I came out at a time when people were constantly questioning authority and analyzing everything.
I’m reading a book by Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, a Sixties memoir.
From a perspective of time I can see how so much that I was going through, all the questions I was seeking answers to were the same questions women born female were seeking answers to.
Quite suddenly that December I started ruminating about being a woman in a spate of dairy entries. Brooding on the masculine lens which filtered perceptions of femininity–’State of being a woman seen through the eyes of men’– I was reinterpreting the woman characters in books by male authors. For instance, I questioned the ‘good girl’, ‘bad girl’ dichotomy in John Braine’s Room at the Top, a novel in which I had obediantly loathed Susan and identified with Alice (especially after she was played by Simone Signoret in the film). I also began reconsidering Sartre’s passive woman in the dressing gown, a figure of dread for me because Bob had communicated her ‘immanence’ as a kind of female living death. Now I had stumbled on to an insight about the obvious; those literary figures I had worried so much about resembling had simply been created out of men’s hang-ups. It was all in their heads.
I tried to make sense out of incidents I had observed with resement, putting many uneasy feelings and responses together– a man at a party talking about women’s buttocks as if she were meat, another calling girls ‘bits’. Women I noted operated within the narrow spaces allotted to femininity, as assertive hip chicks, academic women, mother goddesses, geisha-type sex symbols, independent girly girls, being matter of fact or dismissing men. I thought we jumped in and out of these modes of being and that our discomfort about how to ‘be’ put us at a disadvantage in relation to men. There was an emphasis upon ‘wholeness’ in hippie thinking, and Mary had suggested to me that if these diverse forms of behaving and relating could only be combined it would make women much stronger and less dependent on men.
I puzzled over how this integration could happen. Even in resisting we seemed to ‘map out certain areas of independence and compensate in others’. I was convinced the solution couldn’t be found by simply working out an ideal of emancipation in your head, for the very ways women learned to be feminine came from male culture: ‘Women take on the attributes given to them by men and parade them with pride. Very like the black/white thing’. Nor were we necessarily conscious of how we assimilated our femininity.
Rolling around the phrase, “how we assimilated our femininity”. When I was growing up I learned my femininity second hand through observation, from book, movies, the culture. It was a melange of often contradictory ideas of what it meant to be a girl and how I should deal with the world. At first the lack of experience left me extremely vulnerable to exploitation. I was looking for wholeness and was in a process of becoming.
I turned to women writers, feminist mainly. I listened to women’s music andsubmerged myself in feminist culture. I was trying to escape becoming the subject authored by men, sculpted in the male gaze, idealized to the male perspective of what a woman should be.
In the questioning of authority, including church and state as well as the way the patriarchy sets out to mold women into their own ideal I was struggling to become my own woman. A task rendered impossible in a world dominated by the patriarchy.
Banging against a stone wall is tiring and I settled into being my own woman, picking elements from where ever I find them even if some are thrift store worn and others barely fit. Sometimes I try things out only to discard them if they contradict the sense of my internal compass. Yet the be-ing mingles with the becoming and the journey is the purpose of the trip. I see life as process, including my dealing with my circumstances of birth and not the attainment of some artificial goal, a journey not the reaching of a destination.
