A Question of "Girl"

Source: https://www.pexels.com/search/girl/

 Often times in our culture women are referred to as "girls". In documentaries about Playboy, for instances, the ladies who posed for the magazine or worked for the club are called "girls". They are legally adult women, but they are still called "girls". A group of women - almost regardless of their age - are often addressed as "girls", particularly if they are pretty.

In some online communities, also, women belonging to it are called girls, such as "planner girl", "bookish girl" and so on. Female power are also called "girl power", and there are a lot of expressions that describe perceived female capabilities (or lack of them) that make use of the word "girl" even when they are understood as expanded to all cisgender women. Here I think of things like "girl math" or "fighting like a girl". Yes, these are demeaning and stupidifying women (last time I checked maths had no gender and the hability of people to use them does not depend on their gender), but that's not my point right now.

One time I was at an online group chat and a lady made mention of something that "every girl needs". I was the youngest of the group (not of the females, but of the whole group) and I'm 48 years old. I felt odd because I'm not a girl and I haven't been a girl for... 36 years? I've lived more years being a woman than the years I lived being a girl, and all the other people who identify as a female were pretty much in the same situation.

At another time, in a podcast, I heard the two podcasters mention that they prefer to be referred to as girls, because "woman" is such a horrible-sounding word, and "girl" is much more nice. But why is that? What do people think of when they think of "a girl"?

Based on the references from media and social networks, online materials and conversations, girls are both young, female children as well as young women. Girls are pretty, innocent, playful but also sexualized. Women are coarser, antagonistic or broken into submission and possibly sexually savvy or frigid, boring. Girls are desirable, women are not so much. Girls are still youthful why women are not. Girls are fun, women complain.

The way we use language and the way language is being used makes "girl" to be the desirable word to be called, and "woman" becomes a label you do well to avoid. But to be called "girl" you must be a girl, or at least act like one and look like one: happy, pretty, fun... and dumb. Girls are not threatening, girls can be tricked. Girls can be manipulated, gaslit. Women would fight back, hard. The label "girl" takes power away from a female human. It diminishes her and make her complains a joke. And at the same time, it's sold as "girl" being a word of "care and tenderness". You are a girl, so I'll take care of you.

Would it be the same if we started calling men "boys"? What would happen if we made the word "boy" desirable and we would call pretty men "boys" and build up a social image that boys are nice, pretty, fun and innocent, while men are annoying, complaining and old (and thus, ugly)? What would happen if we laughed at a man that gets a calculation wrong and say "oh, it's boy math!".

I find the use of "girl" troublesome for the pushing of women into place where they are expected to be just-pretty-not-smart, and always deferential to others, accepting that they are lesser, always afraid of aging, and aging out of the "girl" label, but also because by mixing adult women into the "girl" name, actual girls become part of the same group and those open to be sexualized. Men stop being called "boy" clearly when their childhood ends, but women flow and remain in girlhood for years on end.

I personally don't like even being referred to as a "woman", and I prefer being seen as a person and referred to as a person, but if the situation or the conversation is so that my gender needs to be mentioned, then I am a woman.

I wonder how other people feel about this.

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.

Women and the Full Moon

First of all I'd like to extend my greetings and blessings to all of my sisters, for today is Women's Day. And acquintance of mine bitterly commented basically that why should he greet women on this day when no woman remember or even greet them on "Men's Day". It made me smile. He kind of forgot that women have been exploited and abused through history, and this day marks a particular day when women stood bravely against discrimination and fought for their rights. They were brutally murdered, but thanks to the example settled, as well as the fight of many of our mothers and grandmothers and those women - and also men - who believed in us, we now can take part of the political life, have equal rights in the labor world and are no longer regarded as property, but as people.

This year's Women's Day, however, coincides with a Full Moon, which is particularly curious, as in many Pagan religions and believes, the Moon has been linked to the Woman - directly or indirectly through the image of a Goddess - and, if I'm correct,  current Pagan religions, like Wicca,  often relate the Full Moon with the aspect of Mother of the woman or the Goddess. (The Goddess, as I've understood from my readings, has a triple image: Maiden, Mother and Crone.)

