Sublimated Femininity

Charlie's Angels, internalized misogyny(?) and me

Aella

recently wrote about the experience of being a teen girl who wants to be respected like a boy. It moved me. Much more than seemed reasonable to be honest. Sure, part of it was that she wrote it well and she clearly had a tough upbringing and she’s an inspiring person for building the life she’s built for herself, especially when you reflect on where she started. But, if I’m being honest, that’s not why it moved me. I’m not that much of an “empath”. I don’t generally enjoy moody, reflective essays. But this one really hit me. 

She wrote about how the models of womanhood she had around her were not aspirational, at least for her. They were moms and wives first, individuals second. On the other hand, she fantasized about being strong, brave… manly. She grew up in a very conservative Christian culture, one where “"Maybe women shouldn't have been allowed to vote" is a conversation you hear occasionally, slightly tongue in cheek but also kind of not.” She talks about how boys who were abused by their dads eventually hit puberty and were able to stand up to them. In a real way. In a way backed by real power. And in a way that girls who are abused never get to.

This upbringing couldn’t be much further from my own, at least considering we grew up on the same continent at the same time. My parents told me I could do and be anything I wanted to be and they were and are true equal partners. They supported each other, my mom did not “serve” my dad and their careers and interests and education were treated as equally important. They both grinded through late night and weekend study sessions to earn their undergrads while I was in elementary school and eventually their master’s degrees when I was in high school. They had me young and they stepped up to the plate and gave me a wholesome and privileged upbringing full of travel, opportunity and physical and psychological comfort. 

My mom is smart and strong willed and organized and a caretaker but also an earner and an overall Very Effective Person. She didn’t see feminine fun as in conflict with the rest of her. She taught me to paint my nails when I was 5 and liked both dumb rom coms and dumb action movies. My dad is one of the kindest people anyone knows, and he took me seriously even as a 4 year old. He’d listen to the CBC science shows and answer my (many!) questions, not in the way most adults do, where they’re just trying to minimally satisfy the kid so that they’ll leave them alone, but in a real way, like I was someone worth having a real conversation with. I didn’t see becoming a woman as equivalent to accepting a life of perdition. I didn’t even see it as equivalent to becoming a wife and mom. I expected to become those things, but they didn’t seem scary because the moms I knew seemed to be doing just as well as the dads I knew.

But I still related to the essay. A lot. It’s just that my gender related insecurities didn’t really arise until later on. Or at least I didn’t recognize them as such until later on. I was not a “guys girl” as a kid. I had my girl group and we liked girly things and that never concerned us or seemed like a bad thing. We were excited to go through puberty and were boy crazy and my biggest insecurities were about being skinny and pretty enough and having nice enough boobs, not about being smart, or brave or cool enough. 

But at the same time… there was always a part of me that wanted to be brave and cool and masculine and, maybe most importantly, surprising. I absolutely loved the Charlie’s Angels movies that came out when I was 8 and 11 respectively. I loved how beautiful and sexy the angles were (especially Drew, I love you Drew and I still love you despite the Momala nightmare). I loved Lucy Liu’s severe, uncompromising beauty and the way she used her sensuality to manipulate the men around her. What I really loved about these characters was the contrast. The gorgeous exterior and the powerful, capable and, well, masculine, interior. I loved how they constantly caught everyone by surprise. How their beauty amplified their demonstrations of intelligence, cunning, power, skill. Because we don’t expect beautiful women to be so capable. We expect there to be a tradeoff. Women have to choose.

I did my undergrad in math, which is male dominated but not as much as people think, at least at the undergrad level. There were other women in the class, but there weren’t many other women who were like me. I was blonde and liked to party and drink and spent most of my free time thinking about boys. They were nerdy and they loved their nerdiness. They didn’t wear cute clothes or makeup or do “leek soup fasts” or go to Cuba for spring break. To be fair, I’m sure they were a lot more complex than I thought they were, after all I never really got to know them. But my point is, I didn’t relate to those women. I stuck with my little exclusive study group, where I was the only girl. Math undergrad study groups are brutal. Not just anyone could join us. They had to bring something to the table. Unlike the Math Eng students we didn’t share answers easily. We had integrity.

When I’d meet “adults”, parents’ friends or colleagues or whomever, they’d ask what I studied and when I said math they’d always, always react with surprise. Sometimes they’d say something like “you don’t look like a math major”. And I loved it. I loved to get the chance to surprise them. To show them that women, even femme presenting ones, can be smart and do stuff like math. But thinking about it now, that’s not actually why I liked it. I didn’t like that I was an example that could broaden mildly sexist adult’s perspectives on women in general. I liked that I was able to pass all the normie expectations of femininity, do my perfect sorority squat in photos, and then also compete with men on men’s terms. It made me feel superior and smug. Because… I didn’t really respect people with “traditionally feminine” interests either. I respected beauty, I respected male standards of achievement, but I didn’t respect femininity. My expression of and identification with femininity was skin deep.

