Is womanhood a war?

The artist posing for a womanly selfie as she prays nobody will judge her for it

A note before you read this article: I read Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner recently, and it left me in the kind of turmoil that could only lead to writing an impassioned rant about women's place in society, which is what the rest of this article is. So, uh, first of all, read that book because it's incredible, and second I'm sorry (although not really) for the rest of this rant. Love you! Unless you don't love women. In which case, read Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex and THEN read Fleishman is in trouble.

In a previous job, one of my managers told me at a dinner that, if I ever wanted to make partner, I would have to give up on being a woman. Just look at those that made it, he said: hearing him speak, you would have thought they were soulless husks who, if they ever did have kids, abandoned them to nannies and expensive gifts in order to replace the disgrace of a mother they were.

By all accounts, that guy was an asshole, and that was one of the less terrible things he said to me. He was the kind of person who assigned a woman to work with HR and think it was no surprise if they succeeded because, well, you know. A few months after our dinner, he got promoted.

He was an asshole, sure, but there were three other men around that table and, when I started vehemently disagreeing with what he was saying, they defended me with the half-there resolve of people who know it’s the right thing to do, even though they don’t exactly know what ‘it’ is. They knew women could work - they had wives and girlfriends with great jobs and mothers and daughters and colleagues and what have you, and they were all definitely women, so of course that guy was a chauvinist pig for what he had said. And I was there, obviously, and I’m sure none of the other people around that table thought they treated me differently at work because of my gender. What those men didn’t talk about: the fact that they apologized if they cursed when a woman was around; that their wives took full parental leave and they came back to work after half the time; that they worked from all over the world and joked about having to FaceTime their one-year-old before their partner put them to bed, because they wouldn’t get home until a few days later. Intellectually, it wasn’t particularly hard for them to defend me against a sexist ass who thought women were only women if they stayed at home and talked about their feelings. Practically, though, it was a fact that their female partners shouldered the housework.

The worst part about this isn’t so much that our society hasn’t yet caught up with the wonderful feminist ideals of equality. But too many sociologists, pseudo-sociologists and bloggers with an overstated sense of their own writing abilities have ranted about this for my own partner to do anything but nod at me when I get home after a day in the sun reading Fleishman is in trouble - an incredible book, by the way, that I highly recommend to anyone who wants a lesson in both empathy and humour - and yell at him about how unfair life as woman can feel sometimes.

The worst part about this is that there is no respite from the question of womanhood, not even from other women. It’s like de Beauvoir said, you aren’t born a woman, but there’s such a ridge between what we still think a woman should be and all the things women can do these days that everyone, woman or not, has a pretty defined idea of what womanhood means - and they size all of us up against that.

The war on womanhood isn’t just waged by people who hate women. It’s our pervasive need to hold women up against a standard, which I viscerally know does not apply to men, and the multiplication of standards brought about by our modernity has only gotten us so far into peace, because we still need to accept alterity in femininity to really stop fighting.

My teens were spent proving to people that I was 'not like other girls'. My twenties, so far, have consisted of worrying about the fact that I am not, in fact, like other girls, and feeling alternately panicked and threatened by that fact.

I know stay-at-home moms who hate working women because they feel like working women look down on them, and I know working women who do look down on them becase they shoulder the work of stay-at-home moms on top of their day jobs, which leads the former to sneer at the latter even though they should really ask themselves why it is that they’re shouldering two peoples’ jobs at once, why it is that they’re still president of every single one of their kids’ class congresses or whatever it is that children have these days even though there are clearly two parents present, why it is that they feel the need to prove they can do it all even though no man is ever asked to attain that kind of perfection.

And I know badass women who have told the entire world to go fuck themselves and created their own model for womanhood, who won’t have children because they never wanted to be mothers, thank you very much, and I’ve seen them be eyed suspiciously by a society that still can’t quite believe that a woman can exist on her own, no man or children attached, I've seen them refused promotions, cast aside during work socials, because if you’re not doing the thing that everybody else is doing, what’s wrong with you?

I don’t really have a solution for you on how we go about protecting each other, making sure we don’t get to adulthood with that special and innate ability some women seem to have to point out other women’s flaws. I don’t know how we stop considering others as the enemy, either because they’re different from us and we resent it, or because they’re the same and we’re worried they’ll be better, somehow, within that category of womanhood we’ve picked for ourselves because we’ve been pitted against each other our entire lives.

There’s this theory in international relations which is called constructivism. Constructivism says sure, we’re in an all-out war today. But maybe we’re in this war because we all keep acting like we are, rather than some external factor that’s pushing us to it. I don’t think that’s entirely true where womanhood is concerned, because both those involved (girls) and the others (boys) are conditioned to it from the moment we’re born, which means we can’t operate in some vacuum of womanly love towards one another. But what I do believe is true, or maybe hope it is, is that we have the choice to put our arms down. To cut each other some slack. To understand when the other can’t be perfect, and to know when to confront harmful stereotypes. To fight oppression, no matter who’s enforcing it.

It takes a lot more work than our general hostility does, because practicing empathy forces us to imagine models of us-ness that are not us, women who are not women like we are, or like we think they should be. But how can you ever claim to help advance women’s cause if you’re fighting against, not for them?