I’m planning to tell you a adventure that is so prevalent hence painful it is effectively split off from the emotional lives of young women, concealed into whatever neural recesses prevail for the objective of shelving information that feels pointless yet distantly threatening. I wonder if young women will read this? The irony is that they undoubtedly 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 unwanted sexual advances, sexism in the work environment, mommy wars, pay gaps, and gendered put-downs that few females escape. It was a big chunk of time. The matters feminism undertook through those years were essential, and they remain to be. I am grateful to all of the women and men who fought and continue to champion women’s equal rights, reproductive system rights, and freedom from brutality and harassment. It is courageous and necessary work.
But then one thing took place, and if not for the mirrors in my house, I would be very baffled about what changed and why. Young women, you’ll encounter this too, some day. You’ll see your reflection and your breath at the same time and be quickly 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 speaking about this to a pal lately who is FIFTY, one year younger than I am. She said, “Oh wow. I remember my grandmother mentioning to me the exact same thing about being horrified by her reflection in the mirror because she still seemed like a young woman inside, and she was eighty.” So this probably will not end for me, nor for any one of us given the gift of not dying early. It bears remembering .
Men don’t catcall me anymore, and I’m delighted to have aged from that, though a few of my colleagues are not. My daughter is grown, so the mom wars rage on without me. I’m now pleased 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 stumble across facts at the office that a male co-worker who is younger, much less educated and less seasoned than me earns more money than me simply considering that he comes from the penis-owning sex. I am not beyond the physical and sexual dangers all women live with, but they have declined somewhat for me at this period of my existence.
All of this freedom, having said that, is not totally freeing. I have simply been carried into the future stage of bigotry that comes with midlife, and it’s a impressive adjustment well highlighted metaphorically due to the female physique that is ogled and objectified changing into the female body that is invisible. If the loudest and most proclaimed voices of modern sisterhood most often belong to the youngest and most sexually attractive women, is this not a hypocritical duplication within womanism of what happens in our patriarchal society at large?