It Doesn't Have to Be This Way: The Infuriating Reality of Womanhood

[ismnotwasm]

This is a long, well written essay; what I found interesting is that she is a 'recreational pole dancer', although she doesn't exactly identify as stripper and it doesn't matter anyway. I love the opening paragraph especially, but the whole thing is worth reading.

I love women. And as I get older, my life is becoming increasingly about them. I dance with women, I speak with women, I am coached, sponsored by, and counseled by women. I meet them for coffee. I talk to them about sex. I ask them for advice. I hold them while they cry. I love the deep feelings. And the competition. The struggle to be seen and held. The intimacy. The complication. The ability to heal.

My experience at S-Factor has deepened this for me, surely, but on some level, it's always been this way for me. I remember reading Anita Diamant's The Red Tent in middle school and being just obsessed with the vivacious, earthy, female community of the novel. It was this raucous irreverent crew separated from everyone else just because they were female. They were special, ancient, and secret. Aunts, cousins, daughters, grandmas, sitting on moss and bleeding in a tent in the desert, while rubbing each other's feet with oil and cackling about their husbands. Oh my god. I wanted to eat it. I wanted to be there.

It echoed for me. Because even as a middle-schooler, I knew that being a woman does feel like that. Quarantined and venerated. Ever since I went through puberty, I've felt like I was a part of a club that everyone was obsessed with and also couldn't wait to abuse. On the public bus, in a piazza in Italy, I remember those first pre-teen moments, when people started watching me. The power you're gifted just by being a woman. It comes without your permission, and it's heady, potent.

But the lack of control over that power; it comes too. The first time you feel it, it's both. It's neither. You don't have tools to deal with it yet. You didn't ask for it. It just arrived. On that same trip to Europe, just as I started to glow under male attention, someone in Turkey tried to buy me from my family. My parents joked. The man was serious. I was 12.

http://jezebel.com/it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way-the-infuriating-reality-1537068838

[MadrasT]

1. That was really powerful.

And I can relate.

Things I used to take for granted as just "the way things are" make me really deeply pissed now.

I never quite felt the "joy of being desired" though. To me, it always felt like a cross between an insult and a burden. I guess it is nice to be desired by a partner you are in relationship with... but anybody else, no, ick.

I have used that same word - "prey" - to describe the experience of walking around the world in a female body... and I fucking HATE that it is that way.

[ismnotwasm]

2. Exactly

And no matter how tough you got, or fronted off--- you knew you were prey.

That desire thing-- took me years to figure out it wasn't a compliment usually-- not really. I wasn't joyful either, I was uncomfortable, without quite understanding why. An inward cringing.

[MadrasT]

3. For me

it is the need to be seen and desired because they "know" me as a person... desire coming from "knowing" is a good kind of desire.

Random desire that starts and ends with "you have a vagina and look nice" is yucky.

I don't understand desire without knowing, and it is creepy to me.

[ismnotwasm]

4. It is creepy

And like I said it took me years to realize it-- although I tried to own my sexuality from an early age. I remember raging at the double standard, trying to flaunt it, not realizing what I was up against. I was "sex-positive" before there was such a term and discarded it as soon as I realized the real sexual and gendered inequities that existed.


One thing I've always puzzled over is my strong heterosexuality. I think most people are a least a little little bi, but that wasn't the way I leaned. So sorting through so much gendered baggage was difficult because there was so much of male behavior I actively disliked.

[redqueen]

6. +1

[Stargazer09]

5. Very well written

And unfortunately, so accurate.

Why do people expect this violence against women to happen? Well, because it always has. When is society going to realize that it needs to STOP? I don't know.

I'm encouraged by some of the things I've seen since Steubenville. The instructional video showing guys tucking a blanket around the drunk girl on the couch. The acknowledgment that being drunk does not equal giving consent; I'm even encouraged by the guys asking for clarification on that issue, because I know that it means that some of them really do want to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, the girl in the Steubenville case never received an apology. The media still focuses on the boys and their sob story, but never on what that poor girl has lost.

When I was raped in 1985, the police blew it off because I knew the guy and he didn't use a knife. Didn't matter that he was 75 pounds heavier than me and much stronger. I knew who he was, we had dated casually before, and he didn't use a weapon, so it was not rape. Now, it would be considered rape, so we've inched forward in the past 30 years.

We have a long way to go. But I am hopeful that we will get there someday.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

7. &

Thank you for sharing your testimony.

[raccoon]

8. "you knew you were prey"--right on. As a woman who's lived alone most

of my adult life, I can tell you that it's true what my deceased mother said,
that a woman living alone is a target.

Makes me glad I'm old. Which is not to say I can't still be a target, but not nearly as much.

[elias7]

9. She sure watches a lot of TV