Today is International Women’s Day – I love the wave of inspiring Facebook posts and shared articles I’m seeing (I say this without irony. I really do love them.) but at the same time it’s hard to separate the neuroses that people say you have because you’re female from the ones you have because you’re a minority or were an alarmingly fat kid or had the kind of childhood where one of your most heartwarming stories was from the time you accidentally drowned a box of baby chicks.
It’s probably all of them. You don’t know you’re beautiful. That’s what makes you beautiful. Amin Maalouf has this great book about identity where he says,
A person’s identity is not an assemblage of separate affiliations, nor a kind of loose patchwork; it is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.
I love when people are both poetic and smart. And by poetic and smart, I mean One Direction because that’s some lyrical inception.
All the same, this is a post I saw today that I liked; it’s a Ted talk by Reshma Saujani who’s the founder of Girls Who Code. She talks about how girls are taught to be perfect, but not brave. It reminds me of a quote I like from Gone Girl, a book whose thematic genius I only appreciated after watching the movie. Side note: I love Gillian Flynn’s books because her female characters are real people lovingly grafted onto stereotypes who are allowed to be selfish and strange and terrible. Amidst her deconstruction of the perfect, happy wife, she has this to note,
I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
I read The Feminine Mystique two weeks ago, a book about the vapid, empty lives that American women were living in the 50s after they were persuaded that female fulfillment was to be found solely at home in marriage and motherhood. The actual subject matter may be some what behind us, but the book is still relevant.
These women who by all appearances were living the dream were being driven to drinking, depression, affairs, and suicide. There were two aspects to this: some of these women were educated and were feeling the subconscious weight of not reaching their full human capacity. For others, their identities were reduced to their roles from young, and these girls lacked that turning point where they could develop a real sense of self. They didn’t know what to do with themselves outside their predetermined roles which is where advertising stepped in to convince them to fill their lives with fluffy fluff.
It was ‘the problem with no name.’ Reading this gave me a sense of deja vu because this is every millennial today. Entitled or disillusioned, depending on who you talk to.
I followed The Feminine Mystique, fittingly, with The Bell Jar. It’s a semi-autobiographical book about a girl who’s afraid of losing her inner self and identity because society expects her to be someone she’s not. I’ve been meaning to read this for the longest time but I only added it to my list after it was quoted in Master of None (a genius comedy series by Aziz Ansari; episode 3 will give you some uncomfortable feelings if your parents or grandparents were immigrants).
You can read the quote here, illustrated beautifully on Zen Pencils.
*Disclaimer: these books were revolutionary for their time, but they were also racist and homophobic.
I want to tie this all up elegantly, but I’m inspired today to be an incredible mess. So. Femininity, identity, intersectionality, non-conformity, watch Master of None.
I also want to share this poem I found because how do you put this many emotions into a poem about words.
Bloop 