I, like many women, am no stranger to the difficulties and dangers women face: social discrimination tells us from a young age that we are overly emotional and unintelligent, less worthy than men both in the workplace and in the family. From the moment we are old enough to play, we are given dolls, clothing and friendly advice aimed at turning us into nurturing mothers and obedient wives. And don’t even try to be a career woman, that would threaten the well being of the family you are supposed to care for.
Running away from Womanhood
From a very young age I was taught to associate womanhood with fragility. Being a woman, I was taught, meant being a target, being unsafe. Friends taught me how to use a key as an improvised weapon when walking alone at night. My mother told me to always have my bike chain in reach when cycling so I had a way to defend myself in case a man tried to pull me off it. These things stick with you. The association of “woman=target” was ingrained in my brain. I felt a growing dysphoria tied to my womanhood. I wanted to get away from it.
I was a tomboy as a kid. Short hair, boyish clothes, roughhousing, the whole lot. I hated pink, hated frilly, girly things, or pretended to wherever my resentment of girlhood wasn’t complete. Rejecting girlhood made me feel safer and freer, but also disconnected from a part of me. The older I got, the bigger the expectation of my blossoming womanhood started to catch up on me.
As puberty set in, people started becoming displeased with my lack of femininity. If the expectations of girlhood were bad, those of womanhood were worse. All the make-up, heels and skirts in the world couldn’t be enough to prove my femininity and worth. Because as a woman you are to be coveted. I thought being a ‘good girl’ meant being attractive and feminine enough to play the role of woman that I felt was expected of me. All these expectations scared me, made me feel inadequate. I compensated by taking others around me down.
Old Age Creator | Painting by Mikuláš Galanda on Unsplash
Learning to Hate myself and others
Slut-shaming and stereotyping are powerful tools for insecure women. And I was very insecure. This was partly because puberty is a breeding ground for insecurities, but in part also because I was struggling with one of the biggest things about womanhood, and it felt like I was the only one. My menstruation was, and still is, a beast. Being told ‘period pains is just a part of it’ only made me feel like a crybaby, and none of my friends seemed to struggle with it as much as I did. It made me feel unfit to be a woman. Why was this thing that was supposed to make me capable of creating human life instead debilitating me and making me bedridden for half a week every month.
I felt so alone in my struggles because I felt too ashamed to talk about it openly. My health issues weren’t taken seriously, and neither was I. I took these insecurities and I directed them, sometimes rightfully so and sometimes without any reason at all, at men. After all, it was men who didn’t understand my struggles with menstruation, men who didn’t take me or my health seriously, and men who made me feel unsafe and desperately clutching my keys or my bike chain wherever I went.
My worldview, my way of interacting with others, and my way of viewing myself became so muddied and poisoned by these fears and anxieties. No matter where I looked, all I could see was the inequality of society’s treatment of women and the pain and anger that it caused.
Just walking to the grocery store, I felt consumed by this fuming sense of hatred towards any conceived ‘injustice’ done against me and my womanhood. A man could accidentally bump into me, and internally I would scream ‘HATE-CRIME!’. All this rage, all this anger didn’t even get me to where I wanted to be! All it did was make me feel worse, make me feel smaller, angrier, and more in pain.
I wanted so badly to break out of that cycle. But society isn’t going to change overnight. So instead, I started trying to re-frame things. I felt that if I wanted to change how I feel, to become less angry and hurt, I needed to start changing the way I see and react to things: enter Buitenkunst.
Edvard Munch | Death and the Woman Place on Unsplash
Learning to Love myself again
Buitenkust (Dutch for “Outside Art”) is a place I used to go to every summer as a child. It’s a summer art camp that feels a lot like time got stuck in the 70s (by which I mean it’s full of hippies). For a week, you come together with lovely, artistic people in a space marked by acceptance, tolerance and respect for other people’s identities. All week, you’re just humans together in a forest creating any kind of art. It is here that I got the opportunity to dive deeper into different perspectives on womanhood through different workshops about women and gender related topics. After all the things I had gone through, it felt like the universe was giving me a gentle nudge in the right direction.
