ON HAVING AN ABSTRACT FEMININITY IN A SEA OF LABELS

I’m Six. Untamed curls of youth lay unapologetically over strong, bare shoulders. I am thick vines upon redwood trunk, and sometimes delicate flower thorns. Never thin, never shrunken — sturdy, full. I write my aspirations on my body with mud, before society learns how to write them for me. My limbs are made for painting, tomorrow, I decide my limbs are made to swim seas, and every new place my muscles climb, sculpt a new fragment to the concept of me. Before femininity gained morality, it meant parading “she” like a cape, in the shape of whatever female meant that day, daylight upon chest that will eventually be concealed, not by curls, but by the light curve of breast and societies’ signature, reminding us that when we turn thirteen, we’re no longer our own, but a budding XX chromosome’d commodity. Where do we go? Nowhere, and everywhere. Born bare from a warm womb, opening our eyes: a human.

Somewhere along the way, we began to close them, with renown labels in place of pupils that define our attractiveness, significance, level of normalcy, and potential, coaxing us into an identity we feel we have chosen, that, upon closer inspection, looks a lot more like compliance. I still believe in who I have written myself to be, despite how society tells me to write better.

When you’re a young woman, the word young is a thinly sewn hem that outlines our identity, meant to be synonymous with “admirable”, and one’s concept of self. A synchronized bloom where the seed is both the vessel for growth and the source that inhibits it. When the doctor greets me with a hearty, ‘and how are you today, young lady?’, he not only calls attention to my age, but offers fake flattery as well. It seems that the qualities in which we cannot control are often the stained glass walled room we are encapsulated in. A semi-opaque masquerade that others define us by, when they have little to do with our identity at all. Labels.

As a kid, I made art with sea glass — no walls. As I grew older, attaining pieces of a newly budding femininity felt like adding to the collection of me, smoothed by the river of my veins, the concept of breast, hip, and thighs that met like two lovers — sometimes the glass shards cut me, but never as deep as the way becoming a woman did. An affair with body chemicals: excitement, spontaneity, and then, fear. We are programmed to grow up, but never age. The face of my mother, grandmother, in the mirror with moisturized wrinkles and pursed lips, a television commercial on how to undo the years of wisdom, pain, and life experience from our under eyes —simultaneously acknowledging one’s age as one’s identity whilst denying its existence. Youth met with sparkling eyes, and age, a glazed over shrug. At age ten, I wished for blue eyes every morning, at eleven I longed for lighter skin, at twelve, I watched my body begin to change, and the next year, followed in their footsteps, collagen cream in two small palms, on my thirteenth birthday. Labels.

I watch my childhood meet her teen-hood, wishing she’d have been introduced to wrinkles as smile lines, crying when she grew stretch marks as her mother said “you gained too much too fast” after a binge phase in a self-attempted recovery, instead of, “your thighs are rolling hillside, look at the way they hold you, the strength they’ve taken to grow you, they are powerful, they are power, health is beautiful”. Instead of, “you’re no longer your father’s little girl”, instead of associating growth, gain, and maturity, with mourning — my teen-hood ached with the loss of youth. I imagine my mother and her own mother’s teen-hood did too, when she was staring it in the face. I ache that women so commonly ache for their own growing, instead of admiring the honor of growth, of taking up space, of having lived, itself. How can you blame them? Our society banks off of a pre-pubescent make up, that no one has past the tender age of five. Labels.

With a mirror held up close to my newfound womanhood, having woken up the day before, simply a human, I longed to undress the new label that suddenly weighed down upon me. With innate characteristics like a personality, a gender, a sexuality, a self — the pressure to be young, but not too young. To be older, but not too old. To be a woman, but not too womanly, is a heavy load to carry, for a young lady with sand in her palms, watching each grain fall between her finger tips like they are the remnants of her youth. Labels.

I often wonder what other women see, when they look in the mirror - at each other. Have they avoided store window reflections, out of the fear they’d see they’ve bloomed wrong? In a society that encourages delicate petals, “no thorns”, nurturing femininity that’s still strong, but not strong enough that men, dare they ever, see you as an equal being. White enough, tan enough, narrow enough, plump enough, hot is an objective assessment, based on a collection of easily identifiable characteristics. The unfairness in attaining any of that is irrelevant, you just have to want it bad enough.

