One might assume “girl” identity as a way to show naysayers just how clever girls actually are, or to show men how unserious those things to which they ascribe such importance may be. Claiming that something that is supposed to be “for boys” — say, baseball, the Grateful Dead, Karl Ove Knausgaard — is really “for girls,” is like a pinprick into a b

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn’t the number-one box-office star in America, because every straight girl I know would sell her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker. For upwardly mobile women in their

I think there’s a safety in girlhood, in the mistakes and the naïveté, the youth and maybe even the beauty, which is all pushed by the media we consume,” Ms. Reese said. “Womanhood, meanwhile, is seeped with this lack of playfulness, seriousness, aging — the horror, right?”

It seemed an anachronistic ambition, wanting to be a movie star; girls were not supposed to want that in 1968. They were supposed to want only to perfect their karma, to give and get what were called good vibrations and to renounce personal ambition as an ego game. They were supposed to know that wanting things leads in general to grief, and that w