{ my feminism, part one }

My awareness of my own feminism has been slow, but unmistakable. I feel fortunate to have arrived to the movement after many have done the hard work of freeing the word "feminist" from negative connotations. There are still unfavorable generalities tied to feminism --- though to be fair, that's true of many labels.

A handful of the attitudes I now associate with feminism have always stood tall in my mind; I haven't radically changed my views or opinions. The subculture I grew up in didn't explicitly dishonor or abuse women, but many of its subterranean attitudes certainly didn't celebrate or create opportunities for us. I grew up believing women were supposed to complement men, come second to them, in almost every way (except if casserole or cleaning house were involved, of course). I grew up believing that the pinnacle of a woman's life was being chosen for marriage by a man. I grew up believing that a woman truly became a woman if (and only if) she bore children. I grew up (and went through many of my young adult years) believing that no one thought I was or could be a complete human being without being in a relationship with a man. I spent my latter twenties and early thirties puzzling through a chorus of (female) voices telling me they were praying I'd find a man, reassuring me it would happen in time. You can probably imagine what this systematic inundation of attitudes about women and myself as a woman, FROM women, eventually did to me when I found myself at 32 years of age, single AF and seriously questioning whether I was engineered to bear children.

I felt like I'd been duped into waiting for a fairytale that was never going to happen. But instead of doubting the fairytale itself, I doubted myself. I felt hideous, disgusting. I felt like a failure. I wondered what it was about me specifically that was so undesirable and unpalatable that just about every single woman I knew had been married for 10 years and was at home raising 2-5 small children and I was working 12 hour days without a soul to wonder when I was coming home or whether I was alive, or eating dinner, or happy. I figured I was too outspoken, too strong-willed, too introverted and unapproachable. Not thin enough. (God, I was not thin enough. I didn't even have a thigh gap, for fuck's sake.) At my age I was deeply discounted goods, and still no one (no man) had chosen me. I believed I was truly fucking terrible, truth be told.

And then I was kicked out of the church, and things changed. But that's another story for another time.

It's difficult to articulate where I came from and where I stand now on women's issues (is that a PC way of referring to, well, women's issues? I don't even know). It's difficult to give it voice without coming off bitter in hindsight...and maybe I am, and maybe that's okay. I feel the need to be excruciatingly neutral in how I speak about it, lest I be branded an Embittered Feminist (anything but that, she thought with a shudder). But even that portrays my own subterranean attitudes and fears: Be likable. Don't make waves. Don't upset anyone.

There is so. much. more. where all of this came from. It's painful to look back and see how indoctrinated I was, how readily and wordlessly I accepted profound beliefs about the world, about myself...and how devastating those innocently adopted beliefs were to me later in life. How hard I had to work (am working) to unravel them from around my neck, to breathe, to think on my own and figure out if I'm really that terrifyingly repulsive, if I'm actually a worthwhile human being despite not having been chosen in a traditional sense by a man for a safe, traditional, charted life. I'm still figuring it out. I'm still defining myself as a single woman who, as of now, has not chosen to have children. The whole thing is stupefyingly simple and infuriatingly complex. It feels untouchable in a way, inexpressible. But part of unburying the truth about who I am and what is possible for me is traveling in the direction of everything I feel insufficiently prepared to face. And that, for me, means trying to write about it.
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The excerpt below is from an essay I read in Lenny Letter this morning. There's so much more to the article (that I can't seem to find a direct link to on the site right now), but these are some of the words that struck me the hardest. To put it in context, the author is writing about her experience raising a daughter who doesn't behave like she's expected to --- i.e. "like a normal girl."

In 2016, these are still culturally held truths: a girl is supposed to try to fit in. A girl is supposed to want to be liked. A girl, unlike a boy, who can simply "be a boy," is supposed to care about what grown-ups think. When a girl is not that way, she is pathologized. She is labeled. We have models for rough-and-tumble, too-rambunctious boy outliers. We understand Dennis the Menace–like boy menaces. We delight in tiny male Wes Andersons, chockablock with eccentricities. But when a girl is this way, she is weird, her behavior is a concern, her very being is a problem. To be clear, I understand that C’s behavior would be problematic for a boy as well. But I have to wonder if the framing of it and the discussion around it would have been quite as extreme if C had been a Charles.

No matter how many studies show us that gender roles are learned and not innate, we’re still expecting and rewarding girls for being pretty and neat and soft and sweet and polite. For looking like a little princess. For smelling nice. For fixing their hair. When they are messy and defiant like C, when they advocate for themselves and they protect their bodies — sometimes aggressively — they exist outside a set of socially sanctioned boundaries we’re still living within. We say we want our daughters to grow up to be empowered, strong, unique women. How are we not consistently embracing these qualities in them as girls?
 From "For All The Weird Girls" by Jennifer Romolini