Shannon, I know where you’re coming from. For a lot of my life I have felt disconnected from my femininity, or at least felt like I didn’t live up to societies idea of what a ‘good’ female should be. I don’t like the idea that women should only be fun, flirty, light and only show the parts of us that are smiley and agreeable. I have always been irreverent and sarcastic, and a lot of guys who are alpha types I seem to get on the wrong side of, often quite quickly, because I must somehow rub up against their idea of what a desirable woman must be (not saying that I am desirable, rather perhaps that I don’t think they’re dreamy or somehow acknowledge or humor their sense of masculine pride).
It’s also hard when you feel like your body lets you down. I was always flat as a pancake and or rather more like a disheveled pear, and my mother was the most unfussy person on the planet: no jewelry or adornment of any kind, no makeup, not a lot of time for her own self care. I gravitated toward a very glamorous woman in my families circle of friends, and really admired all that was pretty and overtly feminine about her. So did my father, to the point he knocked her up and ran off with her. After that, it felt like betrayal and shallowness to even indulge that part of myself.
My main point to you Shannon, is that you have accomplished the most female thing that any female can accomplish: you have birthed a child. I don’t mean to say that women that don’t have children/give birth are not womanly, but if we are talking about fit for purpose, you have fulfilled the criteria beautifully. I think it’s a very important thing to discuss, and tease out how we feel about what society’s idea of femininity is (and how narrow that can be) and to talk about the reality of how broad the spectrum of femininity actually is, by having conversations that begin with, “I am a woman who…”. Even sitting uneasily in our femininity is still to have a relationship with it. You are a female, and your femininity is yours to own, within yourself as a person, not as some comparative measure against the ideals of it perched on the other end of a scale. I’ve read a lot of your work Shannon, and yours is a femininity that is raw, vulnerable and emotional but above all, real. I am sure you have given comfort to many other women in the same situations, given voice to their struggles and lifted them up.
I know my comments won’t somehow change the way you feel, but rest assured that many other women, including myself, feel a common sense of isolation from a definition of femininity that they didn’t choose for themselves.
