When women demonstrate, such as this Saturday on International Women’s Day, I don’t immediately think: I have to be there. I have never felt so emphatically a woman. By that I do not mean that I feel a man or non-binary; More that being a woman is not that important for my identity. I have always identified myself with intellectuals, cynics, shy people, liberals, weirdos, gourmets, high sensitives, writers, fleetwood Mac fans and atheists than with women. I found my gender too banal and uninteresting feature to hang on a lot.
That feeling that I have always had, gets me again when I read books from women about being a woman. I have been doing that more often lately, because nowadays I realize that there is something like a female perspective. Yet a part of what they write is far away from me. Take Basje Boer and Eva Hofman, two Amsterdam women of my generation, who, respectively, published an essay bundle and a novel about the oppression of being a woman last year: how women are in the tongs of the male gaze, male mores, male expectations. As farmer registers Lying naked: “Women’s fashion is, in essence, not to please the woman. Women’s fashion is there for the man. ” In the book, Boer and Hofman, who are friends, talk about the efforts of women to look beautiful effortlessly. “Nowadays you no longer spread twice a day, but all day long,” Hofman tells Boer about contemporary beauty routine.
I find it interesting, but in a way as if I read about a different species. It is that permanent experience of yourself as a woman, in your own eyes and that of others, who is strange to me. I recognize myself more in the words of essayist Becca Rothfeld, who once said in an interview that she feels a ‘mental hermaphrodite’.
How do I get such a different perspective? That is, I think, a product of experiences and own choice. My experiences: a full -time working mother, a boiling father, girlfriends without a beauty routine, relationships with sensitive men. Who would I have been if I had been brought up more traditional, or if I had worked in a men -dominated sector? Faced with sexism it is more difficult to feel a mental hermaphrodite. Eva Hofmans main character in Josephine As a teenager, she is constantly addressed about her appearance – she is very beautiful – while she wants to be taken seriously as the smart bookworm she is.
But own choice also plays a role. What gives you attention is growing. Those who constantly read books about femininity, or follow Insta accounts about Beauty Routines, views the world through that lens. That also applies both in negative and in a positive sense. There are also people who choose to build their identity around their sex, such as the so -called Tradwives. They must know that themselves, as long as I can know that I find other things more important.
Only recently did I see that I am not the only one about that. There are men like Andrew Tate, the self -proclaimed misogyne influencer, who believe that all women, including women who don’t find sex, must be driven back in the woman category. I can feel a mental hermaphrodite, but the tates of this world really see that I am a woman, and I think I should give birth, cook and especially keep my mouth shut.
Andrew Tate, who came to the US in a private jet thanks to Trump last week, is a cartoon character-like bad guy: he has been charged with human trafficking and fornication with minors, and calls on his followers to hate and suppress women. Unfortunately he is extremely popular among young men. The Australian Stephanie Wescott, who investigated Tates ideas in secondary schools, said last year: “The behavior of boys has changed radically under the influence of Tate. They are openly sexist and physically and verbally threatening to women. “
No one is allowed to escape from his or her sex, is the message of people like Tate, and also of the less hateful right-wing conservatives that are now on the rise all over the world. In that sense, they are a mirror image of the left -wing activists who want to lock men in the MAN category. I realize that when I ask a friend if he feels emphatically a man. “In recent years,” he says. “Since I always hear that I am a white man.” He, too, does not want to find his sex fascinating, but that is not made easy for him.
If I want to demonstrate for something, it is for the freedom of women and men to determine how fascinating they find their sex. Everyone should commit to that freedom. As Simone wrote the Beauvoir in The second sex: “It is the task and task of man to triumph in the given world. And to achieve that highest victory, it is necessary that, over all their natural differences, male and female unambiguously confirm their brotherhood. ”
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC.