On Womanhood

[kimberlysteele]

My relationship to my own femininity has always been complicated, to make the personal understatement of the century. As a child, I was torn between wanting to be "natural", i.e. a tomboy, which was in direct conflict with the urge to be a perfect princess with clean fingernails and well-behaved hair.

It's not easier to be a male or a female in this world. Both genders come with a long list of benefits and drawbacks. Confusion arises when people expect what's good for the goose to be automatically bad for the gander. For instance, the same sexism that traps a would be Amazon warrior at home is the tendency to protect the most fragile and precious members of society from being pregnant while blown to smithereens on the battlefield. Women are simply better or worse at some things than men when we acknowledge the immutable laws of limits.

The Inability to Discriminate

The inability to discriminate is a common end-of-empire phenomenon. It's a way of throwing all caution to the wind until you forget what it was you were being cautious about in the first place. All areas of the political spectrum participate in the inability to discriminate. For the affluent leftist, they do it by sending their children to corporatist indoctrination camps known as "schools" until their child suffers a list of dysmorphias-du-jour and spends countless hours in the psychotherapist's chair in a half-hearted attempt to remedy their misery. It's the same "more is better" initiative that causes right wing Christians to build brutalist faith factories complete with multi-million dollar sound systems and lighting setups when their God was a homeless champion of the poor.

The latest vogue is to apply the inability to discriminate when it comes to gender, that thing that made me a female back when I was being born to a 22 year old Japanese American woman in a Salvation Army medical center in 1973.

It's In the Hips

Gender is not a minor thing. Scientists can dig up fossilized bones from tens of thousands of years ago and determine if the person was male or female. Females have different bones, especially our hips, which are larger because they were designed to help us carry babies. As someone who didn't want to have children in this incarnation and who had myself sterilized in my early 30s to prevent any chance of procreation, I don't like the fact I have ample hips. I would have preferred the prevalent slim hips of an 80s movie star. When Sir Mix-A-Lot came out with his song Baby Got Back in 1992, it had me squealing in laughter as suddenly all my body dysmorphia about my big butt was put into a wildly unthinkable perspective. I had terrible dysmorphia issues about my face as well. All of my female friends had dysmorphia issues with very few exceptions. To be female in the end of the 20th century was to live cheek to jowl with dysmorphia. Every girlfriend I had was at least mildly if not severely anorexic by high school. Yet beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder. One person's svelte is the next's emaciated. One's giant nose is another's ancestral sculpture. And there's also that inconvenient reality that looks are not everything...

Red Tide

Of course I had to get my period shortly after my twelfth birthday and of course it had to happen on the softball field during school. Be careful what you wish for! I have an unfortunate (or fortunate?) talent not to be able to do anything half-assed, and my period was a red tide from the bowels of hell. Think the Kubrick version of The Shining's elevator scene. At age 33, I would regularly turn green from pain and double over in the fetal position if I didn't preemptively swallow four Advil. Back then, one was supposed to suck it up and ignore the pain in order to get good grades. I wasn't able to get good grades with ease, so missing school would have meant academic failure worse than the D's and C's I often pulled in my senior year of high school. Now in hindsight I realize I should have been completely out of school four to six days a month just to deal with my period. Instead I went to the school bathroom every hour to change my soaked dressings for six years, then four more when I went to college, when it happily slowed down to changing once every 3-4 hours. Yes, this means at night I had to wake up every hour to change my pad and later on my tampon and pad, and to re-medicate with Advil, which was the only thing that worked. Anyone who says it is easy to be born female or who romanticizes being born female should consider what having a heavy, painful period every month will be like, because the gods have a funny habit of teaching us lessons the hard way.

I no longer have my period. I don't miss it, but I do miss my young womanhood which seemed to thoroughly depart just as my beloved cat Kiki died at age 15. I miss the old Kimberly's mojo, her ability to embrace the spontaneous, and her scathing wit that came from a place of blackened nihilism. This new Kimberly is not the same. She is more cautious and less quick to judge, but also more timid and less tolerant of thoroughly dissenting views.

Motherhood

When I was looking for my Japanese birthmother in my early 30s, I ran face-first into the crapfest of female exploitation and misogyny that plagues Western culture. My birthmother did not provide her name. It was only through careful sleuthing and a few lucky breaks that I found out her information. My original birth certificate was conveniently lost even though I was promised all of my young life that I would have access to it upon turning eighteen. I was born into an adoption mill. My parents bought me for about sixty grand, which was an absolute fortune in 1973. My birthmother was one of the only unwed mothers in the baby mill who eagerly surrendered her parental rights, hoping never to be found or contacted again. The other birthing moms, most only in their teens unlike my mom, gave away their babies with horror and sadness. One birthmom who later became my friend spent years trying to find her daughter only to be rejected and turned away. As a child of one of society's harlots, I had no rights to my own family name or my genetic predispositions. The birthmom who had her baby at age 16 and later overcame hell and high water to find her, only to be rejected, also had no rights. She was a "slut" who had been too easy and had let her boyfriend at the time have his way with her. Of course he disappeared once she was pregnant and had to be shunted off to a city a thousand miles away to have his shame baby. Adoption mills do not exist in cultures that love and respect women and girls.

