I was fourteen when I first learned that the word woman could be used to make a person feel less than. I had a boyfriend who liked to hurl it pejoratively at me and at his sister when he wanted to hurt us and have us understand our place. This was confusing, especially since the same boyfriend would sometimes use the word with tenderness and look into my eyes and call me woman. It was the whole package. I was barely out of childhood when I was handed this identity with all the complicated love and hate misogyny adds to it.
I’m a cis woman. What this means is that, when I was born, the doctor took a look at me and “assigned” me female, and as I grew, I myself experienced my gender as aligned with the assignment the doctor had made. Because it felt aligned for me, I grew up feeling highly identified with being a girl in America, with the mystique and the unfairness that the role entailed. When I reached adulthood, I saw myself as a woman.
But the truth is, gender is a construct.
A quick dive into Merriam-Webster’s dictionary clarifies that the noun construct, the way I’m using it here, means “a product of ideology, history, or social circumstances”. Notice that it does not mean biology, scientific truth, or divine destiny.
Like a lot of people, I used to think that gender was straightforward and biological. It is not. I used to think that a doctor’s assignment was an unalienable truth. But gender is a social construct.
Starting with anatomy; it turns out that normal genitals develop on a spectrum, as do normal internal sexual parts. It is estimated that 1.7% of people are intersex, meaning that anatomically their bodies are not clearly either what a doctor would assign as male or female. And that does not include the wide range of shapes and sizes of genitals on people who doctors feel clear about assigning.
But actually, genitals are quite off topic when it comes to gender. There just aren’t that many situations where it matters, or where its any of your business, to ask someone what’s between their legs. And, it turns out, gender has almost nothing to do with that anyway. Gender is about identity and self-expression.
I know woman is a construct because there’s this cultural package that comes along with being assigned female at birth, and most of it is entirely arbitrary. There’s nothing about pink that is, at its essence, more “feminine” than blue. That’s craziness. And, there is nothing gendered in any essential way about any other form of adornment either, including dresses, earrings, baseball caps, or satin ribbons.
But still, the social constructs of woman and man have a long and sordid history that’s worth addressing. In 2007, when I went back to school to get the second master’s degree that would fill in for me the missing pieces of my life paradigm, I deliberately chose a gendered program. Women’s spirituality.
Why? Like so many other people, I’d been a woman living in a world that favored men. I needed to experience a paradigm that started from my personally embodied reality and socially constructed reality as primary, not as Adam’s rib or man’s “helpmate.”
The roots of women’s spirituality grow directly out of a reaction against the dominance of patriarchy in most the world’s religions. Patriarchy has been pervasive in the world, and nowhere more so than religion.
In my own life, women’s spirituality was a very needed antidote. I came to understand it as synonymous with earth-based, sensual, embodied spirituality; the mirror image of the heaven focused, sense denying, wait-til-after-dying, religious ideas I’d been raised with. But you don’t need to be any particular gender to want to make that kind of a paradigm shift.
Women’s spirituality, the way I studied it, was;
1) embodied rather than off in the sky somewhere. It wasn’t for monks on hillsides, and it wasn’t for heaven bound saints. Women’s spirituality cared about the cycles of the planet, the growth of trees and plants, the pulsing of the blood in the body. It was connected to the principle of embodied, cyclical life.
2) informed by the creativity of people who were treated as less than- in this case women. It wasn’t the spirituality of the dominators. It was the, often underground, spirituality that went alongside, but was often not written about or celebrated, and was sometimes openly persecuted and violently eradicated.
Fifteen years after I embarked on the journey to find a new paradigm through women’s spirituality though, I have more questions than I have answers.
Knowing what we now know about gender as a construct (and a very often times destructive one at that) does it continue to make sense to speak of women’s spirituality at all? Does it make sense to talk about the divine feminine as different in any essential way from the divine masculine? Because, what is the divine feminine, but an archetypal ideal based on the lives of actual women who were, like me, trapped in a limiting social construct?
