The Ern of Life

(Filed under: don’t read)

I’m tired to death of being female.

Feminism sounds too scholarly, too peaceful for my acidic brand of emotion.

I’m tired of the fact that if you date a man older than you, you’re a gold-digger, and if you date someone younger than you, you’re a cougar. Can we not find words without loaded connotations to describe dating beyond a one-year age range? Can we not address the male half of the equation?

I’m tired of jobs dropped, dreams abandoned, ambitions surrendered for the sake of a ‘sacred institution’ with a 50% failure rate. Love, I’m tired of your meticulous home-making, the careful perimeter of your life already carved into stone at age 23, your bargain IKEA furniture and your traditionally contemporary coffee table with the large-print books you’ll never read. Love, how long can you keep this up? Long enough for a family, long enough for a lifetime?

I’m tired of the black leaking between my legs. How could nature have built so perfect a mechanical system in the human brain, and yet so slipshod a counterpart down south? I’m tired that children are bundled into the equation, that my body thinks it’s smarter than my mind.

I’m tired of cursing. I’m tired that you can call a woman so and so and there’s nothing she can call you back, except perhaps an allusion to your mother and your origin of birth, which is irrelevant and useless.

I’m tired of glass ceilings and boys’ clubs. I’m tired of God as ‘Him’. I’m tired of snaking stomach-length black hair you can hide behind. I’d cut bangs if I wasn’t worried they’d make me look too cute. Then again, I’d cut my hair right short if I could, if I had strength enough to ward off the miles of staring people and off-hand questions. You pass for a very attractive boy.

I’m tired of sugar, spice, and everything nice. I am cut from solid stone; being of compact substance myself I crave substance.

And I’m tired, bone tired, of ‘whipped’. The insidious word ‘whipped’. We punish our boys and guys and men for being hopeless, for being vulnerable, for following a lead. We call them whipped when they watch 27 Dresses with a girlfriend, whipped when they let their wives decide and drive, whipped when they hold her books and the door and her hand. That’s not whipped. Whipped is spending a day smoothing the bed and setting the table and painting on a smile and entertaining his business associates. But we don’t call it that, we call that the perfect woman.

I’m tired, and I’m incoherent, but I’m ambitious which they say isn’t ladylike. And I’m belligerent, rude, sloppy and most importantly greedy. I have an unimaginable thirst to do, to get, to defeat and conquer.

Is it feminism? Is it something more visceral and brutal? I don’t know. Except the traditional female has had endless capacity for love, and I’m a fighter, not a lover, not a lover at all.

3 months ago 369 notes

Tagged with: #oh good i'm seventeen and i think like a bitter bra-burning octuagenerian