There was a workshop on menstruation that I felt deeply connected to because of my struggles. Within this topic of misinformation, failing health care, and pain, we were able to come together as women and share not only our pains but also our strengths. Before you imagine us painting with our menstrual blood or making earrings out of used tampons, I have to disappoint you. We used this shared sense of struggle that we had all felt, and our newfound sense of community, to create an information bank on what menstruation means for us. It felt like taking power into our own hands and breaking the taboo that is such an integral part of womanhood. It felt like safety. Like finally being able to reclaim this extremely painful thing that had been derailing my life for years by being allowed to be open and honest about it. Without having to hide, I felt like I was shedding a sense of shame I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying with me.
Discovering that the way I’ve been viewing myself is so tied to how other people view me, and the way that influences my sense of self, but also the way I treat and view others, was a big eye-opener. Being able to acknowledge that helped me on my journey of rediscovering womanhood.
The kicker was the workshop called The Female Gaze. Tagline: We are familiar with the male gaze, but what would the world look like through the female gaze? This was a massive project with so many women working together in different art disciplines to create a huge interactive (performance) art installation that people could walk through.
Even though for many of us it was the first time we’d met, there was this mutual understanding that we all wanted to harbor love, safety, and vulnerability for one another. Things that we created and experienced together during this day helped me come so very close to a kinder, more accepting way of looking at my own womanhood and the roles of women in society in general.
I won’t be attempting to describe the end result, moreover, I want to focus on what it meant to me. Being able to be open and vulnerable about the fears that go hand in hand with being a woman. Daring to say ‘I love myself, I love these feminine things about myself that people tell me I should be ashamed about’. Finding love and support, an open space for vulnerability without it being marked as weakness. What is the Female Gaze (to me)? It’s being able to look at a person with all their fears, vulnerabilities, so-called imperfections, and saying, ‘I love you, I hear you, I see you, and I will make space for you’.
Now you can say, ‘Life is better in summer camp’, but I think that just saying that these things only have space to exist in an idealistic hippie summer art camp would be a shame. So instead, when I came home after a couple of days of moping about being back in ‘regular society’, I thought, what if instead of moping and missing that space, I implement some of the things I learned into my life. I started trying to listen to my body more. Attempting to move with care for my body, especially my menstruation, and all of the difficulties I experience surrounding that. For me, it starts with just not expecting myself to be well and fully functional around the time of my menstruation, and that’s okay. I also chose to re-frame how I talk about it, less as a nuisance that my body hurts me with and that I have to ‘put up with’, and more as a natural process that is part of my human biology. Body neutrality, if you will. I made an effort to learn about other perspectives on gender, so instead of going on rants towards my friends and colleagues, I started trying to ask them more questions about their experiences and thoughts. I am a true-born yapper, so it’s not something that always comes easy, but the intention is set, and it does help to create a broader perspective.
Another thing that I tried to take home with me was the Female Gaze. For me, that means vulnerability, love, playfulness, and community. Finding a way to express these things in my daily life helped me create more balance in dealing with pain and hardship.
These are the things that work for me, but your mileage may vary. My goal is certainly not to proclaim a so called “truth” about womanhood. I am no messiah. But there are some things I want you to take away from my experience. I want you to know that you are not alone. However you feel about (your) womanhood, what experiences you have, know that there are others. I hope that you can allow yourself to feel carried by your community. Sharing experiences can strengthen our bonds. Besides that, I hope you can also dare yourself to challenge your perspective on things if you notice that your current perspective is creating a pool of negativity. A healthy balance is needed to stay afloat. No need to turn a blind eye to the painful things, as long as you don’t forget to be curious, be loving and playful, and breathe.
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