In this piece in today’s Guardian, Deborah Orr asks where the women have gone in contemporary literature.

All of the top five bestselling titles in this week’s Sunday Times Bestseller list included the word Girl. Not woman, but girl. As Orr notes:

In the 1970s, there was a groundswell of opinion suggesting that “girl” was a highly pejorative way of describing a female who was over 18, used to belittle her and rob her of status. Yet these books all lay claim to celebrating female power. Perhaps “girl” is being reclaimed, like the n-word before it.

But in these books (and in popular culture more generally), the term ‘girl’ isn’t used in an ironic or confrontational sense. It isn’t being appropriated to undermine its pejoritive sense; instead, it infantilises its female characters, labelling them as as immature and unthreatening.

While some might say the use of the term girl to describe adult females is harmless – flattering, even, with its implications that the subject is still young and pretty. But we’re now 15 years on from the era of Girl Power, and still I find it patronising and belittling when used to describe a grown woman. When, at work last year, someone referred to me as ‘girl’, the implications were clear; they weren’t referring to my clear(ish) skin – they were questioning my maturity and professional experience.

The message from these book titles, says Orr, is that women are dreary and past-it, while girls are dynamic and exciting. She worries that, in popular culture “women are being infantilised, and that they prefer it that way”.

To me the argument is a little more chicken-and-egg than that. Do women really prefer to be infantilised? Or are we conditioned by popular culture to believe being young and infantile – being a girl – is preferable to maturity and womanhood?

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