[164/365] failing femininity

[cosmolinguist]

"I bet you got my double chin in the photo," my friend said. Another friend had just taken a picture of our local writer's group, celebrating the birthday of a member with cake and pizza.

It just made me sad that the first thing she thought of when someone took a picture was not "hooray we're celebrating a birthday" but instead about her body and about how worried she was that it is a wrong shape.

"We should learn to do Photoshop, shouldn't we," another (the birthday girl) mused. "To edit that stuff out."

A third, the photo-taker, said "We should Photoshop in lots of double chins and chin hairs and stuff." I was delighted to hear this, and enthusiastic in response. But all I heard from the others were was "oh no," "count me out," etc. It really surprised me.

But then, I was surprised that it had surprised me. The group, born from our WI but no longer affiliated with it and most of us aren't members of that WI any more anyway, is all women except for me (they know I'm not a woman and are happy for me to stay). And if the collective noun for a group of white men is a podcast, I think the one for a group of women is a body-shame party.

It's actually one of the ways the WI was bad for me even before it was really bad; talk about diets and weight and fucking "syns" and negative self-directed comments were inevitable at every WI event.

But even in this group of mostly WI-outcasts -- people too neurodivergent, too queer in my case (I wouldn't actually be allowed in the WI now by the rules we were using, which is living full-time as a woman), too foreign or poor or disabled or just weird enough to be driven off by people who wanted a nice middle-class normative ladies circle last year -- this toxic body-image shit persists. It makes it hard to be around women sometimes, despite how dearly I love them.

People with turquoise hair still flinching from the jokey idea of having a few more hairs on their chin left me feeling weird because...it turns out I have lots (I don't know that I have PCOS but I have like every symptom of it) and I kinda like them now? I love the little sideburns you can see in this icon; that you can see them (well, one) is one of the many reasons I've always loved this picture of me. I know being queer or whatever doesn't inoculate us very effectively from mainstream culture, but I think it helped inoculate me.

Like I said yesterday, I read this on Tuesday. The writer talks about failing at femininity from a young age because she is too tall; for me, I was too fat. (Looking at pictures of myself now, I wasn't even fat but my memories of myself are still all of being fat because I was told I was from grade-school age.) This article says:

I’ve grown up in a world that’s told me my value lies in beauty, beauty lies in femininity, and for women like me, neither of these things are achievable.

And honestly? It has sort of fucked me up.

Me too. She talks about female friends asking her to walk them home, even though this means she will have to walk back alone herserlf, and their conviction that nothing would happen to her.

Being feminine, then, was both desirable and also something that might mark me as a target. Did I really want to be feminine anyway? My thirty-five-year-old self could write a thesis-length rant about everything that’s wrong with that incident: from Amy’s assumption that only certain kinds of women get raped to my own sickening need to be ‘desirable’ enough that she’d never have said it. And all the subsequent times when I made similar statements to others – wrapping my humiliation in a spiky, ignorant pride: “I’ll walk alone, thanks. I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself – just look at me haha!”

This conviction ruins people's lives -- fat women, women of color, disabled women have all been told by judges, cops, lawyers and others with power over them that they can't be telling the truth about having been sexually assaulted because they're not attractive enough -- but it's one that I shared for a long time. I have experienced very few and even then somwehat marginal cases of street harassment in my life, and once or twice when they have happened I caught myself being just the tiniest bit grateful. Relieved that I was finally sufficiently successful at performing womanhood to be permitted to have this universal experience.

I hate all the ways my assigned gender had been poisoned and booby-trapped and used against me. For so long, I couldn't tell whether I was a cis woman or not because I couldn't distinguish any interally-directed perception of gender from my externally-directed hatred of the patriarchy. And I dealt with that uncertainty and that hate in exactly the way the article-writer did: not caring. Or pretending not to care. After a while I wasn't sure if I was pretending or not.

Alongside trying to make peace with my physical appearance, I also work hard to cultivate the attitude that I don’t really care.

I don’t care about make-up: it takes too much time. I don’t care about haircuts: they’re far too expensive. I don’t care about high heels: trainers are far more practical. And if you think I’m going to waste money on a spa day when I could go to Alton Towers for half the price, you’ve got another think coming, my friend.

