Women's emotions are constantly labeled. Any slight deviation from 'pleasantness,' and we are labeled as hysterical. When we are angry, sad, depressed, or manic, we are immediately seen as unfeminine or ugly or weak.
I'm not the sexy girl. I'm more youthful and innocent, the girl who wears jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. But fans have accepted that I'm a tomboy. There's a different group of people who find that attractive.
Four of my children are daughters, and I've watched them devote themselves to reading books about how little girls learn to become women - how they learn to deal with boys and men, and the different hurdles females have to go over.
Women are socialized to be very nice and put up with a lot of things.
When I was young there were lesbians who said "Oh, I will free myself of all norms of masculinity, all norms of heterosexuality ". And then, they ended up in very complex relationships that were maybe full of heterosexual power dynamics or full of lesbian forms of masculinity and they became very confused.
Tabitha blinked innocently. "Why is your consort speaking to me without my having addressed him first?" she asked Kaia. "Have you not taught him the proper order of things?" So the little man wasn't supposed to speak to the women folk without an invitation? Screw that. "Just stay out of my head, Harpy, or I'll make sure you regret it. By the way, how's the leg?" She hissed at him. Win!
I think that you need to balance a critique of feminine, patriarchal beauty ideals while simultaneously understanding how they can make you safe, and they can make you feel safe, and they can open up certain doors for you that would have been closed.
Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara.
Punk allowed women to stop looking feminine. Oh, the relief.
Because I'm not a nice lesbian, I'm a big dyke!
The constant pressure to be the perfect, ideal female - there's no such thing.
I was such a tomboy when I was young. I hated girls' clothes.
Those that think my clothes are androgynous also still believe that women should look like Barbie dolls. That's precisely the problem, the deep-rooted assumptions about what is feminine.
I do think girls in their twenties accept certain kinds of lesser treatment than they would at other times in their lives.
In an ideal world, I wouldn't have to change my body. I wouldn't have to do all this stuff. I wouldn't have to be pretty or 'feminine,' and people would respect that.
There were times when I tried to hide my muscles. When you're a young girl, you hear, 'You're really strong,' or, 'You have really toned arms.' In my head, it wasn't something that should be said about a girl. It should be more, 'You're pretty.'
You can smile when your heart is breaking because you're a woman.
And also I think particularly as a female, you're taught to be defensive your whole life. You're taught not to be aggressive.
It is very difficult for girls. They're told to look one way, but to act another way.
I'm extremely straightforward. And I can't do that sort of traditional girl thing of saying one thing that actually means something else. I never understood it, and I still don't understand it.
I feel that women and men should free themselves up. It took me a while to get over my dysphoria about shopping in the men's section, trying on men's clothes, but when I was thinking about my life and the kind of woman I wanted to be, it was never just this by-the-book feminine thing.
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue who says my hand a needle better fits.
I'm more proud of my upper body. Let's just say I'm a typical female in that way.
There's nothing wrong at all with women wanting to be women.
And then, going to high school, I saw how popular girls had to behave to get the boys. I knew I couldn't fit into that. So I decided to do the opposite. I refused to wear makeup, to have a hairstyle. I refused to shave. I had hairy armpits.
