expect. And I’ve found anecdotally that most of them have much more romantic “firsts” (first kiss to loss of virginity) than the average. Funny isn’t it?
Yikes…those were definitely
Submitted by Kaija (not verified) on Wed, 2010-02-03 17:10.Yikes…those were definitely bad years. I grew suddenly tall and was clumsy until I adjusted, I had braces and bad glasses, I was totally bored in school and other kids picked on me because I was so awkward. I hated my hair and my ever changing body that never changed the way I wanted it to and like Red, I became aware that expectations that were automatically lumped on me due to my gender were mostly BS and that made me angry (along with everything else…I was probably a very very bitchy kid at the time). But I got through it in time to get floored by the brand new brand of BS in high school…heh. College was definitely where I hit my stride/ found my people but it took way too long to get there, to my recollection!
Honestly though, I’m glad I’m not going through middle school now. There seems to be way more pressure to “grow up” and act grown…this whole “tween” thing that seems to translate to “acting and dressing like a teenager” before you even hit puberty. And while the teasing and social jockeying that went on was not fun, at least when I left school, I left that whole world behind and got a reprieve till the next morning so I could lick my wounds and catch my breath and have long conversations with the cat (she was a good listener). I can’t imagine dealing with 24/7 connectivity via Facebook and MySpace and text messaging and the internet at that age…
I remember some of those
Submitted by Shadow (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 15:16.I remember some of those ‘expectations’. There was at some point a ‘you must wear fashion clothes’ thing going on and I absolutely refused to spend more than double the money for a pair of pants just to get ‘the right name’. I went anti fashion for a few years until I started to just not care and decided to just go with whatever I liked.
But for a few years I went anti with a lot of things, whenever all the other girls went like ‘Oh, must have! It’s in!’. That didn’t really seep out of me until late in my teenage years.
I don’t think it was until I hid the twenties I really found people where all that stuff didn’t matter and in whose company I didn’t have to pretend to be someone else or act in a certain manner. That was also when I started to find real happiness.
So I guess the pressure from other girls or boys really do have an enormous effect on people.
(Of course my quest in finding my own place and happiness was detoured by the loss of one of my parents, but I was stubborn and fought on).
[Yikes, Shadow! For what its worth, I have a feeling almost everyone gets that sense of rebellion you felt — it’s just that everyone takes it out in different ways. Rebellion or submission it’s all about dealing with seriously hard changes. Thanks. —fl]
Yeah, it is. My rebellious
Submitted by Shadow (not verified) on Fri, 2010-02-05 16:10.Yeah, it is. My rebellious ways was more directed at a ‘don’t put me in a box!’ And mostly at others my age, since I was very much put in a box by my classmates. (The sentence ‘you’re not like that’ or ‘you can’t do that, because that’s not you’ was annoying as hell. What did they know about me, anyway?).
I know from some of my friends that many (girls) do end up rebelling against their classmates, perhaps more than their parents and the older generation. I think that really says something about the pressure and expections upheld by teens themselves.
Others just close off and retreat inward to escape the chaos that it can be.
Me, I did both. I haven’t actually thought about this for a long time, but now I remember that I used to create ‘secret personalities’ that was my retreat inside my mind. They were in some way always [i]stronger[/i] than me and I did have another name I used with it. It was part of my way of dealing with the outside world. Gave me a private place to find strength.
Otherwise I was fairly conforming even if I refused to follow what was ‘in’. It was just easier that way.
I’ll use recess as a case
Submitted by R (not verified) on Wed, 2010-02-03 18:58.I’ll use recess as a case study for the changes I observed/ experienced between the genders from elementary school and middle school.
In elementary school, everyone played actively at recess- tag, four square, swings, basketball, whatever. And even though the “best friend” pairs/ groups tended to divide along gendered lines, the play/ sports groups were fairly mixed.
In middle school, the guys played sports and the girls talked about the guys (this is a gross generalization but not an untrue one). I think this is when most of the girls of my acquaintance learned project what one might call emotional narratives onto the boys. Since the boys weren’t really interested in the whole dating thing, but the girls really really were, the girls ascribed huge amounts of meaning to small actions of the boys in order to create the scenario they were so fascinated by. The sheer amount of time spent by girls that age wondering “does he like me” was, well, pretty amazing.
I have no idea what the guys were thinking about the girls at that time. I’m fairly certain they were bewildered by the “do you like x?” questions they were asked by x’s best friends, though. On a weekly basis. This is why middle school dances are a cruel, cruel joke.
