Not a boss, not a damsel.
Meditations on the modern woman.
I get it, being a woman these days is fucking hard, truly. Not only are we supposed to do all the things we did prior to the era of us entering the workplace en masse (cooking, cleaning, shitting tiny aliens out through our uterus, looking perpetually sexy, etc), but we now have to do it while grinding 50 hours a week inside buildings with migraine-inducing lighting and bosses who have no other outlet to displace their childhood trauma then on to your underpaid ass.
But if the endless hours of work and domestic labor hasn’t jaded you enough (“but….but, i’m a Boss Bitch”), then maybe the escalation on the war on women’s body’s has. I’m talking about the decades of extremely toxic birth control being pushed on young teenage girls without any regard for the longterm consequences, the anti-abortion laws that just got passed while Democrats controlled the White House and the perpetual expectation to maintain a body that literally can only exist through the use of horribly cancerous beauty products and tens of thousands in plastic surgery bills (we all know that shit don’t look the same in person as it does on IG).
The assumption today is that we do it all. We must be independent, fierce and completely obsessed with ourselves. But we also must embody the forever damsel in distress - to be able to appear weak, in danger and fuckable at any given moment in case an imaginary Prince happens to fall into our tracks.
On top of it all, we’re faced with the constant pressure of having to reproduce. But even with new fertility methods meant to circumvent the stressors put on working women (IVF, etc), birth rates continue to decline in America. And in the process, we’ve become so disconnected from child-making that we’ve entirely ignored that a women’s body is meant to reproduce in a time of abundance, not while under a constant state of stress. And unfortunately for our species, many of these newly crowned masses of Queens don’t have time for stress management, let alone to raise a child.
But I don’t mean to victimize myself or other women. I think every human being (man, woman, or otherwise) can relate to the fact that shit is challenging right now. And while I don’t like to get stuck in categories of identities (especially when identity is as exploited for power as it is today), I do think it’s a useful way to find cracks in society and to begin to actualize new ways of being.
This is all to say that the cracks of modern Feminism could not be more apparent. As much as the opportunities to be a “successful women” seem endless, the movement of women’s rights and the new capitalist femininity has crumbled; leaving little foundation for us to stand on.
The reaction by many women is understandably desperate. You can see it in the Internet “Trads” (traditionalists) who so badly want to resurrect history and bring back the blonde-haired, white-dress-wearing homesteader. You can see it in the young Democrats who throw their entire hope behind a female politician and in the young queers creating identity after identity to replace the old. It’s in the wannabe-CEO who thinks intimidation is a form of confidence and that the 24-7 hustle is more important than love or friendship.
Yet these seemingly “new” categories of womanhood seem to phase in just as quickly as they phase out (in my opinion, a result of their irrelevancy). Besides, we’ve already seen way too many women in office to know that they are just as likely to pull the trigger of mass repression or encroach on women’s autonomy as their male counterparts. And I would bet most women are also fatigued by the constant hustle, the endless re-classification of identity and have little desire or hope to return to the role of isolated housewife.
Really, much of what we see today in both mainstream and even counter-culture femininity are just different expressions of the same anxiety, which at their core do little to help us navigate the rubble that is gender today.
If you look past the anxiety and desperation, however, I think there is something deeper happening throughout our crumbling society that may give way to new ways of being as a woman. And as unhinged as life is right now, I believe it’s also an exciting time for us to begin to define who we are for ourselves, even as society tries so desperately to do it for us.
Somewhere, even in the shadows of the spent ideologies, lies an important truth that what we have right now isn’t working and that we have the ability to create something entirely for ourselves. Something that can allow us to be independent and confident while also vulnerable and in loving relationships. Something that is both strong and feminine, and that even in the absence of traditional structures of the family unit, can still allow us to provide love, care and a healthy and nurturing environment for others.
Whatever comes will require us to become militants in the war on women’s bodies - resisting government policies that restrict our body autonomy (mandates and bans alike), setting fire to industries that poison our bodies and demolishing a culture that pushes an unrealistic standard of beauty on us. And through destroying the structures of old, we can begin to define who we are beyond this monolithic category of womanhood and towards something multi-faceted, fluid and completely unique to our present moment.
We may not have a historical example for where we are headed and certainly, the woman as we know it is dead. But there is hope in knowing that in her place, a new woman will be born.