sweet pea
girlsgogames.com, late childhood, and ant infestations.
Picture this— it’s midnight, I’ve got a candle lit, I’m alone in my room. Do you know what that looks like? It’s a mattress on the floor and a gauzy white curtain in the middle and the books on the shelf being turned on their sides so you can’t read what the spines say. Every wall is white except for one, which is blue with a pattern painted on it. Don’t worry about the pattern. Don’t bother. Furs, fake pearls, teacups on the windowsill, candelabras. The full spaces are really full and the empty spaces are really, really empty. This is probably a metaphor. But that’s better, yes? Easier to see?
So I’m alone on the mattress. The lit candle is tall and the wax is red. My computer is in front of me. I crack both my hips, my spine, my neck, my knuckles, my jaw— I count twenty-seven pops total. Then, likely because I’m bad at being good to myself, I go to GirlsGoGames and promptly get slammed over the head with glittery digital preteen femininity. It’s debatable if I even want to be there. I do it regardless.
When people say that my generation was raised by the internet, there are a few websites I think of. GirlsGoGames, which hosts hundreds of browser games targeted towards young girls, is one of them. The website hasn’t changed nearly enough for it to stop feeling nostalgic— some of the games have shifted and the home page is a new shade of pink, but it’s mostly the same. It’s as close as I can get to feeling like a kid again. Of course, childhood is an ill fit on an adult, but it’s the thought that counts. Maybe if I put an off-brand Disney princess into enough ugly wedding dresses, I’ll get back that sweetness I lost. Maybe I can resurrect myself when I bring “Sleepy Princess” back to life.1
There is a larger, more present part of me that likes GirlsGoGames because it’s like watching a car crash happen. It’s the modern version of the dissected Anatomical Venus. Sleepy Princess: Resurrection is only the tip of the iceberg— there are dozens of games where you can medically assist dolled-up, sexualized princesses and cartoon characters. Their makeup is flawless. Their skin is bared. They are bleeding from their machinated flesh to the beat of ambiguous, non-copyright electronic music. Want to help “Pixie” after an accident lands her in the emergency room?2 Want to pull ticks off of the face of “Princess Mermaid”?3 Want to watch “Ice Queen” breastfeed her newborn twins?4 You can do it. It’s all there. If it wasn’t on a website for children, I would suspect it was fetish content. Sex is everywhere and entirely unmentioned. It’s the dress up games where the only option is underwear. It’s the way every character is built like a Barbie doll. It’s Plato’s Allegory of the Cave— the light is patriarchally-enforced sexuality, the shadows are the games, and I am the one at my computer watching it all go down in grotesque fascination.
And what kind of person does that make me? What does it say about me that this is what defined my childhood? This car crash is familiar. I’ve been here before. I’ve done this before. That means it’s safe, and safety is a liar because there’s no comfort there. John Coltrane is comforting. Autopsy videos are comforting. Laying in the dark under an animal pelt or two is comforting. Nostalgia is, quite frankly, not comforting. It’s familiar, but you would be remiss to consider familiarity as synonymous with comfort. Familiar— nostalgia— is just where you end up when you have absolutely nowhere else to go. And I don’t, so when I open my computer, I go to GirlsGoGames instead of reading or watching a movie or doing something I would actually feel good about. The only reason I don’t consider it a guilty pleasure is because I am the type of animal that doesn’t have the capacity for guilt. I also don’t really find pleasure in it.
The candle slowly burns down into the absence of red. I’ve breathed in enough smoke for a lifetime. I put jazz on in the background so I won’t feel like my brain is truly rotting— the GirlsGoGames tab has been muted, because there’s really only so many reality television-style instrumentals you can take— but I don’t think it’s working. My head might as well be candle wax. Who’s melting me down?
I put eyeshadow on a mermaid with perfectly plump lips and flawless skin. She looks at me with dead blue eyes. I think I might hate her. I keep playing anyway.
Observations about GirlsGoGames:
There are 130 games on the aggressively pink home page. Seventy-six of those games have women in the thumbnails, two have only men, and the rest are either inanimate objects, animals, or hands. Out of the seventy-six thumbnails with women, twenty-one have a woman getting some sort of makeover, twelve of them have a woman cooking, ten of them have a woman either giving birth, pregnant, or holding a baby, and nine of them have a woman getting married. The rest are an amalgamation of shopping, dress up, and home decoration. The only thumbnail on the home page that depicts a woman doing something not culturally associated with femininity is Crazy Bar Brawl; the woman in that one is breaking a bottle on a man’s head.
There are ninety-six faces in the thumbnails displayed on the home page. Out of those ninety-six faces, eighty-eight are white. One thumbnail depicts Not-Jasmine fighting with Not-Ariel over a dress. The rest are repeats of the same two knockoff K-Pop Demon Hunters games. In a similar vein, it goes without saying that every woman has the same face— small nose, full lips, and big, upturned eyes. Aside from art style, the only distinguishing features of these women are hair color, eye color, and what shade of white they are, as representation obviously isn’t a focus. It also goes without saying that there is not a single fat or mid-sized person on that home page. None at all. Not even a man or someone as the ‘before’ in a makeover game. Everyone looks like they have a BMI of 18.5 or lower.
As of writing this, the nine games in the trending section are entirely puzzle and skill games. There are no games related to fashion, despite most of GirlsGoGames’ catalog being fashion-related. This might be because girls have interests outside of marriage, beautification, and homemaking. This could also be because even if you are interested in marriage, beautification, and homemaking, you start feeling shitty when most of those games revolve around getting rid of any and all humanizing traits— ones that you also have— to better smooth the model down in a perfect, stereotypical, cookie-cutter doll.
The target demographic for GirlsGoGames is girls aged seven to fourteen. This is not only what we think young girls enjoy, but what we want young girls to enjoy. We want them to like it.