At times, I wonder what men see — and then realize that I really don’t give a damn. But as a chubby sixteen-year-old, with magazines filled with Photoshop, and a father who wanted me to “go running”, I did. With memories of overhearing him whispering to my mother about which beautiful surfer babe I’d look like when I got older drifting through a dizzy head, his fear of my mother having a second child out of the fear that she’d birth herself to obesity, as I’d hyperventilate with tears in my eyes, to keep up, imagining I was small again, jumping to the mirror to see if I was “worthy yet”, with badly dyed blonde hair, hitting my stomach with eyes closed tight, and the aspiration that if I closed them tight enough, hit hard enough, I’d wake myself up from the bad dream that is being physically non-compliant. Labels.

In a household that very clearly yet very unintentionally labeled the aesthetic of femininity, based off their own societally born insecurity, despite telling me that strong was beautiful, despite the perfection I can only reach with an eating disorder, appropriating— that it was okay to purge dinner, run until I wither, so long as I was not bigger. It mattered. Measuring up to prescribed ideals mattered. In a society that screams “you’d be so pretty if you just lost weight. You’d feel so much better about yourself if you just lost weight. You’d have boys beating down your door if you just lost weight.” What, for lack of better articulation, absolute bullshit. Labels.

A feminine body is both a meadow and a prison cell. I have felt my body as both a delicate weapon, a powerful whisper, a gentle flame, a sacred temple, and a locked room with no key — self-liberation is an ebb and flow, a turbulent sea for the best swimmers. Sometimes, from the deep end, I tread, as I watch men walk through the shallow. While I know that this world doesn’t exempt anyone from the balancing act of societal standards and stigma, encoding men with a heavy slathering of toxic masculinity, I find it simply unfair: to observe as they are praised for their natural form, for the most part, while we, the female entity, are encouraged to make ours “better”. Labels.

I am not stereotypically sexualized because I have small breasts, medicalized “micromastia”, but if I wish to be more “womanly”, I can have them done. More flesh, less flesh. I identity proudly as a woman, the flesh I bare is not my name. I can tantalize the male gaze without the cleavage of a chest plate, and am learning to make myself at home in the space I do and do not occupy. I have learned, I do not have a porn stars vagina - darn. But, I can have Labiaplasty until it looks porcelain. Because being a female means nipping and tucking until you don’t jiggle, bare thighs that don’t wiggle, with sex doll worthy bedroom appeal, right? Wrong. Literally thousands of women in this country alone, are seriously disturbed by feelings of inadequacy in regard to concepts of the body image. Partly as a result of exposure to advertising propaganda and questionable publicity, many physically normal women develop an almost paralyzing self-consciousness. I never see publicity on male celebrities whom have had cosmetic surgery for their dick - perhaps, we as a brainwashed society, are too busy thinking like one. Labels.

When I step back, with open eyes, without acknowledgement to the cocooned barrier of my skin, I am still left with the identity within it. The labels we use to medicalize a world like we’re objects, pieces of fruit to be bought, art to be collected. I realize that these labels are all mere words: a contemporary identity, diverging from traditional medical definitions.

I often wish I were exempt from society’s poisonous conditioning, but I firmly believe that an awareness that has endured is a beacon for the potential to change and make change. I plant myself daily, again and again, editing, revising, and rolling my eyes to a consumption of mirrors and physical limitations, knowing that there are other individuals struggling with identities they must tightly conceal with lies — to simply be themselves at all. I sit in my living room, allowed to be who I am, fearing numbers, while someone sits in theirs fearing life itself. When I am an able-bodied female, who has always been a female. I worry about my thighs, the size of my womanly hips, calories, while an individual who identifies as trans is shot in pursuit of physically representing who they are inside. I have the privilege in feeling sorrow, for a flawed society that has made anyone endure what I will never have to. For the fact that we have to define anything at all, that is far more multifaceted and complex than a word in a textbook. We are all beautifully, innately human beings. How can the mind can be so ugly? Labels.

I have the privilege of being on the outside looking in, and at times, from the inside looking out. Through the dysmorphic perception of femininity, I have the privilege of being safe enough to be able to do something, and angry enough to want to, without being sure how to. I have the privilege of still holding an optimism that sometimes burns my lips, that society can change, that I can change, that the world can radically change. Without labels.