I'm going to tell you a story that is so common hence painful it is effectively split off from the mental lives of young women, hidden into whatever neural recesses prevail for the objective of shelving information that seems unimportant yet distantly threatening. I wonder if young women will read this? The irony is that they quite possibly won't, and the quietly nodding heads will be ones that are graying, like mine.
After passing out of younger years and into the age of puberty, I, like most women, entered a three-decade phase of my life that included an adolescence and young adulthood that was peppered with the sexual abuse, sexism in the work environment, mommy wars, pay gaps, and gendered put-downs that few females escape. It was a significant chunk of time. The concerns feminism undertook through those years were critical, and they remain to be. I am grateful to all of the women and men who fought and continuously fight for women's equality, reproductive rights, and freedom from physical violence and harassment. It is courageous and necessary work.
But then one thing happened, and if not for the mirrors in my house, I would be very confused about what changed and why. Young women, you'll experience this too, some day. You'll see your reflection and your breath concurrently and be suddenly reminded that your exterior no longer matches how you really feel inside, and that it now undermines the power of your voice, the tone that took years to build up. I was discussing this to a friend recently who is FIFTY, one year younger than I am. She said, "Oh wow. I remember my grandmother saying to me the exact same thing about being horrified by her appearance in the mirror because she still seemed like a young woman inside, and she was 81." So this most likely will not end for me, nor for any of us given the gift of not dying early. It worth remembering .
Men do not catcall me anymore, and I'm happy to have aged from that, despite the fact that a number of my close friends are not. My daughter is grown, so the momma wars rage on without me. I'm now happy to be self-employed-- an escape hatch from office sexism that is not readily available to all women, and one that I fully appreciate. I charge what I want as a specialist and will never again come across information at the workplace that a male co-worker who is younger, less informed and less qualified than me makes more money than me just considering that he comes from the penis-owning sex. I am not free of the tangible and sexual dangers all women cope with, but they have regressed somewhat for me at this phase of my existence.
All this liberty, having said that, is not entirely freeing. I have basically been transported into the next stage of chauvinism that arrives with midlife, and it's a impressive change well highlighted metaphorically due to the female physique that is ogled and objectified transforming into the woman body that is invisible. If the loudest and most proclaimed voices of contemporary sisterhood usually belong to the youngest and most sexually attractive women, is this not a hypocritical duplication within womanism of what happens in our fatherlike community at large?
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