A note: My internet is being really shitty this week. Every day, it blinks in and out in clusters for about an hour. Then it’s fine for several hours. Then it does it again for another hour or so. This happens two or three times a day. One day, instead of that, there was an actual outage that lasted an hour. Honestly, I prefer that to the blinking off and on. That’s way more frustrating, and I don’t know if it’s my equipment or ComCast’s fault. I know I’d rather blame them, but it may or not be the case. Oh,excuse me. xfinity.
Note 2: It’s hot as fuck here. 94 ‘feels like’ 102. The last few days have been brutal, and I’ve been cranking the air like nobody’s business. Normally, I have it on 78 and turn it down to 75/76 when I’m doing my Taiji in the morning and before I go to bed at night. In the past two days, though, I’ve been keeping it at 75 pretty much constantly.
It’s not just the heat. It’s been humid as well. I hate heat of all sorts, but it’s even worse when it’s humid. I hate it so much. We’re supposed to drop to ‘only’ the ’80s tomorrow. Which is still bad, but much better than what it’s been the last few days.
Anyway. Back to gender shit. Here’s what I wrote about it yesterday. I talked with my Taiji teacher about it today (we’re friends as well as teacher/student. We have similar history with being ridiculed for the way we woman, but we had a very different response.
I was saying it’s difficult because I have completely rejected almost everything feminine. Not on purpose, but because it’s just not me. We were talking about makeup, and she said that she wears some of it because it makes her feel younger, more awake, and that she’s caring for herself. Which, on a personal level, is fine. But as I tried to explain, when 90% of women in society do that for the same reasons, then it because a societal expectation that is a burden to other women.
Unfortunately, I did not put it that cogently and got emotional over it. I did not want to strike out at her, but I kind of did. It’s just really difficult to fight the patriarchy without making individual women feel like shit. I mean, attacknig the system necessarily means women who do that thing are going to feel tarred with the same brush.
I honestly don’t want any individual woman feel bad about wearing makeup (for instance), but I have such a negative feeling about it because of being deemed lesser for not doing it. They may feel that they are not judging other women for not doing it, but, they are. “Oh, no, it’s ok if YOU don’t do it, but I just feel like a better woman if I do, you know?” Men, as a whole, are not made to feel that they look older, more tired, or aren’t taking care of twhemselves if they don’t wear makeup.
If it truly were a personal decision, then it wouldn’t be such a uniform response. Again, that doesn’t mean I think that all makeup should be banned. But I do think we need to think about what we’re saying as a society when this is the baseline belief.
I really dislike that we’ve reached the point where if an individual of a group does a thing, then it’s automatically pro-that-group. Things don’t happen in a vacuum and we need to acknowledge that if so many women feel they need to do this to be better women, then it’s a societal expectation at best and sexism at the worst.
I just don’t know what it means to be a woman. When I think about my gender, I come up empty. There is a blank space where ‘gender’ should be. Again, I’m not a dude. I know that much. As much as I wanted to be one when I was a kid, I’m not. And that was because I hated being a girl for the way I was treated because of it. I never for a second actually thought I was a boy–I just thought it would be better tahn being a lowly girl.
“Girls can’t run, laugh loudly, yell, wear pants, or ever show they are better at anything than a boy.” This was the overt message I got from my parents and my church. Girls were suppose to wear dresses, sit with their legs crossed primly at the ankles, speak in a whispery little-girl voice, play with dolls, and never, ever, EVER voice an opinion.
I did not fit any of that. I loved running around, climbing trees, laughing loudly, and hated dresses, dolls, and sitting with my legs crossed. My mother commented that I was such a happy kid. She’s also said that her favorite time was when my brother and I were little kids. In other words, before we got minds of our own. Which says something about her.
My brain balks at thinking about gender past a certain point. It just makes me tired and sad. I don’t feel like a woman, even though I feel a kinship with women. That’s because I have had experiences that are similar to those of women, and because I don’t relate to guys at all. Nonbinary is closer to what I feel, but it’s still a gender, which is not me.
I just don’t feel like any gender. I wish I did. I feel like such a freak, and not in a good way. I do wonder how my life would have been different if I could have been at all normal. If I wanted to get married and have children. If I could believe in God and been religious. If I could have embraced being a woman or het or something.
But no. I had to feel the most comfortable being the weirdest queerdo possible. That’s my lot in life and I jsut have to accept it.