I'm going to tell you a story that is so common hence painful it is effectively split off from the mental lives of young women, tucked away into whatever neural recesses exist for the purpose of shelving information that looks pointless yet distantly damaging. I wonder if young women will check this out? The irony is that they probably won't, and the silently nodding heads will be ones that are graying, like mine.
After passing out of younger years and into the age of puberty, I, like most women, entered a three-decade phase of my life that included an adolescence and young adulthood that was peppered with the sexual harassment, sexism in the office, mommy wars, pay gaps, and gendered put-downs that few females escape. It was a substantial chunk of time. The problems feminism undertook through those years were critical, and they continue to be. I am grateful to all the women and men who fought and continuously champion women's equality, reproductive rights, and freedom from physical violence and harassment. It is brave and necessary work.
But then a little something took place, and if not for the mirrors in my house, I would be very confused about what shifted and why. Young women, you'll go through this too, some day. You'll see your reflection and your breath together and be abruptly reminded that your exterior no longer matches how you really feel inside, and that it now undermines the power of your voice, the tone that took years to build up. I was talking about this to a good friend recently who is 50, one year younger than I am. She said, "Oh wow. I remember my grandma informing me the exact same thing about being horrified by her appearance in the mirror because she still felt like a young woman inside, and she was 81." So this perhaps will not end for me, nor for any one of us given the gift of not dying young. It worth considering .
Men do not catcall me anymore, and I'm pleased to have aged from that, despite the fact that a number of my friends are not. My child is grown, so the mother wars rage on without me. I'm now delighted to be self-employed-- an escape hatch from workplace sexism that is not readily available to all women, and one that I fully appreciate. I charge what I want as a professional and will never again stumble across facts at the office that a male co-worker who is younger, less educated and less experienced than me makes more bucks than me just due to the fact that he comes from the penis-owning gender. I am not free of the physical and sexual dangers all women deal with, but they have receded somewhat for me at this phase of my life.
All this freedom, having said that, is not completely freeing. I have basically been carried into the future phase of prejudice that comes with middle age, and it's a dramatic adjustment well highlighted metaphorically by the female body that is eyed and objectified transforming into the female body that is invisible. If the loudest and most heralded voices of modern womanism frequently belong to the youngest and most sexually attractive women, is this not a hypocritical replication within womanism of what occurs in our fatherlike community at large?
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