As girls, we are subjected to boys talking over us, talking about us with gross possessive language, and making us cover up our bodies in fear of their judgment. The list goes on and on. We expect these daily interactions and scrutiny to happen in male spaces, but all-women spaces are equally a part of the systematic judging, silencing, and shaming that girls endure their whole lives. As bell hooks said, “patriarchy has no gender.” While this is due to internalized misogyny and societal norms set up by men, women still need to be held responsible for the generational trauma they are passing on, particularly in spaces meant for only girls. We may want to believe that all-girl spaces are a safe haven and non-conforming to gender norms, but these spaces aren’t always like that.  

My parents sent me to an all-girls camp with the intention for me to find a safe haven away from predominantly male spaces I have been in my whole life. Camp was something that I looked forward to each school year, as it was the space I felt most true to myself. I was empowered and proud of my identity at camp. My camp was fully women-run and all-girls with a small subsection of male counselors. While I was there, however, I wasn’t able to truly process the misogynistic and patriarchal system that my camp was encapsulating us in.

I first started attending camp at 8 years old and by age 11 we had begun having socials, events that happen at least twice a summer where we were put into a room with boys our age and expected to hook up. Whether told to us explicitly by older campers or implicitly through gossip about past years at the camp, we all knew it was expected. This was forced on us while we were young, instilling in us these ideas around sexuality. We were expected to hook up and if not, we were shamed and lost validation from the male gaze and from our friends. There was always a fear of being the only one who didn’t hook up, and if you were that person, you were left out, abandoned, and perceived as less than to the other girls. 

Due to this competition of who would and who wouldn’t hook up, we internalized the male gaze and the patriarchal ideas around sex that came with it. Not only was the pressure to hook up a social norm forced upon you by your fellow camp friends, but also perpetuated by the older age groups. We would come back from these nights and be asked “did you hook up with anyone?” If you said yes, you would gain validation and attention from the older campers. It didn’t matter how gross the hookup was, whether or not you were attracted to him, or how embarrassed you felt at the time; the only thing that mattered was the validation you received after. The best part was that you would never see them again; leaving us to feel as though these hook ups were transactional duties that we must perform to gain the validation we desperately sought. 

At the same time, we were being shamed for our perceived sexuality. In mid-July, halfway through the summer, the all-women directors announced that we would no longer be able to wear bikinis on free swim days which weren’t instructional. They voiced to us that the men’s bunk, which was a small bunk of aged 20 and up male counselors who had the responsibility of the “heavy lifting” at camp, felt uncomfortable by our bikinis. They were UNCOMFORTABLE with 8-15-year-old girls wearing bikinis. 

We consequently were blamed and shamed for this. It was our fault and we were the ones who would have to change. As young, obedient, and impressionable girls, we internalized this announcement and thought more of how we had incited it and less about the perverted men that should have been immediately fired for sexualizing our young bodies. Small snippets of a world run by men were infiltrating our all-girl safe space. And the women running it were internally being run by those same men, because this is a man’s world when it came down to it. 

As women, we seek validation in all parts of our life. Even when we are getting validation from our friends, mothers, sisters, and female-identifying teachers, they are all internalizing the patriarchal world and giving us the validation we seek. It’s a mask we all hold and see not realizing who is behind it. Our society is run by men and set up to benefit them. Even when we don’t think we’re doing it for men, women have assumed the patriarchal way of looking at things and knowing when to validate others. Everything is colored by women’s existences which are framed by a patriarchal system.

The male viewpoint has colored what women have been passing on from generation to generation. Through Ileana Jiménez’s feminism class, I was able to reflect on my experiences at camp with a critical feminist lens. While reading Monika Radojevic’s book, Teeth in the back of my neck, I found lines from her poem, “to be a woman” that resonated with my experience: “You must have a skeleton made of wire, to contort and bend your way around others. Then you must raise a skeletal daughter and attach those same strings to her.” 

Generational trauma and male expectations are unknowingly passed down by women. Lessons about putting men’s needs first, silencing our feelings, or not showing too much skin have been engraved in our minds. All-girl spaces are filled with women who have learned to contort and bend to what society expects and are going to teach younger generations to come. Thinking that this is how to survive in our society, women teach us methodically and yet with a tenderness to conform to patriarchy, all the while thinking they are making our lives easier.

To break this cycle of seeking validation and to break the cycle of patriarchy, we must find the erotic. Audre Lorde explains the Erotic in the essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” While we may have been taught to suppress our erotic, it is crucial to bring it into every aspect of our lives. Lorde voices how “this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively European-American male tradition.”

An ideal all-girl feminist camp would stray away from the European-American male tradition and follow the erotic as its guide. My wish for the camp would be that the female directors in charge would talk about their internalized misogyny openly and there would be facilitated talks about sexism and how the patriarchy infiltrates all-women spaces.

In general, when finding ourselves in all-girl and all-women spaces we need to rely on the erotic as our guide. We must be mindful of the baggage we are bringing into these spaces. Resisting the patriarchal teachings within us and being more in touch with our feelings and what makes us different will help us create and maintain all-women spaces that are free from the patriarchy.