Madyson Meyer sits down with Claire Foster and Aaliyah Riley to discuss what girlhood means to them, and how it’s shaped their lives.
Transcript
(Edited for space and clarity).
Madyson Meyer: Hey Atlanta, my name is Madyson Meyer, and today I’m going to be speaking with several of my friends about what girlhood means to us. To get us started off, I’ll be talking to Aaliyah Riley.
Aaliyah Riley: For me, girlhood is really just the experience of growing up being a girl and then also the experience you have with other women. The relationships with other women can be complicated because sometimes you know that somebody’s going to have your back, but then sometimes you know that person can turn against you anytime.
If somebody needs a product, and they’re in the bathroom or something like that, you know somebody’s most likely going to have your back. But if it’s a close friend or something like that, you never know 100% of the time.
I’m not saying that girls are always plotting against each other. It’s just you can see that often. But there’s also good relationships with girls.
At my dance studio, we all have a pretty good relationship with each other. We grew up around each other like sisters. We have fights like sisters. We had a huge argument at a competition one time over a really small detail, and it blew up, and we had to have a talk with our dance teacher.
But even after that, we were still good. We were all still friends because we understood that tensions can get high, but even then, we’re still a team, and we’re all still in this together.
Madyson Meyer: What you said about women and going after each other and competing with each other… For a while now, the term “pick-me girl” has kind of been floating around the internet and even in the real world.
I think “pick-mes” are a good example of a case where women do feel the need to compete with each other. There are some girls that put a lot of their value in men, which isn’t their fault. That’s what society tells us to do. But have you ever encountered a “pick-me girl” in the wild?
Aaliyah Riley: Probably. I can understand a “pick-me girl”— not saying that I am one — but sometimes the needs, just growing up around the need that you have to have male validation, that you have to impress men, which is just absurd. We don’t need to do that.
Honestly, at this point, who cares about them? Who cares? There’s nobody that you need to impress. And I feel like, as a person who grew up being considered weird as a girl, it’s also really different.
Because you’re not always going to be accepted by most women all the time. Because they consider you not adequate to how they feel other women should be.
I mean, it’s not as much of an issue now, but liking anime back then was…
Madyson Meyer: Weird? Yeah.
Aaliyah Riley: It was considered weird.
Madyson Meyer: Now it’s mainstream.
Aaliyah Riley: Right? I can understand how people viewed me as weird. I would view myself as weird back then, too. Don’t get me wrong.
But being severely judged and then having people make up rumors about you.
When I was in third grade, I used to think that Olaf was with me in class, and people would not let that go. In seventh grade, people would still make fun of me. The worst part about it would be women who would make fun of me still. Other girls would be like, “Hey, that girl…” In fourth grade, they were telling this new girl that I believed in Olaf.
I got over that in third grade. I didn’t really believe that. I was just kind of… bored.
But that’s crazy. You’re just going to pit other women against me? I don’t even have a chance. That’s so weird.
Madyson Meyer: Do you have any other stories you want to share about a time where you experienced girlhood or where you just thought, “I love being a woman!” Anything like that?
Aaliyah Riley: Yeah, I do. I remember—I think it was freshman year—I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my natural hair, with my curly hair, and being able to do that well by myself, especially without my mom’s help. So one day, I did my hair. I wasn’t too sure about how it looked. I had done a braid.
It wasn’t the best braid in the world, but I thought that it might be okay because I wasn’t at my mom’s house. I was at my dad’s house. So it was harder for me to be able to get help or be like, “Hey, does this look good? Tell me what to do.”
So when I got to my class, there was this one girl in my class, who also had natural hair. She said, “Oh! I really like your hair!”
I didn’t even point out anything about my hair. She just was like, “I really like your hair.” That made me feel so much better that day.
I don’t need validation constantly from other people to feel good about myself. But getting that from another girl — somebody else who probably could feel the same way as me — that just made me feel ten times better that day.
Madyson Meyer: That’s cool. Like a common experience, and we love girls being girls! Was there anything else that you want to add?
Aaliyah Riley: I did have something else that I had heard.
So — I think it was Sydney Sweeney — she had said something about how older women in Hollywood are not as supportive as you think they are. Zendaya commented, and she was like, “Yeah, I agree.”
People were shocked. But older women paved the way for us to be able to have all of these opportunities.
But at the same time, some older women — especially if we’re saying in Hollywood — sometimes feel like we need to go through the same experiences to get to where we’re at, even though we don’t need to do that.
Obviously, it’s horrible that you have to do all that stuff, go through all that, but you did that so that we could have a chance. There’s no need to pit us against each other or make it a competition or make us have to go through those experiences, too.
I just feel like that’s so relatable — not even just in Hollywood — just in real life. Even in the workplace, I saw other women saying, “Yeah, my boss, she’ll make my work ten times harder for me.” When you don’t need to do that.
It’s already hard enough being a woman in this world.
Don’t make it harder for other women, too.
Madyson Meyer: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I appreciate it.
