Hello sunshine!
“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”, a brilliant quote by Simone de Beauvoir from her masterpiece The Second Sex written in 1949. In this constant search to match a social ideal – of what is to be a woman – we risk losing our essence. So today, in this International Women´s Day, I would like to talk to you about freedom of being.
We don´t need to live in a prison to be prisoners. Our society is an expert in putting us in invisible prisons and gender is one example of this, feminine for women and masculine for men. And so we grow up confusing sex with gender which is no more than a sociocultural construction. In fact, the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, while studying New Guinea´s tribes Arapesh, Mundugumor and Tchambuli verified that this dichotomy, as natural as it might seem, is not transversal to all societies. Both Arapesh men and women are “sweet” and “maternal” while Mundugumor are “masculine” and “virile”. In the case of Tchambuli she found opposing personalities, but women are the ones with supremacy and determination while men are emotional and less capable. Uou, that´s surprising, is it not?
In our society the feminine stereotype is connected, for example, to beauty, delicacy, fragility, maternity, sensitivity, elegance, passivity…Associated to this are the “choices” that we make: pink (and not blue), playing with dolls (and not cars), doing ballet (and not playing soccer or judo), being a teacher, nurse, hairdresser (and not a firefighter, a mechanic, airplane pilot). There is, in fact, a social pressure to act according to the standard (women=feminine) and which starts once we are born (well, even before!). This pressure begins by being external (parents, rest of the family, other educators, friends, known and unknown people), but then it starts internalizing, incorporating. Without realizing it, we begin seeking compliance with the standard. After all, who doens´t want to be accepted? But at the expense of what? Lives are lost when we walk paths that are not our own.
So let´s embrace diversity today, one of the most precious things we have. Because there are women who don´t want to become mothers. Because there are women who don´t want to be feminine. Because there are women who simply want to…be!
Happy International Women´s Day!
Happy living,
Natacha