From: SueKay
Date: Thu Mar 10 01:47:01 MST 2005
Subject: Another story

It is sad how twisted our views are on so, so many things. Sometimes (most of the time?) I wonder if any of my views are even close to what they should be. How close to the truth are my beliefs? Even, how close to the truth are my emotions? My lack of emotion covers my sadness covers my anger covers my pain covers my fear covers my love... But that is rather general and I am trying to relate my own personal story to the posts here, so here goes. I think for me, one of the twisted messages I grew up with about being a girl is that being a girl meant being weak, less interesting, and less able to accomplish things than boys. For one thing it seemed there were more rules for girls - don't run, look nice, play quietly... I pretty much ignored those rules as much as possible, but I was still very aware that I was going against how people thought I should be acting as a girl. So the message was, since I didn't want to do play by those rules, I was not doing a good job at being a girl. I remember wishing in elementary school that I was a boy, and that wasn't because I wanted to be masculine, but because I didn't want to conform to the culture's view of how a girl should be. It seemed like, in order to my myself, I had to deny the side of me that was a girl. I know that doesn't quite make since, but that is how it felt. I also grew up in a household that, in subtle ways, conveyed that "girly" things were substandard. Things like dressing up and make up and thinking about having a boyfriend were looked down on if not outright forbidden. It is still very confusing to my just what it means to be feminine. Does this mean I should curl my hair? Pierce my ears? Care what my clothes look like? Or does this mean I should be a nurturer, and take care of people? Should I rely on my "feminine intuition" more than facts? Should I be more emotional than men? Should I give in to the idea that I am the "weaker sex"? I really have no idea what being feminine is all about. But whatever it is, I do know I got the message that it was not something valuable. Instead it was a weakness, a handicap, a necessary evil. I wrote a list about 5 years back, of 50 words that described me: daughter, sister, friend, basketball player, singer, reader, student, ... Woman wasn't on the list. Sometimes that disturbs me. Most of the time I think: is who I am really tied so much to the fact that I am a woman? Isn't there so much more to me than that? Does that one fact need to pervade all else? Still thinking... -Susan Park

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