In recent months I have become more interested in understanding rather than blindly experiencing womanhood, or whatever adjacent category exists for a 23-year-old who is no longer a girl but does not quite feel herself to be a woman yet. In friendship and heartache I have been testing the theories and myths and truths I was mysteriously urged to abide by, per my sex and gender. Interrogating internalized beliefs, incomplete and misguided ideas, and the not-yet-bloomed seedlings planted by books and conversations has made the surrounding walls of the house supporting that still intact ceiling, the one they told us we had already broken, all too visible.
In many big and small ways I thought we were no longer affected by trite sexism. With a bit more looking and thinking, it has become increasingly apparent that it’s just evolved into something more insidious.
It is the fact that the stories of women are interesting when they retrospectively recall pain and suffering, and are narrated from a triumphant position. Redacted are the parts where we would have learned that there were few people willing to listen and even fewer willing to help the protagonist. We are drawn to those hero narratives that reinforce the idea that women can overcome great adversity, intact and still beautiful.
It is the fact that many women are better trained in emotional self-regulation than the ability to unabashedly express their thoughts and feelings.
It is that a woman’s right to contraception, abortions, surgical alterations and corrections, pleasure, safety and respect are neither recognized nor understood with any real profundity.
If you ask a woman to identify when she has acquiesced to the phantom version of herself, the self that is agreeable, obliging and unnaturally restrained, she can probably name a few. But it is the moments she cannot immediately recognize, the ones which would require her to dissociate from herself in a complete and impossible way, that allow the nebulous, perennial grip of sexism and subordination to hold. And since men have learned the correct usages for “toxic masculinity” (often without considering how they themselves embody the term) and women can now more openly aspire to be “girl bosses” (a deeply unfortunate phrase) it is easy to conflate these cosmetic changes with Progress™. From those angles band-aids almost look like healed skin.
There are certain realities of womanhood that are remarkably universal. There are some we inherit from the women closest to us and many we absorb from our environments. Yet it is in the sexism’s interest that women remain fragmented, that we continue to see those who make different choices as our enemies and those who share our desires as competition. It is in racism’s interest that we continue to see the relentless discrimination experienced by others as separate or secondary to our own. These days, earnest and performative attempts to elevate the idea of “sisterhood” reveal that, in the eyes of many, we’ll always be girls and never fully women. Despite being laden with its own myths, “brotherhood” legitimizes the unification of men nonetheless, giving their individual decisions and actions a sense of collective purpose. Perhaps it’s naive, but I sincerely believe that if we remove the girlish connotations associated with sisterhood, with womanhood, and work to make it truly inclusive, we may discover not only the political and social solemnity already understood in the word brotherhood but also new, unprecedented meanings that lead to substantive social, cultural, economic and corporate change.
Because I wish that sense of collective purpose for us. I wish a collective understanding of the word “woman” that includes every single person who identifies with it. I wish for us relationships of all sorts that are healthy and uplifting. I hope that whenever we find ourselves in positions where we can speak up, on behalf of others and ourselves, that we will. And perhaps most of all, I wish us opportunities and respect and peace and freedom and that we all may be exactly as we are wherever we are.
Though the cliche of “everyday should be Women’s Day,” just as any celebratory day reminds us of how we take people in our lives for granted, rings true, today is a wonderful day to unabashedly celebrate the women we love and to honor the women we admire. And today reminds us to include women who are generally excluded from popular narratives of womanhood: trans women, like rapper Ms. Boogie; unmarried women; sex workers, many of whom have been struggling greatly during this pandemic; childless women; disabled women, like actress and model Jillian Mercado; and undocumented women, like Cristina Martinez who created an acclaimed Barbacoa restaurant in Philadelphia, challenging the dish’s male-dominated history, and was nominated for the James Beard Award, a prestigious culinary prize, for Best Chef in 2019. Their stories are important, and they open our eyes and minds and hearts to the millions of people who go unnoticed everyday. Today is not for the women who sacrifice their peers at the alter of their ambitions or hateful beliefs. And today is not for women who are proxies for misogyny. Today is a day, which should be like all days, where we believe women, empower Black, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous women, support all women, invest in women, remind women who have been told their whole lives they are insignificant that they are essential, include women and listen to them too.
I used to hate pink because its associations with womanhood felt limited and frivolous. Then I realized pink could be the color of resilience, unity and every other word we use to celebrate intersectional womanhood.
“From those angles band aids almost look like healed skin” I got chills. Happy women’s day to one of my favorite female writers! Thanks for putting words to the thoughts we all have but can’t quite express ❤️