Girls' Talk

The other night I saw a play called John Proctor Is the Villain. I knew very little about it, but I wanted to see a play; I never go because they cost so much. A friend knew how to get less expensive tickets so we went and sat perched in the bleeds, overlooking the stage and down on the action from a distance where the actors faces weren’t clear and a lot of the spoken lines disappeared on the way up to the mezzanine, but I caught enough of it to be moved and delighted. I’m not going to review the play, but to talk about an aspect of it that took me back to my own girlhood, something I loved about my school and my friends. This was the way the girls talked to each other. They talked intellectually about The Crucible, which they were reading in class and doing a project about, and they talked emotionally about their feelings and problems.

The playwright, Kimberly Belflower, caught the difficulty of the teenage Georgia rural schoolgirls trying to find the words for what they needed to express. Sometimes it was so difficult that they ended up babbling or screaming or laughing/crying/laughing. But their effort to talk to each other, both in class and privately, moved them forward in their thinking and their understanding of their place in the world. One girl, the crazy bad girl (surprised?), disagrees with the male English teacher’s contention that John Proctor is one of the great heroes of American theater, because he chose his good name over all other considerations. She argues that his name and his sense of honor doesn’t stack up against the body of the girl he had sex with and discarded. This is a shocker…a necessary one. The others return to her point in a later scene and analyze the first thing Proctor says in the play and the last, as the teacher has taught them to do, to get at a deeper truth of his character. I won’t give away all the twists and turns of their arguments in case you are fortunate enough to see this very good play; what I wanted to reflect on here is the fact of the conversation, and how rarely we see an example in public of people talking a subject through from beginning to end and arriving at something new. I am going to venture that this is because we rarely see girls talking this freely, unless we have teenagers in our houses.

And even then—my undergraduates have told me they are afraid to say their opinions in class for fear of being secretly filmed and ending up the subject of mockery in a group chat or on the Internet. Apparently this happens among friends, too…and been in the news as a cause has of suicides. But there is also communication, as thrillingly depicted on stage. It took me back to my 13 years at an all-girls school where I learned how to have a conversation that built and built and became a kind of object, made by many voices. I was a teenager in the late sixties-early seventies, and the subjects of discussion were urgent and new and exciting, and we spent hundreds of nights sleeping at each others’ houses and staying up to talk. Building building building. I didn’t know how good I had it; I wished I could go to school with boys. But when my wish came true in college I was shocked by their different conversational style, which interrupted and refuted far more than it built. A number of girls from my class went into a depression in college, and having to have conversations this way was no small part of that. Now, what else do we see but interruption and argument? It’s good TV!!!!!! I hate it.

One thing we didn’t talk about much at school was the sexual aggression we were experiencing, some of it incest, some of it “boys being boys.” We lived with this reality without knowing how to build a conversation around it, not even with a therapist or a mother. Why? The answers to that question are known to us now; shame, confusion, not wanting to be the one to get a father or a brother or a boy into trouble, and so on. The inability to discuss these experiences left us with burdens that last to this day. I was very glad to watch the girls in the play discuss the sexual abuse going on around them, but it was a tentative conversation, held not nearly at the level of sophistication or faith that it would lead somewhere as their intellectual classroom builds or even their talks in feminism club. They were fearful of not being believed and fearful of being blamed. Yet when one friend believes another, an enormous energy is released and the end of the play is a shattering of constraints that made it all the way up to the rafters and beyond. It was magnificent!

The things is, girls between eleven and eighteen are not women, no matter how they look or what they are wearing. Nor are they children. They are a special category of human being that we should protect as one of our most valuable resources. They know things that can help both women and children, and men and boys, and people of all genders, and the society as a whole. Can we please allow them their freedom to grow naturally, without hurrying them up by calling them women and critiquing their appearances? Can we listen to the women speaking out about Epstein and his buddies who used them when they were as young as thirteen? Can we wrap our minds about how deeply perverted it is for a man to look at a girl as an object, and insist men stop doing this? Can we face as a culture that this is hardwired into our worldview and has been for millennia, but it shouldn’t be? It’s not just a matter of putting these men in jail, though that would be nice. It’s a matter of listening to girls and taking them seriously and building the world for them.

It was fantastic to hear all the young girls in the audience at the play cheering on the bad girl who liberated herself, with the help of her best friend. But where were the grownups in their lives? Standing right beside them, just like we are. We know what they face, so what are we going to do with our knowledge? Are we going to say that the testimony of the Epstein victims is far down the list of problems facing us now? Or can we raise it up as an example of the problem that lays the groundwork for all the exploitation and extraction and aggression and cruelty and tearing down of societies that we face wherever we look? One of these days we have to, or nothing else is really going to change. Meanwhile, I hope the girls will keep screaming.

The Girls Are Screaming