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)]

I got the 7 days every 14-23 days version.

There is one absolutely banned middle grades author at my home. Bet you can guess which: the one who made a big deal out of how mild and cool periods are.

I disagree with you about the purpose of abortion in our culture: the purpose, as I see it, is to make women's bodies available for sex with men without consequences. No brother or father showing up with a shotgun to make him "do the right thing", no state mandated child support (the modern version of the shotgun marriage's purpose). Birth control, abortion, she has no reason not to be sexually available. I think we see this with the demand that lesbians be available for sex with pre-transition MtF as well. I mean, seriously, not wanting to should be an acceptable and final answer for anyone, and it's no one's business why not.

Of course, being a Christian, I believe abortion is murder and support crisis pregnancy charities, so we'll disagree on what abortion is, but do you think I'm so very far off on the making women available for sex side? I think it does tie in with the sexualization of young girls and the constant portrayal of women as sex objects at all times. I knew a lot of girls who felt like they had to have sex and found it unpleasant and unfulfilling as teens. As an adult by my first time, I found it fun, and suspect my friends would have been much better served to wait until their rather stupid and mostly transient boyfriends matured a little!

BoysMom

P.S. Accidentaly hit post comment while typing. This is the same comment, less a case error and with the entirety of the last two sentences.

[kimberlysteele]

Ay yi yi -- at least mine was a 28 day cycle!

I never realized how overrated the aforementioned author was until I read her book Wifey as an adult. Ick. She should have stuck with cutesy Junior Room lit.

I had not thought of it that way. You have a good point. I do agree with you that abortion and birth control are extremely useful tools in ensuring that women are at least always perceived as being available for sex. I was terrified of having to obtain an abortion. I sat with two different teenage friends when they got abortions, and both times we had to walk through Christians holding vile, graphic signs, hurling foul curses, and literally throwing projectiles at us. In my next essay, Christianity's Coda, I'll be talking about why I believe Christianity is in its last days as a major world religion. That aside, my fear of having to possibly get an abortion and catching a venereal disease is what ruined sex for me in this incarnation, and I don't believe waiting for The One would have made it better, especially not if I was pressured or forced to have a baby or babies I did not want. The girls I sat with in the abortion clinic did NOT want to be there and I would be shocked if they did it twice. Both had abusive families and both had used double/combo prophylactics. One was 17 and the other was 18. In previous generations, these were the exact kind of young ladies who would have been shunted to someplace far away to have their children in a baby mill. Once at the mill, these women would be marooned from everyone they knew, casually abused by Christian do-gooders like the prideful Filipino doctor who brought me into the world, and then scolded and told of how unfit they were for motherhood despite the fact their grandmothers and great grandmothers started bearing children in their teens. It didn't matter if they decided they wanted the child come what may, NOPE, the for profit baby mill would have its product, no going back. Personally I would have taken my chances with a back alley abortionist, or just killed myself and saved everyone the trouble.

Some women find sex to be extremely fulfilling and wonderful, and as far as being portrayed as objects, as long as people are consenting adults, I say good for them. I enjoyed sex during the key parts of my marriage, but the damage of being terrified during my formative years left deep scars and chronic UTIs from condom use. Now that my husband and I are 22 years into our marriage, we have a relationship much like what you would expect of a loving, older couple. I wish I had been born an asexual because that would have been easier than dealing with a normal sex drive in a culture that was ¡¡¡VIRGIN WHORE VIRGIN WHORE VIRGIN WHORE!!! all the time.

I would like to see Christians act more like Jesus and instead of trying to change people's minds, to help them actually change their lives. That's why if I was a Christian, I wouldn't give a dime to a support crisis pregnancy charity but instead would give to a homeless shelter or a food pantry. It makes more sense to feed a homeless mom and her kid or one who is struggling to keep food on the table than to fund the paycheck of a counselor who will attempt to convince a woman to bear an unwanted baby. When we are realistic about outcomes, if the mom keeps her child, they'll probably be poor because the State does not do much for single moms, and even if it did, it would have to keep up with inflation. Let's say the kid was like me and went to be fodder for the adoption mill. That's still a crappy outcome and the mother's story in the link I left above may offer some explanation. Adoption agencies are always for-profit baby brokers to this very day, BTW, the one I was born into was neither special nor unique.

Less complicated just to feed and shelter the ones who are already here, I think.