Stop Calling Little Girls “Fast”
It’s not only archaic and sexist, it might be shaming them for a medical condition they can’t help.
It’s 1990 and I’m on the floor of my shower messing around in the little puddle I’ve made. It must be spring. It’s shortly after my eighth birthday and the gravity of what I’m about to realize is going to hit in a few seconds.
As I contort around in the cold water pretending to swim — I grew up in the tropics, after all — my chest finally grabs my attention. It is as though I’ve been stopped dead in my tracks; hit a brick wall at high speed. I remember being confused because I thought that eight years old was too young.
It have to be… I think to myself — my thoughts in Patois.
I poke at them gently. I’m unsure if these are breasts because they are barely noticeable nodules under my skin.
Nah…
I don’t believe these are breasts, even though I know they are deep in my heart. They’re so little.
They must be mosquito bites. I going ask Grandmother…
I dry my little frame off, and then wrap myself up. I walk timidly into the kitchen, unsure and concerned. I can see my grandmother’s slightly hunched back sweeping. Her back is turned to me. Her house dress in some awesomely retro, floral pattern. She was probably still wearing her “setters” (hair rollers).
I stand there for a few seconds before I get her attention, and ask her while pointing at my chest, if I have mosquito bites, or breasts indeed. She does not come over. She stays where she stands. She is catatonic almost. If she could have dropped the broom, I think she would have.
She would pull herself together, tell me to go get dressed, and stop messing around. Eventually she did answer me, but it took her a day or two to process what she’d just seen, heard, and understood…
I think — and I say this in present-day, non-flashback mode — that she was afraid and horrified. As horrified as when I found out about my daughter’s own brush with puberty at too young an age. I often looked back at Grandmother’s reaction with a mix of fondness, good humor, and disappointment. Her dismissal hurt me. After all, I’d come to her for answers — and reassurance. Instead, I was turned away. But, having my strength as a parent tested? In the very same way? I realize now — even as I write this — that I should have been less judgmental of her response.
Why? Because I now know the fear, the dread, and utter helplessness she probably felt when she realized that my body had betrayed my youth.
The very thin line for some men between girlhood and womanhood is already blurry as it is. Having to navigate through that at eight years old? I still played with Barbies. I was still losing my baby teeth…
And now, I’d had the nerve to grow breasts. Coño!
Last summer, my daughter and I were play wrestling, as we often do. I guess looking back I should have noticed, but to be honest, I never really looked at my breast buds when I was little. It looked like baby fat. As I went to pick her up, I felt something hard underneath the fat on her little chest. I’m a grown ass woman who’s had her pap smears, so I panicked immediately… Internally. I’m grateful for my poker face.
I stopped the game and asked her if she’d had any pain or noticed anything different regarding her chest. She said she didn’t, so then I asked if I could examine the bump. Again, being a woman, you know how to do these things from doctor’s visits. An impromptu breast exam and several hundred frantic Google searches later, I was able to narrow it down to a disease called precocious puberty… Or cancer.
Fuck me, right? Still keeping my composure, I asked her more questions, and then told her we’d see our pediatrician about it.
Several months later the verdict is out. She has precocious puberty. It’s hereditary, so I was able to put two and two together. To exasperate things, Black girls experience puberty earlier than their non-black peers.
The feelings I felt — the dread, fear, anger at imaginary men that would try her one day, helplessness, and guilt — were an overwhelming flood that hit me in the second it took to realize she had a breast bud.
I remembered my own experiences and what happened when my guy friends and playmates noticed my breasts weren’t baby fat, but small breasts. The sexual abuse was unexpected. I’d been warned about creepy men, but not little boys emulating creepy men.
Calling little girls “fast” because of the way their bodies fit in clothes is sexist and ignorant, and says a hell of a lot more about the poisoned mind behind such thought than it does the child being judged.
Nobody calls little boys fast if their bodies mature too quickly; if they are affected by precocious puberty. They earn accolades for being sexually active — even in stunning cases of child abuse. Don’t argue. You’ve seen the same poorly-adjusted men in the comments section or social media praising some poor boy for being sexually molested by an older woman and teacher. Remember when Chris Brown said he lost his virginity to an older girl at nine? That’s rape. Yet, his confession was met with praise by far too many men.
And I’m fed up with people assuming that because they can’t see a disease, illness, or medical condition, that one is perfectly healthy.
Furthermore, where is the grace for these kids? Where is the desire to protect and care for these girls? Why must they be excoriated, judged, labeled, and debased because of something they can’t control?
Why must we always sacrifice our girls to assuage our ignorance? And why are we still so quick to throw them to the wolves?
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