The coincidence made me think a bit about this aspect of women, and how could the Full Moon or even Motherhood itself be represented in those of us who have no children - whether we plan to have one or not. Well, if we make a loose correspondence of the tree stages with those of the seasons, Maiden being Spring, Mother being Summer and Crone being Fall (I believe I've read some of that in a book, probably Thea Sabin's but I'm not citing nor refering for I'm not sure, and here I'm going on simple likeness), one could establish a sort of productive cycle, seeing then the Maiden and Spring as the preparation, the awaking, the planing, in Mother and Summer seeing the working, action, the seeding and grooming of the land, the tending of the crops and herds, the long labour, and in the Crone, the reaping of the fruits of labor, the reflective work, the meditation. Thus, in a Women's Day that's shone over with a Full Moon, I think about the hard work we still have ahead of us.

We've come a long way, but there's still much work to do. As women, we still have to work to ensure our rights, to make them available for our daughters, but also to our sons. Yes, as women we must not forget that men are equal to us, just as we are equal to them. Our fight isn't about excluding them, taking their rights for ourselves while stripping them. Our fight isn't about establishing a new world order ruled by a Matriarcal System, but to live and work and love and laught WITH our brothers, not as "equal but different", but as people, undiscriminated and equal in every single aspect.

As women, yes we are goddesses all of us, beautiful and divine, but our brothers are gods in their own right, equal to us in every single aspect. Yes, we had it rough and we still have it rough here and there, but life isn't a bed of roses for them, nor has ever been. Our brothers have been forced to take responsability for us, to support us, to carry with us. They have been forced to mask their feelings, swallow their tears and "man up".

Today, as we celebrate our gender and our achievements, let's also remember our brothers, for many of them fought shoulder to shoulder in this fight, and though none of them might have died burned in that factory in Chicago, they have still been at our side one way or the other. Let's burry the manhating attitude that handpick a few dicks and judge a whole gender by them. That's unfair, just like it is unfair to judge us from the example set by golddiggers.

In the aspect of Mother, let's remember our work and the fight still ahead of us. "Mother" is our productive force, our capability to work, to create, to make things happen and come to life. Be it a project, a smile, our daily work, the result of a hobby. Show your innate productivity in working better, in breaking from depression through finding yourself a new hobby. Work and achieve that hard position that has always given you a headache at yoga, find a fabulous book and make the best remarks at your book club, roll a bead between your fingers and create a breathtaking necklace out of it. It's in us, we are that wonderful, that fantastic, that marvelous. Our brothers are still tied down by our society and they can't, just like we do, pick something pretty and arrange it in their hair or make a fabulous new necklace and wear it with pride, with formal or informal clothing. Don't believe me? Just look at the tv show "Bones". We, ladies, can pull it! We could wear a chicken head in our neck with an Armani suit and all people would say is "how trendy!". But a guy puts a small murano glass in his neck and everybody looks at him like his lost his marbles.

Yes, we have the power, but let's use it wisely, let's share, let's embrace our brothers in our day and tell them that the fight for our rights is for their rights as well.

Blessed Be All my Sisters and Brothers!

Women and Woman Power

There was an e-mail from Political Voice of Women in my mailbox. I haven't kept in touch with them, nor have I been checking the site, which is why I'm not sure about the trail this mail has, the direction and all, but it got me thinking. The e-mail had a link to an entry in the blog Can I Just Tell You, by Michel Martin titled No, We're Not Going to Sit Down and Shut Up. It makes reference to yet another piece where she and her colleague, Cokie Roberts talk about the role or position of women in the political sphere and how these women are still to this day subjected to demeaning comments. Two "gentlemen" were kind enough to provide them with evidence of such comments and attitude towards women who step into the political arena.

