Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH!
Last Tuesday, I published a post talking about how in society, we pressure women in their 20’s and 30’s into motherhood because motherhood supposedly is essential for all women on this planet. Can’t relate, as Jeffree Star once said.
That post made me think much deeper about my person individual womanhood and what it meant for me to embrace it more now that I’m now entering my years of being a woman rather than just a girl.
Anyway, the following night, I had a conversation with my only girl-friend about a very controversial and “taboo” topic: the debate regarding pro-choice and pro-life. While we do share the same views about the topic at hand, it did make me think about my womanhood as a whole and the things I’m embracing about it as I’m getting older. Personally, it’s very refreshing to have girl talk at times because it reminds you that the things you may be struggling with as a woman could be things that other woman can relate to. So, shoutout to my girl, Tori who drew this amazing drawing after our conversation about womanhood Sunday night!
As I’m learning what it means to be a woman in my own personal life, I’ve learned a lot about how I define my own and how to embrace it instead of following what society teaches us to be when we are young girls.
Womanhood is unique and non-traditional in the 21st century.
I truly believe that we are a generation of women who want to be more than housewives and more than just “so-and-so’s wife”. Don’t get me wrong, we still want to be loved by a man/woman and be someone’s significant other in life, but I feel like many women want to be just as successful. We want to work hard, we want to be breadwinners, and we want to be able to have our own names on this earth. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a woman’s womanhood being more traditional, but in this modern-time, each and every woman’s womanhood is completely different and uniquely designed to fit them personally. Some womanhood involves them loving both men and women romantically. Some womanhood involves them being career-driven and successful, and so forth. We want to be recognized as women, not as just another “inferior species” to man.
My womanhood includes me realizing it’s also humanhood.
As a woman, I realized just how beaten down we get when we show emotion or put feeling into something; society thinks we fall under pressure and can’t handle things without becoming emotional about it, that because of our more emotional sides, we can’t do the job of a man, i.e possibly one of hugest reasons why Hillary Clinton– despite her experience– did not win presidency in 2016; society wasn’t ready for a woman in power. In hindsight, we are taught to care for other people’s feelings before our own and to be as “perfect” as possible, especially when it came to dating and being in relationships with people. Personally, it’s been extremely hard to break out this cycle of belief for me, and I tend to forget that WOMEN ARE HUMAN AND ARE ALLOWED TO EXPRESS HOW THEY FEEL AND SHOW EMOTION WITHOUT BEING RIDICULED FOR IT. There are no “angry black women” or “overly dramatic drama queens” or “psycho white/Hispanic girls” when we express our feelings and emotions. We are humans that have emotions. End of story.
My womanhood involves tattoos, piercings, and decisions I make with my body.
This one is something that I’m personally learning to embrace because frankly, I’m tired of feeling ashamed for what I decide to do with my body and how I want to live in it. Once again we are taught at a very young age that we need to be presented a certain way that is appealing to others in society because a woman’s purpose seems to only be mannequins and dolls in a toy store called “the good and pure ones”. So by saying that, when you present yourself being a woman with piercings, scars, tattoos, short hair, even being a fat girl for God’s sake, you’re looked at differently as being “impure” or “ugly” and “not desirable”. I’ve had other women tell me that my nose piercings were “too busy” and “loud” for me, and I’ve had other women look at me and say they felt prettier when I was around because I was the “fat friend” of the group. Yes, even our own kind are feeding into this twisted ideology that we need to look, act, and be a certain way to be accepted into society, and it took me a while to finally say fuck it, I’m getting any piercing, tattoo, and haircut I want, and then going out to lunch afterward to eat anything I want.
To be honest, it took me cutting my hair into a pixie cut to realize that even with this body and with this hair, I am just as much of a woman who is opposite of me. What I decide to put in my body and place on my body is my decision and my decision only; this body that I live in is going to have the time of its life because I’m choosing to do things that make it happy and make it feel more like me.
At the end of the day, these things may seem like basic “common sense” things, but they do take experience and observation to finally recognize and be accepted to these things that are not taught when we are young girls. More than ever, we are voicing what makes us women of the modern-day time. We are speaking up to the issues and injustice of how we are treated, how we are viewed as, and how we are supposed to be to be accepted in society when in reality we are progressing!
Embrace who you are, not try to be what you’re “supposed” to be.
-Liz. (:
Letters From Liz. 