Good Girls aren’t supposed to want

Express yourself; don’t repress yourself.

— Madonna

For ages, girls have always walked on a tightrope. We were always expected to perform a strange act of balance. Girls are supposed to be attractive, but not too eager. Girls can be sexy, but never horny. Girls can be sexualized, but never to sexualize.

And if we do the opposite, we’re at risk of being labelled as… “that kind of girl”. Of course, you know what that ‘kind’ means. Or whatever that means in this great age.

While men talk about sex like discussing the weather, we women are repressed — or repressing ourselves — from being sexually literate. To somehow have to learn how to act unfamiliar with desire itself. If we engage in those types of conversations, then voila, social structure may label you as a naughty girl.

Desiring a desire

At some point, the Great Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed of mounting the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object of every necrophiliac’s lust — the innocent, victimized Sleeping Beauty, beauteous lump of ultimate, sleeping good. — Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin

Do you remember the first boy who liked to pick on you in kindergarten or primary school? Yes, I do. I remember there was once a boy who was constantly picking on me, pulling my hair tie, and even scaring me with disgusting frogs. When I told my teacher about it, she said: “Ah… that means he got a crush on you!”

A crush.

So that means he wants me, right?

But if he wants me, why does he make me scared?

From an early age, girls are taught to become pretty before they are taught to understand desire. This prettiness is not merely grounded in appearance but also in our behavior. You might hear these lines often: “sit like a lady, “don’t run around; it’s not very ladylike,” even before we knew what it meant to be a lady. On the other hand, boys could come back to the class with scraped knees, an untucked shirt, and messy, sweaty hair, while girls are being corrected for even sitting slightly wide. Disturbing girls’ peace is often dismissed as ‘boys will be boys,’ as if male recklessness is natural and female discomfort merely collateral damage.

Honestly, if I were a boy, I would feel insulted. What do you mean my natural traits are supposedly destructive, reckless, and incapable of basic empathy?

Adolescence is the most important phase in shaping a girl’s thought patterns and her self-perception, both sexually and socially. In middle school, I had lots of female friends who were obsessed with Korean boy bands. Those girls were mocked because they simply liked somebody and constantly thought about it. The issue is not really K-pop. It is the discomfort people still have with girls showing their desire. Hence, in social spaces, these girls are dismissed as ‘cringe’, ‘hysterical’, or ‘shallow’.

Meanwhile, boys’ obsessions, like football, gaming, and cars, are rarely mocked with the same level of contempt. And pornography, sometimes more visibly treated as ‘what boys do’ among boys’ friendship circles and society, seems to be approved of. They don’t mock boys who are obsessed with porns with the same enthusiasm as they mock girls with K-pop addiction.

The high-school era is where relationships are treated as something serious and life-altering events for us pre-adults. During that time, I remember having a crush on a boy. It was innocent, nothing overt, just simple admiration. I followed his Instagram page, replied to his stories, and smiled at him in school hallways. But what baffled me was my friends’ reaction — especially my female friends’.

“You shouldn’t do that,” they said.

“You have to let your feminine energy come out by acting cold and make him chase you instead.”

What? I never understood the logic behind that. I was the one who wanted him, not the other way. Why do I have to act passively to preserve my femininity? Why does femininity require disingenuousness over one’s desire? And now we can see that even girls are now brainwashed about the idea of being ‘feminine’, which requires them to act passively, silently, and be an ‘object’ for boys to chase or fight over. If we do the opposite, we somehow perform an act tied to manhood.

Moving on to where my life is now, the young adult era. My understanding of desire and womanhood has slowly formed through observation and exposure to different ideas. Sex life is now part of daily conversation, no matter whether it’s around boys or girls. But I still notice a difference between the two genders. While boys are talking about it as something victorious, girls are more burdened with social expectations and vulnerable to consequences. Whether because they get pregnancy scares, or simply don’t know how to enjoy themselves first before they give something to their partners. I remember my friend’s story where she accidentally dropped her wallet in a cafe. Her concern wasn’t money, important IDs, or cards. But a condom that she put in her wallet.

She stated to me that if the worker in the cafe found it, she’d be embarrassed because of it. Especially because it was a woman’s wallet, and inside it was a condom. Not because carrying one was wrong, but because people would immediately assume what kind of woman carries one. Long before girls learn how to understand their own desires, but about what female desire still represents in the public imagination.

The Good Girls Factory

… if the oppressor were aware of the demands of his own freedom, he himself should have to denounce oppression. But he is dishonest; in the name of the serious of his passions, of his will for power… — The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir

Looking back, I think girlhood often feels like a long training program on how to become desirable without ever appearing too desiring yourself. We have seen how girls are mostly shaped from an early age through tiny humiliations: corrections to our posture, behavior, and how to preserve our ‘femininity’ by being silent, and more importantly, not showing any desire the way boys do. A girl tends to learn that there’s always somebody watching her performance. And this, this is how Good Girls are manufactured. Good Girls learns to edit herself before they even understand who they are.

None of those experiences felt political to me at that time.

A boy pulling at my hair. K-pop girls are constantly mocked. Advice from friends to act cold, silent, and passive to get a boy’s attention because somehow those traits are more feminine. The odd contradiction about having a condom in a woman’s wallet.

