Femininity

Femininity isn't often something that naturally comes with being a woman. It is certainly a thing I don't feel so strong inside me either because I was raised by my parents more concentrating in the fact that I'm a person, equal to all my peers, or because my mother comes from a different background, where the accent was put in excellence as a professional and an intellectual, and less on matters such as make up and lady-like behavior. Not like my mother isn't a lady, for she's perfect and well educated, but I have never really been "corrected" when it came to my pushy and forward and "stay out of my way when I want to get something, or prepare for my battling". The normal feminine things that come natural to most woman and are usually passed down to them by their mothers and older sisters, where passed down to me by my friends. My mom wasn't one to collect parfumes or have a dressing table with drawers filled with cosmetics, many parfumes, creams and other fantastic items women treasure carefully and use to remain soft and beautiful, stretching youth long past the years alotted to them.

My mom has her own femininity, though, with a box filled with the most wonderful necklaces you can imagine. That box had always captured my imagination, for it had more necklaces than you can imagine, and my mom could always find in it that perfect one that made her clothes stand out. She's all about simplicity and demure manners, with a gentle kind of femininity that doesn't ooze on you, that nearly passes unnoticed if not for the silent and humble quality of it.

A friend of mine, whom I love to bits and pieces ^_^, has a quite hard personality to her. She has had a difficult life, and has been through a lot but has always come through, survived and fought her way into the kind of life she wanted to live. She and her sisters are very, very strong women and often come down right as people too much on the defensive side of everything. Strong, unrelenting, in your face, she would come out as the least feminine woman in the planet. And yet, if you got to ger bedroom - which was a sacred place reserved only to herself, her sisters and her closest of friends - that contained the secret of the depths of her femininity. Delicate bed linens, carefully picked lingery, and a dressing table where all her cosmetics, her many creams and hair products lined up perfectly for her to get ready each day to work or church.

Femininity is a feature I'm still not sure if it's innate of women - which would advocate to the idea that men and women can be naturally different in more levels than just the sexual level - or if it's a socially programmed, feature, a characteristic we are filled with as part of a community that needs to work and a way to do it is by efficiently distribute and assign roles to each component of it. However, be it as it may, I guess all of us - women - have our femininity, either in full view or well hidden, either as a secret little intimate corner of our lives where we go after a long, stressful day and put laces in our hair, and play Princess, or either as the piece we wear knowingly or unknowingly, and that makes the world stop around us, open doors to us and take off hats, as a natural reaction to the presence of a lady. I can't tell you what's my femininity, and probably is very well hidden, though little slivers might have been sighted here through the pictures of my many lipsticks - and funnily, I don't actually wear much lipstick, but rather prefer going for chapstick or lipgloss! I'm more of a kohl kind of woman - or maybe, in the steps of my mom, my femininity is in my jewelry box, with my earrings (I'm big on earrings!) and necklaces, and sometime my bracelets.

However, learned or innate, programmed or natural, thining about femininity reminded me that we are not always as we look like to the rest of the world, but we all have a little soft core that relates to the rest, that makes us, maybe not alike, but equal and capable of understanding one another based on this common space, this common turf, this common language we all possess. Both Femininity and Masculinity are still mysteries to me, when I try to place them in a logical system where it could support the idea of men and women being equal, of all of us being just people, but I realize they do exist, they are somewhere there and both of them can be fabulous to live and enjoy.