OPINION: My love letter to being a woman

I love being a woman. I am proud to be of the Girl Power generation and even prouder to be of the generation entering the fifth wave of feminism.

Before I go on, I am so lucky to feel at home in the body I was born in,and recognise that to be comfortable with the sex I was assigned at birth is a sheer privilege. 

There is a reason that Beyoncé, Rhianna, The Spice Girls, Girls Aloud, Lily Allen and many more female pop icons own such a special place in so many young girl's hearts. They scream about the joy of being female, validating so many things which society has dismissed over time.

The female union is better together, and wow, are we strong!

Nothing is stronger than a group of girls consoling their friend over a boy who wasn't worth her time, or the girls encouraging one of the gang to wear THAT dress, or the screaming excitement when someone is promoted. I never feel stronger than I do when I have my girlfriends behind me, uniting together.

It is this which promotes Eve Livingston's piece for i-D that "The girlboss era is over, 2022 is the year of the girlunion". What is the point of individual success if you have no-one celebrating with you? As the Spice Girls taught me from a young age "If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends", and this applies to more than romantic relationships. We get a lot further, a lot quicker, when we work as a team.

But uniting as girls is boosted by the pride in girliness.

As a little girl, my favourite colour was pink. I am seen head-to-toe in pink in many family photos, shining like a beacon of candyfloss. Then I started telling people my favourite colour was anything but pink and purple, to appear cool, grown-up and sophisticated. Who am I kidding? I love pink, always have, always will, and the idea that it is a "girly girl's" colour, I now wear as a badge of honour.

We are conditioned as young girls that anything girly is lesser. In the Always campaign #LikeAGirl, the narrator asks: "What does it mean to you when I say 'run like a girl'", to which a young girl replies: "it means run as fast as you can", yet the term when I was growing up, was used derogatorily.

I run like a girl, and beating the boy in PE who declared he couldn't be beaten by a girl in a 100m sprint is still one of my proudest moments (honestly, I don't know what came over me).

Sisters - keep smashing it.