We’re going to move on to our last interview of this episode. Do you want to introduce yourself?
Claire Foster: Hi, I’m Claire Foster. I’m 17.
Madyson Meyer: And Claire, how would you define girlhood?
Claire Foster: To me, girlhood has always been being able to find the people who you can relate with. The women around you that either inspire you or their goal is to inspire you or to help you.
Growing up, I was never a girl who had guy friends, except for maybe, like, one. And it was because I was growing up around a friend that I’d known since I was literally a baby; it was her brother.
But other than that, I’ve never really experienced… growing up around guys… that sense of friendship. I’ve only ever really had girl friends. Growing up as a girl and always having girlfriends, I think I seek friendship a lot of the time.
I want to be friends with a lot of people, and I know one of my friends, who lives in California… I did kind of think that maybe she’d be a friend for life, but I wasn’t sure. Because I was the one who went up and talked to her on the first day of third grade and was like, “Hey, do you want to be in this friend group?”
Then that friend group broke apart, and now she’s kind of my person left. But she’s my person. Her mom is my second mother. There’s so much from growing up with that sort of experience.
I went on a cruise with just me and my mom, and I think that was really like a moment of just, “I love being a woman.” Because I didn’t feel the need to impress anyone while I was there because it was just girls.
It was just us. It was just us being us.
My mom and my friend’s mom — they are probably some of the best moms I’ve ever been around when it comes to raising girls to understand that, like, “Hey, these things can happen, but you need to seek certain friendships or certain things.”
Madyson Meyer: For me, when you say that, I think about my experiences with school dances, like prom and homecoming. My sister, who is three years older than me, told me when she was in high school — I think a freshman — she was like, “When you go to homecoming, especially homecoming but also prom, do not go with a boy. Don’t go with someone that you’re romantically invested in. Go with your friends.”
“Because ten years down the road, you’re going to look back at those photos, and chances are, you won’t know who that boy is. You probably won’t have talked to whoever your partner at the time was in years. But you’ll remember those friends, because friendship tends to last longer.”
Friendship tends to last a lot longer than romantic relationships do. That’s just kind of a fact of life, especially in high school, where relationships are a little bit less serious and it’s more so about your friends. I think that was probably the best advice that I’ve ever gotten because every homecoming I’ve gone to was in a group of people. Even at prom last year, I went in a group of people.
I’m glad that I did that because I look at those photos, and I look at those memories, and I just remember the friends that I still have now. We’ve spent all four years going to these dances together and having fun and getting dressed up together — not to say that you can’t bring your partner to those dances; they’d be in the group too — but you don’t want to isolate yourself to just one person.
I think that was a part of girlhood for me. Not only my sister giving me advice about her experiences being older, but also understanding the importance of community and fellowship, especially among women. Because I do have guy friends, but, honestly, the relationship that you have with guys as friends is very different from the relationships that you build with women as friends.
Going back to what we talked about earlier, men aren’t as used to being emotionally vulnerable. I have several friends who are girls who know everything about my life, who have seen me at my very worst moments and loved me through it anyway, and have been so open and so vulnerable. We know so much about each other. Nothing is really a closed door in our relationships with each other.
Then there’s the guy friends who — they’re fun, they’re nice, they’re sweet — but it’s hard to be emotionally vulnerable with them because a lot of them feel like they can’t be emotionally vulnerable with people unless it’s a girlfriend or a mom. I think that’s just a really sad thing, but I think, as women, it’s just important for us to have a female community with each other.
Claire Foster: And I think, even just her, in general, being my friend specifically — she lives across the country from me. She lives in California.
But I’m still friends with her.
She moved away at the end of seventh grade, so she started in eighth grade in California. I remember it was one of the most upsetting periods of my life because I thought I was going to lose her.
I thought I was never going to really speak to her again, and that was really, really hard for me because she’d become so important to me, and I was so close with her. But, even though there’s a three-hour time difference, and I don’t even text her that often, I saw her over break because we went and visited California, and it’s just the best time.
I know that whenever I’m around her, I can be however I want to be.
She’s never ever going to judge me for what I do or who I am.
I think that is a really girlhood experience — having those friends that you know, “I can be, truthfully, my authentic self,” and not have someone sit there and be like, “Oh, that’s weird.” Like, “No, that’s just her, and I’m friends with her.” She makes me feel that way.
I have other friends who make me feel that way, but I feel like there’s also other girls out there where I don’t feel like I can be that way around them.
There is a societal expectation of how girls are meant to act, and there’s girls that are raised in that, and that is put in them much stronger than others.
My moms raised me to be a very independent female. I think that there’s others who — I’m not judging how people raise their kids — but they get raised to look at the “likes” of men.
And I disagree with that.
Because I don’t think that I should ever be defined down to the point of who I’m with or what manner or anything like that. I will forever love the fact that she’s still my friend for all of these years, even though she lives thousands and thousands of miles away from me.
I think that is a really girlhood experience, keeping a friendship.
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