I'm going to tell you a adventure that is so typical hence painful it is effectively split off from the mental lives of young women, concealed into whatever neural recesses exist for the purpose of shelving information that seems pointless yet distantly threatening. I wonder if young women will check this out? The irony is that they undoubtedly won't, and the quietly nodding heads will be ones that are graying, like mine.
After passing out of childhood and into the age of puberty, I, like most women, entered a three-decade phase of my life that included an age of puberty and young adulthood that was peppered with the unwanted sexual advances, sexism in the workplace, mommy wars, pay gaps, and gendered put-downs that few females escape. It was a big chunk of time. The concerns feminism took up through those years were critical, and they continue to be. I am grateful to every one of the women and men who battle and continuously champion women's equality, reproductive system rights, and freedom from violence and harassment. It is courageous and necessary work.
But then one thing occurred, and if not for the mirrors in my house, I would be very bewildered about what changed and why. Young women, you'll experience this too, some day. You'll see your reflection and your breath together and be suddenly reminded that your exterior no longer matches how you feel inside, and that it now undermines the power of your voice, the voice that took several years to develop. I was discussing this to a friend recently who is FIFTY, one year younger than I am. She said, "Oh wow. I remember my grandmother telling me the exact same thing about being stunned by her appearance in the mirror because she still felt like a young woman inside, and she was 81." So this probably will not end for me, nor for any one of us given the gift of not dying early. It bears remembering .
Men rarely catcall me anymore, and I'm delighted to have aged out of that, though a few of my colleagues are not. My daughter is grown, so the mommy wars rage on without me. I'm now happy to be self-employed-- an escape hatch from office sexism that is not available to all women, and one that I fully appreciate. I charge what I want as a advisor and will never again come across facts at the office that a male co-worker who is much younger, less informed and less qualified than me makes more money than me just due to the fact that he comes from the penis-owning sex. I am not free of the physical and sexual dangers all women suffering from, but they have receded significantly for me at this phase of my life.
All of this freedom, having said that, is not entirely liberating. I have simply been carried into the next phase of prejudice that comes with middle age, and it's a impressive adjustment well illustrated metaphorically by the female body that is eyed and objectified transforming into the woman body that is invisible. If the loudest and most declared voices of modern women's liberation most often belong to the youngest and most sexually attractive women, is this not a sanctimonious duplication within feminism of what takes place in our patriarchal culture at large?
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