The scary thing is, this whole narrative habit totally carries on through adulthood for most women. The amount of subtext the average woman reads into perfectly innocent questions/ comments made by the average male is frankly frightening. The number of times I’ve been asked by a female friend “what do you think he means by this” would be comical if it weren’t so sad. So now I try to even the score by explaining the level of meaning innocent comments carry to my male friends. I hope it helps.
[“The scary thing is, this whole narrative habit totally carries on through adulthood…” Wow, R, that’s exactly the sort of thing I think isn’t given enough attention — stuff we continue to carry with us into adulthood from those points of upheaval. Girls do it with their narratives, leading to Cosmo style insecurity. Boys do it with theirs, leading to Details/Esquire/chickenhawk insecurity about “manliness” Thanks, R. —fl]
The adults around me always
Submitted by Nobody Likes Me (not verified) on Wed, 2010-02-03 20:55.The adults around me always said “You’re a late bloomer, it’s OK, don’t worry about it.”
I’m female, but I was a tomboy as a kid, my friends were mostly boys, and it’s true, physically I was a late bloomer. I got my drivers license before I got my period. I always considered myself flat chested and was honestly shocked when I realized it was no longer true (when I was in college!).
I was tall, and I got that height early. By 6th grade I was taller than most of my teachers. There was one girl who was taller than me, thank god, and I watched with fear, horror, and silent sympathy as she was picked on, not just by other kids but by teachers too.
In elementary school I felt that I was continuously being picked on and bullied. I’m not sure how true that belief was, but it was real to me then. In fifth grade, my parents paid tuition to send me to another school, hoping it would help me socially. It didn’t, but I knew that money was hard to find, so I kept it from them, I didn’t want them to know I had failed, when they had spent all this money to buy me a second chance to fit in. In 6th grade I told them it was OK, I would go back to the old school. They marveled at how much the year in the expensive school had helped me, and I never, ever told them. In fourth grade the cruelties were still fairly gender neutral; girls got kicked around and messed up on the playground just like boys. In sixth grade, suddenly the other girls were very grown up, and the cruelties were very gendered and almost entirely verbal, so they were easier to conceal from parents.
I was a reader. If you could get me to completely pull my head out of a book, I would talk a blue streak about the exciting things I had read. But mainly I was irritable at the interruption and longing to get back to that other world, or entirely absent and impervious to anything going on around me. This probably contributed mightily to my social difficulties. It doesn’t make you popular to be irritable or to outright ignore overtures most of the time, and then to chatter like mad, and then to mentally drift away on them when they speak in turn. People notice.
Middle school cruelties from girls can be considerably deflected by pretending you don’t care about your appearance, and by not trying to enter the boyfriend stakes. If you’re not a challenger for status, girls like to think they are nice, and they will make an effort to not be cruel. If you challenge them, they will take you down in some more subtle way, but I became fairly successful at not attracting those types of attentions, during middle school.
Middle school cruelties from boys took on a different flavor. They would tell me I was an ugly dog, and engage in a lot of really gross sexual harassment. One boy in my middle school used to always sit down near me, spread his legs, point at his crotch and say “Hey, ugly dog, here’s your lunch! Lunch!” He thought this was explosively funny. I was completely at a loss for how to react. The adults tell you to ignore that stuff. This is an example of adult idiocy, I think. How can you convincingly pretend you didn’t notice something like that? And when you’re the only 13 year old girl in school (or so it seems) that has yet to get her period or a bra, you feel completely unqualified to cope with all this sexual stuff. Though I suppose the girls who matured earlier fared no better. A lot of this is probably just the boys showing off for each other, establishing their positions in the boy pecking order by stepping on the girls who don’t fight back.
I sometimes wonder if I would have fared better in these harassment scenes, if I’d been able to think of witty comebacks that made them fear for their status when they tangled with me. Maybe not. How many 13 year old girls can do that, and if they did, what would other people think about them? They’re supposed to be blushing and innocent, and you’d need some amount of worldliness to tangle wits with the likes of Mr Dogs-Need-Lunch. And if you get known as someone worldly or sophisticated, your classmates probably throw something else unmanageable at you, like actual sexual assaults from older boys (or men) and whisper campaigns from the girls. There were “sluts” in my class as well. Maybe it’s better to just be obviously uncomfortable and let them have their victory when it’s just words, sticks and stones.
I remember, though, looking pityingly at the teachers in middle school, thinking very clearly that this was hell. I realized even then that eventually I would outgrow school, and move into my destiny as a crazy old maid cat lady, but at least when I was an old maid I would be alone. Meanwhile the poor teachers would be stuck here in middle school forever!
