I'm planning to tell you a narrative that is so prevalent and so unpleasant it is effectively split off from the emotional lives of young women, tucked away into whatever neural recesses exist for the objective of shelving information that looks unimportant yet distantly intimidating. I wonder if young women will read this? The irony is that they quite possibly won't, and the silently nodding heads will be ones that are graying, like mine.
After passing out of childhood and into adolescence, I, like most women, entered a three-decade phase of my life that included an adolescence and young adulthood that was peppered with the unwanted sexual advances, sexism in the office, mommy wars, pay gaps, and gendered put-downs that few females escape. It was a huge chunk of time. The concerns feminism undertook throughout those years were critical, and they continue to be. I am grateful to every one of the women and men who battle and continue to champion women's equal rights, reproductive system rights, and freedom from brutality and harassment. It is gutsy and necessary work.
But then something occurred, and if not for the mirrors in my house, I would be very bewildered about what shifted and why. Young women, you'll go through this too, some day. You'll see your reflection and your breath at the same time and be suddenly reminded that your exterior no longer matches how you feel inside, and that it now weakens the power of your voice, the tone that took decades to develop. I was speaking about this to a pal recently who is 49, one year younger than I am. She said, "Oh wow. I remember my grandmother saying to me the exact same thing about being surprised by her reflection in the mirror because she still seemed like a young woman inside, and she was 80." So this most likely will not end for me, nor for any of us given the gift of not dying early. It worth considering .
Men do not catcall me anymore, and I'm pleased to have aged from that, despite the fact that a few of my colleagues are not. My daughter is grown, so the mother wars rage on without me. I'm now happy to be self-employed-- an escape hatch from office sexism that is not readily available to all women, and one that I fully cherish. I charge what I want as a advisor and will never again stumble across facts at the office that a male co-worker who is younger, less educated and less experienced than me makes more money than me just due to the fact that he comes from the penis-owning gender. I am not free of the tangible and sexual dangers all women suffering from, but they have declined to some degree for me at this phase of my existence.
All of this freedom, however, is not totally liberating. I have basically been carried into the upcoming stage of sexism that comes with midlife, and it's a remarkable change well illustrated metaphorically by female body that is ogled and objectified changing into the female body that is undetectable. If the loudest and most heralded voices of present-day feminism frequently belong to the youngest and most sexually attractive women, is this not a sanctimonious duplication within feminism of what happens in our patriarchal society at large?
Comments
Post a Comment