And, what about the idea of yin and yang energies; sometimes called the active and the passive, or the dominant and the submissive. I always assumed that there was something universal about seeing the feminine and the masculine as polarities on these spectrums, but now I’m not so sure. My gut is that the binary ways of thinking about this is problematic. There are different forms of energy. But it might be best if we de-gendered them.
And another question: does the construct woman serve a useful purpose as a grouping? My training has been largely in the area of women’s mental health. But I’m no longer niching in that way.
Because, the clients that I most want to work with- my ideal clients, as they say in the marketing courses, are certainly not all people who identify as women. They are people who are conscious about gender as a construct. They are people who understand how the abuse of power structures, including but not limited to patriarchy, impact identity. My ideal clients are people who care about respecting pronouns, and who know that gender is a construct, and who stand in what it is for them without getting all defensive or essentialistic and insisting how it is for them is how it ought to be for everyone.
So, when I say woman, I am claiming and reclaiming the word for myself.
I’m clear that I feel aligned with woman as my identity. It feels good to pull it back from the mouth of my teenage boyfriend who had the power to please or hurt me with the way he chose to say it. I claim it as my own now. I am woman. And fuck whatever anybody else might try to put on me about what that means. I get to take it as my own.
I have no desire to decide who else it might apply to. It applies to any sincere soul who, like me, claims it as their own. I have immense gratitude for trans and nonbinary people who are questioning the whole package of gender that we were asked to swallow. I feel sorry for and impatient with cis people who don’t understand that trans rights and trans wins are wins for all of us. More than anything, I want to keep on expanding the paradigms for more inclusion, more self-belonging, and more sovereignty to claim the identities that are ours. Because who would know better who we are than we do?
Seeing is a Powerful Path to Love
One of my favorite things to photograph is flowers. There are a lot of reasons as to why, but here is one of the stories about flowers from my life that I like best: When I went for my first wilderness rite of passage, one of my co-questors returned with a gift just for me; a small tin box full of petals and little flowers. “Consider the flowers” she wrote. “They’re sexual organs, ya know!” It was true. And it was a message that she knew I needed since a big part of what I had come onto the land to heal was sexual shame. So now, when I photograph flowers on my travels (I found the one in this picture in Sutherlin, Oregon last month on a trip with my sweety) its with a smile and an awareness of the sensual power they hold, and that sensuality is really nature expressing its longing in beauty.
What I’m Reading
To help me prepare to write When I Say Woman, I read excerpts from Lillian Faderman’s Woman: The American History of an Idea. I want to clarify that so far, I’ve only made a thorough read of the last chapter; “‘Woman’ in a New Millennium” and the Epilogue: “The End of ‘Woman’?” so far, so this is not going to be an exhaustive book review. What I will say is that I was suprised to be so thoroughly absorbed by such a dense, historical book.
Faderman catalogues the political uses to which the construct woman has been put to in the past twenty years (really, the last 300, but as noted above, I didn’t read the whole book…) and shows the impact on women’s lives of how this idea is used and misused. She talks about Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head- I had no idea what a conservative backlash followed Mattel’s announcement last year that they were going to drop the “Mr.” from their brand name and move the Potato family in a gender neutral direction! Faderman also shows how societal attachment to a narrow idea of woman has posed an as-of-yet insurmountable challenge to women with an eye for the public office of president in America.
I learned so much from the parts of the book I read, and I hope I can get to the earlier chapters at some point. I’d recommend this book to anyone who wants to review the history of the construct woman in America. It helps me understand the larger social forces that were at play in my teenage relationship, and many of my relationships with people and institutions since.
Prompts and Practices
What are some of your identities? What parts of those identities feel indemic to who you are within yourself as a person, and what parts feel like things put on you by society? Write for 10 minutes. If you want to, share your insights below.
What sense-based practices help you move out of shame and into sensual presence? (Like photographing flowers does for me.) Choose to do at least one of those activities this week.