I never had any doubts about being as smart as the boys, or of my ability to do math or science. I’d heard my mother talk about these things with her friend who was on the school board, but it didn’t seem like anything that actually applied to me in the real world. I could do anything I wanted, academically. The way I saw it, the problem was that I was ugly, awkward, unable to do athletic stuff, and therefore no one would ever love me – I’d never marry. So I needed some sort of job, someday, so I could get that place with the cats and no one there to yell at me or hassle me about how homely I was.
Who’d have ever thought I’d have boyfriends someday? Me?
Middle school cruelties from
Submitted by Lynn Gazis-Sax (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 23:29.Ah, maybe that’s why I never got any of the middle school cruelties from other girls that I hear other women complain about. I was really, truly, totally uninterested in the boyfriend stakes at that age, and didn’t particularly care about appearance. I was intensely competitive about grades, but if other middle school girls were more threatened by boyfriend competition, that may not have mattered.
The thing I remember was that boys used to cluster in groups and shout at me, “Will you go steady with me?” (I suppose the phrasing of that shows my age.) Something about the way it was delivered made it sound as insulting to me as if they’d said I was an ugly dog, but at least they weren’t physically bullying me the way they did in grade school, so it was still an improvement.
[Ooh, that last anecdote nicely backs up a further concern about boys’ readiness vs. peer pressure to be read, as articulated in the following post about Lil Wayne. When you’re not ready but you think you’re supposed to be then, yeah, it’s pretty harsh when they get in groups. Even worse when they’re so wrapped in their heads and sure of their insignificance it never occurs to them how much impact they have on others. Uggh! Thanks, Lynn. —fl]
I had non stop savage
Submitted by Adela (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 01:33.I had non stop savage violence and sexual abuse from both genders in school for grades 5-12 over 6 different schools which would be 1978-1985. Attempted gang rape on a field trip was the last straw for me. The adults were useless. I learned jaded bitter cynicism in everything and everyone early and deeply. In hindsight I should have been making them bleed for it when ever they attacked rather than fearing additional reprisal and adult authority consequences.
The only thing that’s changed is you hear a lot more hand wringing outcry and impotent lip service to prevention and helping victims but it is still a hell hole once the adults look away.
Amazing how many adults, except actual victims, have amnesia about what middle school is really like.
I went to three different
Submitted by Nobody Likes Me (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 12:30.I went to three different schools between grades 5 and 12, and apart from playground scuffling, or petty acts like shoving, hat snatching, spitting and snowballs, I never encountered violence. The sexual abuse was also petty – lots of crude verbal nastiness, occasional groping or yanking of clothes, mooning, etc. Soul destroying stuff, but nothing that ever left physical marks.
I wonder if you had less burdensome levels of supervision? Not to blame your parents, so much as perhaps a reason to forgive my own parents. I was painfully well chaperoned, to the point where I experienced my childhood as a prison. I have always resented them for that.
I would also say, based on the things I did endure, and the typical adult reactions, if something more awful had happened to me, I would probably have blamed myself and avoided reporting it if I could. I learned very early that the typical adult responses would be one of these:
1. They do it because you react. Stop reacting.
2. Sticks and stones.
3. What did you do to provoke them?
4. Stick up for yourself, but don’t do anything we might find out about.
5. It’s all your fault. We’ll see to it that you are sorry you told us.
Jeez. Did anybody actually
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 12:18.Jeez. Did anybody actually like middle school?
[One thing that did happen for me was I found a group of people I could be very close friends with — other classic nerd-patrol types, of which there are rarely more than one per elementary-school class. But in middle school (technically Jr. High for my city) six or eight of us were able to come together. That part was great. Thanks, Ozymandias. —fl]
I actually have great
Submitted by Mike (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 12:48.I actually have great memories of that time in my life…of course there were the awkward times, but I honestly have to say the the good times and positive memories definitely drown out the negative ones. Reading the comments of others, I seem to be in the minority, but I’d re-live that time in my life anyday!!
Mike
It sounds like from the
Submitted by Shadow (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 15:41.It sounds like from the comments that middle school was tough for the girls.
Perhaps because the girls’ bodies change in more readily appearent ways?
You get picked on if you change early, getting breasts and hips, and you get picked on if you change late, having no breasts or hips to speak of.
