Somebody please tell me.
Because apparently, we’re supposed to look a certain way and suddenly I am surrounded by experts in the field, everyone seems qualified to dictate or comment on how “real” women are meant to look. And as there are so many authorities on the subject, can someone tell me which one I’m supposed to believe?
The Western Ideal tells me that a woman is fine-boned and petite. She walks with a sashay and smoothes her blouse over a pair of full-breasts and raises a hand to a head of flowing hair. Her skin is creamy and her lips, a perfect rosebud pout. Add a pair of tiny feet clad in vertiginous shoes, a cinched handspan waist and there is your woman.
But real women have curves I am told and yes, they do. Real women also have no curves. Real women are tall and short, shapely and squat, possessing of button and wide noses. They have chiselled calves and club feet and nails they refuse to polish. Real women have huge breasts or tiny breasts of perfectly medium breasts and sometimes (gasp!) even no breasts at all.
Am I blowing your mind yet?
Because there is more.
Women have hair that is so short, one cannot plait it into feminine braids with bows and clips. Women also have hair that is so long that some would imagine it nothing but inconvenient. Women have pink hair and black hair and hair that falls in twisted locs around their shoulders. Some women (G to the A-S-P!) have no hair at all.
And they’re happy that way (someone call the Femme Police, someone somewhere done screwed up.)
Women wear jeans and Doc Martins and Louboutins and £5.99 H&M ballet flats. We wear shapeless sweaters and lacy underwear and flouncy dresses and sometimes no dresses at all. We like leggings and bowties and blazers and suits (trouser suits if you can imagine something so terrible) and sometimes, in the dead of night when all the men are asleep and cannot shun us, we might even wear boxers and SOME OF US – uncouth, hapless, hideous creatures that we are – might prefer not to have wax poured on our genitals and hair ripped out.
Forgive us. (No, but really, we neither want nor require your approval.)
Let us not get started on how we’re supposed to act.
We can pierce our ears (but just the once, anything else is vulgar) and tattoos? Don’t be ridiculous. We must press our knees together and peck at our food (never clear your plate, it is unladylike). We must never get drunk and our husbands (because all women OUGHT to be married) should be the only men we have ever slept with. We should populate our houses with offspring and take an appropriate amount of time off work to raise them. We should never raise our voices or display our anger and we ought to feel grateful when we are reduced to a collection of body parts because that means we are desirable. God help us if we choose to swear.
We’re meant to cook and bake and people fail to hide their disappointment/disdain when inevitably, we aren’t perfect.
So what if I am more than that?
An errant hair or an extra roll, does this make me less of a woman? Who’s standards have I failed? Which rule have I broken and what box have I stepped out of? How will I be punished?
Who gave someone else the right to define what I am supposed to be?
So you can keep your gender roles and norms and your pigeonholes for someone who cares to fit them. My hair is too big for all that crap. I’d rather be me a thousand times over than even one version of the “supposed to”.
I am what a woman looks like.
And so is she and she and she and she and she.
And so are you.
Don’t let anyone tell you different.