Do I do this because I prefer it? Because it’s easier? Both. But there’s another reason I do it too: defensively, instinctively, I reject femininity because I know that I will never achieve it, and the realisation that I can’t achieve it hurts far more than occasionally being told I’m ‘the man of the group’.

Now I've ever really been hurt by being called "one of the guys" or whatever but my reasons for this have evolved into less unhealthy ones, because I started with a ton of internalized misogyny. My brother's toys were better than mine, boys' clothes were better, boys did better in school for less work than I did...even in grade school it was obvious to me that being a boy was better than being a girl so I took it as a compliment to be "like a boy." It was only in my twenties I started realizing and dismantling how terrible it is to think anything associated with girls is bad compared to anything associated with boys.

But I still cut my hair short and adored being misgendered, despite the fear instiled in me by my upbringing that looking "like a man" just meant ugly. I was going to be ugly anyway, so there was no point trying to avoid that.

I am still not feminine, and therefore I will never feel beautiful, and I will hate myself for not being beautiful almost as much as I hate myself for wanting to be.

When I’m nudged towards femininity, I cannot work out if I’m rejecting it so forcefully because I genuinely don’t want to perform it, or if my rejection is there to protect me from publicly admitting that I can’t.

If you don’t try, then you can’t fail.

And I tried, then I failed: so I stopped.

I didn't get enough practice at failure when I was a kid, being good at school and banned from sports or anything I wanted to do because of my poor eyesight. (Why my poor eyesight didn't exempt me from piano lessons, which depned on it a lot mroe than basketball does, was never explained to me!) So I can be a perfectionist too; I hate being bad at things and will absolutely give up and pretend they never happeneed if I'm not effortlessly succeeding at them. So some of my impostor-syndrome brainweasels tell me that calling myself agender is just pretending I can quit the game of femininity rather than admit I've lost.

Oddly, no-doubt-dysfunctionally, as well as all the wonderful affirmations from people in my life, one of the things that convinces me this is not quite true is how strangers treat me in public. Some days, I'm given more space if I'm standing on the bus/train/tram. Some days, people don't walk into me nearly as much as they do other days. Some days, a stranger will say " 'scuse me, boss" (a local honoritfic only used for men) instead of " 'scuse me, love" (which is used in this context only for women). I've been addressed as "lads" when part of a group that's otherwise men. I've been called by Andrew's name when I do something with the joint account at the bank. Maybe this isn't all a cop-out after all.

But I still feel fragile around the subject; I'm, at best, in recovery from femininity.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Thank you

[cosmolinguist]

<3

[worlds_of_smoke]

♥

[cosmolinguist]

<3

[erratio]

Argh yeah, I feel like I can't win at the femininity game either and can't tell whether my own vague agender feelings are actual agender feelings or escapism from a category that hurts me. And I have no idea how to tell the difference.

[cosmolinguist]

I totally relate. I can hardly suggest anybody do what I did, which was just to eventually impulsively say I was agender when the stakes were sufficiently low and the audience was sufficiently welcoming, and seeing how I felt about it as time went on. I really think there must be a better way of figuring out!

[alatefeline]

Hugs offered. Some of this is highly relatable! Some is new and different to me. I’m glad you are here and you.

[cosmolinguist]

Very kind of you to say so. :)

[haggis]

“For so long, I couldn't tell whether I was a cis woman or not because I couldn't distinguish any interally-directed perception of gender from my externally-directed hatred of the patriarchy. ”

If it’s any help in reassuring you that you are not ‘copping out’ because of “failing femininity” - I recognise so many of these feelings about patriarchy and femininity in myself BUT my sense of my gender as female is strong and unwavering. When you said you were agender, that immediately made sense to me because of all the conversations we had about this stuff. You are absolutely talking about something real.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I mean it's been a few months now and I recognize every one of the brainweasels as being analogous to the bi ones -- you're not a proper bi, you just don't want to be straight, how can this be real if you have to keep coming out and people keep forgetting about it, it's impossible for you to pass, etc., etc.