The first girl to get breasts in my class had to endure a lot of shirt pulling, especially from the boys. I didn’t envy her at all.
i remember the girl who
Submitted by sunflwer75 (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 23:54.i remember the girl who developed early in 4th grade. people noticed. she was labeled a slut at a young age. finally at 27 she had breast reduction.
I think it was 5th with my
Submitted by Shadow (not verified) on Fri, 2010-02-05 16:17.I think it was 5th with my class… But I’m not entirely sure. Of course she got a lot of breast and hip, so there was no way she could have hidden the changes. It lessened when other girls started changing, too, but it never completely stopped during those years. Just changed nature, I guess.
(Of course if you’re large breasted there’s that other consideration of back problems and that is always a good reason to consider breast reduction).
I at first didn’t know how to
Submitted by sunflwer75 (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 21:28.I at first didn’t know how to respond to this entry, I wanted to wait and see what others said.
i already said what happened when i was 12. I was a tomboy and had a older brother. just before he got into paintball he played war games with his friends. I joined in to be a nurse but one of his friends made me his hostage. i was developing breasts and he noticed. as a hostage i had to be tied up on occasion, lets just say some of what he did was wrong and obvious abuse.
In Jr High boys were immature trying to be mature.
my most embarrassing moment was my teacher asking if I had chicken pox when it was acne, in front of other students.
I hid my body under baggy clothes to not be noticed and developed bad posture as my breast grew. for girls the changes going on in her mind and body are whacky and just as confusing. A radio personality out of LA talked about this issue, one his daughter’s friends creeped him out with what seemed to be a bit of flirting, this girl was 12.
its mucky and a very murky issue as you have pedophiles who use this normal behavior and development as a way to to support their sickness. or as a defense. Just look at well known cases like Elisabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard (sp) as examples, both in middle school.
the other things i remember were bad haircuts and neon nail polish.
[“its mucky and a very murky issue…” Yes, definitely! Just because someone’s body is kicking into gear, and just because he or she is interested in flirting, it’s really not likely that they’re “ready” for full-contact interactions, and certainly not with adults. This is way too-much overlooked by too many adults. I mean, it’s not that it can’t be done, it’s that it often sets up pretty miserable dynamics after the interfered-with child becomes an adult. Waiting just a handful of years can make a huge difference for the rest of a lifetime, which is just one of the reasons I call this blog what, well, I call it. Thanks, sunflwer75. —fl]
My experiences were not as
Submitted by chingona (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 23:44.My experiences were not as extreme as yours, but I also developed physically at an early age and it created some very confusing situations. I remember being maybe 12 or 13 and walking home from a friend’s house by myself in the summer and a man drove by in a truck and catcalled me. And I was flattered and gave him a little wave. Then he drove around the block and caught up with me a few blocks later and started driving really slowly next to me as I walked and trying to chat me up and get me to go with him. I was absolutely petrified. I was starting to want to be sexual. I had thoughts and desires. But I had never even kissed anyone. I had no idea what to do with that, how I would act with a boy, and no idea of what I was projecting to grown men. And at the same time, this man was probably in his 40s. Could he really not see that I was way too young to be messing with, even if he didn’t realize quite how young I was?
And I too wore lots of baggy clothes and developed really bad posture to try to hide my body.
[Aarg! If only guys like that got that they wouldn’t have to resort to stalking little girls if they’d just stop stalking little girls! Because people (men and women) who aren’t freaked out by sexual pressure before they’re ready tend to be waaaay more sexually self-confident, capable, and comfortable as adults. Instead, on top of everything else that’s going on with bodies, hormones, mushrooming cognitive development, and peer pressure, there’s that whole extra layer of adult interference. #%
Thanks, Chingona. —fl]
What’s your recollection of
Submitted by Lynn Gazis-Sax (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-04 23:20.I skipped kindergarten and spent grade school as almost the smallest in my class, and physically bullied by boys who, since everyone in my grade was a year older than me, were bigger than me. I hit back when bullied, so I got into a lot of grade school fights.
The junior high school growth period when girls grew faster than boys meant that, though I was still one of the smaller girls, I was no longer smaller than all the boys who had bullied me in grade school. The number of boys who tried to physically bully me in junior high dropped drastically, and I was glad of this. I was even on civil speaking terms with a few boys.
I did not, however, experience a surge in interest in the opposite sex, as some other people did in junior high. I’m pretty sure I didn’t develop sexual or romantic interests ahead of the average boy my age.
Some others my age were a lot more interested in flirting than I was.
