Girling and Growing Up
by Amy Chu
Last month, I attended a wedding and ate dinosaur nuggets with my high school friends before the reception. I watched my prom date’s baby grow up through Instagram posts. I have multiple friends who’ve lost their parents; my mom still calls to ask if I’m eating enough, or if I have a crush on any boys I’d like to play house with. At the advice of online skincare gurus, I began using retinol when I turned 25. It’s as if every milestone, conversation, and advertisement in my 20s is a reminder of my fleeting girlhood.
Maybe that’s why I recently gravitated to the music of the Linda Lindas, a young all-girl American rock band I discovered too late in multiple senses of the word. While growing up has lately felt discordant and off-key, the Linda Lindas’ 2022 debut album, Growing Up, sounds upbeat and bright.
The Linda Lindas are 20, 17, 18, and 14 years old, and they first went viral with “Racist, Sexist Boy” when they were even younger. At a time when #BLM and #StopAsianHate were trending, and kids, isolated from peers, were asked to stand still with the rest of the planet, the Linda Lindas launched forward with fiery momentum. Plus the Linda Lindas are just plain COOL, which means that when I was their age I was completely unlike them. While the Linda Lindas are colorful, fun, simultaneously carefree and rebelling against injustice, in high school I listened to songs like “How to Save a Life” and “Teardrops on my Guitar.” Nothing about their music reminds me of my actual youth, and yet it makes me feel like a young girl again; it makes me wonder when “growing up” became “aging” and when “girl” became “woman.”
What is a girl?
In Feeling Girl, Girling Feeling: An Examination of “Girl” as Affect, gender studies professor Monica Swindle quotes a passage from researcher Carol Gilligan, a reading of “girl” that goes far beyond age or gender:
“... that intense experience of pleasure, seeing the girls at the beach – their bodies, their freedom. Minnow-like bodies darting in and out of the water. Running on the sand. Dancing, turning. I began to remember an eleven-year-old body and to enter that body. Without thinking I began running, unencumbered, fast like the wind.”
Gilligan identifies girl as a feeling connected to a melding together of other feelings such as freedom, joy, exhilaration, speed, and movement, unencumbered by the self-consciousness (especially surrounding body image), doubt, and destructiveness she argues becomes the norm in middle school and the stuckness and drudgery that can often continue throughout the rest of women's lives. This feeling is a bodily reaction; it literally moves her body in a way that occurs, ‘without thinking,’ before thought.
Just as Gilligan started running, reentering her own 11-year-old body, I started dancing while blasting the Linda Lindas: bopping my head and jumping and grooving my body inside my crammed Cambridge apartment, with moves that could only kindly and sociologically be described as “‘without thinking,’ before thought.” While I’ve written so much about the specific experiences of being young and confused, the Linda Lindas have reminded me that youth is not a fading memory; it is a feeling, meant to be experienced again and again.
The expression of a past life is perhaps integral to surviving the current one, one in which our problems are still the Racist, Sexist Boys. When the same bullies keep trying to convince us we are powerless, why is it more important than ever to feel like a girl? The Linda Lindas explain:
Under the table, we'll whisper in each other's ears
We'll share our hopes and dreams, and all our other greatest fears
And when we get burned from jumping in the fire
We'll never tire, 'cause we'll always find ways to fly higher
We'll dance like nobody's there, we'll dance without any cares
We'll talk 'bout problems we share, we'll talk 'bout things that ain't fair
We'll sing 'bout things we don't know, we'll sing to people and show
What it means to be young and growing up
Though the Linda Lindas have matured into a more visceral and rock-forward sound in their sophomore album, the tune of girlhood remains just as galvanizing. To be a girl is to embody freedom, movement, and joy. To be a girl is to strive towards your truest self. To be a girl is to have fears and to face them with your friends. Let’s grow up, together.
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