daniella does it all

Girlhood, intimacy, and the discipline of desire

There is a particular kind of story that repeats itself across women’s writing — not because it is copied, but because it is lived.

Mona Awad’s Bunny, Emma Cline’s The Girls, Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, and Esperanza Hope Snyder’s Orange Wine are not in conversation by design, but by gravity. They return, again and again, to intimacy — female intimacy, romantic intimacy, bodily intimacy — and to the quiet way it hardens into a system with rules.

Read together, they begin to trace the same pressure pattern:

What does it cost a girl to belong?

In each of these books, belonging arrives first as warmth. As invitation. As relief.

The girls in Bunny are ambivalent until they aren’t. Once invited, you are wrapped in sweetness, given a name, folded into something that promises permanence. In The Girls, the ranch does not initially feel dangerous — it feels like recognition, like living at a rarer pitch, like believing that love might finally be absolute. Girlhood names the contract more explicitly: behave correctly, absorb the rules, and you will be protected. In Orange Wine, desire opens as a private, intoxicating space — chosen, meaningful, almost sacred.

I recognize this invitation. The ease of being chosen. The way the world smooths itself when you know how to behave.

But belonging is not neutral.
For girls, it is often the first mechanism of control.

What follows the invitation is enclosure.

Each of these books describes a closed room — sometimes literal, sometimes invisible — governed by expectation. There are rules. There are rewards. There are punishments. Smiling matters. Compliance matters. Wanting the right things matters. The outline already exists; you only have to step into it.

Intimacy, we’re taught, is proof of love. But here, intimacy functions more like governance. Attention replaces autonomy. Obedience is mistaken for closeness. Romance itself begins to feel suspect — not because it is false, but because it is so often based on a story written by someone else.

There is a version of the self that thrives in these rooms — polished, fluent, good — and another that waits quietly for you to come back.

The cost of staying inside the room is paid through the body.

The girls learn to make themselves smaller without being asked. They learn how to hold their stomachs in when hands move where they shouldn’t. They learn that the value of a girl lies in her ability to provide a known value — aesthetic, emotional, sexual — without disrupting the atmosphere. Consciousness does not preclude false consciousness. Knowing better does not always save you.

I keep thinking about how often the body recognizes truth before permission is granted — and how easy it is to call that confusion instead of clarity.

What keeps the system intact is culpability. If you believe you are responsible — for the harm, for the misreading, for the silence — you will protect the lie that made it possible. You will call endurance strength. You will call suffering grace. You will believe that beauty is the price of freedom, and that erasing yourself is the same thing as becoming yourself.

And when a girl refuses — when she speaks, when she names what happened, when she steps outside the script — the system does not call her hurt. It calls her dangerous.

This is how witches are made.

Anything that threatens the comfort of men, or the coherence of the story, can be recoded as threat. Invent the witch. Make witchcraft illegal. Put men in charge of deciding what counts as truth. Let any deviation register as evidence. The girl who will not disappear becomes something that must be disciplined, silenced, or removed.

But Girlhood offers another way to read the descent.

Persephone is not abducted. She is already home. The time spent in the dark is not punishment but enactment — a necessary passage. There is no Hades, no captor — only the self, moving between realms, discovering there is nothing down there she hasn’t already found a piece of in herself. Both worlds are hers.

Seen this way, healing is not escape. It is opening. Dropping into the lost parts of the self to reclaim them. It is slow. There are no shortcuts. It requires choosing, again and again, not to give oneself away.

Listening to the truths of other women teaches you how to listen to your own. Writing teaches you which words your body needs to hear — and how much you must mean them.

These books are not about girls who made mistakes.
They are about systems that taught disappearance as love —
and about the long, deliberate work of making an opening where none was meant to exist.