Observations on my past self, as a GirlsGoGames frequenter:
I played GirlsGoGames the most when I was eleven years old. My favorites were the Sara’s Cooking Class games and a now-unavailable series of games where you could perform various types of surgeries— heart surgery, brain surgery, spine surgery. They must have gotten removed because they were too gory. I dabbled in the dress up games, as long as they weren’t Disney Princesses. I was also fond of My Dolphin Show.
By the time I reached age eleven, I was asked about my future wedding as much as I was asked about what career I might want. I was also consistently asked if I wanted children. I hadn’t even gotten my period; it wasn’t physically possible for me to bear children, but it was still something I was frequently asked. I was told that I would be a good mother, and it was meant as a compliment but it never felt like it. Adults liked me and I held no illusions about why— I was quiet, clean, unemotional, and I could take care of myself without needing to bother anyone or ask for help. These were valuable traits to have. Children who didn’t have those traits hammered into them, who couldn’t help but express their emotions or forgot to clean up after themselves, were punished. I was grateful to not be punished. I was very glad I would, apparently, be a good mother, even as a child myself.
Other notable events that happened when I was eleven:
Eleven was the age where I first considered suicide. It was the age where I was first catcalled, too. I was no stranger to misogyny or adult men flirting with me at that point, but it’s a little different when a drunk man on the bus is telling you that he’s going to choke you to death on his cock so you can’t fight back when he finally rapes you. I wasn’t surprised by it, and I wasn’t surprised when no one said anything or stood up for me, but it was all very disappointing. I discovered soon after that incident that you can get high on cough syrup. I made my first Tumblr account not long after that. Eleven years old was also when I almost failed a science class because I had a teacher who called girls sweetheart and made me stay after school to make up a dance routine if I wanted to retake a test.
I started to wonder if men could detect something about me that other girls didn’t have— none of my friends were getting harassed on the bus or catcalled or anything, but it kept happening to me. I wasn’t even the prettiest girl out of the bunch. I knew it wasn’t because I looked like an adult, either. I looked like a child because I was. Could bad men sniff me out like bloodhounds? Was I marked like Cain after being banished from Eden? Did God hate me, and if so, what did I do wrong? How could I get God to forgive me so they’d leave me alone? So eleven was the age where I started praying in earnest. I briefly experimented with self harm as a means of tithing or penance, but I didn’t get any results and I didn’t like the pain, so I stopped after a month or so and just said as many Hail Marys before bed as I could. I wanted it to be enough. I wanted to be alone.
I look at pictures of myself at age eleven now and it makes me so sad. Stuffed animals, dress up games, breastless, trying to dodge sex like it was a bullet with my name on it. I was a kid. You wouldn’t believe how little I was. You wouldn’t fucking believe it.
There are ants everywhere. Ants in the bedrooms, in the kitchen, in the bathroom; they pop out of the floorboards and drag their tiny bodies up the walls, finding nothing and taking nothing home. Ants across the molding. Ants on the countertops. Ants on the blankets. It’s February, so of course there’s ants— there’s always ants in February— but it never makes it less of a surprise when you pull your skirt up to itch your leg and find an ant instead. Last night, one even found its way into my mouth. It wasn’t an enjoyable experience. I imagine it was worse for the ant. Either way, neither of us can take it back. And here we are.
So the forces of good inside my body are losing and the world keeps going fuzzy around the edges. It’s been a long day. I’ve got a headache and a recommendation to seek out an inpatient program and no will to live or desire to die, which are two very different things, and I keep accidentally killing ants when I try to brush them off me even though I don’t want to— I really don’t want to kill ants, I’m very fond of ants, ants are such noble little creatures. Their bodies are all around me and my hands smell like the alcoholic-chemical-sweet of dead insects. There’s no horror in death, objectively speaking, but there is horror in me. My kill count is in the dozens. If I knew what regret was, I’d be rolling in it.
For now, though, I’m out of time. My bottleneck event is getting closer. I hate it when I have a dream and it comes true; I know that the dreams I’ve been having for over a month now are quickly approaching. It’s fine. I’m not nervous because I don’t know how to be. Disappointed, maybe, in the fact that my subconscious has to lead me around like a leashed dog, but not nervous. It’ll happen. I’ll survive it. That’s all I need to know. So for now, I’m playing dress up games and counting down the days until it erupts. Day one was wedding dresses, because that’s the only part of my hypothetical wedding that I care about. Day two was cooking games. Day three was horses. Day four was nothing at all. Tick, tick, tick. I reckon I’ve got a month or two, give or take. Sigh. Oh well.
Today is just dress up games; it’s day five, lucky number five, and I want to have fun. Headache, long day, etcetera. I want to have fun, so if I can, I make the characters goth. If that’s not an option, I do the colors of the trans flag, because there’s usually pink and blue clothing. If I can’t do either of those, then my goal is to make it not look like shit, which is harder than you’d expect— most of the clothes in these games look like the Disney channel wardrobe on steroids. Not-Elsa gets black hair and a dark red top. Angela (yes, the talking cat) looks like she’s about to hit up the pride parade. I try to find assorted schoolgirls matching uniforms and hair that doesn’t fit strangely on their heads. Back in the real world, there’s an ant crawling across my collarbone. This one survives when I flick it to the floor. It’s nice. I want to be nice, I think. But that’s what the bottleneck is for, isn’t it?
The day ends without fanfare. Hours have somehow slipped past me. I’m currently putting Not-Ariel in a prom dress. Poor girl; her options aren’t very good. There was a point in time where mine weren’t, either. She’s still alright by the end— I hope I was, too. I hope things will be sweet. I really, really hope so.
it's literally so bleak out there. holding ur hand