Being a Girl: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Teen Life

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Being a Girl is a visually attractive and highly readable book. Aimed at
female adolescents, it covers a range of topics: body image, beauty,
family, friendship, dating, and sex. Above all, Cattrall promotes
self-confidence and self-esteem. Her book is peppered with inspiring
quotations from a number of successful women, and punctuated with brief
sidebars and anecdotes.

Although Samantha Jones, Kim Cattrall’s Sex and the City persona, was
somewhat subversive in her refusal to accept a sexual double standard,
the approach in this book supports relatively normative gender roles.
For example, while Cattrall encourages girls to be comfortable in their
own skin, she also provides steps for a skin-care routine and tips on
makeup application. The content and organization of the book also
suggest that the main concerns of adolescent girls have to do with
appearance and social life. While these are of paramount importance to
many, or most, teenage girls, so too are areas of their lives that
Cattrall mentions little or not at all: school, extracurricular
activities, and part-time or summer jobs.

While Being a Girl would be very helpful for many teenage girls, it
does have some significant omissions that make it less helpful to
others. For example, while she is candid about heterosexual
relationships, masturbation, and (hetero)sexual fantasies, Cattrall does
not so much as mention lesbianism, bisexuality, or other non-normative
sexual desires or experiences. She also mentions drugs and alcohol only
in passing. These omissions are somewhat surprising, as sexual curiosity
and experimentation with illicit substances are a part of adolescence
for a significant number of teenagers. Nonetheless, the positive message
Cattrall promotes makes this a worthwhile read for many teenage girls.