*

I feel like a woman when I get my nails done, and they’re shiny and polished, and for at least a day afterwards, I’m conscious of how graceful and tentative I can be with my hands so as not to cause any damage.  Femininity is delicate, and dainty.

*

I feel like a woman when I get my hair cut at a salon, and it smells like flowers, and I’m moved to swing my head back and forth, coyly, as I cross the street, wondering if others notice my stylish hair.  Femininity is clean and insouciant.

*

I feel like a woman when I wear a new dress, and I’m cute, and other people compliment me, and tell me how pretty I am.  Femininity is adorable, and solicitous.

*

I feel like a woman when I shave my legs, and my underarms, and my bikini-line, and I am as smooth and as soft as a child.  Femininity is infantile.

*

I feel like a woman when I starve myself, reducing my presence, whittling myself into a willowy shadow of the substantive.  Femininity is weak, petite; unobtrusive.

*

I feel like a woman when men question me, when men explain things to me, when men demand of me my attention, and my adulation, whether or not that adulation happens to be a pretence enacted so that I can escape their imposition on my time and my person.  Femininity is deference.

*

I feel like a woman when I apologize: sorry sorry sorry.  Sorry for your mistake, sorry for mine, sorry for my kids, sorry for my existence, sorry for speaking too softly, sorry for speaking my mind. Femininity is mitigation.

*

I feel like a woman when I walk down a dark and empty street at dusk with my keys clenched between my fingers, eyes forward, listening keenly, replaying other times and places in my mind.  Femininity is fear.

*

It is, as so many articles and blog posts and opinions have stated of late, the right of each individual to formulate, declare, and enact their own identity.  Just as valid, is the right of each individual to question the very concept of “identity”, for themselves.  The supremacy of “Identity” is intrinsic to western culture, and because we’re in it (culture), it isn’t possible for any of us to step outside the idea of individualism, completely—just as none of us can opt out of our varying degrees of privilege.

*

Like every single other woman on the planet, I occupy the double-bind of having to choose between performing femininity as best I can (which can never be achieved to the impossible and ever-shifting standards that are established by a culture of patriarchy) or abandoning that performance—both choices come with some rewards, but greater punishments, on either side.  There is no “choice.  Gender is a hierarchy: there is no third option, and all women are subservient to men.

*

I have, over the years, come to realize that “feeling like a woman”, is my litmus test, a tool with which to differentiate between socially-constructed bullshit, and reality—indeed, by “feel”.  Anything that makes me “feel like a woman”, I can safely and immediately recognize as make-believe.  Everything that makes me “feel like a woman” is either in service to objectification and sexualization, or an experience of the constant low-level terrorism that is life for females under male domination.

*

My bleeding uterus and vagina do not make me “feel” like a woman. Milk leaking through my shirt as I rush home to feed my baby does not make me “feel” like a woman.  These are simply part of the reality of femaleness.  They are.  I am.

*

The exhaustion, discomfort and heaviness of late pregnancy don’t really make me “feel” like a woman.  This is just a part of gestating a child—the possibility of female biology.

*

The awesome intensity of the bodies of my children, stretching me open, and sliding forth into the world from between my legs, does not make me “feel” like a woman.  During birth, I enact my womanhood.  Being a woman in actuality (as opposed to the feeling of “womanliness” that I or others might sometimes have) is what makes pregnancy and birth possible.

*

Selves do not exist outside the body.  But the essence of who I am is in my thoughts, words, convictions and actions in the world.  My sex, (my womanhood, my femaleness) have placed me, from birth, in a subordinate class.  This position on the gender hierarchy has created in me a particular political perspective, and involves certain internal conflicts that I’ll play out, likely forever.  And I will likely continue to play with nail-polish, lipstick, haircuts, and the other outward irrelevancies that we all engage in–partly to relieve the monotony, and in part to negotiate the pernicious expectations of gender, so that I can somehow survive in a world of illusion and injustice.  But I’m increasingly wary of getting lost in individualist interpretations of selfhood based on externalities—like hair, and makeup, and clothing.  As a woman, my sex is the locus of my oppression in a patriarchal world, not the feelings I may or may not have about who I am, or how comfortable I may or may not be with the the expressions of gender that are expected of all of us.