I’m going to tell you a adventure that is so typical and so painful it is effectively split off from the emotional lives of young women, concealed into whatever neural recesses prevail for the objective of shelving information that feels pointless yet distantly damaging. I wonder if young women will read this? The irony is that they quite possibly won’t, and the quietly nodding heads will be ones that are graying, like mine.
After passing out of childhood and into adolescence, 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 office, mommy wars, pay gaps, and gendered put-downs that few females escape. It was a huge chunk of time. The matters feminism undertook throughout those years were essential, and they remain to be. I am grateful to all of the women and men who fought and continuously champion women’s equal rights, reproductive rights, and freedom from physical violence and harassment. It is brave and necessary work.
But then one thing took place, and if not for the mirrors in my house, I would be very baffled about what shifted and why. Young women, you’ll experience this too, some day. You’ll catch your reflection and your breath at the same time and be abruptly reminded that your exterior no longer matches how you feel inside, and that it now weakens the power of your voice, the voice that took years to build up. I was speaking about this to a pal recently who is 49, one year younger than I am. She said, “Oh wow. I remember my granny telling me the exact same thing about being shocked 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 young. It bears remembering .
Men rarely catcall me anymore, and I’m happy to have aged out of that, even though a couple of my close friends are not. My little girl is grown, so the mother wars rage on without me. I’m now happy to be self-employed– an escape hatch from office sexism that is not readily available to all women, and one that I fully treasure. I charge what I want as a advisor and will never again come across facts at the workplace that a male co-worker who is much younger, less informed and less seasoned than me makes more money than me merely considering that he comes from the penis-owning gender. I am not beyond the tangible and sexual dangers all women deal with, but they have declined a bit for me at this period of my lifetime.
All this liberation, having said that, is not totally freeing. I have merely been transported into the next phase of prejudice that arrives with middle age, and it’s a impressive change well highlighted metaphorically by female body that is ogled and objectified transforming into the female body that is invisible. If the loudest and most heralded voices of present-day women’s liberation frequently belong to the youngest and most sexually attractive women, is this not a hypocritical replication within feminism of what occurs in our patriarchal culture at large?