As I was saying before, I haven't had any real doubts about this and it's been four months now so generally I'm pretty settled and happy with being agender. But the brainweasels still get me when I'm having a bad day. Outside reassurance helps, thanks. :)

[rmc28]

Yes! Exactly this. I am not very good at fitting the socially-approved model of femininity, but I have never doubted that my gender is female.

[cosmolinguist]

Thank you. It is good to know this is possible for other people because it never has been for me.

[finding_helena]

I agree. I am frustrated by a lot of the "performing femininity" and tend to opt out, but I still feel I am a cis woman and comfortable in that identity.

[raino]

Just regarding the body shame as female bonding mechanism, it really stresses me out when I encounter it. I know it stems from all kinds of cultural factors and very real emotions, but I find it hard to maintain detached empathy, it pushes me to irritation and even something like mild internal rage. It's like people I care about, even superficially, even as little as jut being in the same space voluntarily, just suddenly start stabbing themselves or hitting their head against a wall. OK they most hurt themselves, but hey also me, having to witness it! Even being expected socially to participate in that, by consoling them afterwards (or worse, being expected to stab myself too, but that I refuse).

[cosmolinguist]

It really stresses me out too. Especially because this happened near the beginning of the evening, because part of me wanted to get up and leave just to protect my own mental equilibrium (which is not fantastic at the moment). But I didn't want to miss the nice evening with friends I'd been looking forward to (and it did end up being otherwise great) and I didn't want to cause the big scene that leaving abruptly would be.

But I'm finding it increasingly difficult to sit through and, as you say, be expected to participate if not actively, at least by nodding and consoling people. Ugh.

[sfred]

Lots of this is very familiar to me.
Much love to you.

[cosmolinguist]

Lots of things you've said about gender for many years now have been very helpful to me. So much love to you as well. :)

[sfred]

<3

[moem]

There's a lot here that I can relate to. Not everything, but a lot. Thanks for writing about this.

Especially this part resonates:
"For so long, I couldn't tell whether I was a cis woman or not because I couldn't distinguish any interally-directed perception of gender from my externally-directed hatred of the patriarchy."

[cosmolinguist]

I think I could've written just that sentence instead of this whole long thing. :) Things I've been thinking and not able to articulate for a long time are all in there.

[norfolkian]

I identify with much of this too. I've often wondered if I have PCOS, but my periods are regular and pretty heavy and they didn't find anything when I had scans for mystery tummy pain a couple of years ago. But I've always had quite a lot of hair, including on my face, which is increasing as I get older (and since I stopped taking the pill). I often feel ashamed of it and I wish I didn't.

[cosmolinguist]

There is such a range of body types, PCOS is far from the only reason a cis woman might be hairier than is socially acceptable (especially when any body hair at all is not socially acceptable). It's really difficult not to be ashamed; I wish you could avoid that too but it's hard work to unlearn these expectations and it's okay if your efforts need to be directed elsewhere.

[norfolkian]

Thanks - I suspect my hairiness has something to do with my Maltese heritage.

[silveradept]

This is a very relatable post in terms of feelings and the thought of failing at one's assigned or apparent gender. It's not quite as full of body shaming on the end I was coming from than yours, though.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I'm sure other paths to this same feeling are going to have their own delightful details. I do think it's a shame what an essential feature body shaming is of any group of women. I noticed the same thing when I worked with nurses because the vast majority were women.

[mrs_leroy_brown]

*applause*

Holly, you are such a good writer. I have many thoughts about this I'm dissecting and have no coherent comment now, but may come back to this. What I can say now is that it was you who helped me love my own sideburns and now I cultivate them as part of my bitchin boss hairstyle. Right now they are quite long as I'm due for a haircut, but rather pointed and I like to think rather elvish :)

[mrs_leroy_brown]

LOL. I just pointed out my elvish sideburns to Steve and he thought I meant Elvis-ish. Sadly, they are not that mighty!

[cosmolinguist]

You are very welcome to come back to it later. :) And I'm delighted to have helped you appreciate your sideburns! <3 Elvish sounds great (if differently great from Elvis :) ).