Her words, not unknown for me, as I'm sure they are not unknown for any woman who has ever stepped up to the places "that are not for women", made me think about other fights, and how often our worse enemies are among our ranks. As women, we are getting used to work, struggle and hardly take a moment to rest. We may cry here and there, maybe more often that our male counterparts, but we keep pushing and pulling and never give up. That's just us, and that's why I believe we keep pushing, encouraging each other even when there are men out there wooing us and catcalling us, treating us as mere sexual objects wishing for nothing but a good ramble; and even despise the women that support such a vision and play to it, feeding further that idea that we are simply natural born whores.

Truth is that booking every men under the lable of "enemy" would be unfair, as many support us, many believe in us, but also because women themselves can also be our enemies, our worse counterparts in this fight for full equality, not only in the eyes of the Law, but also in the eyes of our Societies, our Jobs and our Families, as well as in our own eyes.

I would talk about this case I know, but since everybody knows cases like this, I would simply make mention of them: the women that use their sexuality to climb in life. If you think about it, you probably can at least mention the name of three women who have gotten their position by becoming the woman of some top head. The revealing dress, the tight, short skirt, the laugher... and not like those make them, but what they make of them, how they use the garments and the attitudes. Those unafraid of offering sex for a higher paycheck, a hierarchic position, business trips outside the country to attractive destinations, and so on. Perhaps you even know cases of women that have gotten their Superior Education Degree also through sleeping with the Principal or several of the teachers.

Cases like that simply make me sad, specially when I see women work hard, suffer much more than men, some struggling with putting kids to school, getting home to fix lunches and help with homeworks, and not to mention those that have no kids but still gara get home to fix dinner and do the chores. There are then those also that have to do neither (usually those who can afford a maid, or live alone and can't care less about how crazy their home look like), but still gara put up a fight at the office to be taken in consideration. Women are the ones more often expected and noted by their superiors or people encharge of the "professional appearance" about the kind of pants they are using, the kind of shoes, about how long and what shape must the skirt have, or even if they have not put on enough make up to look "as expected". Honestly, I would like to see the day when putting make up is no longer an expectation for women, and that getting wrinkles and grey hair is no longer something to be ashamed of. I believe that we could walk to a society where our bosses do not expect us to use high heels, and feel entitled to ban us from wearing pants just because they don't like it. But then even though clothing and personal care are close boudaries where we are being attacked, that must also be conquered, there are other fights we must concentrate on, and many of them must be fought against our own sisters.

We must erradicate the idea that climbing through sex is a valid way to go. This is the kind of behavior, practiced by some women, and accepted, even rewarded by some men, that grow then the space for comments such as asking whether someone would conduct an interview with Ms. Sarah Palin while she's sitting on his lap. I'm not saying that all women, or any woman at all, should go asexual, but we must, as a gender, as a group that makes up for a good portion of the global population, teach our surroundings that our job has nothing to do with our sexuality. Our sexuality has to do with the people we want to have sex with, consensually, by our own free will, and that our job should concentrate on our skills, as professionals, as people. This teaching must come from our daily behavior, the way we relate to our surroundings, to ourselves, to others, and it must also come from our principles.

I'm a woman, but I do not want to be treated differently because of that. I don't want to be treated worse than my fellow male counterparts because being a woman does not give anyone an excuse to mistreat me. I'm a person like anyone else, man or woman, and I don't deserve being mistreated, just like no one else deserves it. I don't want to be treated better either just because I'm a woman, I'm not useless, I don't need favors, and I can do it just like anyone else.

Yes, women have special needs, like time to spend with their kids after having them. Men don't get pregnant, nor they have to take care of babies, breast feed them, and so. These are not "favors" we are asking, these are things that come along with being a woman, and things that must be ensured for the good of society. Pushing this in our faces and say that we are unreliable because "we get pregnant any moment" is irresponsible.

Cases such as maternity leaves must be defended and cut from the fight, the fight that puts maternity in the same bag of "women are all about sex", and "women are not for the workplace". We are not sex slaves, we are not whores, we are strong fighters and we must keep on doing, firmly separating from us those cases that take the easy way, the no-work way that undermine our path, and so teach those men that see us as meet on a hook that we are people, and we deserve the same respect anyone does. We must teach, through example, that being a woman doesn't make us less person.