Film helps women rediscover girl power

Doing things "like a girl" is something to be proud of, writes Shelina Janmohamed

The fastest way to insult a male, whether boy or man, is to claim that what he is doing is like a girl. Is he playing baseball? Tell him he “throws like a girl” and you’ll insult him and his technique. If he’s on the football pitch, allude to how he “kicks like a girl” and no one on the grass will take him seriously. Don’t think about entering a relay race with someone who “runs like a girl”. And well, if he “cries like a girl”, then he’s not a real man at all. There are plenty of other examples of negative connotations: “drive like a girl”, “fight like a girl”, “punch like a girl”.

Whatever aspect of life we refer to, it seems that doing it like a girl is the sissy, pathetic option worthy of disdain. Even grown women use the term insultingly. It seems that anything done by females is somehow just not very good. We’ve all absorbed that idea that women apparently can’t do things the “proper” way – that is, the way men and boys do it.

A recent video released by Always, a feminine hygiene brand, explored what it means to do something “like a girl”, and it has notched up more than 17 million views. Director Lauren Greenfield, who won the Sundance Film Festival directing award for The Queen of Versailles, is the voice you hear on film instructing the participants.

The video opens with an attractive young woman being asked to “run like a girl”. I must admit what I imagined was exactly what she did – pointy feet flapping side to side, hair being flicked, a breathless helplessness in the run. Subsequent participants echoed this weedy running. Already I began to question this deep-rooted idea of how girls supposedly do things.

When Greenfield asked young girls to run, they gave it their all, dashing forward with gusto. “That’s how girls run, because I’m a girl,” one of them tells us. I felt proud of them and ashamed of myself. When Greenfield recounts the responses of the young girls to the older women, she asks the women if they’d like to redo their “run like a girl”. And now they run with passion, with strength, with commitment. One of the final participants expresses the lesson: “Everything I do is ‘like a girl’ because, guess what, I’m a girl.”

When did “like a girl” become an insult, asks the video. It then lays forth the challenge: we need to address this hidden insult to girls and women. What girls and women do, and the way that girls and women do it are valuable, legitimate and worthy. By accepting this premise is the only way we can give respect to girls and women.

In this world we live in, where “like a girl” hangs like a dark cloud to insult both men and women, one of the few routes that women have found to be taken seriously rather than as lightweights is to downplay their femininity. But here’s the double whammy: too feminine and she is dismissed as lacking gravitas. But any female who attempts to do things in a male fashion is put back into her girlie box by being called a tomboy, masculine or mannish. This double bind makes women’s position clear: lesser, pathetic but also never capable of breaking out.

I hope that this video will instil pride and respect in doing things like a girl. The key is for our goals to be self-determined and for us to reach them with as much passion as we can ­muster.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk