Dear Reader,
I hope you’re doing well. From avid readers to newcomers, thank you for reaching for this issue of Europe&Me.
The leitmotif this time (drum roll) is womanhood. I loved the way our authors tackled the term from various starting points and with diverse stances. For what hides behind this seemingly self-evident word is far more complex than one often manages to acknowledge.
Let’s get grounded with period-tracking apps: their usefulness and intrusiveness combined. Data privacy meeting stereotypes and framing, both evenly disconcerting. Then, we move to a deeply personal exploration of what it means to be a woman, pain of menstruation and joy of gentleness included equally. It asks whether womanhood shall be defined by fear. Or expectations?
Onward, we scrutinize how softness, care, or sensuality are often twisted into signs of weakness, and how that ties into the way masculinity is perceived and performed.
We explore these absurdities further in a story of relativism, where beauty standards shift with geography, though the narrator remains herself: in Colombo, earning compliments for fair skin; in Europe, exoticised because she’s brown.
We also unpack gender equality. Quotas can open doors, but they also quietly remind us that without such measures, those doors might stay shut forever. One of our texts takes this dilemma into a concrete dimension: the question of mandatory military service for women. Is it a step toward fairness, or simply a new and cynical form of coercion? In parallel, another narrative piece captures the interplay of consent and power imbalance, unfolding across the fragile canvas of a first sexual experience story.
Finally, one can also join a poetic city walk through São Paulo, exploring what it means to move through the world as a woman where balancing self-expression and beauty meets the need for safety.
I invite you to reflect on what womanhood means to you. To what extent is it a social construct, a power relation, or a tag helping us organise how we perceive the world? Use our texts as a frame for navigation, but dare to draw independent conclusions.
Yours,
Editor (Berenika)
Cover made by Niusha Khanmohammadi
