Hello, again
Thoughts on gender, womanhood, bodily autonomy, and why in the world I would write about gender. (tw: sexual violence, suicide)
I watched myself become a woman through the eyes of men. I became aware of the way men looked me up and down, the ones who catcalled me on my way to school, and those who pressed up too close to me on public transport. I wish she could see what I know now; I was just a young girl.
A young girl walking down the street, wearing a school skirt and polo shirt that stretched uncomfortably over my growing chest, marking the passage of time and puberty since the previous summer. Through my headphones, music blared, singing of experiences I hadn’t yet lived. I was just 14; unaware of the realities of the world. I wasn’t thinking about my safety, nor too much about the people around me.
Just about catching the bus when I feel a hand reach beneath my skirt and grab the flesh of my upper thigh, touching skin that had yet been touched by foreign hands. Whipping around, I face an older man. He winks. This marked the moment I passed from being a girl to a woman; I no longer walk feeling safe without a care.
This was my first experience being touched without my consent and it certainly wasn’t my last. Ever since then, catcalling and unwanted sexual advances have become a part of my lived experience as a woman. Being a woman means a lot of things, and means different things to different women. These meanings are an amalgamation of our lived experiences that shape what we know and value.
Our experiences as women can’t be summarized (nor reduced to biological sex, more on this in a later article), because we all experience it differently. However, there’s a thin commonality in our experiences under the patriarchy. Walking in our shoes often means experiencing being sexualized, objectified, and policed for our gender presentation.
For many girls like myself, their earliest steps into womanhood can involve their first encounter with catcalling or unwanted sexual advances. It can mean fearing for your safety and taking steps to protect yourself. There are the common examples of not going for a run after dark or walking with keys between your fingers at night. Or texting a friend after a date or night out to make sure they made it home safely, and sharing each others’ locations. It may mean illegally carrying pepper spray because breaking the law is better than being dead. It can mean that sometimes saying ‘no’ will be ignored.
Being a woman means different things to different women, but for most, our lived experiences overlap with moments of insecurity, where we lack bodily autonomy, and where we feel powerless under the patriarchy.
Being a woman often means having to fear for your safety but this is intersectionally impacted for women at the intersection of multiple dimensions of oppression who experience heightened discrimination and violence. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to highlight the way people’s identities can interact, such as race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, and more, to create compounding experiences of discrimination. The experiences of women of colour cannot be reduced to racism or sexism, as they are not experienced independently of one another. Transgender women, who are often at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalization, experience extremely high rates of violence against them, from acts of transphobia to sexual violence and interpersonal violence.
A first version of this piece appeared shortly before Sarah Everard’s death, who was sexually assaulted and murdered by a policeman. Since then many more women’s names have become famous for cruel events, most recently with Mahsa Amini’s death while detailed by the ‘morality police’ in Iran. Her death sparked protests in the name of ‘Women, Life, Freedom’, ongoing weeks later and which have seen an estimated 250+ deaths by ‘security’ forces.
These deaths at the hands of police, within different geographies, contexts, and cultures, are rooted in misogyny and patriarchal forces. The same forces that oppress women the world over and control our bodies, restricting our choices and abilities, to paraphrase AOC’s tweet below.
Women should have bodily autonomy; to be able to choose whether or not they want to wear the hijab, whether or not they want an abortion. Living as a woman often means being policed for our bodies, and yet never having full control over our bodies. Desiring to just exist in my body without restraint, and yet objectified and sexualized, constrained within the expectations, rules, and legislations put on my body. We just want to be able to choose what to do with our bodies, how to be, how to live. We just want to live.
WHY A GENDER BLOG?
Gender permeates daily life, whether we notice it or not. However, it’s certainly become more noticeable since this project first began in January 2021. From the current women-led protests in Iran, the phenomenon of Andrew Tate’s popular misogyny to the Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to abortion. In 2021, the US had a record-breaking high of 117 anti-transgender bills, which has already been broken so far in 2022. Researching gender can be liberating and enlightening; it has provided me with the tools and frameworks to better understand the issues we confront daily.
We all live similarly in dissimilar ways under the patriarchy, men included. The term ‘patriarchy’ highlights the oppression and domination of others by men, which also includes the domination of men themselves. Studying gender has shown me how men’s investment in masculinity harms and negatively impacts them, such as being told to be strong, thus equating repressing emotions with strength. These expectations of masculinity lead men to suppress their emotions and not ask for help, which often leads to self-medicating through drugs and alcohol. Research shows that men who identified with rigid gender beliefs, i.e. men must provide, be invulnerable, and self-sufficient, were more likely to experience suicidal ideation and depression. This culminates in the statistic that men globally are two times more likely to die by suicide than women.
We need to study the way gender negatively impacts us to free ourselves from oppressive gender stereotypes and systems. We need to study it to better understand the masculinity crisis that underlies the rise in popularity of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and the like. We are all harmed in different ways, and to different extents, by the patriarchy.
When this project first began, it came from a desire to apply a gendered lens to political and social events to better understand the world. Today, the world, quite frankly, feels heavy. There’s so much bad. So much so that it has held me back from wanting to publish articles again. Why bring more attention to the bad things going on in the world?
Because knowledge is power.
And knowledge is often gatekept. This past year, I’ve spent immersed in these topics while pursuing my master’s degree in Gender, Policy and Inequalities from LSE. A privileged experience that I’m so grateful for; to have spent a year reflecting on power dynamics and writing on topics that range from paternity leave, and the gender wealth gap, to race and ‘newsworthiness’. Most recently, I spent months researching and writing my dissertation on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. My desire for this blog is to share the knowledge and research I’ve amassed this year, but in more digestible ways, both in terms of length and academic jargon. Because knowledge should be accessible.
My knowledge, which comes from my lived experience, is not universal and does not encompass the experiences of all. I am a white cisgender woman, meaning that I was assigned the female sex at birth and identify as a woman. I have the privilege that comes with existing as a white person in this world. I intend to include the perspectives and experiences of the marginalized by centering their voices. It’s important to highlight my identity because, throughout feminism’s history, white women have systemically excluded women of colour and other identities from the mainstream feminist movement. This movement centered the priorities of white women and fought for their rights, to the exclusion of those who didn’t fit their narrow definition of womanhood. I never want to repeat the actions of the women who came before me, however, intention and impact are not the same. Sometimes I might fall short, but I am always here to listen, to learn, to grow.
(An earlier version of this article appeared in January 2021 and was co-written with Jillian Giberson. Thank you a million times over for giving me the confidence to pursue this project and for reading nearly every word I’ve ever written. I look forward to continuing this project in our aims).
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