[It’s totally impractical for a million other reasons, but sometimes I think it would be really nice if there was a way for girls to start school about two years ahead of boys — based on a lot of in-class parent volunteering so much of the “boys are trouble” discipline problems people brass on about seem to be more about immaturity. It would make puberty a little more synchronized as well. The problem, of course, is that somewhere between, like, 16 and 21 boys catch up with their chronological ages… which then on-average would put girls at the disadvantage. Thanks for the insights, Lynn. —fl]
I remember that a few girls
Submitted by chingona (not verified) on Fri, 2010-02-05 00:01.I remember that a few girls got interested in boys around 5th grade, and I remember one girl having a boyfriend, but I don’t know that it’s socially acceptable for girls to be interested in boys that young. I also remember most of the girls looking down on the girl who had a boyfriend and calling her a slut, even though I think all they did was hold hands.
Which led, though, to a conversation with my father that resulted in the best advice I ever received about sex – and I got it at a very young age, young enough that it probably made a difference. I made a comment to him about a girl who let her boyfriend put his hand on her ass and said something about him “taking advantage of her.” And he told me something to the effect of sometimes he puts his hand on my mother’s behind, and it’s something that people who like each other and feel attracted to each other like to do, and there’s nothing wrong with it. And then (this is the part that stuck with me), he told me that the important thing was to not do things that I didn’t want to do, and if I only did things I wanted to do, I couldn’t be taken advantage of.
[Wow. I wonder where your dad got that? Because it’s not part of the regular parenting script. (That doesn’t mean wisdom or compassion in parents isn’t way more common than we grow up believing, it’s that there really aren’t scripts for it so each parent has to roll their own or go without.) Anyway, I really appreciate the way he distinguished acceptability and what each person is ready to accept. A big example I haven’t talked about for a while is marriage: it’s totally acceptable to have sex on your wedding night, even if you’ve never had it before, but despite a little prayer, a piece of paper, and a piece of white cake the principals still might not be ready. Your dad really did give you good advice. Thanks, Chingona. —fl]
For better and for worse, my
Submitted by chingona (not verified) on Sat, 2010-02-06 08:17.For better and for worse, my dad wasn’t a guy who went by the regular parenting scripts. Part of it came from his character and part of it came from being just 19 when he had me. He became a parent when he was still in full scale rebellion against what he saw as his own parents’ hypocrisy. But he was and still is a big believer in giving it to kids straight and in the idea that they’re smart enough to see right through it if you try to bullshit them. He approached drugs the same way – being really honest about what was addictive and dangerous and what was kind of fun and fairly harmless – because he thought that kids who had been lied to about marijuana would decide adults were lying about everything when they smoked their first joint and didn’t go bonkers. As for sex, he ended up being less comfortable with the reality of me being a sexual person in my later teen years than he was in the abstract with that potentiality when I was younger, but even then, he ultimately was able to realize that as long as I was being safe, this was his problem to deal with, not one to inflict on me. I’m so, so grateful for that, especially given all the other crap that one ends up dealing with (as discussed in my earlier comment). Not only did I not have a heaping dose of parental guilt and shame to work through, he taught me that my sexuality belonged to me.
Much of what I wrote in this
Submitted by Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) on Fri, 2010-02-05 09:52.Much of what I wrote in this post talks about junior high school.
I manufactured reasons to stay after school – math team, working in the school store, art projects, whatever – so I wouldn’t have to take the bus home. (I already didn’t take the morning bus because I took a class at the high school first period.) The bus home happened to contain the faction of boys that had personally dedicated themselves to making my life hell: sexualisation, groping that at least stopped when I hit the boy in question hard enough that he fell on his ass, constant sexual comments. I could not escape them during the school day (in particular they were also all in my gym class), but at least I could avoid the bus. (Complaints to the school principal – who happened to adore me as the star student of the time – produced “Boys will be boys, you know”, demonstrating to me that even people who claimed loyalty and affection were lying liars who lied.)
I had one friend in junior high school: the boy they all hated more than they hated me. So we wound up sloshing around together in the bottom of the bucket. It wasn’t much to base a friendship on, but it was better than complete solitude; we had someone to eat lunch with. Of course, because I was female, he figured that my hanging out with him meant that he owned my sexuality too, so despite never asking me if I was romantically interested in him, he assumed it.
I was younger than my peers and a late physical developer to boot; none of this meant I was anything other than a sex object. It’s damage that probably led to me being nearly raped freshman year of high school, because human contact was so precious that I forgave and glossed over boundary violations for a long time.
I went to a non-local high school to avoid the sexual harassment. I knew that if I tried to continue in an environment containing those people it would be Bad.