Little Girls Are Not Whores

I was 13 when I was touched for the first time. Under the pants, over the underwear. I wouldn’t remember this until I was nineteen when I was confronted with him at the Noodles and Company cash register. I had to remember to forget his name as I ate my pesto. I was 14 the first time I took a picture of my naked body. I didn’t stop growing until I was 15. My body was brand new and my brain wouldn’t stop developing for another eleven years on average. It will be 2025 by then. I was 14 when I had my first kiss. It was chaotic and sloppy and my shirt left my body even though I told him it wouldn’t. He was the first boy to tell me I was pretty. He was the first boy to make me his without my permission. He asked for the nude pictures. I showed a stranger my breasts (among other things) for the first time when I was 15. It was on an anonymous video chatting service where anyone could see me at any time I wanted, in any way I wanted. I chose a skirt, no underwear, and pigtails with a buttondown shirt that was almost all the way unbuttoned and tied at the bottom. Like the girls in the movies. 25 men told me I was sexy that night. They never saw my face, I assumed that was why they didn’t call me beautiful. I told them I was 19. I’m 19 now and I’ve lost track of anonymous men that have told me I was hot or sexy. I’ve lost track of the money I’ve made from the comfort of my bed, bending my body and begging my heart to keep the racquet down. I’ve lost track of the moment when I stopped being a beautiful little girl and into a pair of tits, a heartbeat, and a vagina. I was 15 when I told someone I was a feminist for the first time.

Merriam Webster defines “Whore” as a person who engages in sexual intercourse for pay. Synonyms: prostitute, call girl, harlot. When I was in fourth grade, I wanted to be a zoologist. Five years later I was no longer even a girl. I was a whore. However, what I was trading for wasn’t money (at that point). It wasn’t goods. It was affection. I was bartering my brand new breasts for the hope that someone would tell me I was pretty. I thought that at some point I’d believe them.

But it wasn’t that I suddenly I had finished puberty and had discovered the secrets of sexuality. I had to be taught. The internet taught me how to french braid my hair, how to illegally download music to my iPod nano, how to be a feminist. I was told that feminists fight for everyone with ferocity, they save others, they believe women and that pussy is power. The internet made it very clear to me that being a woman is my biggest superpower, which isn’t a falsehood. But what the internet also told me is that sex is a weapon, and real feminists don’t care about taboos like nudity. I was taught that the key to my power was owning my sexuality. These were truths I held close to me, and on their own, they are not harmful. But I was thirteen with an intense need to be loved and uncensored access to Tumblr, so the followup to this new way of life was unsavory at best.

The most unsavory part of it all is how uncommon my story is. Certain parts are more niche than others, legitimate sex work being one of them, but little girls are exposed to false sex-positivity and self-objectification every day between social media, movies, and classic patriarchy conditioning. This new wave of sex-positive feminism is not feminism at all, it is the conditioning of women to treat themselves as objects for men, which isn’t a new phenomenon, but now it is being taught by other women who claim to be right and in charge. The women teaching this do not know that they’re promoting unhealthy behaviors because they are so brainwashed in their own sadness and need for approval that they think they are the wise ones — that they are the subjects of their own sexuality narrative. But subjects act on their own accord, they call the shots. They do not submit to what has been expected of females for thousands of years. Objects, however, get acted upon. Void of autonomy or feelings, they follow the centuries-old ways of trading the female physique for male attention. I do not blame these women for not knowing for self-objectification is an epidemic that no one sees or hears about because the rest of the world is being too loud with its pop-up porn ads and songs about one night stands, and they are but the symptoms.

I call this an epidemic because it is a plague and it will change the course of your life, paying no mind to the destruction it leaves in its wake because when you tell impressionable little girls who probably already hate everything about themselves due to the invention of social media that the most interesting and most powerful thing about them is their body, you create mindless objects obsessed with holding onto a false promise of happiness and power. You create a little girl who will instantly become critical of everything she is made of and looks like. You create a little girl who is no longer a young girl, but instead, the world’s whore. She will trade her body for even the slightest attention of her heart. She will do whatever it takes to be the prettiest girl in the room because a “feminist” once told her “my body, my rules” without telling her what the game was.

Men have been influencing the way women think about themselves since the beginning of organized society. The conditioning of women to be subtle, sweet, and available is a pillar of society that has yet to be completely undone, and now, with this phenomenon of self-objectification masquerading as feminism, that pillar has been reinforced by thousands of little girls sacrificing themselves for the shallow approval from a man and the world in which he runs. Sexuality should be a choice and it should be fun and it should be consensual. Sexuality should not be for little girls who look in the mirror and see someone they don’t recognize because they’ve never heard their name from a man’s lips. Sexuality is not a price to pay, not even for all of the love in the world.

If I could gather all of the little girls in the world in one room, I would hug them and tell them that they are not whores. They are the light at the end of the tunnel, they are the most beautiful things to walk the grass beneath them, they are already who they have been looking for their whole lives. I would remind them that no body part, no wink in the wrong direction, no amount of regrets will change that and that it is not their fault that they sacrifice the light in their eyes for the reassurance that they are not the monster they see in the mirror for they were raised to fight for affection as if desire was a finite resource. I would remind them that they were raised to be pretty before they were raised to be smart, but after they were raised to please. I would tell them all of these things and I would cry because no one ever told me. I would kiss them on the forehead and whisper to them that the world is better with them in it and they don’t have to be desired to be loved. I would rub their back as I reassured them that change can happen and that it starts with them simply being the subjects of their own story. I would tell them that the internet lied to them and that sex doesn’t have to feel like an auction. But most importantly, I would tell them that I know that they don’t believe me. They won’t believe me until the day that there is nothing left to believe in after a long, winding road of what the world has done to them. I would tell them that when that day comes because it will, I will be waiting for them to cry to me. As they cry, I would remind them once more: Little Girls Are Not Whores. Then they would understand.