I have a lot of words this morning

[geozine]

The things I contemplate the most these days (apart from Mass Effect, money, and how long I can put off my homework) have to do with sexism, feminism, and communication.

Comments

*HUGS*

[liaku]

It takes a lot of personal confidence and security to accept criticism, and you seem to be in kinda an extreme flux like an early mid-life crisis right now, so I get why you'd want to stay clear of shitfests. But really, you have every right to be confident and secure in yourself. You're smart, pretty, educated, the only real thing you need to work besides self-confidence is communication skills, and hey, practice makes perfect, right?

You are a million times stronger than you give yourself credit for. You strength is the sum of your own good traits. It's got shit to do with what anybody--be it me, or your friends, or men, or women, or a retarded puppy--thinks of you. I swear, the moment you kick the thought not good enough to I'm pretty fucking awesome, the angriness and bitterness and exhaustion with dealing with all that bs will go away.

...You definitely want to work on stopping the erryone is mai enemy thing. I can tell you where it comes from, read a study on it waaaay back. It's from back when there was only one woman in each business firm (like quota style hiring, or just a niche spot, idrk the details), so every woman saw all the others are direct competition, because welp they were. Plus, they did have to be a million times better than a dude to get a promotion. And I think that sort of catty behavior has just become expected from woman--most businesswomen are portrayed as EXTRA cutthroat, for example. I think America's changing very quickly about that though; women have become great at supporting each other in the work environment.

Look, this is a totally bizarro suggestion and I feel crazy just saying it, but maybe stop referring to yourself as a woman. Like, ignore the gender thing altogether. Which isn't to say get rid of your gender identity (sorry, but r00d question: is it even woman?), but just don't worry about it? Sexism is a fucking shackle, and the simplest way to free yourself from it is to just ignore the label. Be whoever/whatever the fuck you want to be.

Honestly, the way I see it, you've had a epiphany and this is your chance to remake yourself. I say make yourself someone better. Idk what "better" means to you, but I think you can. /voteofconfidence

Re: *HUGS*

[geozine]

Haha. It's obviously all pretty crazy stuff. I don't usually like to refer to myself as a woman or a girl because I guess I always thought it was limiting to be one. I'd rather just be a person. The feelings that go with "woman" and "girl" don't always reflect how I feel, and neither do words like "man" or "boy". I imagine it's the same for a lot of people. It should be impossible for a person's identity to always reflect one side of a binary every day all the time. We really shouldn't have to pigeonhole how people feel based on whether we call them a man or a woman. But people will. I think I call myself a woman in these superlong essays because I'm trying to strip the word of its traditional meaning. I know enough about who I am and what I'm like to know that "woman" is not an adequate word for my identity. I figure if I keep using it it'll lose most of it's meaning to me and just turn into a kind of vague word which refers more to some kind of club that I happen to be in, rather than to a supposed summation of myself. I do this not because people are never going to stop calling me a woman, but because I don't want to go through life with the habit of presuming that whether someone is called a man or a woman is deterministic of their intrinsic identity. Identity is more complicated than that. And if I can't believe that I, myself, am not defined by the words used to refer to me, then I certainly can't do it for anybody else. I'm trying to learn to view everyone as just a person, no matter what they're called.

As for my gender identity idk. I think about it sometimes and then I decide it's not worth thinking about because putting words to it seems dumb. tbh I feel like anybody who puts words to it is either oversimplifying, or doesn't really care to be too accurate. If I had to describe it it would probably look something like a skinny power ranger...or The Truth from FMA only less creepy...
Huh. You know now it makes a lot of sense why I tend to like characters whose faces you never see.