Anonymous asked: "the feminist narratives of womanhood never include anything I am, could be, or might aspire to" - so as someone to whom the 'feminist narrative of womanhood' is literally 'there are all kinds of women, women should be able and free to be themselves, self actualize, do what they want, etc' - what to you are feminist narratives of womanhood? (er, I don't mean this as at all hateful or anything. I think we might have had different experiences of feminism and I'm genuinely wanting-to-know)
Gender is not a salient aspect of my identity. I used to be really uncomfortable with being identified as a woman at all. Lately I’ve managed to change that a little bit, to the point where I no longer feel sad when someone mentions I’m a woman, unless they say I’m something like a ‘rationalist woman’ or an ‘effective altruist woman’ or anything that suggests that my womanhood is something they strongly associate with me and something that makes me marked in a way that my other group associations don’t.
I feel deeply repulsed by spaces where womanhood is a topic of conversation. Should they exist? Of course! I would fight for them if I thought they were in any danger. But I hate them. They make me feel trapped inside my own skin; they make me feel nauseous; they make me profoundly miserable. Feminist posts that are like “yay lipstick and winged eyeliner! we do everything men do, but backwards and in heels!” literally turn my stomach. Ditto for “ladies love your bodies! love your [list of features people commonly dislike about themselves]!” It feels like it’s digging up something about myself that I’d just prefer not ever be marked or noticed, and demanding that I have the right emotions about it. I actually have ‘love’ and ‘body’ blacklisted at this point.
Radical feminist stuff that’s like “womanhood is about the ways you’ve been socialized by the patriarchy to be a compliant tool of men!” are even worse. And “these amazing women deserve more love!” posts feel to me like “these amazing South Koreans deserve more love!”; they probably do deserve love, but certainly not because of their membership in a category I personally identify with, and if you try to convince me that I should feel some affinity with them on the basis of our shared womanhood I’ll steadily spiral into wanting to die again.
None of my role models or aspirational self-inserts are women.I wrote that and then did a mental inventory and like half of them are, actually. None of them come to mind when my brain searches for ‘women’, because my brain doesn’t process their gender as being a significant thing about them.And then there’s the flip side of the coin: Feminists say a lot of things like “all women experience street harassment” and “all women have had to deal with gross creepy men” and “all women feel scared walking alone at night” and “women never objectify the people they’re attracted to” and “women never stare in locker rooms” and “women are constantly afraid of being raped” and other things that are just patently untrue of me. So even as I desperately wish I could be excluded from feminist generalizations about womanhood and the female experience, I also feel like I already am and always have been excluded from those, like I’m an imposter and if I admit as much, then I’ll be told I’m either lying and really a man, or else wrong about my own experiences.
Basically people shouldn’t talk to me about gender, is what it comes down to. I hate the fact I have one and I hate people trying to design programs of empowerment or assumed solidarity off of mine and so feminism feels like constantly screaming at me “you know that thing about yourself that you prefer not thinking about? it’s your most important characteristic! it’s your only important characteristic! we are the only people who are willing to overlook the fact you have it and the only people who will say that you can do things, despite having it! let’s talk at length about how much you have this trait and how much your life has been affected by having it!”
