kimberkit | "Feminine" (cross-posted from the real journal)

I'd always hated the word "feminine." To me, it meant "weak"; when I thought of "feminine" women, I thought of women like Blanche, in A Streetcar Named Desire. I thought of the oppressed, tortured female: The Handmaid's Tale, The Color Purple, Beloved. I wished, very desperately, for people to stop focusing on women's plights and instead start treating women like human beings.

The usual role models I got for this were people like Rosalind, of Shakespeare's As You Like It. Rosalind, incidentally, was a cross-dresser; she found her ability to speak because she could speak as a boy, to her lover. Or, I had role models like Tamora Pierce's character Alana, in Lady Knight -- again, a clever woman who could fight, taking on a traditionally masculine role. Yet while both of theses characters demonstrated great strength of character and great ingenuity, they also made me feel just the tiniest bit intimidated.

What if I didn't want to express being a woman by being able to fight like a male, or being able to cross-dress and give coarse advice like a male? Was there any construction of a feminine role that didn't automatically either degrade women or feel like it had to usurp the masculine role before being respected?

And here, I can hear people asking me, "well, why shouldn't women be able to be fighters, or do anything else they want, for that matter?" Well, they should be able to, if they want. The Israeli army recruits women just as well as men. But you know, I really don't think women actually want to take on the role of being soldiers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Xena the Warrior Princess. Those are nice role models, but they don't make me feel as if I know what a real life woman actually should act like, in the ideal world. Men are expected to be soldiers - they might actually be able to use a model like Hercules. Women aren't, and creating a female Hercules doesn't fill a very satisfying role inside, somehow.

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ginnunggap pointed out that perhaps if I didn't construct women's playing of a supportive role as being "weak," I might have a more satisfying answer to some of this issue.

For example, Penelope, of The Odyssey, was every bit as clever as Odysseus was. In fact, she probably showed more strength of character than her fickle husband -- because Odysseus, in his travels, had quite a rest stop with the seductress on the island. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope held off suitors, by pretending to weave her mourning veil, while unraveling it every night. And Penelope was faithful.

If I remember my fairy tales correctly -- not the Disney versions of them -- then I remember that Cinderella played out her subservient role, but used her own talents and a tie to her dead mother to ask for help out of her situation. She proved stronger than her weak father, who allowed his child to be abused. And yes, she went to marry the prince, but she did it on her own terms.

I remember that Beauty, of Beauty and the Beast, was the girl who decided to accept her fate when her father stole the Beast's rose. She went forward and decided she'd face death in order to protect her father. When the Beast came to her door covered in blood, she sent him away; but she loved him, and saw inside the heart of the Beast where no one else would.

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I guess the challenge, in the U.S., where women can speak as well as men can, and where women basically have broken the glass ceiling, is to still find whether we fit this supportive and clever role anymore. We're really not tortured in the histrionic sense that Atwood proposed, when she wrote the Handmaid's Tale. We have jobs, equal voting rights, mostly-equal pay, etc. We don't always get treated with the same respect in the field of math, but women who make it don't usally get actively cut down anymore.

But if anything, we're a little lost, because now the culture values androgeny. Open up a magazine and you find sexless boys and girls, not full-figured ones. We like movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, and Hilary Swank. (Although Swank did a brilliant job in Boys Don't Cry).

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I want to be a wife, and I want to support my husband. That's not at all fashionable, these days, but it's true. I don't want to make nothing of myself -- I have a brain between my ears, and I have a good job -- but I want to embrace the supportive role. I want to be a mother, I want to find the same fierce internal strength that Penelope did, and I want it without necessarily having to feel as if I'm betraying the women's movement these days, which wants to do battle over everything. I want to embrace the feminine without feeling as if I'm undermining the work of women before me to get equal rights.

[[last paragraph edited out -- see real journal]]