Pop-Up Show- Emily Brown

Things We Teach Our Girls, or The Bubblegum Bitch Manifesto

The Things We Teach Our Girls, or the Bubblegum Bitch Manifesto ______________________________________________________________________________

A wise woman of our time, Marina and the Diamonds™️ once said 

“Hit me with your sweet love, Steal me with a kiss.

 I’m Miss Sugar Pink, liquor liquor lips 

I’m gonna be your bubblegum bitch.”

•From the day she is born, we teach her that she is made of sugar and spice and everything nice so she will never remember a time when her main purpose was not to be as consumable as possible.

• We teach her that she is of value, only because of her relation to her father, her husband, her god, her children, but never for existing in her own right.

• We teach her to hold back tears of frustration from the time she can understand words.

•We tell her that she is not the default, and that the things made for her come with caveats- chick flicks, chick-lit, girl pockets that are fake and necessitate a girl’s purse.

• We pump her full of saccharine bullshit like “why fit in when you were born to stand out?” and then call her an attention whore the moment she finds a niche.

• We teach our girls that any change she tries to enact will only be a desperate, high-pitched screech into the void, while withholding the fact that that void is full of other girls just like her, each wishing she wasn’t so alone.

• We teach her that being conventional makes her basic, that liking anything else makes her a manic pixie dream girl, and that both are her fault.

•We preach the happily ever after, without warning her that it might include hiding money in envelopes so she could leave her husband if she needed to. That she might breastfeed her sixth child while crying against the side of the bathtub, while babies 4 and 5 scream for her attention. That her reality will become making dinner every day for the rest of her husband’s life. That she might have to force a smile and say “It is what it is” after her husband of 35 years is caught cheating with the fourth person and second man in under two years. That she might have a mental break and go on to have kids that she will admit were only so she would have enough pregnancies under her belt to have her insurance pay for a hysterectomy. Or that her husband might forbid her from playing the piano in her own home because he doesn’t like the way it sounds when she does something for herself, or that she might spend the rest of her life having to ape content with silent, self-administered orgasms after her husband rolls over and goes to sleep.

• We teach her to swallow. To swallow his cum, her words, her pride, the lump in her throat, herself- so as to avoid being labeled a bitch.

•We teach her that her body is a temple, but never that she might be worthy of worship.

•We tell her that her personality is something she needs to grow out of.

• We show her that a self-respecting woman keeps an aspirin between her knees and and a Xanax in her purse.

•We teach her to begin and end her sentences with an apology. But we tell her to speak up, to steady her voice and her hands and her knees and that she’d better not cry or she will never be taken seriously.

•We teach her that women brought forth the fall of man, but also the birth of Christ, but then tell her the dichotomy between virgin and whore is an oversimplification and she really shouldn’t be so sensitive.

•We tell her to shrink, to not take up space, to hush and that she’s beautiful when she cries and then act surprised when she swallows pills and slits her wrists in an effort to either appeal to the masses or opt out entirely.

• We tell her to stop crying, to veil her face, to bow her head and say yes.

• We teach our girls that because some man already did it decades before she was born, that her attempt will be unoriginal, trite, and that she shouldn’t even try.

So I am for an art.

I am for an art that is a baby girl’s first wobbly step into the world we did not prepare her for.

I am for an art that is angry, cliché, ham-fisted, off-key, stubborn, self-centered, clumsy, glittery, garish, and god forbid, girly.

I am for an art from a Bubblegum Bitch.