Dead Wild Roses

Women don’t come of age, so to speak.  But rather have societies stereotypes and prejudices thrust upon them.  Amy Eileen Hamm speaks to her experience on growing up in a patriarchal society.

“Men have asked me to do things, forced me to do things, threatened or done things to me. For too long, I silently agreed that my body was an invitation.

I was angry when I lost control of my body. When my breasts appeared and my uterus bled. When this foul and mutating vessel made everyone around me think that I, too, had somehow changed. Or — painfully, in hindsight, because I believed it was true — that I was using my body to send messages of desire or consent, when I was still only a child.

Of course, there are women who suffer more, and in more terrible ways. I can’t speak for them; I can only understand how womanhood is too often an imposition.

Earlier, I described having learned an unshakeable, dysphoric shame. Bouts of shame plague me still, in my mid-thirties. I want an androgynous body I will never have. (Though I recognize, in the rational part of my mind, no variation in body type would be an escape from the female sex.)

I have bridled with rage and self-hatred after seeing male colleagues glancing at my chest. Breastfeeding was a months-long nightmare of intense dysphoria, on top of the typically associated pains and struggles. The triggers are plentiful and often mundane.

I don’t know how to overcome this, just yet. There are balms, including radical feminism and radfem communities.

It has been healing to openly share the ways our bodies move us through this world. And to discuss how our female bodies — from which there is no absconding — often dictate our treatment and well-being.

After all, what do I know about how it feels to be a woman, apart from what I’ve learned while others — largely men — react to my being one? Nothing. I only know how it feels to be treated like a female-bodied person.

I don’t know what it feels like to be a woman. I don’t believe this feeling exists. I have yet to hear a satisfactory or sensical answer to the question.

Without a female body, there is no equivocating oneself into womanhood. There is no incantation or initiation that can transcend our bodily reality.

“Woman” is not a feeling. “Woman” just is.”