This is everything. It is everything I have been thinking about and crying about and trying to write about these past few weeks. Last night in bed with someone I’ve been seeing I started to sob and I couldn’t quite understand why–why I was crying and why I felt so embarrassed letting him see me that way, messy mascara and reddened cheeks and the ugliness of vulnerability. To let someone see your weakness automatically grants them the agency to hurt you. It has been three months but I am not ready to be hurt again. Not right now. Not yet.
After reading this interview I know what I was trying to say to him last night, in between the apologies for “being crazy” and the jokes meant to derail my own derailment. It had nothing and everything to do with him–nothing because he could be anyone, everything because he is the perfect metaphor for my own internal contradictions: for the first time in a long time, I have no idea what I want.
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.