I’m 14 years old. I live a 5 minute walk away from my secondary school with an 8:30 am school bell, and yet, my alarm goes off at 6:30 am sharp every morning to give me enough time to get ready for the day. By 7 am prompt, I’ve showered, eaten my breakfast and done my 5 step skincare, and I’m ready to sit down at my desk and start my makeup. It’s 2016, meaning a full-glam face of birthday-style makeup is the everyday norm, and I schedule myself a whole hour to paint it on my face (my thick, overdrawn eyebrows take a good 25 minutes on a good day, and they often need re-doing). At 8 am, I straighten my hair to oblivion for a good 15 minutes or so. I’m out the door by 8:20 sharp. Meanwhile, my mother enters my brother’s room at 8:05 and tells him it’s time to wake up. He rolls out of bed, shrugs on his uniform and starts his day within 10 minutes, grabbing a piece of toast as he walks out the door.
More than anything in the world, at that age, all I wanted was to be pretty, and significantly, polite. Whether it was the extra hour of sleep I could have had in the morning, or swallowing down an opinion that the boys in my class might have laughed at, I sacrificed everything just to feel good enough. My femininity had become defined by how palatable I was to the boys around me; if I looked pretty, if the boys at school thought I looked pretty, then I was doing something right. If I was quiet, didn’t speak out of turn, and was an all-round, delicate good-girl, then I was adhering to the feminine expectations demanded of me, and therefore, I was doing something right.
In primary school, before I ever even knew what femininity meant, I knew that I wanted no part in it. I was a “tomboy”, and proud of it. What other girls liked, I made sure that I didn’t; I rejected the dresses my mother picked out for me, wanted no part in “Bieber Fever” or “One Direction Infection”, and proudly claimed my favourite colour as red instead of pink. I have since realised that the hatred of “girly” things in my youth was very much a product of misogynistic influence that encouraged me to believe that stereotypical female interests were unimportant in comparison to strong, dominant male ones. My femininity has never been fully authentic – not even as a child.
And as I grew into my teenage years, and swapped my hatred for lipstick-and-mascara-filled mornings, I can’t help but wonder if my “embracing” of traditional femininity was more than just a growing-out of my “tomboyish” ways. More so, it was imposed on me. Perhaps instead, it was a means of survival in a society that caused the loss of my female innocence to come with the objectification of my body, expected to be plucked and primped to be pretty for my constant male audience.
At the centre of her book Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, writer Florence Given asks the question: “How much of my femininity is who I truly am, and how much of it is a product of patriarchal brainwashing to exist for male consumption?”. And while I wish that at 22 I have solidified an answer to this, and have grown from my old ways, I am still in the process of finding a femininity that is wholly and authentically mine. But how can we strive towards crafting a femininity for ourselves that really feels like our own? How can we strip our femininity away from the conditioned pandering toward male validation and patriarchal expectation?
For me, I’ve tried to separate the things I do into two categories: the things that bring me genuine enjoyment, and the things that I feel like are a performance. For example, I am trying to distinguish between enjoying doing my make-up for a night-out as something separate from the imposed pressure that I have to always look presentable. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learnt to be proud of my stereotypical feminine interests. My love for reading romance novels and the 2004 movie The Notebook is just as cool – if not cooler, but we can agree to disagree – than my brother’s love for football or my father’s love for The Godfather (1972). The things I love now feel like they are very much mine, very much part of who I am. That, to me, is the closest thing I have to an “authentic” femininity.
It’s important to remember that femininity (and masculinity) is a social construct. There is no such thing as the “true” feminine, or “feminine energy”. What it means to be “feminine” to me, is likely to be different to somebody else; all definitions are certainly valid. We are products of our environment, influenced by the dictations of the world around us, and the people we know. I may be able to claim my love for chick-flicks as an affirmation that I am reclaiming my femininity, but I still carry multitudes of patriarchal expectations on my back. My need to feel pretty still lingers in my mind, and as I age, that temptation to start reaching for the anti-aging cream is becoming more and more prevalent, no matter how hard I try to fight it.Â
My journey to finding an authentic femininity has been a long and difficult one, and is most likely never going to reach a completely perfect conclusion. It may be impossible for me to remove patriarchal expectations entirely from who I am. But I will keep trying to reclaim the parts that I want, the parts that empower me the most, as definitively my own.