A Loveletter To Womanhood

The Cigarette Was Never The Problem

I contain multitudes, (un)fortunately, it would be much easier if I didn’t. I could select one aesthetic, buy the corresponding outfit, and allow the algorithm to explain me to everyone, but social media did not teach us how to be feminine. It handed every woman the same mass-produced pamphlet and told us to follow along. Easy to copy, categorize, sell, and approve of. Fuck that.

After 34 years of living, I’ve finally realized that real women are horrible at maintaining a coherent brand, which is something that has always made me feel ashamed and confused about where I stand with myself. We are tender and vulgar, beautiful and badly behaved. We moisturize with one hand, personally I prefer the jasmine or coconut,while holding a grudge in the other. We curse at corrupt politicians while fixing our lipstick. We carry kind hearts but are still able to allow it to coexist with rage. What may have felt like years of piled up contradictions – what I mistook as an inability to pick a lane, or even a lack of identity – has now become the clearest evidence that I do, after all, actually have one.

That’s the thing about contradictions. They draw a false line between authenticity and obedience, as if knowing yourself means successfully following a pamphlet God knows who created. No man has ever put on a nice Ralph Lauren polo and thought “the volume of my voice doesn’t really match the price tag of this shirt”.Women, meanwhile, have somehow been convinced that every outfit they put on and beauty product they buy comes with its own personality clause under the “Terms and Conditions”: ‘Must remain soft under any circumstances while wearing this pink sundress’ I don’t remember signing any clause. My mom didn’t either. Neither did hers. And yet, somehow the pamphlet keeps getting passed down, only now it’s edited with trending songs and fun typography to make it more sellable. The rules keep shapeshifting but the message underneath always has the same face: don’t become the kind of woman people don’t know what to do with.

Ex. A man smoking a cigarette outside is just a man smoking a cigarette outside. Put the same cigarette between a woman’s fingers and suddenly we’ve written her a whole backstory. And now, that very cigarette has suddenly become evidence in a trial nobody told her she was attending, as a suspect of course, duh. And God forbid she exercises her rights to defend herself, because now the prosecutor has Exhibit B. And if she’s still single at the age of thirty-four, we may as well call in the jury.Apparently, nothing a woman does is ever allowed to remain just the thing itself. A cigarette becomes a personality test. Anger instantly raises the question of “is it that time of the month again?” as if that isn’t offensive enough. Being single past the age of 30 becomes public inquiry. Not wanting children becomes “just a phase”, but wanting them too badly somehow makes us “desperate”. Ambition and success get translated into intimidation. Somehow everything we do has to have a meaning attached to it.

And maybe the ironic part is that none of those meanings actually tell you very much about the woman herself. But that’s exactly what I love about women. We are impossible to reduce, dilute, and shrink without losing something important in the process. Because we can want to be loved without trading our self-worth in for it. We can desire marriage while still living a life that already feels complete. We can not want children while still having our motherly instincts intact for someone else’s child. We can cry on the bathroom floor but still get up ready to defend ourselves. We can be soft without becoming submissive, angry without becoming cruel, ambitious without apologizing for taking up space. Maybe those so-called contradictions are exactly what turns that outdated pamphlet into a love-letter to womanhood.

For the longest time, I thought the contradictions meant I had failed to become a fully formed version of myself. I kept waiting for the day everything would finally match. My clothes, my music, my politics, my habits, my desires, my temper, my softness. But maybe a coherent woman is just a product somebody is trying to sell us.

So, to the women reading this: under no circumstances let anyone convince you that you are an empty box waiting to be checked. Because of all the things I have been lucky enough to become, being a woman is one of my greatest sources of pride. Not because womanhood is one shared experience – it isn’t – but because there is something profound about belonging to a community so vast that another woman’s life can look completely different than mine, yet still matter just as much.

Anyway, wear that pink dress, but please disregard the terms and conditions, say the bad word, ruin the aesthetic, because fuck you, that mother-of-pearl bowl is definitely an ashtray.