Individually, those events are harmless. Even trivial. But together, when I stack it up in one tower of social structure, it begins to show a pattern.

A pattern where femininity is rewarded when it remains passive, restrained, but somehow — still consumable within male desire. Where femininity is only plausible when you are centering male approval.

This pattern has a name: patriarchy.

Bleh.

Again?

A lot of people hear patriarchy and still think in shallow ways. Abusive fathers, parents who prioritize sons rather than daughters, or husbands who won’t do housework. It’s true, but those are still the products of patriarchy, not the definition of patriarchy itself. In this modern age, patriarchy works in subtler, quieter mechanisms. It lives in social expectations. In jokes. School hallways. Dress codes. And even in how girls relentlessly monitor themselves before they understand why they have to do so. The factory doesn’t use lethal force alone, but it uses repetitive patterns in social structure generation by generation until it is embedded in individuals — whether a girl or a boy.

In Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman writes:

“Patriarchy constitutes the division between the private and public spheres, where civil freedom is a masculine attribute that depends upon the subjection of women. It ensures men’s orderly access to women’s bodies and labor…”

At first glance, it may sound abstract. But perhaps that’s precisely how patriarchy survives. It is already stitched neatly into ordinary life, until it no longer feels foreign in the sheet of life. And until it stops being political altogether.

The Good Girls Factory is one of the patriarchy’s biggest investments. The mechanism works because it produces the main source of patriarchy’s life. Which is obedience.

Girls are not merely taught how to behave in society. Deeper than that, they are taught to become socially acceptable to men, so behaving came as a byproduct of the factory itself. Desire and bluntness about sexuality are somehow unnatural to girls and need to be disciplined. A girl is allowed to be beautiful, seductive, and even sexually available — but only if she preserves the male’s control over the interaction. Openly sexual girls are treated as unserious beings; moreover, they often face ‘punishment’ from society. Slut-shaming is one of the punishments. People weaponize women’s sexuality against them to bring down their dignity. Patriarchy uses this to control the narrative of women’s worth by reducing women’s rights for their own sexuality by promoting ‘virginity’ and ‘innocence’.

Like what Pateman said, that freedom for men under patriarchal norms is merely dependent on the subjectification of women. Patriarchy believes men are the ‘masters’ and that women are subjects who must be dominated to acquire certain ‘masculine’ power. So, across time, it creates a narrative where a horny man is considered ‘normal’, and a horny woman becomes a warning label — something unnatural and compromised.

I noticed this during countless hangouts with both boys and girls. Boys would throw sexual jokes casually across the table, sometimes just to watch the girls react. Most of them just beat around the bush, showing minimal discomfort, and pretending they care less than they do. And strangely, this certain act of distance is often rewarded. The quieter girls were often treated as more ‘innocent’, ‘pure’, and ‘feminine’. The perfect product of Good Girls Factory.

I realized this even more whenever I threw back at them — not flirtatiously, just with the same casualness they used among themselves. The atmosphere would shift dramatically like a theatre play. Some laughed awkwardly, some just stared. It was just a girl speaking fluently in the language of sexuality, and it turned out that it disrupted the role they unconsciously expected her to perform.

There’s a contradiction I really want to sink my teeth into. Women are expected to be sexually attractive without trying too much, and simultaneously could satisfy partners, but somehow remain pure. Society under patriarchy wants women to master sexuality without admitting they possess desire themselves. They are allowed, only if it remains in their cage or on their own minds, without being fully allowed to express.

Last words for The Good Girls

Sex may be conjured away, but the question remains why such difficulty is encountered in distinguishing women’s consent from enforced submission, and why men demand to buy women’s sexual submission in the capitalist market. — Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman

The Good Girls take the patriarchy’s narrative for granted because they are taught that obedience is rewarded by safety and protection. I hate to admit it, but hell, it’s true. But not entirely.

Patriarchy creates both protection and violation. Like a factory protecting its own products, patriarchy offers women a form of conditional protection — one that lasts only as long as they remain acceptable within its system. This protection requires a terms and conditions form, and The Good Girls have to tick all the boxes.

For ages, I have met many girls who are either avoidant about sexuality or haven’t even once tried to explore their bodies. And some, surprisingly, did not fully understand female anatomy beyond what school books briefly taught them. At the same time, I rarely met boys with the same unfamiliar experience regarding their own sexuality. And I realized it now, male sexual explorations are more normalized as something instinctive, while female curiosity with their body is something taboo and dirty.

So, I found something empowering about being loud about women’s sexuality. Not because women are encouraged to perform sexual openness, nor because liberation means reckless hook-up culture, but because female desire deserves to exist openly without immediately being treated as shameful, dangerous, or morally suspicious. An equal and healthier understanding of both genders’ experiences in exploring desire will create less social burden for one gender. Perhaps then, the curse words related to women’s sexuality would not exist at all.

It’s complex to be a good girl, right? Yes, because they are constantly viewing themselves and their worth under the male gaze. To preserve the myth of masculinity and femininity.

And they can only exclaim that they are worthy only if it is acceptable to the male gaze.

A Good Girl is expected to discover her body through male desire, not through her own curiosity.

Perhaps that is why I never fully became one.

I touched myself long before I ever let a man touch me.