The fear of getting pregnant was a cross I bore from the age of twelve until thirty-three when I had myself sterilized. I spent my entire young womanhood terrified of pregnancy. At no time did I ever want to become pregnant. I didn't fear becoming pregnant because I would be a bad mother; I feared becoming pregnant because I would have no choice but to become a good one. I still feel that anyone who would force a woman to carry a baby to term against her will is a disgusting barbarian unworthy of the freedoms he or she enjoys. Never once do these types admit that it's about controlling the female who carries the baby, not the actual baby. The proof is in the pudding when it comes to providing a viable support network for young, single women that does not cast them into generational cycles of vicious poverty.

As @mikevyers said on his banned, deleted, Streisand Effect-viral TikTok Dr. Phil video when addressing some bearded M-to-F crossdressers:

"What you want to do is appropriate women. You appropriate womanhood and then basically turn it into a costume that can be worn."

Exactly. You don't get to take billions of years of planetary biology and pretend the pain of menstruation and childbirth never happened. You don't just erase the for-profit baby mills of the last few centuries.  You don't get to pretend little boys have the same media-implanted dysmorphic images in their heads as little girls.  You don't get to erase the soul-disintegrating terror of what it is to have sex or be raped and get pregnant as a result.  You don't get to pretend you understand the mind-rending pain of miscarriage.  You don't get to pretend you're a female just so you can win a series of absolutely meaningless accolades for Best Swimmer like William "Lia" Thomas.  You don't get to pretend that several major religions didn't bar all those with your genital set from all roles other than pretty little f**k machine, baby factory, and housekeeper.  And at least if you're going to appropriate womanhood, shave off the goddamn beard and mustache, you pathetic, lazy, weak-minded poseur.   Yikes... I guess the old Kimberly is back for the moment!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Kimberly,

I'm a Gen X-er too, born a couple of years after you. Midway through high school my hips swung wide while the rest of me stayed thin. I still struggle with it, though I should know better. I went on diets hoping to shrink the hips and shed the pounds my hormones deemed necessary around hips and thighs. Zero luck. The ideal female shape chosen by our culture seems designed to inflict maximum female frustration (big bust, tiny waist, no hips but curvy butt. Big bouncy hair on the head while being hairless everywhere else). Why?

I learned very young to be afraid of male violence. Then as a teenager, I would go for walks to relieve stress and adult men would drive by staring at my body like a piece of meat. Even though I'm nothing like the ideal female and didn't dress in an attention getting way. There are lots of ways women cope with this...my way was to attempt invisibility and hypervigilance.

Some drag queens seem to be exploring femininity and I have no problem with that. They're more than welcome to my share of makeup and uncomfortable clothes. But some of them seem determined to take what is worst about women and amplify it, acting shrill, shallow, hysterical. OK, some women are, and a little good natured critique is fair. But until they've walked a mile in our horrendous heels, I don't want to hear it!

Many of the women I know in my age group didn't have children. I was terrified of pregnancy and childbirth too. That's something I often wonder about.

I'm glad old Kimberly came out to say a few things.

Pschedelic jocular puca

[kimberlysteele]

The saddest thing is when women who have lots of currently fetishized features, such as an anime face, a tiny waist and a bubble butt, literally make a living off of it. They learn that their value as human beings is directly proportional to how many insecure girls and perverted old men fetishize them on social media. Heaven forbid they age naturally and start looking middle aged, even when they are middle aged. It's a trap. Once they start showing the natural signs of aging, they arrive at a place where they have no people skills aside from gutter trash manipulative tactics (like this woman who sold her dirty bathwater)it's over, and they have spent the most productive learning years of their life as parasites.

As for male violence, it's the thing that makes males the inferior sex, in my opinion. I'm finally passing out of the age where I'm looked at as a piece of meat, but it happens regularly enough that I have to be vigilant whenever I'm out in public.

Drag queens don't seem to be as problematic as the bearded idiots in the Mike Vyers video, unless it's that small set trying to normalize the sexualization of children a la Drag Queen Story Hour. The last drag queen show I attended didn't even allow children because it was in a bar in Chicago. If we could all return to a sensible set of boundaries, i.e. no children allowed at drag queen shows because they are boozy and the humor is aimed at the sexually mature, that would be great.

Finally I have come full circle and realize that my fears of pregnancy were most likely my karma from previous lives. It's not that I was afraid of pregnancy on the physical side -- whatever, I'm very strong and if it was only a physical matter, I could have popped out several kids. I didn't want the responsibility of being a good mother.

[(Anonymous)]

Kimberly,

It has often seemed to me that to be born female is to be trapped. We are often forced into subservient roles by violence and threats of violence. Forced to mute self-expression lest we draw the wrong kind of attention. Trapped by monthly cycles that range from inconvenient to painful. And before widespread birth control, trapped in constant cycles of pregnancy and childbirth. The culture here in the US is unhealthy is many ways but it also offered women a little breathing room from those cycles. My gratitude goes out to all those women who fought to improve our lives.

I clicked on that bathwater link. Yuck on so many levels! Sad too.

Psychedelic jocular puca

[kimberlysteele]

Women are not given the same respect as men when it comes to matter of autonomy. People, especially men, want to make our decisions for us, including matters of life (birth) or death. The idea of us having control over our own decisions and our own bodies is seen as scary. It's no wonder forced compliance as a zeitgeist has swept the globe -- now that women have more power over their own bodies, the forces that would otherwise control them have become frustrated and exploded onto the scene in the form of MRNA vax mandates and masks. I don't think it's a coincidence that the most draconian vax and lockdown measures happened where women are most likely to be considered liberated. If they cannot rule half the population via fear, might as well go for the whole enchilada.