Throughout history, men have depended on women to tell on each other and keep each other in line.
I think often of the young women who set off and kept the Salem witch trials going, probably knowing that their claims were entirely fictitious yet holding to them anyway. By the end of the trials, fourteen women and five men were executed, their accusations primarily coming from young women and girls. As noted by Megan Abbott, there is something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls, but only so often does the boredom of teenage girls turn an entire community into mass hysteria and deaths. Still today, despite the lack of a formal witch trial, it is the social pressure of women and girls that keep us in line socially.
Throughout my life, I have always been a girl’s girl. I can excuse the crimes of a woman no matter their severity, will condone the actions of my friends to the point of delusion, and try my best to be supportive to my friends no matter what. Despite this, I have never felt like the Other Girls. Never pretty enough, never interested enough in the same things, or interested exactly the same amount but in the wrong ways, too loud, too weird, too gay. For so long, and even still, there is a resentment I nurse deep in my chest for the girls who seemed to fit into this Other Girls role so effortlessly. Boys liked them, they knew what to say, they knew how to look. I couldn’t figure it out, why could they?
