What Is Femininity?
I don’t know if it’s the effects of social media but I feel the conversation and politics around feminism are gaining more traction than ever, with extrapolating views on what a woman should look like and be like. Polarising opinions on femininity, terms such as stay at home dad and house husband, and girlboss movements are as hot as well… access to abortion, LGBTQ rights and climate change. It’s sad, isn’t it? That all these topics are a matter of political agenda rather than civil rights. That we have all this access to technology and information and yet, the world is getting more dichotomous than ever. No room for grey, only black and white. Regardless, something that has been swirling in the back of my mind more than feminism itself lately is femininity. Or rather, the desperate attempts to define “woman” and the thus, the notion of femininity.
So, what is femininity? Any modern dictionary will tell you it’s the qualities of the female sex, often simply ending there with “womanhood” and “womanly qualities” for synonyms and “manhood” and “manliness” for antonyms. Yet, almost everyone knows intuitively that femininity is associated with empathy, nurturing tendencies, kind, cooperative (more so doormat), demure (more so passive), helpful, devoted, etc. the list goes on. What should be positive qualities. Poems have been waxed on the irresistibility of feminine qualities. But beyond that, these are almost worthless. It’s like the sun and the moon. The world is inconsequential without the sun. It’s a given. And the moon gets praise for its borrowed light and waning beauty. Some acknowledge its role in tides. But it almost disappears into the background that if the ancient man didn’t stop and track the moon, there would be no agriculture, no attempts to sail, no attempts to chart the earth, no calendars, no predictions and thus efforts to control nature’s effect on man, and ultimately, no civilised societies. Earth simply can’t exist without the sun and the moon. Still, the sun, the almighty sun (presented as masculine in most cultures) gets all the recognition, and the moon while praised for its ethereal beauty, gets nothing more.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand; what is femininity? At the crux of it, femininity is vulnerability. Femininity is a weakness. It’s how I saw it and how society still sees it. And it’s exactly why I hated the term growing up. From getting a man to open a jar for you to small things like not helping to pick up the suitcases from the baggage carousel to literally being “saved” from my own life. Books, movies, TV shows, women are weak, being a woman is a weakness, a guy’s “weakness” is his woman. It’s like they had created this logo with one ginormous “W” and put “eak” in the first line and “oman” in the second line. I hated it. I wasn’t old enough to wrap my head around sexism but I remember feeling small, weak, and trivial from a young age. And it’s exactly how femininity is still portrayed to this day. This is why we have “insults” such as “you kick like a girl”, “you cry like a girl”, “dude, that’s a girl’s drink”. It’s where “self-aware” statements like “I’m not like the other girls” and “I’m more of a girly girl/ guys’ girl” stem from. We’ve all said this at some point. But is that really all femininity is? To be weak and vulnerable? What is so bad about being vulnerable anyway? Because it takes strength to be vulnerable. Being stone-faced at a funeral doesn’t seem like masculinity and strength to me, it looks like a socially-conditioned mask. The way we look around to see if anyone’s watching when we trip in the middle of the road. Vulnerability is a brief moment of intimacy, a window to one’s innermost thoughts and it takes courage to reveal ourselves at our core to … well, anyone really. Tell me is it not harmful to allow only one half of the population to say “Help me” and “I don’t know” or “I can’t cope”?
Until 25, if you had asked me, “What is femininity?”, I would have said femininity feels like a burden; yet another chore relegated to women for no good reason whatsoever. I would see multiple Reddit posts where women/ wives post along the lines of “I work two jobs, cook, clean, have a three-year and a new-born, and asked my husband/ boyfriend/ partner to watch the kids while I take a 30-minute bath for some me time and now he’s yelling at me saying I’m taking time away from his video games while he winds down from work and that it’s my responsibility. I’m not sure, he’s never been like this, so AITA (Am I The Asshole)?” And you would see in the comments lately he’s been losing interest in her too, or asking her to lose weight, why she doesn’t do makeup like she used to. I would want to scream at my phone in frustration, “No, lady, you’re clearly not! Kick that dirtbag to the curb where it belongs!” I’m fully aware this sounds like a bad stereotype but with conversations of marriage and settling down swirling around me during this time, I saw and heard enough of to feel suffocated by my implied future simply because I was a woman. It's so easy to say, it’s the 21st century, a woman can be whoever the fuck she wants to be. But it’s fucking exhausting living up to that statement. Because the repercussions of doing just that are severe. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe a woman can be whoever she wants to be but you can’t deny there’s no winning when it comes to being a woman. We all know this. Wear red lipstick to the office and you’re inappropriate. Skip out on the makeup or do a subtle, minimal look, you’re not even trying. Embrace your sexuality, you’re a slut; refuse to talk about it, you’re a prude. Or worse yet, “I bet I can change your mind.” Going childfree is sacrilege, and being wonderfully single and happy at fifty is as mythical as a unicorn. Everything you do is measured on a scale of femininity by everyone but no one has the exact parameters. It’s worse yet when you are nothing like the average woman in your society. I would know because I was seen as anything but feminine or female for the longest time. I was essentially a sack of potatoes, an object at best, devoid of sensuality and feelings. A means to an end at times, a source of comedy more often than not, and completely invisible for the most. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that a woman can be strong without sacrificing her femininity. I came across this quote and it pretty much changed the way I saw everything:
“Feminism isn’t about making women strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.”
Anytime you talk about women and feminism and women’s rights, I invariably think of my late grandmother. She was a STURDY woman, and she was built like a tank; a physical and emotional embodiment of the word “strength”. If she wanted to go to the shops, she was going to the shops, no one can stop her, nor did she care to wait for her husband (a male company). I look at some of the stuff she had in the kitchen, the tools to pound rice, grind rice and lentils, grind wet pastes, separate husks from grains, fetch water, and I think my deadlifts are a joke. I mean any of these could easily kill you and if all you came out with was an injury, you should probably count yourself lucky. But I would never say she was NOT feminine: she adorned her hair with her jasmine flowers, I still cannot think of her without her mookuthis (nose studs), her pottus, hell, she had her own self-care routine before self-care was even a thing.
And so, over the years through a mish-mash of self-reflection, multiple binges of Wonder Woman, Legally Blonde, and a recent admiration for Thena from Eternals, if you ask me now, “What is femininity?” I would say it’s hard to answer because it’s a layered question and not as simple as the inherent qualities of biological sex (reproductive functions, fat percentages, you get the gist). There is nothing inherently wrong with feminine qualities and I’m learning to embrace those qualities in me, unlike the way I ruthlessly squashed them earlier in my life. I’m not even going to go to the extreme to say in fact feminine qualities are BETTER and more needed in leadership, tech, STEM, NASA, what have you. Because feminine traits are human traits. Why does the position of having to be emotive and compassionate only lie on some people and not everyone? What are we inculcating then? Someone who puts themselves in the shoes of others doesn’t deserve a position of power? Someone who takes the time out of their day to make a space warm and inviting doesn’t have value beyond that? Someone who is the first to be happy for you is not of worth? And if feminine traits are human traits, isn’t thereby femininity a part of being human and thus, feminism, human rights rather than woman’s rights? So, I don’t fully understand what femininity is at this point but I do know one thing for sure: femininity needs to be reclaimed and rewritten.
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