A Personal Open Letter to a Dear Friend

I’m sorry, but you don’t know what it’s like. As wise as you are my friend, and as transcendent and connected as you are, you can’t understand.

Our status as epitomizing the most loathsome human traits is ingrained into every girl since before she can remember; like some original sin that every girl has to learn to cleanse herself of. I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that I was inferior because I was girl, but I knew it and I verbalized it (bluntly) and what was more, I accepted it. Because that’s what children do.

As we grow we learn to loathe other women and strive to be the exception: the girl that’s not like the other girls. We learn to like boys better. We learn to loath openly the faults of women and loath silently the faults of men, so we end up liking them better. Growing up, it’s like pulling the bars of a cage one by one from your soul. Lifting the confusion and obstacles that obscures your true self and your true personhood. First we think we need to love cultural femininity and devote ourselves entirely to performing it, then later we are pressured to reject cultural femininity with a ferocious zeal, lest we be loathed for one of those girls… assumed to have no intellect, no thought, no soul beyond frivolous and shallow pursuits. Finally, those of us who truly break free of the gender obsession bravely, boldly, and unashamedly learn to do what the fuck we want and fuck the yuppies and fashionistas for not thinking us stylish enough and fuck the hippies and hipsters for not thinking us rebellious enough.

Freedom for women is when you stop yielding to pressures to be feminine enough or reject femininity enough and focus on something the fuck else.

What is radical? Loving other women. Loving women friends. Not giving a shit about performing or actively not performing cultural femininity. We embody both the stereotype and the anti stereotype. And how we choose is by whatever the fuck we want to choose.