Nobody in Amanda Peacock's "To be a girl" is allowed to get it right. Stand up tall and you are a "wh**e"; refuse to "lay down" and doors close. Be thin like the "celebrity status skin and bones" and the magazines still "laugh and taunt"; be fat and you are "on your own". Even the line about skirts tangles itself so that, however you read it, the verdict "sl*t" is waiting. The central idea is the double bind: rules so contradictory that failure is guaranteed. The poem's anger is aimed at the people who enforce them, and these turn out to be almost everybody.
The opening refuses to show whole people. We get "empty faces", "grubby hands", "beady eyes" and "frowns", body parts doing the judging, as if the crowd has been stripped down to its worst features. "Empty faces filled with guilt" is a neat contradiction. The watchers are hollow, yet somehow brimming with a guilt that, as the poem goes on, seems to be handed to the girls instead. The second stanza speeds up into orders: "don't wear that -go here -look this way". The dashes leave no room to breathe, which is the point. The stanza ends by making acceptance conditional on obedience: "your unwanted if you disobey."
The form works against its own tune. Peacock writes in rhymed couplets with a bouncy, roughly four-beat rhythm, close to a playground chant. That singsong sits uneasily on dark subject matter, and the poem seems to know it. "Rape culture hah that isn't funny now" rhymes with "big fat cow", so a serious term and an insult arrive in the same breath, as they might for the speaker. Many rhymes are slant ("guilt/dealt", "much/sl*t"), and the looseness sounds more like speech than polish. One sound also travels across two stanzas: "put out", "shouts", "figure out", "doubts". Sexual pressure, being ignored and being interrogated are tied together by a shared echo. The missing punctuation and apostrophes make the whole thing breathless, as if it were written in one angry sitting. As printed here, the slurs are starred out, a small irony, since the words are awkward to print yet are thrown at girls so casually.
The point of view shifts as the poem goes on. It begins by watching "the girls", then claims "control of my body" in the first person, then turns to a third-person "she" under questioning: "what was she wearing stone faced they ask / was she drunk?" The line "to prove guilty is their task" turns a courtroom inside out, because the person on trial is the victim. "Guilt" from the first line returns here, and "stone faced" echoes "empty faces". The poem circles back to its starting point, and the faces haven't changed.
The question "what is it like to be a girl / in this dirty awful world" appears halfway through and again at the end, and the repetition is the poem's cleverest move. The first time it is a lament. The second time it is a question put by someone else ("you ask"), and the poem finally answers: "to be a girl is to stand your ground / be you who you are make some sound." "Stand your ground" quietly reverses "stand up tall", the gesture that earlier got a girl called a "wh**e". "Sound" answers the unheard "shouts" of the passers-by. The "dirty awful world" is repeated word for word, so nothing has been fixed. The ending offers defiance rather than victory, and "some sound" is a modest, achievable demand.
That is much of what makes the poem worth reading. It puts catcalling, body-shaming, sexual pressure and victim-blaming on one continuous line, so they read as a single experience rather than separate issues. Its rough edges give it the feel of testimony rather than of a carefully sanded argument. And it leaves the reader with a pointed choice. The bystanders in the poem hear nothing, but anyone reading it has at least heard the sound.