Girls Will Be Girls – Emer O’Toole

O’Toole with sincerity and wit, about a topic it is all too easy to dismiss. She discusses body issues like female body hair, fake tans, boob jobs, boobs with brave honesty. She dares these things to be trivial, and proves that they are not. We should not dismiss these so called ‘women’s issues’ lightly, or sneer at our counterparts for engaging in socially conditioned high maintenance grooming, nor should we judge those who choose not to participate.

The structure vs. agency debate that Emer points to throughout is not new, but the way she uses it to dissect the issues she confronts is a thing of precision. It becomes at once obvious to the reader that much of our assumptions about our female identity has been curtailed to support male privilege. The agency theory is an important tool for neo-liberalism as it states that the individual is free to choose. But are they free to choose in a society which so strictly defines the role of its players, by class, race and gender?

Emer’s argument becomes a double edged sword, the same weapon that feminists have been grappling with for decades. On one hand, women must be free to choose their lives if there is to be equality, however this comes at the high price of challenging the structure in place that rewards conformity and punishes the non-conformist, thus making freedom to truly choose a new form of suffering.