I’m going to tell you a story that is so common hence troubling it is effectively split off from the emotional lives of young women, concealed into whatever neural recesses exist for the objective of shelving information that seems irrelevant yet distantly terrifying. I wonder if young women will read this? The irony is that they undoubtedly won’t, and the silently nodding heads will be ones that are graying, like mine.
After passing out of childhood years and into the age of puberty, I, like most women, entered a three-decade phase of my life that included an age of puberty and young adulthood that was peppered with the sexual harassment, sexism in the office, mommy wars, pay gaps, and gendered put-downs that few females escape. It was a huge chunk of time. The matters feminism undertook during those years were critical, and they continue to be. I am grateful to all of the women and men who fought and continue to fight for women’s fairness, reproductive rights, and freedom from violence and harassment. It is gutsy and necessary work.
But then one thing occurred, and if not for the mirrors in my house, I would be very confused about what shifted and why. Young women, you’ll experience this too, some day. You’ll see your reflection and your breath simultaneously 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 10 years to build up. I was talking about this to a pal lately who is 50, one year younger than I am. She said, “Oh wow. I remember my grandma mentioning to me the exact same thing about being horrified by her reflection in the mirror because she still felt like a young woman inside, and she was 78.” So this probably will not end for me, nor for any of us given the gift of not dying early. It bears remembering .
Men don’t catcall me anymore, and I’m pleased to have aged out of that, although some of my buddies are not. My daughter is grown, so the mommy wars rage on without me. I’m now happy to be self-employed– an escape hatch from workplace sexism that is not offered to all women, and one that I fully cherish. I charge what I want as a coach and will never again stumble across data at the workplace that a male co-worker who is much younger, less informed and less qualified than me earns more money than me merely because he comes from the penis-owning sex. I am not free of the physical and sexual dangers all women cope with, but they have receded to some degree for me at this period of my existence.
All this liberty, having said that, is not totally liberating. I have merely been moved into the future stage of bigotry that arrives with midlife, and it’s a remarkable adjustment well illustrated metaphorically by the female body that is eyed and objectified transforming into the female body that is invisible. If the loudest and most heralded voices of present-day womanism most often belong to the youngest and most sexually appealing women, is this not a hypocritical replication within womanism of what happens in our patriarchal society at large?
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