I don’t think I really believed that any women actually had those feminine interests and desires. Maybe, at some level, I thought they had adopted a false consciousness that held them back from doing actually cool and hard things. Or… maybe I felt threatened by them. I had a friend in second year who had a pretty blonde girlfriend he’d been with since high school. The kind of girl who is perfectly wholesome and eager to be a wife and mother first and an individual second. When he proposed to her after college, she posted an Instagram that said “he stole my heart, so I’m stealing his last name”. Puke! She was sweet and nice and I liked her but she got under my skin. I told myself I felt sorry for her. Why, oh why would she accept this feminine mold that the patriarchy created for her without even a struggle!? How pathetic of her. (they now have 3 extremely adorable kids and what looks from the outside like a wonderful relationship.)

After all, who would want to be so womanly? Didn’t she know you’re only supposed to want to look womanly?? Doesn’t she want to be good at things that actually matter? Rather than be good at mundane, lesser, supportive tasks like being a mom? From my perspective, as Aella said:

when boys are insecure it’s because they’ve failed at being manly enough; but for you there’s no comparison. no girl feels like a failure for not being womanly enough; really, the more womanly you are, the more humiliating.

Of course, she’s wrong. Some girls do want to be maximally womanly and feel like failures when they don’t live up to that standard. But neither she nor I nor the girls we liked wanted to be that. And the kind of guy I wanted certainly wouldn’t want a womanly woman like that. He’d want the white-collar professional equivalent of a Charlie’s angel. 

I did my master’s in agricultural economics, which was more or less randomly chosen because it was the August after I graduated undergrad, and I didn’t have a plan and was introduced to a prof from the department who liked me and gave me funding and let me start the following month without properly applying. The program was actually mostly women, and it was not very competitive and the rest of my classmates didn’t have math training so I cruised. I used to study with a guy from my micro class which I was quite clearly at the top of. One time his friend joined us and was pushing back on my answer, thinking I had made an error (I hadn’t). And my friend said “dude, you should listen to her, she’s the smartest girl in the class”. My head almost exploded! Smartest girl!?!?! No fucker, I’m the smartest person in the class. I know he didn’t even mean it that way and I’m sure he would’ve agreed I was top of the class had I pushed back. But, as a woman, I was automatically slotted into a separate, lesser, sphere of competition and that enraged me.

Since then, I’ve been in actually male dominated spaces most of the time. I originally made friends in New York through the discussion group I started, which was originally based around Sam Harris’s podcast. You can guess the number of women that tended to show up. And frankly, the norms of the group, the norms that I created and liked and still stand by were not for the faint of heart. I didn’t allow hand raising or go around the circle so everyone could participate - people had to either jump in and make a good point or else sit and listen quietly. Weirdly, most of the women who came once didn’t come back. I wonder why?

I worked in asset management doing portfolio analytics and risk and quantitative analysis of hedge fund returns. Of course, I was conscious of how good it looked for them to have a woman on the team. So it bothered me any time my gender was brought up or even alluded to in the workplace. My boss used to call short meetings in one of the offices and there were never enough chairs and my colleague (who is great and I’m still friends with) would always gallantly step aside, gesture at the chair and say “ladies first”. This made my blood boil. Of course I’d never say anything. What is there to say? Don’t be so kind and generous? Saying something like that would only make me more womanly. And I didn’t want to be, as Aella said, one of the “hysterical harpies ruled by their silly woman emotions”. 

I wanted my male friends and colleagues to see me as one of them, to think I’m reasonable and logical. To think to themselves “Wow, you're not like other girls [...] You're actually cool. Maybe we should take you seriously and listen to you?”, as Aella fantasized. I didn’t want to want the silly woman things I did in fact very much want. I agonized over my desire for a man to unironically propose to me with a proper ring. How silly, wasteful, shallow, girlish. I wanted to compete with the men and win. Aella again:

all your thoughts are a woman's thoughts, your actions a woman's actions. your gender is a trap.

and the only way out is to actually be better than boys at boy things, but that's basically impossible. you don't actually have the core boy drive to do boy things. if you were really honest with yourself, which you're too scared to do - you actually do love romance novels and you want babies and all your nerdiest thoughts are ultimately about people, not things. you aren't cut out to be a boy. your inferiority is stamped into your bones.

For me, maturing as a woman has been a lot about accepting how much I really do want to be womanly and how much I really do want to achieve the goals central to traditional conceptions of successful womanhood. I want to have babies, and not only do I want to have them, I want to spend a lot of time with them especially when they’re little. I used to think I was jealous of men. They got to have babies whenever it was convenient for them. They didn’t have to rush their career or take a break at the most critical time to physically bear children. But I’m really not. I wouldn’t want a house husband who would let me grind it out and focus primarily on my career. I do want someone who's happy to take on the majority of the burden of financially supporting the family while we have young kids. Who will let me be the primary caregiver that I want to be. 

I still enjoy male spaces and friendships with men of course. My interests and personality are such that I’m almost guaranteed to find myself in at least some male dominated social and professional spaces. That’s great. I like men and get along well with them. But I’m not a Charlie’s angel. I’m a woman. And I’m finally happy, actually happy, to be one.