I. Me
Last fall, when I found out that my stepmother was having a baby, my first thought was one that, as a feminist, I’m ashamed to admit. With guilt tightening in my chest, I clenched my fists and hoped, “Please don’t let the baby be a girl.”
I think women have it tougher: there, I’ve said it. And that is why I wished for a baby brother.
Some of you will undoubtedly disagree with this sentiment, and surely men face their own set of societal problems, but this essay is not about that. This essay is about the fact that at one point in my life I found it so difficult to be a woman that I didn’t want someone I loved–or would love, once those cells coalesced into a being–to have to go through life as a woman.
I don’t consider myself a casualty of “the patriarchy,” but sometimes I do feel victimized—particularly when walking home by myself late at night, or when wondering how many dates is a ‘proper’ amount to wait to sleep with someone. I do not want to be a victim—I am strong and independent, a modern woman—but sometimes I do feel like one, and that confuses and upsets me. I live in a time and place that is arguably one of the best for a young woman in this world to live. I come from a family who never made me feel that my gender was an obstacle. I went to a college where “dismantling heteronormativity” was brunch conversation. But I guess this essay isn’t about all that either.
This is about the endless amount of small things–things the world expects of me, and that I have come to expect of myself, because I wear my femaleness with skepticism. It is about the minor battles that I wage with myself every day because I have been taught one thing by society but have come to believe another. The feminism blogs I read are constantly taking swipes at each other–no one can seem to come to an agreement on whether or not “hook-up culture” is bad, for example. And so, equipped with feminist texts and fashion magazines and my own canon of disjointed experiences, I am left to figure these things out on my own.
II. Them
All of the men I’ve dated can be grouped into two categories: “Incapable of love” or “incapable of loving me.” Still, I fall with the abandon of an amnesiac, convinced that every prior bad romance must have simply been a fluke.
I’ve made a lot of concessions to please the men I’ve loved, and I’ve behaved in many ways that didn’t come naturally to me because that is how I thought I should behave. I’ve pretended I didn’t want relationships and contented myself with casualness; I’ve tucked away snide comments or important choices in order to make room for the needs of others. “You have a habit of putting the concerns of others before your own,” a friend told me when I showed him a draft of this essay. “And that isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it is when done at your own expense.”
I have done and been so many things I didn’t want to, simply because as a woman I felt like that was what was expected of me. They are small, but they are compromises that–every time I make them–cause me to lose a little bit of myself. One day I am afraid I will have made so many compromises to accommodate the men I’ve loved that I will become small and misshapen and, like an old quilt, I will unravel piece by piece. If I am one of the informed ones who has read Gloria Steinem and bell hooks and even Andrea Dworkin, how can I explain away all of the concessions that I’ve made? How can I hope that my days-old sister will live any better or differently than I have?
III. We
“When they’re on their knees in front of a worked-up guy they just met at a party, they genuinely do feel powerful — sadistic, even,” Nancy Bauer writes of women my age in today’s NYT. “After all, though they don’t stand up and walk away, they in principle could.” We could, but frequently we don’t. Why?
Have we begun to believe that what men want is also what we want? Sometimes it feels like to want anything different is to be old-fashioned or pathetic or clingy. We act in certain ways without knowing if it is for them or for us: we moan like porn has taught us to and we shave like porn has taught us to and in return–if we’re lucky–men give us orgasms. Is that enough? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t, and I guess that’s what confuses me. Sometimes I do things because I want to, and sometimes I do those same things because I feel like I have to. The trouble is discerning which is which.
It isn’t the “hook-up culture” that I fear for Maddie: it’s the confusion that stems from it, the regret over not regretting. Last month, a friend of mine drank too much, blacked out, and had sex with someone. “I don’t feel bad about sleeping with him,” she told me, “I feel bad about not feeling bad.”
As a woman, there are so many things to feel bad about that when you are guilt-free, when you don’t feel bad, you may even start to feel bad about that, too.
IV. Us
My parents joke that having a baby sister will make me want a baby of my own–in fact, it has done just the opposite. Now, I look at pictures of Maddie, her cheeks sweet and ruddy, fat mouth puckered, and I can’t help but feel like crying. She is so small. I don’t want her to feel even a whisper of the anguish that can exist in the small things, in the spaces between words and bodies and meanings.
How do I reconcile the contradictions, the tiny disappointments and rejections and blows to the ego that so often make up the female experience? How do I make them go away, so that my little sister, just a few days old, doesn’t have to live in the world I’ve lived?
I guess I deal with them the only way I know how–by trying to parse and learn from my own confusing experiences, by forgiving myself for all of those mistakes I have made in the name of my body or in the name of someone else’s. I guess I deal with the pain and loveliness of being a woman simply by writing about it–for my sake, and hopefully for Maddie’s, too.
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