The tears came the night the Australians beat Canada in the Women’s World Cup.
It wasn’t at the beginning of the match, with anxiety, when the Matildas marched out to play knowing the match was do-or-die for their World Cup hopes, star skipper Sam Kerr on the bench and not quite – not yet – recovered from injury. It wasn’t with relief at the nine-minute mark, when Australia’s Hayley Raso scored that first, dam-busting goal. It wasn’t even at the end of the game when the whistle blew. Australia’s thundering 4-0 triumph over the Olympic champs obliged sportswriters worldwide to acknowledge Australia didn’t merely beat the Canadians; Australia destroyed them.
I wasn’t even crying about the game. What had me reaching for tissues was a brief cutaway shot of the crowd, broadcast at some point between Raso’s first beautiful goal and her second beautiful goal. The camera had found the faces of some Australian girls – maybe 11 years old – in the stands. They were decked in Australia’s green-and-gold colours, cheeks and foreheads smeared with matching paint. They were exuberant with fandom, they were excited at being on camera, and they were cheering – roaring – climbing over one another in their plastic seats, exhilarated by the women’s game … and unafraid of what it meant to show it.
The scene provoked in me a feeling writer John Koenig dubbed “anemoia” in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: “Nostalgia for a time or place that one has never known.” To see the wild, thrilled faces of those girls was to remember the euphorias of my own girlhood that, sadly, never got to include howling through a game of top-flight international professional women’s football. I longed to yoke their present to my past.
Between this World Cup and the Barbie movie, western culture is beginning a tentative, honest discussion about the reality of girlhood. As western women – in groups, in pink – revisit their experiences of a shared cultural object common to very diverse childhoods, what the movie is helping us all to remember is the intensity of feeling, of connection and of play that exists in girlhood … with the realisation that our culture’s long-term habit has been to erase our exuberance from public view, replacing us with lifeless bourgeois cliches about what we should resemble rather than who we really are.
I am 48. Raised in a sports-mad household, I was enthralled by the drama, the tension, the ambition and competitiveness of sport. Yet the cultural objects my entire western generation absorbed – from pop songs to Xanadu, nursery rhymes, weekend Beach Party movie reruns and, yes, Barbie dolls – portrayed girlhood as an experience of demure naivety, the overriding object of which was to be thought of as pretty, agreeable and neat. I wasn’t any of these things, so as I grew into adolescence I faked it, learning – laboriously – how to camouflage my true nature for the benefit of mixed company. There were few alternative cultural role models. Even the most powerful female athletes of my childhood – the tennis players, the FloJos, the gymnasts – were hailed for the feminine performances that patriarchal media narratives deployed to obscure their strength.
What the Barbie movie evinces so deftly is a confession made in front of other women that even Barbie is exhausted by the social performance of being Barbie. If you’re still confused about why western women are booking out theatres to see this film, it’s because in our culture girls learn young that there are only two places they can be their authentic, excited selves: on their own or with other girls. At least half of the film’s appeal is its pretext for women to physically congregate with their girl gang in a cultural space where they can be rambunctious in the present and reconnect emotionally to the rambunctiousness of the past.
The poem that decided little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice” is 200 years old, catnip to patriarchs, and a lie. Little girls were never and are not now biscuits baked for someone else’s consumption. Observe girls left to themselves and you’ll find dirt mountaineers and back yard explorers, readers and climbers, art critics and project managers, soldiers, sailors, surveillance specialists, moralists and mess-makers. They’re costume designers and standup comedians and more than one together becomes a parliament of larrikins. It isn’t due to some inherently gendered quality. Girls are curious because all children are curious. Girls are excited by the things they enjoy because all children are excitable. And as they get older, girls grow into young adults who are temperamental and intense, vulgar and rebellious sassy hornbags – yes – because that is what teenagers are.
The World Cup is exciting because it shows girls that the wild, strong, competitive, resilient creatures they are with their friends can be powerful and meaningful in any of the cultural spaces they used to be kept out of. Indeed, that’s precisely why uncompetitive men squeal so furiously to defend unearned domination. Think what it means to a generation of girls to see Australia’s Katrina Gorry play the midfield role of the game’s international “hardmen” like Roy Keane, Vinnie Jones and Patrick Vieira – making tackles, getting kicked, getting up and kicking on. It means the confidence that gives you to embrace youth and young adulthood without pretence, without discomfort, without fear.
I truly weep with envy, but – by Christ – I’m cheering, too.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
