The Problem with “Fearless Girl”
I’ve read the company who commissioned the sculpture’s statement, the artist’s statement, and many responses to the piece. Most of it has been positive; most of it I agree with.
I want to be happy about her. I want to be grateful she was commissioned and installed and generated such an overwhelmingly positive response.
But she has bothered me since the moment I heard of her.
According to the company who commissioned her, she’s supposed to represent a push for more women on corporate boards.
According to the artist, she’s meant to depict women standing up to intimidating challenges (though she was intentionally created to still look “soft; she’s not defiant, she’s brave, proud and strong, not belligerent”).
According to visitors and supporters, she inspires our daughters and shows them they can be anything. She’s a rare representation of a defiant, clothed, non-sexualised female in a prominent work of art [that is] still vanishingly rare.
What would people say if, instead of a 50-inch bronze of a girl in a windblown dress facing the charging bull, there was a 64-inch bronze of a grown woman in a suit?
Would she represent increased gender diversity on boards?
Would she depict women standing up to challenges?
Would she give our girls someone to look up to?
Wouldn’t it be something to see a woman on Wall Street?
Girls and boys are children. Men and women are adults.
We can’t stop referring to women in the 18–35 year old age range as girls.
It’s rampant in tv and movies. Whether the character is a friend or coworker or lover or boss, whether she’s a mother or doctor, she’s still a girl — not yet a woman.
It’s in my conversations with my friends — I struggle to self-correct and say “woman” and not “girl” about my peers, but it still feels like I’m referring to someone at least decade older than me, even though I’m 30. Why aren’t we women?
So what would the press be about the sculpture if it were “Fearless Woman”? Would it have the same tone? same word choice? same response?
Would more men strike out and sexually defile it?
Would more men criticize it for being an advertising scheme with no right to change the meaning of an oversized icon of male virility stomping around our country’s financial core?
Would women and men and parents and newscasters and politicians all rave equally about how wonderful it is?
Or can we at least acknowledge that it’s universally easier to encourage and love and support girls, but not women?
That we are comfortable with non-sexual, immature, uncomplicated female children, but that we are uncomfortable with an adult woman who may be both professional and nurturing, a sexual being but not an object, strong and soft, fierce yet fallible, and more?
That we aren’t actually ready to allow women to be women and not girls.
I am an American Millennial; I was raised with a generation that was told we could grow up to be anything we wanted.
As a girl, it never occurred to me that I was less than the boys around me.
As a woman, I’ve been repeatedly taught and shown that I am.
We are catcalled and harassed. We are afraid, even in public spaces. We are considered bossy and bitchy at work. We face unconscious biases by men and women alike. We have worse odds and less access than our male counterparts. We are underpaid in the workplace and still bear the brunt of domestic duties at home (or pass it on to other women). We are disempowered and discredited. We are sexualized and sensationalized yet our womanhood remains a taboo secret. We may be lovers and mothers and supporting characters — but we aren’t meant to be in positions of power or have a voice. We are underrepresented, and we have an expiration date. We are supposed to laugh at jokes, not make them. Simply put, we still aren’t equal.
We are already fearless as girls.
We need to see brave women to show us that we fearless girls actually do have a future. That we belong on Wall Street, and in the world, as adults.
We are more than girls.
We want our place as women.
Katherine works remotely while she travels the world — on the road since June 2014. If you liked this piece, please give it a ❤ Thank you!
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